Providence Committee on Finance-Tuesday, May 20, 2025-5:30 PM

Good evening. My name is Helen Anthony. I'm the chair of the committee on finance. I'm calling to order a meeting Tuesday, May 20 And please state your names and your titles for the record.

Steven Grace, director of regulation.

Chris Lindbergh, deputy finance director and vice officer.

Kent Park, director of economic development.

School and school deputy directors wanted to start us off with the Mhmm. I think we need a handout. There is a pin down.

Please. Where is the first department? And the budget for this department begins on page one sixty two.

You. You.

Thank

you, everybody. I'm going to presenting on this budget. I'm joined today by director Ted Card, the director of. I'm on slide two. Total expenditures in the department of the office of economic development are $1,793,075.

This represents a 6.71 increase over the fiscal twenty twenty five budget at $1,680,274. In fiscal year twenty twenty five, salaries in this department were budgeted $743,967. We need to adjust the budget in fiscal twenty twenty six for the following line items. There is a staffing adjustment for fiscal twenty twenty five due to some vacancies in the department when the budget was initially proposed. Historically, if the budget if the position is vacant, we budget the lowest step of the lowest rate for that position.

And then these two staff members were retained. They were hired at a

step above step one. And so

this adjustment is to right size their salaries based on the the positions they were offered. We'll also be making an adjustment of $16,222 for cost of living increases and $15,208 for staffing through. This total cost of $790,037. This department's budget has been broken up into fixed and discretionary costs. The first budget to discretionary line item is $250,000, and this is summer jobs that are offered to province youth.

The next discretionary line item is $1,500 for certified mailings. There is a modest advertising and marketing budget of $4,000. These subscriptions have been budgeted at $15,000 and represent a $15,000 increase over the fiscal twenty twenty five budget, and this is for cell software that the department is utilizing in fiscal twenty twenty six. Professional development has been budgeted at $5,000 in its level funded from fiscal year 2025, and there's been a $5,000 allocation for consulting services that the department may utilize throughout the fiscal year. When looking at total supply items, the first discretionary line item in this question is grant expenditures of $280,000.

I will find that not all of this is probably put in the discretionary category because it is considered a grant expenditure. $250,000 of this is the first source allocation and is required by ordinance. Office supplies are budgeted at $1,000 and have been reduced by $2,500 to fiscal year 2025. Their stationary budget is at $1,000, and a portion of that was reallocated from the office supply in 09/2001. The rent for their appropriate space at 12.4 is $45,073, and the copier and lease maintenance for

this office's budget is $2,700. And that wraps up the lease and last budget approval. Okay. And before we start on

I guess we can start.

Looking at the org chart and early, please remind me. Is licensing under the office of economic development?

Well, that's a new change for us, ma'am. We are very excited to create a one stop shop for business activity, and licensing will be moving with us to new space at Westminster.

Okay. Can you just for the record, just talk to us about what what when this one stop shop is opening and how it's being created and who's moving from where and the whole nine yards?

Okay. Sure. So this is an initiative of the mayor that coincides with other departments. The permitting office is currently in the first floor by Smithsburg. We're moving into the deep revenue in the new facility up at Adams Avenue.

Licensing will be moving over with us. The transition will happen at some point this summer. The idea behind this is to create one place where everybody looking for economic assistance can come and get everything that we've done from the city government in one spot Well, both both departments are very exciting office. We hope to I think that the permitting office will vacate in June. We'll need about a month to do a little bit of work there, and then we'll be moving in in July if everything stays on track.

And so just so I'm are you going to be in charge of

the one stop shop? Yes.

Okay. Alright. That's good to know. Alrighty. And I just think I'll hand it over.

So are there any vacancies in there? I'm sorry. Are there vacancies in there? Are there vacancies in your department?

Oh, we do not have vacancies at this time. We have nonmany programs including my stuff.

Okay. Alright. I mean, I'm just looking to see who is reporting to whom on this org chart. I am very, very excited to have you here today definitely am not gonna open the info. I think that all of us are very excited to hear.

We're making any headway on WBE and E.

Yeah. I I am very glad to report we are. No. No. I was here a year ago.

It was my first few weeks of work. This this is a state licensing requirement. At that time, there were about 700 small businesses in this category that are registered. We have a very good relationship with our state partners, and we're glad to report that that list is approximately 1,100 small businesses now. So we're up significantly.

We had a modest goal of trying to increase this by 10% when we went by that. We're very pleased. That that's an activity we continue to work on, and that's going very well. We are also pleased to recognize the water supply department is issuing procurement opportunities in excess of 20% to this population of business owners, so we're very pleased that the city procurement services are doing well in this regard. Yes.

I just do follow-up on Thank you, chairman. Thank you, director. What exactly is the city doing to improve the the outreach for businesses. Is there, like, something the city can do to license MBE, WBE directly without having to wait for, like, them to be licensed through the state or certification. I'm not sure what the proper terminology is.

But is is there anything that the city can do? And and thank you for sharing the the numbers definitely in the right direction. Something that that we see constantly in this committee is those percentages of MBE and WBE and and contracts that we approve, have zero percent. So what what can the city do in detail to to improve this category?

So a couple of things we're already doing. We are actively in this community if we know of this business. So we're hosting events. We're coming to board council meetings. We're talking to these companies wherever we can.

We use very effectively a small grant program in that was issued to small businesses because of the

closure of the bridge.

We're glad to report almost 700 applications, and we were able to fund all of that. It was not designed to fix the problem of the bridge or the business activity that was lost, but it was grants small in nature, $525,100 dollars. Did exceptionally well in this regard. It was because our team is out in the field, so we're doing that. We're working with partners like Skills for Rhode Island and others with a series of events to cater cater to this community so that we can say that we are here.

We recently had an event there by the mayor where the development community came together to this is an activity that we do here in the city regularly, and many small business owners were there. So we look at opportunities like that to connect with them. I think one of the things we're most proud of is being very responsive to being out in the field. So if we find out a company is available and something we can do to help them, we do that. We did use one time money this year to enter the contract that you're doing here in the city in our department managed.

That's an organization called Tough Lead. It's a very unique technology based structure that helps to identify the one thing and one thing only, and that is companies in this category for purposes of procurement. So they helped us to do that, and that's been successful in procurement. It's had us we we are very pleased with the fact that we can now cultivate real information about businesses in the community. So they do data mining.

They do outreach. They they have a solution where they actually call small businesses, and that's been very helpful. We use one time our money. It is not currently in our budget for next year, but it has been effective, and it's been a good expenditure for us. So we've done as much as we can, and that is at the basis of because we we are are active in the community that we haven't seen an increase in the register.

The first part of your question is, is there something we can do outside of the registration in Sydney? Currently, there isn't. It was a state requirement. We'd love to do more. We are we are very interested in making sure that if there are businesses that can do this, that we're engaging with them and helping them register.

I'll give you an example of one. One ninety five just awarded a contract to organization, a woman owned business developed. We're working with the. This is where

Let me do that one. I'll just provide the overview of business have to.

Start But there's a there's also lost this, but the the part of the business that is a one of minority business is a state department.

So they couldn't just to put understanding on this. So they couldn't if we opened up a certification process, like, that wouldn't be valid, like, with our own procurement?

I think it's something certainly we've been considering at the moment now is the states the state is a sort of running into the. Thank you. It's a great idea.

Yes. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for being here. It's nice to see you. Nice to see Yeah.

I think you need to follow-up after a little bit walk on the street. So

I got something to report on that.