Oh anything.

Good afternoon.

I am going to call to order the finance and economic development standing committee meeting at this time.

Um Madam Clerk, would you take care of the chamber emergency evacuation?

Upon upon activation of the emergency alarm signal, all persons should immediately exit the building.

Please use the exits to the left or right front of the council chamber or the north or west stairwells outside of the rear doors of the chamber.

We will proceed with the public comment period for those that are here that would like to address the committee on items that are not on the docket.

Is anyone that would like to provide comment for anything not on today's agenda?

See none public comment period is now closed.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Minutes for approval.

The minutes to be approved from the July 15th, 2026, finance economic development standing committee meeting.

If there are no amendments of corrections, then those meeting minutes stand approved as presented.

Those minutes have been approved.

Thank you, Madam Clark.

We will proceed with the document as it is presented.

Item one, ordinance 2026 081 to amend city co-cusign publication of the city's payment register for the purpose of promoting transparency and accountability in the expenditure of public funds by providing public access to information regarding payments made by the city to vendors for goods and services and reimbursement to employees while protecting confidential and personal information as required by law that pay was for the committee.

Good afternoon, Chair Robertson, Vice Chair Jones.

What yeah, you can have as many as you'd like.

Yeah.

Uh my name is Lassen Wijay Saria, Chief of Staff to Mayoravula.

Thank you for having me.

Today I'm here to reiterate the administration's commitment to provide maximum proactive transparency to the public, especially with our money, while honoring legitimate privacy concerns and following privacy laws better addressed through the FOIA process.

We learned a lot through the process of producing the fiscal year 25 payment register, as I've previously shared at the last committee meeting, which has informed our proposed amendments to our ordinance.

We also adjusted our proposal based on the committee's questions and guidance back in June.

So I have provided a new chart for your review since the comparative chart provided before the amendments were actually introduced, which was in your briefing, are actually no longer accurate.

So based off of the careful work we've done, we now have a better understanding of what it takes to prepare this payment register.

And it's based off of our own financial records, the actual realities of the systems that we have, which fields of data are standardized, which are not, and who within the organization has access to which pieces of data.

And really, we, as you can see from the amended chart, are only removing a few pieces of information based on that information.

So our proposed amendments to the current ordinance.

First, change the scope to vendor payments and employee reimbursements based on the high volume of privacy laws governing the other payments to individuals.

We must protect personal information and ensure legal compliance.

And we can do this based on a more automated, predictable process, not by relying on time-consuming manual redactions with the risk of human error.

Again, I want to note that the individual payment information still does remain available, but we strongly recommend against mandating proactive disclosure through city code because of the increased risk of sharing someone's protected private information.

We are proposing to remove invoice description and add account description.

Invoice description is a free form text field that staff write into on their own.

Through the process of producing the fiscal year 25 register, we learned that the invoice description field was actually mostly left blank.

The instances that were not blank many times required manual review and had to be redacted for the reasons already discussed.

So instead, cost center, which was already there, and account description, which we're adding in, are more helpful for understanding what was purchased because you can tie to the budget with cost center, and you read a description of a particular payment from the account description, things like office supplies and stationary uniforms and safety supplies, etc.

We are removing fund code and keeping fund description because the fund code does not match any other information that the general public has access to.

It's really just four digits that are used internally.

Um, and so we don't think that it adds information and does actually uh or doesn't add meaningful information, but does add the risk of things like AI being able to mimic payments and so on and so forth.

Payment document used is a field that does not actually exist in the original data that we find in the ordinance, the original ordinance.

And so we believe it is intended to satisfy the same information we're disclosing in type of disbursement.

So the this was the one that previously at the committee we talked about payment document.

We actually don't know exactly what was intended in the original ordinance, but we believe the intent of payment document was just to know is it a check, is it a wired transfer, et cetera?

So we are keeping in that information in type of disbursement.

And then we also adjusted the timeline for publication to be more specific, addressing a maximum of 60 days after close of the month's payments.

So I'm gonna steal a line from Vice Chair Jones, and I'm gonna say it with my chest and say this is our best and final proposal, which from our perspective is only making a few adjustments to the information proactively shared with significant benefit of protecting individual privacy and deploying the city's resources proportionately for public benefit.

Thank you, Ms.

Lesson.

Any questions, Ms.

Jones, before we move to public questions?

I do have one.

Is there an imp is there a um have you all prepared an implementation plan for this?

So um yes, our because we just went through this process based on the old one, we feel very equipped to know what we'll need to do.

Of course, the SOPs will need to be written if this these proposed changes are accepted.

So we have not pre-written those out because we need to know what what we will be doing, um, but we feel very prepared to do so within the timeline that has been laid out.

What is the time?

So the implementation timeline, do you have uh start date?