SPEAKER_00
We are recording.
We are recording.
Wonderful.
Okay.
Good afternoon, everyone.
The September 14th, 2021 Governance and Education Committee meeting will now come to order.
It is 2.01 p.m.
I'm Lorena Gonzalez, chair of the committee.
Will the clerk please call the roll?
Councilmember Warriors?
Here.
Councilmember Mosqueda?
Present.
Councilmember Sawant?
Present.
Councilmember Strauss?
Present.
Chair Gonzalez?
Here.
Great.
Approval of the agenda.
If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.
Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.
Colleagues, we do have a brief but full agenda for this afternoon.
Just quickly before we open up public comment, we have three items of business.
The first is a technical ordinance related to city employment.
The second item is consideration of the reappointment of David Jones as city auditor.
He is with us here at this meeting.
And then the city auditor's office will conclude our meeting today with a discussion of their annual work plan.
and annual report.
So that is what we've got on today's agenda.
So without further ado, my understanding is that we do not have any folks signed up for public comment or anyone in the weight room.
So I'm just gonna look to the clerk to confirm, clerk and IT to confirm that we do not have anyone signed up for public comment for this afternoon.
There are no public comment registrants.
excellent okay so uh we are going to go ahead and close out the public comment period since we do not have any public comment registrants if folks do sign up before the end of the meeting we'll make sure to give them an opportunity to address the council so that being said will the clerk please read item one into the record
Agenda item number one, Council Bill 120172, an ordinance relating to city employment, commonly referred to as a third quarter 2021 employment ordinance returning positions to the civil service system and amending classification titles for briefing, discussion, and possible votes.
Great.
Thanks so much.
Okay, colleagues, as I mentioned, this is routine legislation related to City of Seattle employment.
Karina Bull from our Council Central staff did prepare a memo for your review in advance of today's committee, and it is part of today's committee materials.
And so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Karina for her to introduce herself for the record and walk us through this bill.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I am Karina Bold from Central Staff.
And indeed, I have a short memo and short presentation about Council Bill 120172, commonly known as the Third Quarter Employment Ordinance.
The Seattle Department of Human Resources submits up to four bills a year to legislate personnel actions that require the Council's approval.
so in this particular instance the bill would return 13 positions to the civil service system and would also amend five job classification titles and to give you an idea of what positions would be impacted i will pull up my memo So here you can see a chart with those positions.
There are 13 positions across eight departments.
All but two of them are vacant.
And just as a reminder, the Seattle Department of Human Resources reviews whether jobs should have civil service protections, either upon the request of the department who may have noticed that the job duties have changed and no longer meet the criteria for being exempt from civil service protections, or perhaps it was a new position that was added during the budget.
And when positions are added in the budget, they're not always able to be reviewed by human resources to have that determination of whether or not civil service protections would be appropriate.
So also as a reminder, civil service protections exist for about 90% of the city's workforce and those protections automatically provide employees with a number of protections such as merit-based hiring and promotions, probationary periods of employment, opportunity for folks to correct performance and only termination if there is a cause.
So it does enable a lot of job security and financial stability for employees.
So the next piece of this legislation would amend classification titles for five positions These positions are formally known right now as police communications dispatchers.
These positions are being transferred to the Community Safety and Communications Center as such.
That classification title is no longer appropriate and they would be renamed 911 emergency communications dispatchers.
So you see those titles there.
For both of these changes, there would be no direct cost associated.
I have noted some possible racial equity impacts.
And the city's commitment to workforce equity includes eliminating institutional and structural barriers to attracting employees to apply for jobs and retaining those employees and also enabling opportunities for employment success and career growth.
So according to the city's workforce equity technical report, BIPOC employees and especially BIPOC women are underrepresented at the top levels of city employment.
And that's both in terms of the top quartile of supervisors and high wage earners when compared to the county's general population.
So increasing the number of positions, especially higher paying positions with civil service protections could achieve more equity for BIPOC employees by removing the barriers that create risk and uncertainty for seeking career growth.
I'll go ahead and turn off my memo at this point.
Many of the positions in the legislation that would be returned to civil service protection are strategic advisors, and those positions are unique, same as for managers, where they can either have civil service protections or be exempt from civil service protections, depending on the type of work that they do.
There's a broad range of work that strategic advisors and managers can do.
So Seattle Department of Human Resources has noted that for employees seeking mobility out of step placement programs, usually the first place that they will go are strategic advisor positions.
So ways to create more financial stability and job security for those positions could increase the diversity of candidates applying for them.
So that is a note about possible racial equity impacts.
And that would conclude my presentation.
Are there any questions?
Colleagues, any questions or comments or concerns about this before I formally move the bill?
OK, I'm not seeing any hands raised.
Karina, thanks so much for walking us through that council bill and for the good memo and also for highlighting the benefits of civil service status, particularly as it relates to our workforce equity goals as a municipal employer.
So appreciate that.
Again, colleagues, this is largely consistent with actions we've taken in the past.
And some of these changes are changes to classifications for positions that we are asking to be transferred to the Department of Community Safety consistent with prior council actions.
So if there are no questions, I'm going to go ahead and move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 120172. Is there a second?
Second.
Thank you so much, Council Member Juarez.
It's been moved and seconded to recommend passage of the bill.
Are there any final comments?
Hearing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the committee recommendation that council bill 120172 be passed and forwarded to the full city council.
Juarez?
Aye.
Mosqueda?
Aye.
Vellante?
Yes.
Strauss?
Yes.
Chair Gonzales?
Aye.
That's five in favor, none opposed.
Thank you so much.
The motion carries on the committee recommendation.
will be that the council bill be passed and will be sent for approval to the September 20th, 2021 city council meeting.
Thanks so much, Karina, for being with us.
Appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Will the clerk please read item two into the record?
Agenda item number two, appointment 02033, the reappointment of David G. Jones as city auditor for a term to December 13th, 2025 for briefing discussion and possible vote.
Thank you so much.
So today before the Governance and Education Committee is the reappointment of David Jones.
David was first appointed in 2009 to be our city auditor and has nearly 40 years of public service to his name.
If his reappointment is approved today, this will be his fourth term serving as city auditor.
His work has been instrumental to good governance for our city and he leads a team to help the city of Seattle better understand some of the most complex issues facing the city with an eye for nuance that is important to our governing.
I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to David so that he can reintroduce himself to us and introduce himself to the viewing public and share with us a little bit more about why he is seeking a fourth to serve as our city auditor.
David, welcome.
Thank you, Council President Gonzalez.
Thank you, members of the council, who have been so steadfast in your support of our office.
And I have to say that I wouldn't be here without all the efforts of everyone who works in our office.
It's truly a group effort, and I've been blessed with working with a team of very dedicated and experienced public servants.
So I just want to extend my I thank STEM, any success our office has experienced has been because of their hard work and their efforts on that.
You asked Council President Gonzalez why I want to be reappointed.
It's because I still love my job and I still love the city of Seattle.
We have a lot of work to do and a lot of transitions and I'm still up for the challenge from dealing with the pandemic, switching to a remote working environment.
to the stuff on our work plan, you know, from us looking at the municipal court probation program to looking at the police department acquisition of patrol vehicles to working on a project in Rainier Beach.
You know, there's just a plethora of things that...
interest me that I think benefit the city of Seattle.
And one of our important tasks is to provide you, the decision makers in the legislative branch of city council with the information you need to perform your oversight role.
So I'm still excited about that.
I'm excited to keep working with my colleagues in our office and excited to continue our focus on equity.
One of the things that's happened recently and the government auditing standards, which is kind of the Bible, if so to speak, of what we follow, was a move to re-include a focus on equity as one of the principal things you look at when you do a performance audit, which is a lot of what we do.
Not only looking at effectiveness, is this program working, efficiency, are you getting the biggest bang for your buck, but also, is it fair?
And I know the city of Seattle and this council place a high premium on that.
So for all those reasons, that's why I'd like to be reappointed.
And thank you for answering the question.
Thank you so much, City Auditor Jones, for that introduction and for answering that initial question.
I do want to give my colleagues an opportunity to either ask questions or make comments.
And if anyone would like to do so, please let me know by raising your hand.
Okay, I'm not seeing any questions.
You know, we are all really familiar with your work, City Auditor, and really have appreciated an opportunity to work with you over the last six years.
As a council member, you've been really at the center of making sure that we have access to some of those best auditing practices.
And you all have an incredible workload over at the city auditor's office related to some of these good governance practices.
And as you framed it, help the City Council fulfill its oversight function and role as the legislative body for the City of Seattle.
I wanted to ask just really quickly, you know, there is, as I mentioned, a lot of work that you all do.
There are currently 108 implemented recommendations that your office has issued to executive departments.
And I guess I'm wondering how you would help the executive and legislative branches better understand your recommendations and how you would sequence implementation of those recommendations.
Of course, some of them are probably more contemporary and current than others and just sort of wanting to get a sense of how we can create an opportunity to get higher compliance with implementation of your recommendations?
Thank you.
That's an excellent question.
I think the key for recommendations, one, they have to make sense.
We have to do a job in our office to develop a recommendation that makes sense.
And I will say we've been blessed in the city of Seattle.
A large percentage, I think it's like 70%, we made 788 recommendations since 2007. and 70% roughly of them have been implemented.
I think one of the keys is we really try and work hard with the departments to say, you know, because we're, what we say is, you know, we don't want to make you look bad.
We want you to look as good as possible.
We want you to avoid as many risks as you can.
So I think what we've tried to do is to be really open and transparent with departments, really focus on not trying to be, you know, gotcha, type otters, but to try and be, you know, helpful.
And I think that's the key.
We have to keep on crafting recommendations that, you know, the departments, when they look at them, they go like, yeah, that makes sense.
You know, that's going to help us.
That's going to help this city.
And that's going to help us avoid a problem.
And then one of the things we do, I think, is just the fact that we keep following up until it no longer makes sense to either the recommendation isn't implemented or or it doesn't make any sense to have it implemented.
To give you an example, we did a series of reports looking at the city's navigation team, which no longer exists, but was a tool that was being used to deal with unsanctioned encampments.
And we did a series of reports on that.
And when the team was abandoned, you know, it didn't make any sense to keep following that particular thing and those recommendations.
So we set those aside.
So, you know, it's knowing when to set something aside.
It doesn't make any sense.
Sometimes things change, you know, a program stops, like in that case, you don't have it anymore.
And it actually is kind of, you know, we call that a red, you know, stop.
We're not going to implement our recommendations.
It may lower the score, but for us, it makes sense.
So I don't know if I answered your question, but I think, you know, just being by following up on them, you know, pursuing them until, you know, the audit recommendation is either closed, it's been implemented, or it no longer makes sense to pursue it.
And I would say a lot of ours are pending, you know, because departments, often what we're suggesting they can't do overnight you know it takes some time for them to do it you know with their um resource constraints and just trying to get some of this changes made and we understand that and that's why um when we do our follow-up we say look we're going to check back in a year you know unless we get a request from you the council to bird dog it a little bit more quickly.
We generally give them a year because often it takes that long for them to fully implement a change.
So Council President Gonzalez, I don't know if I answered your question or not.
No, that's helpful.
I wanted to shift gears a little bit to, I think this council in particular has really focused on process improvements in addition to funding and identifying new revenue sources to increase the amount of affordable housing and other types of development that can occur within our city to increase housing choice across the city.
And I know we are joined on this committee by the good chair of our land use committee.
And one of the questions that I have for you is related to SDCI.
Of course, we know that they do a lot of complex code enforcement and permitting work and whatnot.
And I was wondering if, based on your experience in auditing many of those program areas, whether you have any observations now that you would be interested in working on in your next term to help the city council identify ways and SDCI identify ways in which they could streamline services in that area of code enforcement and permitting work that oftentimes we hear particularly from folks like childcare providers and affordable housing providers that can really sort of gum up the system in a way that results in delay and cost and sort of slower production of the amenities we want to be able to create within our neighborhoods.
To answer your question, Council President Gonzalez, We're always delighted to look at something that council and or the public and the executive is interested in us looking at.
I think that is an area that we haven't looked at very in great depth in recent years.
I'm aware I've been here long enough.
I have enough dust on my shoulders here that You know, there have been a series of studies over the year to try and figure out how to expedite, you know, say, housing, you know, permitting for housing, which is such a challenging issue for those of us in Seattle.
And so I think that would be a good area that we could look at.
You know, we'd want to sit down with council, sit down with the department and figure out what makes sense, how we could add value in that.
So yeah, asking you, we haven't looked at in a while, but I think that's something that might benefit from our going to look at it, bringing our independent lens.
Yeah, our neighbors to the south in Tacoma have certainly, I think, comparatively done a better job than we have at the city as it relates to sort of streamlining those services.
And I continue to hear from our housing developers and childcare facility the sort of significant need of reducing the bureaucracy in order to expedite the process of creation, again, of those amenities in our city that we want to see created.
Okay, colleagues, any other questions or comments on Auditor Jones's reappointment?
Not seeing any hands raised.
So I'm going to go ahead and advance this reappointment.
I move that the committee recommend confirmation of appointment 02033. Is there a second?
Okay.
Thank you so much.
It's been moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the reappointment of David Jones as our city auditor.
Are there any additional comments?
Hearing none, will the clerk...
What's that?
Just excited to be able to vote to reappoint.
Awesome.
Will the clerk call the roll on a committee recommendation that the appointment be confirmed?
Juarez?
Aye.
Mosqueda?
Aye.
Gallant?
Yes.
Strauss?
Yes.
chair gonzalez aye that's five in favor none opposed great the motion carries and the committee recommendation that the appointment be confirmed will be sent to the september 20th city council meeting thanks so much and congratulations city auditor jones but don't go too far because the next agenda item uh is yours so will the clerk please read item three into the record agenda item number three the 2020 annual report and 2021 work program update for briefing and discussion Great, thanks so much.
Of course, we just heard about some of your accomplishments and your perspective as city auditor.
So now we get an opportunity to dig into your 2020 annual report and also get an update on your work program.
So I'm gonna hand it over to you as city auditor Jones to walk us through that report.
Thank you so much, Council President Gonzalez.
I'm going to keep this brief, and I'll have a spot for questions.
But we have a lot of materials that you can read about this.
So I'm going to be talking about our 2020 annual report, which is a charter required document, and our 2021 work plan.
For those in the viewing audience who may not be familiar with our office, the Office of City Auditor provides independent analysis of the city program.
to ensure that the government of the city of Seattle operates as effectively, efficiently, and equitably as possible.
We provide information to the Seattle City Council to help it in its role of overseeing Seattle city government, and we make recommendations to city departments to help them do better work and avoid risks.
And of course, there's information promoting government transparency and accountability to the public.
Could you go to the next slide, please?
That would be slide two.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
So what I'm going to do is just talk about some of our accomplishments in January 2020. And again, as I said earlier, I'm really proud of the staff in our office who kept up their productivity despite a forced transition to remote work in March 2020 due to the pandemic.
Our staff continued to produce insightful, relevant reports containing recommendations for improvements on some of the most complex issues.
and urgent topics that CL face, things like homelessness, transportation infrastructure, utility billing issues, and surveillance technology.
And as I talked about a little bit earlier, we continued our decade-long practice of annually following up on our recommendations.
In our last annual recommendation follow-up report, these are reports we do every year, we keep following these recommendations until they're done, we reported on the status of over 200 recommendations.
we're following a lot of recommendations.
And again, as I said earlier, I'm pleased to note that about 70% of the nearly 800 recommendations we've made since 2007 have been implemented by city departments.
And we take a great deal of pride in that, that we can come up with something that departments are willing to implement.
And finally, as noted on the slide, but I'm really proud that we continued our longstanding practice of thinking through the potential race and social justice implications of our audits.
We on every audit will use, we have a modified version of the city's RSJI toolkit, and it helps us plan our work and keep our lens on issues that may be raised when we're doing that work concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And one of the great things that's happened is this tool has been adopted by other local government or audit offices throughout the country.
Could you go to the next slide, please?
So again, these are just some of the highlights on a report published since 2020. The first one bullet that you see there is our audit on bridge maintenance that was requested by Council Member Peterson.
The report identified a significant bridge maintenance funding gap and suggested ways for the city to deal with it.
I'm proud to note that it actually won the highest award for a 2020 performance audit from the Association of Local Government Auditors.
The next report note on the slide was conducted at the request of Councilmember Mosqueda, who was responding to a complaint she received from City Light customers about their unexpected high electricity bills.
So we did the audit looking at City Light's customer billing practices and made 16 recommendations for how City Light could improve these practices.
There's a third item listed there.
It's another City Light audit, something we as City Auditor initiated.
It contains 13 recommendations, and it concerns the City Light's management of a multi-million dollar utility pole replacement program.
So utility poles, you know, where they have various wires and things going into them.
We looked at that.
and then the next one the next item services we actually completed two reports of that in 2020 one was at the request of council president gonzalez we produced a report on the human services department's management of contracts it had with service providers and we came up with 18 recommendations in that report for improvement and i should note in this the implementation of some of those recommendations that haven't yet been implemented they're really going to fall upon the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
They're going to have to consider whether or not they want to implement those recommendations.
So that's just something to watch.
And again, I said the second report in 2020, the Great End of Homelessness, it was a response from Council Member Herbold.
She asked us, a request from Council Member Herbold, I should say.
She asked us to look at the activities of the city since disbanded navigation team.
And that report was actually the fourth report we did since 2020. regarding the city's approach to unsanctioned encampment.
And this particular audit identified five concrete strategies the city could use to address trash accumulation around unsanctioned encampments.
And finally, the last bullet you see on that slide, that referred to, and this is something that was acquired by the surveillance technology ordinance.
We ended up completing the first two reviews that were acquired by that ordinance and what those first two reviews involved were.
two Seattle Department of Transportation technologies, license plate readers and traffic cameras.
And in our report on those two surveillance technology, we made a total of 28 recommendations for how the city can improve its oversight of those two technologies.
Anyone else out there in the viewing public, if you want more information about all the stuff we did in 2020, go look at our 2020 annual report, which can be found at www.seattle.gov slash city auditor slash annual reports.
Could you go to the next slide, please?
Slide four.
So I'm going to take you through the next three slides.
This is about our office's 2021 work program.
And this program is actually contained in our annual report, our 2020 annual report.
And going forward, you'll see it there every year.
One thing I have to emphasize, it's a living document.
Our work program is a living document.
It's not fixed in stone because we want to remain flexible enough to take on emerging topics of interest to the council and the public.
Great example of this is our bridge maintenance audit we did after the West Seattle Bridge unexpectedly closed, and that precipitated a lot of interest in the state of maintenance activities in city-owned bridges.
But when you're looking at the slides, if you look in the middle right there, there's a thing called source.
That's a column heading.
And that's another way of saying that.
And that's one of the reasons that explains why we did these projects.
And if you just go through the three slides, you're going to see that most of our work is either required by ordinance, which the council voted on, or it's in response to a city council member's request.
And I think there's one in here, a statement of legislative authority.
So a lot of our stuff is directed at council and requested by council.
And I've been very fortunate in my years, like the stuff that we've been asked to do has been good topics, good things.
And that's made our life a lot easier.
And the other thing just to note is we sometimes, you know, we do performance audits, but we also do some non-audit projects that council's asked us to take on.
For example, we've administered the contracts for two ordinance required evaluations of the laws passed by the council.
If you look on this slide, you'll see a reference to the sweetened beverage tax evaluation.
That's the type of thing where we, council's asked us to oversee and administer a contract where we go out and have some experts look at the effect of an ordinance.
And finally, the final thing to see, we've completed, if you look at the slide, two of the items on our work program.
You'll see the traffic cameras and the tweet and beverage tax evaluation.
But we're about ready to come out with three more reports.
We've got one on gun safety, one on the municipal court's probation program, and another on a notice of intent to sell for low-income housing when certain multifamily units are put up for sale.
So those things will be coming out soon.
Could you go to the next slide, please, slide five?
So slide five, we're doing some work right now at SPU, Seattle Public Utilities on residential solid waste billing.
This is something that involves a lot of money.
And one of the things we do is we make sure that the utilities are doing a good job of handling rate payer dollars.
taking care of those.
So that's another example of that kind of work.
The second thing you'll see there, encampment dashboard.
There's some work we're doing at the request of two council members, council member Herbold and council member Lewis.
And it's really kind of a follow-up on our four previous navigation team audits that are looking at and sanctioned encampments issues dealing with those.
And what the council members want us to do is to come up with a report that identifies some metrics that'll help the city understand changes over time in conditions concerning unsanctioned encampments, kind of a scoreboard, a dashboard, so we can see how we're doing.
And the dashboard falls into three, the measures fall into really three categories, lived experience of those who are homeless, public health implications, and what we call system performance.
And I should say right now, we're actually working with the King County Regional Homeless Authority and Seattle King County Public Health on a draft of the dashboard.
We put some information together, we put together a draft, and now we're kind of talking about it with them.
on that i'm excited about that um going down again and uh council member lewis asked us to look at sidewalk maintenance so we're in the middle of working on that uh next on the list council president gonzalez and council member mosqueda both asked us to look at how's the city doing in terms of handling all these millions and millions of dollars of COVID funding we're getting from the federal government.
So we've been doing some work on that.
And then finally, the last thing there, Council Member Lewis, again, we're working on an audit of the city's procurement of Seattle Police Department patrol cars.
the effectiveness and efficiency of that process.
And some of you may wonder, you know, who know the city pretty well, like, why are you guys, your office, the Office of City Auditor, looking at this?
Why not the Office of the Inspector General?
Because this involves something involving the police department.
The reason why we're doing this is because actually it's the Department of Finance and Administrative Services that's responsible for purchasing city vehicles, including police patrol vehicles.
That's why we have it in our daily WIC.
If you could go to the next slide, please.
Again, I talked about the secure scheduling ordinance that our office was required to administer and to award a contract with academic researchers or experts in the field.
The final report, there have been a series of reports.
This is the same with the sweet and beverage tax that have come out over the years.
The final one for this particular, the secure scheduling ordinance, is going to be done in early 2022, and they're going to focus on the employer experience with implementation of the secure scheduling ordinance.
The report that just came out this year was on the worker, the employee side, and these reports have focused on both the employee side and the employer side.
The second thing listed there, the community safety initiative, some work we started this summer at the request of Council Member Herbal, and it kind of falls out of some work we did in 2015. We looked at the street outreach program, a program the city was doing to do street outreach to help present violence.
We made some recommendations in there that Council Member Herbal was saying, hey, I think that report, you could really be useful to work with the human service department to inform them to support them because they've made these community safety awards to all about you know 20 uh odd um so community-based organizations so we're going to be doing that help them make sure that they um support these organizations that are trying to do the work and another thing that's what portal do look at how the human services department is coordinating with and providing support to the king county regional peacekeepers collective which is part of this whole effort uh you know to try and intervene and reduce violence in the community And next on the list, again, these are, you see we're doing more work on surveillance technologies.
We're looking at one from the Seattle Fire Department and three from City Light.
We have to report on these in September of 2022. And the last thing here, I listed there, evaluation of Rainier Beach and I did grant for PBIS.
That reverses the work we've been doing since 2013 and we've been doing this work in partnership with other city departments.
It's a non-audit project.
Seattle Public Schools and community-based organizations in Rainier Beach and the whole point of the work is to reduce youth victimization and crime in Rainier Beach.
by using community-led strategies.
The whole idea being that we want to keep youth out of the criminal justice system because all the research that we have says once you get folks in the criminal justice system, it's just, it doesn't on average lead to good outcomes.
So if we can prevent that from happening, that's a good thing.
The city got a grant, a couple of grants, but in 2016, the city got a grant from the U.S.
National Institute of Justice.
And they're implementing in Rainier Beach and the schools there in some community settings, two sort of things, positive behavioral supports and restorative practice in the settings of Rainier Beach.
And so the evaluation for these grants, the report on how this grant is performing, how it's doing, will be published sometime in 2022. Okay, if we could just move on to the next slide.
And I'm almost done, council members.
This is just a repeat of the second slide I showed you, and I just want to say, remind you and the viewing audience, our office is working hard to improve Seattle city government through our reports and the recommendations in those reports.
And if you go to slide eight, the grand finale, I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have about our work in 2020 or what we have in our current work plan or anything else you'd care to ask me about.
And let me conclude by saying I want to thank the council for our office.
Seattle has really done a great job in supporting performance auditing, which is a good thing in my opinion.
So thank you very much.
Thank you so much City Auditor Jones for the presentation.
This is a good way to punctuate your reappointment that we just voted on.
Lots of really important work that your office is doing.
You have an amazing team of really smart folks who are digging into this work every single day.
And I saw lots of bodies of work that I've asked your office to do, and I'm excited to see those particular results and And as always, lots of council members asking you all to do some of this important oversight work.
So I did want to open it up for any questions or comments from my colleagues.
This is just a briefing and discussion item.
So if there's anything folks want to add, please feel free to do so.
Council Member Mosqueda, please.
Thank you very much, Council President.
Thank you, Director Jones, or Auditor Jones, excuse me.
I wondered if there was something in the works that perhaps I'm not as familiar with to help monitor the recommendations and then how each department is doing with filling that out.
We talked a little bit about dashboards that you're investigating for departments, but is there a requirement departments that have had an audit to then upload maybe automatically without you having to prompt them upload at some periodic times how they're doing with adhering to those recommendations is there anything like that in the works because this is just coming to mind as we're talking about the Seattle City Light audit and how important it was for us to have that investigation done by you all.
And I think it led to some really important recommendations.
We saw actually the department work pretty quickly on two or three of those ideas that we had asked for initially, then be prompted into action because of the audit.
But now, since I think August, we've asked Seattle City Light to get back to us on how they're doing with the rest of them.
I think had it not been for the briefing that I had with you, I might not have remembered to say, what is going on?
What's the latest with those recommendations that weren't acted upon immediately?
And they're going to get back to us.
It sounds like City Lights in the midst of compiling information to get back to us.
But I'm wondering if there's a way that is currently systematizing or if we need to set some protocol or process up for the future so that there's automatic uploads from the department so that we can see a recommendation where it's at in implementation.
And then if there's a gap in terms of action.
Great question, Council Member Mosqueda.
And, you know, now the current tool we use is, you know, once a year we're going to have a report that's, you know, a traffic light report, if you will, you know, like red for not being implemented, green for implemented.
yellow for pending um so that that only gets to once a year unless unless a council member asks us and we have bandwidth to do it we'll follow it up sooner than that but we do we are working on something um we are working on some software that um and i want to get ahead of myself because of course i know least about this other folks in our office know about it more than i do that'll make it a lot easier and quicker and allow departments to sort of immediately put in information when they've implemented a recommendation and that we'd be able to get more real time information about that out to you.
So there is something in the works on that.
I'd be delighted to talk to you in further detail about that to get somebody who's more conversant with exactly what we're doing right now.
But we're always looking for ways to make that process more transparent and getting you the decision makers and the public the information more quickly.
So, yeah, there is something that works.
I guess that's the short answer, you know, to try and get it more quickly to you.
I should say one thing we have done, if you go on our website, we do now have an interactive.
where you can go and look by department or year and other things.
You can sort of slice and dice what you want to look at if you want to follow up on your own about recommendations.
So we did do that this year.
I think it's mentioned in our annual report too.
So if you're just curious about, you know, how's the, We have some police department recommendations.
We did a report on police department management of overtime back a couple of years ago.
You could type in police department and you could see sort of where we stand with those recommendations.
But back to your question, we're working on something to even get more rapid to make it easier for departments to respond to us.
And I'd be happy to get you more information about that.
Did I answer your question?
you did thank you very much and um i look forward to chatting about that as well appreciate the annual reports we will be providing an update and i think that real-time um implementation idea is great so look forward to chatting with you yeah and the and the dashboard is um is a step in the right direction i'd say for those who haven't had a chance to take a look at it please um you know
meander over to the city auditor's website and check it out, because I do think that is an improvement.
In the past, we've gotten sort of, you know, multi-page documents that were sort of coded red and green and yellow and red, and it was a lot more burdensome to sort of sift through.
So the dashboard is definitely headed in the right direction.
Appreciate that improvement.
Any other questions or comments?
I'm not seeing any other questions from council members or comments.
And City Auditor Jones, do you have anything else that you'd like to add, particularly as we're sort of looking towards heading into our budget process?
Any sort of gaps or needs that you'd like to take the opportunity to highlight now before before we sort of engage in a more formal process of soliciting your input.
I know we've already, my office has been working closely with you as the council president on identifying some ongoing needs to fulfill many of the things that you have in the work plan for 2022, but just did want to give you an opportunity to share any sort of global thoughts with the viewing public and other members of the committee before we begin our budget deliberations.
You know, thank you for asking.
You know, we'll always work to as hard as we can to use any resources we get from the city from the Council.
I would say the one challenge, just to tell you, just to be honest, and I think a lot of organizations in government are facing this, is we've had a couple of our more experienced auditors retire.
I think they had about 40 years of experience between the two of them, and we are probably gonna have um another one um in in some time within the next year so you know heavy on mine is um succession planning because we want to have a strong team and keep producing the work that the council needs and the public expects um that's and that city departments benefit from so so that just just to let you know that's one of the things i'm trying to think about you know um how we're going to replace all these years of institutional wisdom and you know we're trying to do things like automate certain things that we've done more manually before to free up time maybe work in teams but that that's one of the challenges and I don't think that's unique to our office I think a lot of folks are dealing with that but You know, we will we'll let you know how that specifically will play out.
But thank you for asking.
But that's like the one challenge that I that I see.
And I'm really excited about trying to meet that challenge.
You know, we'll we'll figure it out how to deal with it.
Thank you so much for answering that question.
Really appreciate it.
And of course, we'll stay in close contact with you and folks in your office as we continue to work through legislative branch priorities for the budget okay colleagues if there is no further business to come before the committee the committee will be adjourned I'm not hearing anything else so this does conclude our meeting for today we will not have another meeting until I think December given the budget budget process that is ahead of us for the next few months so Thanks so much for all your hard work and thanks for being with us.
We're adjourned.
Thank you.