Providence Committee on Finance-4-23-2024-5:30 PM

Not an hour. Sleeping.

Yeah. Yeah.

And

you're spelling too accurate. Yes. Exactly. Okay. I know that.

It was noted.

Did tonight too. So no. Thought there.

You wanna keep the same name?

Alright. I can't So what?

You wanna keep your name or keep the name?.

We're all set. Yes. Sorry about that.

She may have.

Good evening. My name is Pamela Anthony. I'm chair of the committee on finance. I'm calling to order a regular meeting on Tuesday, 04/23/2024 at 05:33 Madam clerk, would you please call me in? Chairwoman Anthony?

Present.

Betty German Taylor?

Here.

Councilor Andrew?

Present.

Councilwoman Graves?

Present.

Councilor Sandry in action. Forecasting in action, you have a plan.

Thank you so much, and I'd like to recognize protem Picharda who is joining us this evening as well as Nelson and Vargas.

It's nice to see you.. We also have from the city solicitor's office. We have Aaron Gardner, our director of policy, and our chief of staff. So thank you all. And may I have a motion to waive the readings of...

For items one through four? So moved.

Second.

Okay. All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed? And then for the purposes of this evening, we will leave...

Do I need a motion to discuss them together? Or You you don't have to make a motion. Okay. Alright. Alright.

Then we will ask if we could please have colleague. She's. Oh, you're welcome. Yes. And our director of finance, Sarah Silveria.

Okay. And before we begin, I think we have a presentation that will be handicapped, and I'll be asking that in one of those as exhibit number one. So moved. Thank you. Thank you.

And the motion is made by councilor Anderbaugh, seconded by councilor Daniel. All in favor? I'll just All opposed? And this is entitled proposed FY '25 budget, 04/23/2020. K.

Alright. Courtney or is it you or who would like to start? I'm gonna start. Thank you, the chair, and members of the committee. The purpose of tonight's meeting is for me to just provide you with a framing for this budget at a high level what you should expect.

You can hear from department directors as they come before you in the coming weeks. So with that, we will jump right down. Are we gonna put the presentation up there? No. Okay.

Thanks. So the budget before you... I think the thing that we are most proud of is that as we committed to last year, we successfully weaned ourselves off one time federal funding and are presenting a balanced budget for you. That means the new investments are really limited, but they're the things that we felt were most important to build on the foundation of the budget that we passed last year. So there's a better overall 3% increase in the total city city budget.

As it relates to revenue, we are not proposing any changes to tech... Any tax increases this year. We are hoping that we'll be able to implement a bifurcated tax rate, which means taking the city back to a owner occupied and non owner occupied rate, which it's had in the past, and it... Which it eliminates the homestead exemption. It's doesn't change the amount of money anyone's paying in property tax, but provides for more transparency into people understanding how Providence's tax rate compares to other cities.

So for example, if you're shopping for a house on Zillow and you look at a listing, it shows you the tax rate. It doesn't explain that there's a home instead. And so someone who's looking or considering moving to Providence isn't gonna understand that we actually have the eighth lowest rate in the state. So this, we believe, makes us more competitive as people think about where to buy a home while also not changing or impacting people's tax rate in any way. This does require state enabling legislation, which has been introduced and heard at the state house already and would allow for us to implement this change.

No change to the commercial or tangible tax. The state pilot that's budgeted is what was in the governor's proposed budget, and the local pilot includes new agreements with the institutes of higher education that were negotiated last year, which included the significant increase associated with the MLA and Brown. It does not include any pilot payment for lifespan, although we are anticipating and hopeful that we will move the most negotiations to a place that we'll be able to eventually include that in the start. So as it relates to investments, I'm just gonna go through at a high level four areas of investments that are consistent with how you've heard the mayor talk about the budgets since he took office. So the first priority area that we look at is where we've made investments that improve the lives of children children and families across the city.

And the first investment there and probably the largest in the entire budget increase, we've an increase to private public schools of $3,000,000. As you know, we... That's the largest increase in seven years. Previously, the... There was no increase last year.

And so we felt that given the rising cough associated with everything, that it was important that the city do its part to try to support the district in providing quality education for their students. We have been able to mirror both the summer learning and summer jobs investments. Summer learning, in particular, is a partnership with the district where we provide money, and the district provides money so students can have robust summer learning opportunities when they're not in school. And as a reminder, this Saturday is the summer learning heat, play, learn event at ECTA where families become signed up for summer learning, recreation activities, and then summer camps. What time is that?

I'm sorry. The morning ish, but I will. There's also all of the little big opening days. So get ready for a lot of things too. We've made a modest increase in recreation, although that department did add several key staff last year that were maintained.

This increase is specific for programming, so things like the new soccer league that launched this year. This also includes funding so that we can bring back what we are now calling summer night's basketball in case... Until we come up with a better name, formally referred to as midnight basketball this summer, but will allow for the recreation department to continue to add year round program. We've also increased our allocations to the community library of Providence and the public library, Providence Public Library. You will probably remember last year, the aerospace provided really compelling testimony about the need for an increase for the community libraries of Providence.

So we're really thrilled to be able to provide that in our budget because it's very important. Okay. As it relates to building a safer city and public safety, In the police budget, it obviously funds the full time positions for the police officers that will finish their training this fall. That's a class of 36 officers that have been in an academy. It also provides for the same schedule that you all implemented through this budget last year where we would have another new academy start next spring of 40 officers.

It's important to note that when those officers are done training, we actually have a federal grant to pay for 20 of the 40. That grant requires that the city match. So in order to get funding for the 20, we have to do another 20, which would give you the total of the board. It also... And and the fire department funds the 40 laterals that are currently in an academy, so they will become firefighters in this next budget.

It also allows for funding for 10 additional laterals that would only be brought on in the instance that retirements occur and we need another full time firefighter. Finally, it provides for the recruitment of a academy that would start in fiscal year twenty six. That would be a full academy in that one. Okay. In telecommunications, we've made a modest increase to add a quality assurance specialist to that team that will be listening to calls and providing training and support for call takers in telecommunications.

And it increases funding to Family Service in Rhode Island through their GO team, which is a long standing program that provides care of social workers with police officers to support victims of crime. SSRI was going to experience a reduction in funding from other sources, and so we've added a $100,000 to support the. As it relates to city service, we've made a few small changes here in addition to maintaining the funding that was added last year. So our focus in DPW has been in two areas. One is in sewer.

This is the team who is out providing during rainstorms, both in preparation and during the storm and flood mitigation response working for Dave Ambro. So this is another team of folks in Dave's unit in... For. It also adds two staff in DPW engineering, both an assistant chief engineer and an engineering project manager. This is an an area of need that I identified this year as I started to dig into our...

All of the capital improvement work we've been doing. The city definitely does not have enough engineering and project management staff to be able to manage the amount of projects that we are implementing right now. So this provides a modest increase to that department to help them ensure that we finish spending the ARPA money and implement the first two years of the CIP that has been passed. And then finally, within the CIP budget, so this won't see as a general revenue budget, we've added another landscape architect for the parts department similarly to help them manage that two year bond money. And then the last area is around Best Run City.

So this is where we look at changes within our internal departments to make us more effective and efficient. We've made a big investment in municipal court to purchase a court case management system that will help improve service and operation in that court. That's something that was requested by the court administrator who's doing a fantastic job in the municipal court and working closely with the administration. There's a restructure to the city's human resource department that better aligns people's functions and also adds two positions in our benefits administration and one position in talent acquisition. These are two big pain points for all city departments and an opportunity for us to really operate more efficiently, especially in the area of the benefits.

Because we're self insured, if we're not tightly managing our benefits program, we are likely losing money. And so that team will be tasked with identifying areas where we can improve how how we're doing that work. And then you'll see in the budget two reorganizations that we previously talked about, but were done through MOA in the last fiscal year and have been implemented through ordinance in this budget. One is through an inspection of the standard for director Moore has realigned its people functionally, and the other is the merger of Healthy Communities with the CDBG Housing Department to become the newly coined housing and human service department, so you'll see that in your budget. And then finally, there's a modest investment in digitization.

This is gonna be something that you'll likely hear more about from me over time as we try to allocate other funding sources to this, but it is our desire to go digital on all city permits and records so that they can be available to the public online. Director Morris is gonna start this process for us in DIS, and we're gonna be looking for alternative funding sources to be able to expand it. They're also working on this in vitals and, obviously, in archives and the recorder of these. So I'm gonna pause there, and Sarah and I are available for any broad questions. I would ask, you know, department related questions, and I'd really like the directors to have the chance to answer those.