09-13-17 Personnel and Finance (#6)

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Committee Chair White thanked Mr. Murphy for all his work and his commitment to the Administration, the City and to the citizens. Mr. Murphy continued, We probably have one (1) of the best finance departments in the State. It is a great team. Jen Hockenhull, City Controller of the City of South Bend with offices on the 12th floor of the County-City Building, stated, Thank you for giving us the opportunity to present to you all. We are bringing in a Director of Facilities Management for the Central Services budget, and Matt Chlebowski will talk more about that. We are a very different department from what you have seen so far. We have an outdated ERP system. We come to you as a giant group of administration and finance. We house Human Capital and Inclusion which includes Human Resources, Human Rights, and Diversity and Inclusion. When we get a new ERP system, these will all be separate divisions from the General Fund. However until we have a new ERP system, we are going to present as one (1) group. We now have Central Services in our budget for 2017. We reassessed purchasing and other internal service functions and after a lot of research it made sense to have a centralized purchasing division that we've never had in the past. We had about one hundred and fifty (15 0) buyers all within the City buying all sorts of stuff. It was all legal but it just wasn't efficient. Mr. Murphy stated, The Administration and Finance budget is projecting an increase for two (2) main reasons. One (1) fiscal officer moved from the Code Enforcement budget. The second is an addition of an Administrative Assistant for IT, HR and Admin and Finance. We have an increased number of people and we haven't increased the support staff in a long time. Last year we actually decreased the support staff by one (1) and a half people. Human Rights is broken into a General Fund component which is requesting a five percent(5%) increase. There is a separate grant-funded Department Fund#258. It receives HUD and EDOC money and that is a self-funded department. The County Option Income Tax is our COIT Fund and that is used for a lot of things. That revenue increased four point two seven percent(4.27%)this.ye. We receive a notice from the State August 1 of every year of what it will be for the next year. Last year it increased ten percent(10%) and we didn't know about that until later in the budget. That helped but this increase is a good increase. We typically plan a two percent(2%) increase. That budget is balanced and there is actually a small surplus in that of a couple hundred dollars. The EDIT Fund has an increase of three point zero two percent (3.02%) in revenue. The EDIT Fund is used for transfers to other departments like Community Investment and Code Enforcement. The interesting thing about COIT and EDIT is that it is a County-wide tax. Any growth in South Bend helps the County out. Any kind of growth in Mishawaka,Notre Dame or Granger, it helps us out as well. He continued, Telephone costs of about$550,000 used to be paid out of the COIT Fund. Telephone expense is a general expense that nobody really wants to take. That has been moved over to the IT Budget so when you see the increases in all Department budgets for IT,that is one (1) of the reasons for the increase. COIT will help fund the start of the new ERP system. That is budgeted at about$600,000 but I don't really think we know at this point what it is going to be. We hope by next summer we will have a better understanding of that. Our Hall of Fame Debt 3