So I'm gonna ask you Vinny and you Dave to give us again an overview of the department.

Yeah, happy to uh appreciate the opportunity.

Uh you can uh as you know, I was just sitting here for API's budget hearing.

Uh and as the deputy mayor had explained, uh with the some changes earlier this year.

Uh currently working I'm currently working with the digital services and uh IT teams, even though they're a little bit separate at this point.

We can get to that conversation in a little bit.

Uh but uh I don't think Dave is a new face to you all, and I'll let Dave uh introduce himself, but uh I think just generally you all know that uh um you know IT is a longstanding uh department here that provides what I would describe the special uh in particular as uh functional technology, right?

Uh essentially the equivalent of keeping the lights on, I would say uh uh but in a digital sense.

So um Dave, morning counselors.

Always a pleasure.

We're ready for any questions you might have about our budget.

Oh, okay, so we're just gonna dive right in.

All right, so we're gonna start on page eighty-five.

I see uh LAN technical support specialist.

There were none, and now you're looking for one, correct?

Yep.

Well, so uh not necessarily that we're looking for one, but uh this was a transfer that came from the parks department to Central IT, as we'll just call it.

So uh it's um I I would say across the the budget overall wouldn't necessarily be reflected as a a new ass for an increase, but shifting uh what was a position uh the same position in parks over to the central IT team to help augment.

Several of the larger departments have somebody on their staff in place there that does t IT work.

We consider them a part of our group, but they don't show up on the the org chart that way.

But this was an example of somebody that came from parks and now is formerly a part of our group.

So where are we at?

Um we have um well we've lost a couple of people over the last three years, have not replaced them.

Uh we are the embodiment of doing more with less, or at least the same with less.

It's a challenge.

We talked about it here last year too, when there's a job posting, and that same job pays more in the county, and that same job pays more in the school district.

And neither of those have the residency requirements we do.

That makes hiring a challenge.

Yeah.

That really helped that really helped close the gap.

That really helped close the gap.

I think it makes us at the very least competitive.

We're now we're in the ball game.

But we still have that residency requirement.

It may be a big deal for some people and maybe not for others, but that uh salary increase was long overdue.

Um the adjustments are across the board, and it gives us a fighting chance now.

Before we really didn't.

So were we able to pick up anybody from right ways raising the wages?

We have not.

Technology changes all the time.

So we've been able to absorb those workloads with current staff.

And we have for a long time and continue to have a relatively a large dependence on some key consultants.

That's just how we're built now.

In a perfect world, we'd have triple the staff, but we don't.

And as Vinny alluded to, we look at ourselves here as the nuts and bolts folks.

We got to keep the buses moving.

So we have not increased staff since the two departures three years ago.

So when we use a consultant, isn't that a more costly way of doing that?

I don't I don't disagree.

I don't disagree, but at the end of the day, our job is to get to keep the buses moving, so to speak, using that analogy.

So I'm not in love with that.

Me either.

I do want to highlight though, I think there's uh I don't think there's a world where we never have outside consultants to partner with, right?

You know, the uh there's certain initiatives where we need augmented services, right?

And I think uh to Dave's point, there's it makes me feel less comfortable when we do rely on outside consultants for what I would argue to be baseline functions, right?

And I'd like to see a world where we get to uh grow this team both I would say uh um in size and capability, right, to be able to perform those what I would argue basic internal functions uh uh or basic functions internally.

So we uh um or I think in agreement on that sentiment of uh being more costly externally, but it's uh an effort that I think over the next year we want to make an earnest or concerted effort to best align and as the deputy mayor was alluding to in the API budget hearing, looking at that, you know, uh all those teams, but then also uh looking across now that uh you know having digital services and IT work closer together as well and and make the best use of our resources.

So what's the increase?

So the the increase of about what about 280,000 dollars in the utilities and operating, what is that made up of uh part of that was reading central, right?

Yeah, so what that is is in the utilities account.

So when we moved the police department from SPD, they had a decades old um phone system that would not you can't move.

So we purchased a new phone system.

Now phone systems now are all in the cloud, like some of you may have at home.

So that utility cost is now being borne by IT going forward.

That represents $70,000 of the increase.

Now in that building, the new uh new SPD, we also have fire.

So rather than spending our days splitting nickels between departments of floor alone, we're all in the same mandate.

IT's gonna shoulder that and show that in our budget.

So that's $70,000 of the increase.

And let me ask you this question, because we talked a lot about because I looked at all those brilliant young people sitting out there, and when you talk about not being able to bring people to the table, have we looked at any of the graduates from our different schools in the area?

Yeah, um so I think both Vinny and I have had experience trying to recruit up at SUSU is a big name.

So when you have a chance to go to work for JP Morgan or something like that with a three-year training program, it's hard to compete with that.

No and and sometimes coming out of school, the allure of working in local government for the next 30 years to get a pension does not um it's hard to compete with some of these other um opportunities.

Then I have a couple questions.

We're gonna go back to the budget.

Let's go to page 86.

Because I'm looking at your um total personal services, that's up 181,000.

Yeah, so uh a portion of that is as we said, there was a transfer in.

So it's uh it looks as a new cost for us in this upcoming fiscal year, but uh it was a previously funded position in a different department that we're now incurring.

And then there are uh let's see here.

That's our land.

Well, yeah, there's the one land tech that moved over and trying to think the just for yeah, that is what that increase from my sake.

When you do if it is a transfer, could you identify where it's transferred from?

It's from parks.

It was in a it comes in at about sixty-five thousand dollars to our personal line for the next year.

It's from what parks department.

Parts.

Parks.

Parks, right, and the creation.

So you guys took money from parks to do what?

The person, so the that person worked at parks doing IT work.

Now they work here at City Hall with us in IT.

So the expense now shows up here, whereas last year's budget it was over there.

Uh that's the same.

Are you asking about personal services?

Or perfect personal services.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I want to go to the um operating supplies and expenses.

That went up to $654,000 from $58,000.

And that's $70,000.

You just answered my question about.

So the phone system, is that in utilities?

Because I was I wanted to know the phone systems and utilities.

Okay.

I think the the I believe the additional increase for the um utilities was the uh the mobile phone bill.

So 70 grand is the new phone system for 1153, and the other Delta is the cell phone bill.

So what's with the operating supplies and expenses?

Operating supplies and expense.

So I was looking at professional services.

Where are we here?

So that was the ninety six.

Was the cell phone bill somewhere else before?

And now it's coming over in IT.

The cell phone bill.

Landlines and utilities, right?

The the utilities also come from a landline increase.

Okay, you we're talking about utilities, but I'm talking about the operating system.

I was answering this question over here.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So the operating.

Why is the operating go up so much?

654520.

Went up 130,000.

It went up more than 130,000.

It's 596.

Okay.

The operating supplies and expenses, a lot of that, a much of that expense has to do with we we've migrated a number of bills over to that line, including our our disaster recovery and backup.

Is that true?

That's in that line?

Our DR and backup?

Yeah.

Our backup recovery, our disaster recovery, we back up all of our data, our ability to restore systems.

Should you lose the data, we'd be impacted.

That that expense has gone up.

596,000.

It didn't go up by 500,000.

Yeah, no.

So it's 58,000 and now it's six hundred six hundred and fifty-four thousand.

Oh, you're going back to twenty.

You're going back to twenty-five.

Yeah, and I think some of that to that point is uh proper uh uh organization of uh uh or accounting in terms of where things need to be budgeted for.

So um I think we we also similar that we we run into the situation sometimes too where uh we went over the software budget previously and we've gotten the software budget uh into a good place where it represents truly what software is sometimes there's expenses that were embedded in there that was maybe a phone system but should be categorized under utilities or other operating expenses, et cetera.

So um I think it was from proper accounting measures.

I wouldn't say this is uh that we incurred five hundred thousand dollars of new expenses since uh fiscal year 25 actual.

So so that the 654, it looks like a huge increase from 25.

Indeed, it is okay.

So there's a number of components there.

So um we do more and more computing in the cloud.

Okay, we buy less and less servers on site here.

All right, so that that's an increase.

That's 120, we spend about 10,000 a month on that, doing our compute up in the cloud versus adding servers to any of our data centers here.

Our bill for Microsoft 365 for 1100 and 1200 people is 300,000.

It's 300,000 in next year's budget.

So we weren't doing that in 25.

It was budgeted elsewhere.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it was like so.

Microsoft 365, that was spread out all over the city departments, and now you're putting it all under IT.

Uh it it was in a different example.

It's a different account.

I think that was in software at one point, but again, that's more of when we were describing those enterprise tools that are available to the entirety of the organization, it's better suited and and more aligned with the nuts and bolts as Dave was saying is necessary as opposed to you know an add-on piece of software.

So what's the $130,000 jump from last year to this year?

Was my question.

So from the $526 to the $654, which I think is what Councillor Hudson's asking, too.

What's that jump?

Uh that's an increase.

That's an increase in mostly the Azure expense.

$10,000 a month.

And do we expect to see that every year?

Yes.

I'd say we yeah, to put maybe maybe a little bit at ease in that one.

Uh it will be incremental over time to Dave's point.

We buy less and less on premise or you know, uh hardware servers that we physically place here in City Hall.

And as we upgrade systems over time, it is just modern technology is hosted in cloud-based solutions.

So that will, as we retire things here, slowly increase our uh or when I say slowly, depending on the rate that we update those systems, increase our bill uh in this line.

So what used to be capital expenses, right?

Of buying hardware are now operational expenses.

We need people up there to run them to maintain them when there's a red light or there's a beep in the middle of the night, who's gonna do that?

That's what you when you move it to the cloud, that's what they do up there.

We just talked about how our how our staff is shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

Well, you know, you you gotta have it one way or the other.

If you're gonna buy the servers here, okay, then this Azure bill can go away, then I'm gonna need some bodies up here to answer those calls.

All right, the much more efficient way to do it is to migrate to the cloud and you can have and flow that.

And there's people in teams up there that do that.

We can't do that with a team of six people.

So it's it's kinda it kind of goes back to our initial conversation about our staffing.

Yes, uh professional services.

So that's gone way down.

So are we phasing professional services out or we don't have much need for it?

So th that that e what we're looking at from 2025, that was the tail end of our implementation of the Microsoft 365 program.

Okay, so it's that was a huge effort where we went from an on-premise email server to the cloud-based solution.

All right.

So we're taking a lot of money from that line and it's going to another line?

Well, that expense just goes away.

We've implemented it.

We're no longer hosting email um in-house.

Microsoft does it for us.

That year in which you do the implementation, there's a lot of expense.

You bring consultant firms in who just do those pieces, blah blah blah.

So that's why those professional services got to be so big.

Okay.

So going.

So back to the um positions.

In the other one, in the last meeting that to be determined was zeroed out, but here it is you're keeping it.

Yeah, no, so still we don't have a rate.

That one was uh a typo in the budget book here.

Uh what's shown on the org chart that you have uh the with the yellow one there.

You'll see it's not listed there because that one uh does not have funding allocated in this budget.

Okay, so that's what's allowed to hand.

I'm good.

Council Months?

Thank you, Councillor.

Thank you all.

Appreciate it.