Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the very first meetings of our special commission. I raised meetings. Yeah.
Councilor Anderson Councilwoman Graves? Here. Councilwoman Peterson is absent. Councilor Sanchez?
Vice chair? Yes. Taylor. We have three present, two absent. We have a court.
Now the voting, I I'm gonna entertain a motion item is to elect the vice chairperson of the special raising, the.
I would like to nominate councilman Jim Taylor.
have a second? Second. Well, Thank you, committee members. I wanna give a special recognition shout out to all my wonderful colleagues that are here. We have majority leader, Espinal, deputy majority leader, something that may be senior.
We have councilwoman Jill Davidson, councilman Juan Ricciardo, councilman Eric Harris, and council president Richard Miller. We have a lot of our staff too here that's gonna be very engaged throughout this process on the council staff. So big shout out to our chief staff and our policy folks, Cal Young, Brandon, and folks from our communications office, and director of chief. So we're gonna I'm gonna ask for a motion to take something order. Gonna mention to take item seven and eight out of order.
So Second. Two seven, you wanna continue? Yes. So we have the seven. We'll continue that for us to to item eight.
So I'll, entertain a motion to continue, to continue item seven. So moved. Second. Thank you. Now, motion to, take item eight out of order.
So moved. Second. Thank you. So by the. We can take a bite of eight.
We need to know. Just take one here from the administration or, folks that are gonna present on item eight. We're gonna discuss it more in in the budget conversation, since we have folks, here specifically for item eight. I don't wanna keep waiting here all night. So Thank you.
Hi. Well, as soon as you guys seem so far away from now. Thank you, Crystal and Elizabeth, for coming in and
And so for us to pay for this service on every ticket issued in the city of Providence, it's an additional cost about $1,800,000. The city has
this court software, I came and spoke with you guys about a year, year and a half ago. It is doing wonders for the court. It keeps everything transparent. It keeps everyone engaged. It keeps the court at a level that everyone can understand and follow.
So it takes that secrecy away from everything. So as the court receives more tickets coming through the system, we can draft increase. We started our state violations and moving violations, the more serious violations that you've hearing
in this before. Now we're ready for parking.
Thank you. I know we are currently discussing other software type interactor, just like with existing work softwares. Is the I I know you guys are are working through to make sure they're all on par, which is how are those conversations going? It's it's actually been really refreshing to work with
the new vendors about that we've
been trying to pipeline, which is the
vendor that we provide for seven years now. I think we're out of place with the new vendors that's converged with the software where everyone's on the same page and everyone has the same mission. So it's it's been very nice to continue that. I'm gonna
go transfer you now for the future. We all
know you've got have the we have with the vendors that we currently have that are
in this conference. Awesome. Thank you. So just to clarify, I think, what what's happening here. So from my understanding, we have the existing that states that it's a $2 fee, and we are updating this ordinance to state that it's a $6 fee.
Yes. We are requesting that we update the ordinance to cover the actual cost of the software, which is $6
to me. Committee members, anyone have questions? About the meeting is available. They'll stop there. Is there any other council members here that have any questions or comments?
Just a a clarification in terms of the order is going from $2.50 to $6. What was the cost of the software? Does it increase the software based on the fact that the military police charge $6?
No. So the software the decision was subsidizing the cost of the software previously. It was somewhat affordable because there were not all of the cases going through this court. But when we started to factor in putting 330 cases through this software, $6, that loss on $4 a unit was not something we could afford in this year's budget. And so bringing the fee up to $6 is making the city whole for the cost of And it doesn't impact the
residents in terms of the tickets going?
The ticket fee itself would not go up. This is a technology.
Does anyone else have any questions? Seeing that there's none. Elizabeth, thank you so much for, taking time to come to our meeting hearing today and, of course, to give all the great work that you and Ms. McCord the best to the city.
Oh, thank you for having me.
This time, I will entertain a motion on item number eight. Thank you. Hello. Finance team. How we're gonna go with what's easy to explain.
We'll start with just a little overview of how we got here and then we'll go over to Crystal. He's gonna take you through these additions. So when we started this budget, kind of setting the table, we knew we did not have tolerance for a tax increase or any fees to finance to our residents. We knew we had investments we wanted to make. Some of them came from feedback from all of you.
Things that we've heard you say all year that you wanted us to be doing, things that we we wanted to be doing, the investments we're asking for. And we knew we we always are looking at passing the budget that we can stick to. We don't ever wanna come to the end of the year, but with the deficit because we do set targets So the budget you have before you has a percentage growth of one and three quarters percent, 1.75. I went back and looked. The previous five years coverage was just over 4%.
Growth of 1.75 in the context of March plus inflation is really significant. It shows how we're gonna work to keep the budget as constrained as possible. I'll also note that last year, we've had with you all a lot, so there wasn't a lot left for us to constrain. So, again, we looked at every dollar spent and said, to be absolutely this is something that provides a service to residents that, you know, that they will. And then when you look at revenues, you're gonna see that our our revenues were at point 62%.
It's $3,800,000 net on a, you know, $635,000,000 budget. That's basically. So there wasn't any money coming in for us to, here to exceed that. Crystal, that's because they were rich production to increase. Crystal does this terrifying exercise where she notes off of the wish list items, departments, all of their asks into a budget and brings it to us to a starting point.
This year, that starting point showed a $35,000,000 deficit that we had to work from. And that is just you know, I say that to recognize that, like, there are always things we wanna be doing. But it is, unfortunately, our job is to make sure that we're managing expenses and prioritizing things and setting expectations. So the work we do is looking at those priorities and determining what is is you know, what we should limit what we should invest in the limited. And so the investments that you'll see, the the mayor ultimately challenged us to figure out our our housing package, which is good for you already, Crystal, and Sarah to talk to you about how that's gonna come through in the budget, but we need to be needed to provide relief to cost provisions of renters.
We wanted to always continue to invest in city services, which are getting investments you're gonna see are things that are. Universal, code enforcement, you know, really small investments to do the the deal. And,
Thank you, Crystal. First, sir, I'd like to say, I do wanna give you guys a huge shout out. Definitely are IT department as well for our IT department. I think, literally, the next day, that budget was introduced mayor. It's all on the website.
Super user friendly. If anyone's listening or anyone here, has access that. Know you could I'll see you in portal. Thank you, Courtney. Just in in the sense of transparency, we have plans to actually meet up here, CIP, next Thursday.
So folks could start planning for that. Take us through all your magical work, Jessica.
Wonderful. Thank you, chairman. Mister chair, can we have a pledge of something? Format, which is the first in my career doing this budgeting. And I was just so proud to be on a team that was, like, willing to be able to participate and do that.
