The meeting, held on April 14, 2026, focused on the city's new "Center of Excellence" for grant management, a centralized approach to streamline grant applications, reporting, and compliance. City staff presented the initiative as a formalization of existing efforts, while council members raised questions about capacity, return on investment, and staffing.
But we haven't had that much success. This I think we will have incredible success. We have made leaps and bounds from where we were before. And it's a really exciting topic to talk about. Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you. Great. Sorry. No, no, that's fine. It's what you want. Sure. Gotcha. Primarily with the Center of Excellence is formalizing things that we have been doing for years. Um we search for grants for departments. We refer grants to departments. We technically help grant or departments with submitting their grants, building their budgets. But now we're going to be also instituting automatic reminders when reports are due and helping departments with the reports if they need some technical assistance. We are going to be able to track we put together one golden list of grants over the last several months. Every department met with every department. So now we have a clear field of exactly what we're working with now. We did find in i in our in our work, we did find there were some grants that were out there that had been closed or had been that we had not taken off our you know, closed off on our books. So we took care of that, so it's all clean now. Everything looks looks really good. And but do we get the money? No, but yeah, right. Yes. We just hadn't been taken off the box, right? There might have been five dollars left here or five dollars left there, but they didn't, we just got just closed out and yeah, so that was we didn't lose any money. So um so we're very we're very excited about it. I'm excited that we'll be able to see, we're hoping to see trends of grants that we are successful with, and perhaps grant trends of grants that we're not successful with, and that we need to put more attention into our research and into our development of those narratives. I'm just glad to see that you're working to bring everything together because for so long everything has been sporadic and it's been all throughout the city in different departments in different areas. So I'm glad to see it's pulling together. Absolutely, and there will still be the subject matter experts in the departments. They will be doing a lot doing a lot of the writing. We will be assisting them for example. I don't know about planning, you know, so Owen Carney will be writing those grants. We will be assisting him, but the all the centralization of the management will be in research. And you'll keep your eyes on it. Okay. No. I'm sorry, it's not. Okay. Um just getting getting at the capacity issue. Um I wrong, do you guys know that? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if it was a consultant, but did you have somebody? Did you have somebody in a temporary service? Sorry, yes, it's um Sarah Stevens.