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REGULAR MEETING OCTOBER 24, 2016 pay them to keep them. As this City grows, we need to employ the best employees who are the best quality. The game is changing in this area. He stated he remembers one (1) time Kareemah Fowler intercepted him in the County -City Building and diffused his frustration with the government and he left the building feeling better about the City. When you get people that need to be kept on, you need to pay whatever it is to keep them. There are a lot of great cities in this country and while South Bend is getting better, we can't lose talent to other cities. Public service needs to be supported. This job market here is enormously strong. The petitioner was given an opportunity for rebuttal. John Murphy, City Controller with offices on the 12th Floor of the County -City Building, stated he wanted to mention a couple of things. The Parks Director got singled out a little bit but that position has received a big increase of responsibility. It is no longer just the Parks Department but also supervising a convention center, the best performing arts center in the area, and other responsibilities. It is a big responsibility but there has been savings. Dennis Andres has retired and that position will be deputy position and there will be salary savings there when that position has been filled. These increases are completely funded in the budget. Our operating budgets have revenue equal to expenses. We have issues with the fiscal curb but this is an annual budget and we are fully funded for 2017. There were also comments about transparency but other offices and specifically the Administration and Finance Department pride ourselves in transparency. We have a tremendous amount of reports sent to the Council and all viewable online. Our IT Department has a lot of a material available on the Open Data portal. Some people may not believe it but we do focus on transparency and we are trying to do better every time. Our Department has saved over $8.9 million dollars in refunding since 2012 and the Legal Department has saved considerable amounts of money in preventing loss of claims paid out. The claims the last few years have been hundreds of thousands of dollars less than traditional trends would indicate. There is some benefit that we have been able to achieve the past few years working together. Chairperson Ferlic stated now the Councilmembers will offer comments and after all Councilmembers have been given the opportunity to speak we will entertain a motion. Councilmember Williams- Preston stated one (1) thing she wants to make clear is that this is a beautiful example of why we need to engage the public and the Council a lot earlier and all along the way when we are creating the budget. There were a lot of questions today and she still has some questions. The City may have some really reasonable answers to those but doing it all at once makes it hard and adds to the frustration of the community. She stated that is something she is going to look forward to addressing in the next budget cycle. We end up with all this frustration but if we engaged back in January maybe it would be different. She stated it would be really hard for her to vote for this, as is. Councilmember Randy Kelly stated he is in support of this and Mr. Murphy spoke to some of those reasons. He stated there were some big numbers that jumped out to him when he first saw this that were daunting but we have been having budget meetings for months now and then you get into the weeds and start to understand what that is about and reasons behind them. The overall non - bargaining increase is two point four percent (2.4 %) which is in -line with what we are seeing for Police and Teamsters. As has been pointed out, the Parks Director was a big increase but a big increase in responsibilities and we did see some savings lead to that with Mr. Andres retiring. We have seen some increased efficiencies in these departments and there have been millions of dollars in savings in the Administration and Finance Department and hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings in the Legal Department. We are seeing development throughout our City in numbers we haven't seen in decades. That speaks to what they are doing in Community Investment and Public Works. That is because we have good people working in these jobs and again even with these increases they could make much more money in the private sector. There is still a big public service element to this equation. It is important that we retain these people and have salaries in place where if people do leave the number is at a level where we can compete for the top talent. Councilmember Broden stated her thoughts are a combination of the two (2) prior Councilmembers. She stated this is her first time around on this process and she attended every M.