08-08-18 Personnel and Finance (#2)

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I ®CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK members. We have an environment in which equality toward gender, race and age are indicative toward a strong commitment to the City's core values of inclusion and excellence. She continued, We have reached many of our goals last year for 2018 because of your help and support of the budget. We accomplished our goals under teamwork by fostering a spirit of collegiate and helpful behavior, energizing the workplace and supporting a culture of respect and trust. We also were able to accomplish several of the goals regarding professional development. Thanks to the 2018 budget,the department was able to send six(6)attorneys to the 2018 Municipal Lawyer Seminar. This is an opportunity for our lawyers to collaborate, meet and network with other municipal lawyers across the State. This is the first(1St)time during this Administration that six (6) attorneys were able to attend this conference and we found it to be very helpful. We were also able to recruit and onboard three (3) highly qualified and experienced attorneys through our salary budget. We were able to reward our talented staff through mid-year reviews and upcoming end-of-year reviews which gives the staff something to look forward to. We have implemented a system of cross-training and collaborating that makes us as attorneys more valuable to each other as well as the City. We have invested in the cost of annual attorney registration dues for all attorneys. That is a valuable benefit as the attorneys previously were paying that on their own and we are now providing that to our attorneys. We are committed to being a helpful and cohesive team and we keep an eye toward the development of each attorney increasing their value to the City. We thank you for your support in that. She went on, The Legal Department works toward increasing transparency which is of the utmost importance to our office as well as to the City Administration. One (1) of the most prioritized and valued services identified by Priority Based Budgeting is the access to public records services we provide in the Legal Department. We maintain and process by which we review each request and respond to each one (1) fairly and in accordance with the State Law. 14,359 APRA requests have been received and processed by this Administration since 2012. We have had no violations. That is quite the accomplishment. This ,year, already, we have processed 1,723 APRA requests, as of the first(11t) of this month. She continued, The Legal Department's accomplishments include successfully resolving eight (8) lawsuits in this ye alone. We have had a seventy percent(70%) decrease in pending litigation in the course of one(1)year.We have maintained a positive,proactive,and friendly risk-management strategy that is increasingly hands-on. Defense of lawsuits and resolving claims are just two (2) examples of the daily services we provide. We've been trying to handle more matters in-house. That gives our attorneys some experience and also helps to reduce cost. For example, one (1) of the cases we handled in-house was the lawsuit of Kerr v. The City of South Bend. We were successful with that case and we defended that in-house. She went on, As of today, there were one hundred and fifty-three (153) total claims received in 2018. The amount demanded of us was $5.4 million. The number of claims we resolved in 2018 are thirty-four (34). We have denied eighty-three (83). We paid $85,685 in claims. Our approach to claims is we pay what we owe. We have a system of conducting thorough investigations and comparing market rates for each claim so we make sure we pay things we owe but we handle them in an equitable manner so that we are not over or under paying. She continued, Another one (1) of the Legal Departments daily services includes the efficient management of established collections procedures and record keeping. The system in place is EXCELLENCE I ACCOUNTABILITY I INNOVATION I INCLUSION I EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building I227W.Jefferson BvIdI South Bend,Indiana 466011p574.235.9221If574.235.9173 TD574.235.55671www.southbendin.gov 2