Vice Chair Yang.

Councilmember Vui.

Here.

Councilmember Coleman.

Here.

Councilmember Kim.

Councilmember Jost.

Here.

Council President Naker.

Here.

Chair Johnson.

Here.

Five present two absent being Vice Chair Yang, who is excused, and Councilmember Kim, who is expected shortly.

Yes,

Council Rickem and I passed each other heading into the building.

So for those that were able to go

to

the fire department, uh station seven over on the east side, we're heading back from that.

So apologies for being a couple minutes behind.

So I'll be handing it over to our city attorney.

Thank you so much for your time this morning for the opportunity to present the proposed city attorney office budget for 2027.

The way that we'll go through the presentation for CAO is the template that the city council has provided.

So thank you for doing that.

We will spend most of the time, well, we'll spend some time on 2026.

We'll spend most of the time on the proposed budget itself.

Um,

keeping in mind that there was some additional information that was requested of CAO, and so we'll make sure to address what the council has uh brought up previously.

Um

for the executive summary did want to focus in on the priorities for 2027.

Uh we'll talk more about each one of these in detail later.

But we did want to make sure that we focused in three areas.

One was to strengthen the support for city departments across the entire city in all the work that the city does.

Focus in on the city's data practices work, which is something that has been much needed, and then also to invest in technology so that we have greater efficiency and then address any potential liabil liabilities that there may be in the future.

I did want to just spend a moment to ground us in the mission for the city attorney's office.

Um we seek justice through law and equity and build prosperity by protecting the safety and interests in the entire St.

Paul community, and you'll see that throughout.

But you'll see quite a bit of overlap in the proposed budget request in front of you.

And so, as I briefly mentioned, we are looking for ongoing funding as it relates to technology.

Um, this is largely for two platforms, one for our prosecutors and one for our litigators.

Uh, and so the dollar amount will not much in the overall budget for the city is significant to help us do our work.

Uh

I will spend more time on the request for a civil attorney.

This is where there have been a number of programs, either through city council or departments that have been created, but as those creations had happened, we didn't get accompanying FTEs within CAO.

We'll spend quite a bit of time talking about data practices just by a glimpse.

There have been significant volume in terms of data practices requests of the city over the

last almost 10 years.

And while there isn't a request this year for increased support for our criminal division, I did want to highlight information that the city council has seen in the past.

The prosecutor caseload is significantly high.

Since 2018, we have always been over what has been recommended by the American Bar Association of 400 cases per municipal prosecutor.

And in 2025, we actually exceeded our pre-pandemic level of caseload.

Our victim witness staff, which we are grateful to have it helps our prosecutors meet our statutory obligations in terms of crime witnesses.

And so we want to just point out that this is significant amount of contact that we want to ensure that we have with victims, but you can see the number of service contacts and the number of victims is very high per FTE that we have for victim witness.

Wanted to spend some time here.

Some of the information was asked for us to focus in on, so I will do that at some points in the slide.

As we looked back at 2026, um, I am mindful the first time that I was in front of the city council was unfortunately the day that Renee Good was killed.

And so Operation Metro Surge was then in full force.

The city attorney's office did have to pivot at that point in time and make sure that we spent dedicated time to address what was happening in our city.

And so that response didn't come with additional funding, but came with a fair amount of resources from CAO.

The other thing that was unanticipated was also the work that we needed to do, and it did start in the end of 2025 to make sure that we protected federal grants that the city had been awarded.

And so we put a fair amount of time and resources into affirmative litigation to protect over 394 million dollars that the city had in federal funding.