08-16-17 Personnel and Finance (#1)

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administered City values that are identified by Priority-Based Budgeting. The Legal Department achieved a healthy program distribution. Most dollars in programs fall into quartile one (1). We, the Legal Department,have the lowest number of quartile four(4) dollars of any City department. It definitely demonstrated the value and necessity of our programs in serving residents. The top two (2)programs that were identified by that process were litigation and administrative hearings in access to public records fact compliance. These results are consistent with the time and energy expended by the department in those areas and are in line with governance priorities. The one (1) quartile four(4) program that was identified by the initiative was legal counsel for the South Bend Building Corporation. That program consists of one (1) required annual meeting and is mandated by ordinance, so it is something that we have to do. It only costs one thousand one-hundred dollars ($1,100) in the grand scheme of things. She continued, I'm very proud to say that we have a sustainable budget. I would like to thank the Council for that. The reason why the budget is sustainable is because every year we have looked at this and we have achieved what we have said we are going to do with the dollars approved. There are no significant budget changes. Frankly, there is actually a decrease by $35,418 and that is largely due to a decrease in the allocations to the Legal Department. For example, in 2017, our IT allocation was $99,335. That has been reduced to $73,815. Our postage allocation was three thousand six-hundred dollars ($3,600), and that has been reduced to two thousand dollars ($2,000). She went on, This is always the fun part to talk about our accomplishments. The Access to Public Records Act(APRA)benchmark of ten thousand (10,000)requests is really significant. Not only did we hit the benchmark, but we did that all without a single violation. We also developed a litigation transparency guide which was published on the Police Department's Transparency HUB to give residents greater access to case terminology and court documents. For example, one (1) case that received a lot of media attention was jury trial case titled `Franklin v The City of South Bend.' Folks wanted answers for that and the trial was in Fort Wayne and we purchased, for two thousand eight-hundred dollars ($2,800),transcripts. We published that online on the HUB so people could go and read the transcript. That amount of money can be cost-prohibitive for many families to be able to know what is going on. We've also provided training to our City employees and that helps empower the employees to do their job most effectively. Those trainings have been in open-door law, APRA, procurement and claims investigation. There is a consistent downward trend in our Liability Fund. Back in 2013 we were averaging $1.4 million paid out, and in 2017 we are at a little over $100,000 paid out. If we continue having proactive plans resolutions, aggressive defense strategies and implementing the proactive safety measures, it will help keep that downward trend going. While our Liability pay-outs are going down our collections have been going up and that is what you want it to be. We treat all of the City debtors with dignity,respect and civility. We, as the Legal Department, are charged under statute to collect all debts due to and owned by the City. We have an obligation to do that but we also know that things happen in people's lives so we've also created payment plans for as little as fifty or ten dollars ($50 or$10)a month. We do work with our residents while still holding them accountable. In addition to defending cases, we also initiate litigation. We have a confidentiality agreement so we legally have to remain quite vague about the details,but we filed an action and we recovered$425,000. We are very proud of that because it was an innovative legal theory. We also responded individually to sixty-five (65) claims 3