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

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number of what our staffing numbers and demographics are. We are also supporting a new staff performance evaluation, career development and succession planning procedure. We continue to leverage our new partnerships. We also look forward to finalizing our new Vendor Handbook. I want to host the IDOA MWBE Commission meeting here in South Bend. Kyra Clark, Director of Human Resources with offices on the 12th floor of the County-City Building, stated, I've been in my position since April 2017 and am very excited to be here. Overall we have no FTE staff changes. That said, we have a very small department that serves a good size population of employees so we must do what we can to make sure we are maximizing the responsibility and potential. We are changing the Talent Manager title to the Deputy Director of Human Resources and that includes a cap increase. The reason for that is we need that Talent Manager to touch many other parts of the department and the title change would be consistent with the responsibility change. We currently have a Benefits Coordinator but that will now be titled the Benefits Manager. The City of South Bend has taken a great step toward recruiting and keeping fantastic employees and we are implementing a really aggressive policy for parental leave. It is for one hundred percent (100%) paid leave for six (6)weeks. That will be starting in 2018. This is a fantastic benefit offered to all City employees. We have also completed a comprehensive review of the benefits. The City already has a very competitive benefits package and we wanted to make sure we are providing the best quality benefits at the lowest cost possible. We are contracting with an organization that will serve as a customer service line for the City employee benefits. She continued, Looking forward to 2018 we are really neck deep in the Kronos implementation and we want to make sure that is an absolutely successful transition. We will also continue reviewing and revising our employee handbook. Our number one (1) asset are our employees and we want to set them up for success. We would like to focus more on professional development starting 2018 as well. Lonnie Douglas, Director of Human Rights with offices at 319 N. Niles Avenue, stated, In order to do more with less we must make sure everyone in the department is trained in every aspect of the department. With taking on the County as part of what we are doing, I will be out of the office a lot and being out of the office means that I have to have people in the office that can run the office. We have taken the liberty of eliminating an Investigator position and we also had a retirement last year. What we have asked to do is make salary changes in the department. There will now be a Housing and Employment Supervisor. If I'm training in either of those fields, that respective supervisor will come with me. That means that both supervisors must be fully cross- trained. We are preparing ourselves for that. Diana Moya, Inspector for Human Rights with offices at 319 N.Niles Avenue, stated, We have managed to meet our contractual obligations with the EEOC and with HUD. Every year we host a fair housing training event and this year we had more than one hundred (100) attendees. We awarded three (3) scholarships to three (3) students from the local high schools. We trained staff at the South Bend Housing Authority and Center Management Corporation. All staff attended the Indiana Consortium of State and Local Human Rights Training Conference and we also attended the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission National Training Conference. We will be attending the Housing and Urban Development Training at the John Marshall Law School. 6