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CITY OF SOUTH BEND OFFICE OF THE CLERK I'm meeting with the Best Friends Society, which is nationally renowned animal welfare agency. So, I have a meeting with them in August to discuss things that we can still continue to do to improve within the shelter so we can maintain and achieve that ultimate goal. We will continue to hopefully build a more robust volunteer base,which will help not only our animals,but the burden on staff as well. Chuck Bulot,Building Commissioner for the City of South Bend with offices located at 125 South Lafayette Boulevard, stated, Good afternoon. First (1st) of all, I'd like to say that our primary objective at the Building Department is to be invisible. And by that I mean, I don't want you to ever hear about the Building Department in any negative aspect. I don't want to be on the news. I don't want to be in a lawsuit. I don't want you to have any reason to contact me for anything other than to find out information about building or building projects that are going on in the community. With that being said, we try to maintain the highest caliber of education and professionalism in our department. That's our primary objective. We like to take the complexities of the built environment and make sure that it is in its simplest form both for our ability to enforce it, and also for the community to understand it.That being said, I'm going to leave you with some simple ideas or accomplishments that we've had for 2019 so far. First(1st)of all,we have issued 1,487 building permits. All inspectors and front office positions are now filled. We had problems over the years with budget, and people retiring, and illnesses and things of this sort. We finally are at full speed. In this day and age, this time in the building community, we need that because right now, South Bend is at full speed in terms of building projects. Eighty-eight percent(88%)of all inspectors are now certified through the ICC. The ICC is the International Code Council. They are the organization that actually writes all of the building code books.Once you're certified through them, you are qualified, in a certain sense,to be an expert based on the testing that you qualify for. He continued, Our goals and plans for Q3, Q4 is to go from that eighty-eight percent(88%) to one hundred percent(100%) certified inspectors by the end of this year. Also, we want to improve our committee membership in IABO and other industry associations from the current twenty percent (20%) to forty percent (40%). We think it's important to reach out and be in contact with other organizations who might have a different point of view or have different abilities that we don't currently possess. Anything that we can learn that will help us benefit the built environment for the benefit of the health,safety, and welfare of the community is a benefit to us, and we'll continue to pursue that. I know it seems pretty simple. Although these are simple ideas or simple aspects, what we do is extremely complex. It takes a lot of years of dedication just to get up to speed to inspect buildings proficiently. We pride ourselves in being able to keep the complexities of the industry very simple. Thank you. Jitin Kain,Director of Community Investment with offices located on the 14th floor of the County- City Building, stated, Good evening, I'd like to briefly share some of our key accomplishments. One (1) of the first (1st) is the launch of the South Bend Home Repair Program. This really began in 2018, and our team's been working closely with the community and are accepting applications. We received close to three hundred (300) applications for the program. I think by the time we've gone through some of those applications, it's about one hundred(100) individuals right now going through the program. A few of those grants have been awarded. We expect to award some more by the end of the year. The other key accomplishment in the department has been the TIF realignment. Again, this realignment adds certain areas to the overall TIF areas. We have certain corridors now added, certain areas were reduced or removed from the overall TIF area. So, the airport and certain portions of the northwest part of the River West District were removed. It still EXCELLENCE I ACCOUNTABILITY I INNOVATION I INCLUSION I EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 1227 W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 466011 p 574.235.9221 I f574.235.9173 I 11)574235 5567 www.southbendin.gov 17