Budget Committee September 16, 2025   9/16/2025

Good morning.

My name is Aisha Chugtai and I'm the chair of the Budget Committee.

I'm going to call to order our adjourned meeting for Tuesday, September 16, 2025.

Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation.

These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community.

Therefore, all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast.

We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments.

Council member Payne is absent.

Council member Wonsley is absent.

and the City Council.

There are eight members present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

I will also remind my colleagues that we will be using speaker management today, so please make sure to sign in.

from the Office of Public Service, the Assessing Department, and the Arts and Cultural Affairs Department.

Welcome.

Good morning, Madam Chair.

Margaret Anderson Kelleher, City Operations Officer for the City of Minneapolis, and I will begin.

This shows our structure committee members Obviously the reporting structure here is for me directly to the mayor and then the number of departments below 17 which also includes And we'll go over here to just show you the breadth of this the Office of Public Service oversees

the non-public safety departments in the city, all of them in the executive branch.

The COO and the deputies and I will say we also include in our deputies the PW director for planning purposes and the civil rights director who also report directly to me.

That includes 2,700 employees of the little over 4,000 employees in the city of Minneapolis.

The lines of service are clustered into areas that can foster cross collaboration between the different departments, which is very important.

And each of these lines of service represent hundreds of employees underneath them.

Then directly to our office,

Our office is organized in this way.

So we have administrative support, we have the DCOO for Communications and Engagement, Laura Mellem, Deputy COO for Internal Affairs, Saray Garnett-Hahouley, and DCOO Brett Jelly, Overdevelopment and Health and Livability.

We also have a number of people who work on special projects, coordination across the enterprise.

So you would know them as folks like Mr. Cato, who has led a number of projects on our behalf, as well as Jessica Stone, who is the coordination person between a number of departments on the Climate Legacy Initiative.

I'm going to keep moving here.

You can see our mission up here.

Our mission is to provide that service of efficient, effective, equitable, high-quality services to all who live, work, and play in Minneapolis.

An important piece of that is our work with all of you as City Council members and your staff, as well as with the mayor and the mayor's staff as well.

Often these are overlapping

Issues that we are dealing with and working through and so we try to do that sort of coordination We make sure that residents as well as businesses and visitors have the information they need they can easily connect with the city through tools like 311 and Minneapolis is recognized nationally as a clean healthy and thriving city and

We do lead often the coordination and implementation of both the mayor and council's objectives to meet enterprise goals and serve the residents of Minneapolis.

We provide that executive leadership to our other departments who are reporting up

through these lines of

We also are working very hard to continue to break down those silos that exist in large organizations.

And I think we can see some good evidence of that in many of the projects we've been leading or assisting in.

And then, of course, establish supportive and trusting environment within the enterprise for employees.

I want to highlight some of our achievements.

in this past year.

So the ongoing executive leadership and cross-functional leaders engaged in a number of enterprise projects.

So we work as well on public safety reform.

I was listening in to MPD's presentation yesterday and you heard them reference the IT department, you heard them

talk about OPCR in the Civil Rights Department, and it goes beyond that.

HR, finance, a number of supportive engagement.

Climate and resilience work lives under our part of the organization, working between health and public works, as well as others.

The strategies, and I will just say and note the very

Sad and unfortunate shootings of the last 24 hours here, but our work on unsheltered homelessness is an important piece of our work that we continue to do.

Also supporting immigrant communities, managing public health issues, providing more opportunities for stakeholders to participate.

Some of the community engagement projects that we have engaged in help lead and then transition often to other departments, but the work at George Floyd Square, the work on the Future Democracy Center, and the Climate Legacy Initiative.

Another highlight this year, and I believe most of you have met Adam Fetcher, who is the new Chief Communications Officer.

Having a Chief Communications Officer for the City of Minneapolis with a unified communications department and plan has been a lot of work.

I want to commend Laura Mellem on that work.

and then of course these special events that have lived within our office.

Things like Open Streets, the Big Honkin' Truck Parade, Dinner du Nord and a myriad of other smaller events that we assist on along the way.

And then we have been working very closely with the Clerk's Office on materials for the onboarding of elected officials after this year's election and that is both on the executive and the legislative side.

The risks that we face as a city are, of course, many, but I want to highlight a couple of them.

Risk to federal funding and what could happen, although I will say

knocking on some wood, we have been able to largely keep our federal funding flowing.

Budget challenges, just the very challenges all of you are talking about, the change in commercial industrial property valuations, the shift to homeowners and renters.

Those are things that are a risk.

And then, of course, as you have all witnessed too, just like us and been part of, unanticipated emergencies that can affect how we're all operating.

We are working on our outcomes Minneapolis, so these are some of our proposed outcomes.

As we have talked about before with outcomes, we need some time to be able to measure, but in the executive management area, making sure that the percent

of OPS departments that are meeting at least 75% of their outcomes Minneapolis measures is going to be one of our measures.

Project management, you can see a number of things listed and our strategic initiatives and special events area.

The QR code will take you to an older document of ours but still a relevant document since we are in process of working with PMI on these goals.

Our budget.

We have existed since 2023 as a department, and you can see there's some variability in these budget numbers.

I will point out in 2024, we had a fair amount of one-time money for projects.

That is where you saw the bulk of money that went towards George Floyd Square planning.

There were some ARPA dollars.

I believe there was even a little bit of public safety money in there.

and then that rolled off in 2025 and you can see that we have slight growth in the 26 recommended budget.

We are a department of people.

We do not have a lot else in our department.

We have really one program and that has been Open Streets as our program and so we'll talk a little bit more about that.

But you can see most of this lives in salaries, wages, and the fringe.

We've had no turnover in this department.

We have zero vacancies, we've had a very stable team, and I think that is overall a very good thing.

And so you can see that we have 12 FTEs here, and that stays the same in the recommended budget.

Again, we will continue to focus on that executive leadership on project management for George Floyd Square, obviously hoping that that project is moving forward.

There still will be a number of things to work on there.

The Democracy Center has been transitioning over to leadership in the clerk's office.

We still provide a supporting role there.

the climate legacy initiative, special events and initiatives that will continue going forward.

So those things are not changing.

We had a budget target as well and we were given the task of preserving our employees as a high priority.

We really have only one place to go and that is the Open Streets program.

And so this is a reduction in Open Streets and what it would mean

is that we will reduce to three open streets for next year should the proposed budget be adopted.

We will also scale back the dollars that are reserved for city services at open streets.

I think as we have transitioned this program to be in-house, what we have learned is that we need some money to be able to provide

The hard costs like restrooms and other things we do still provide and plan on providing a full $65,000 in in-kind costs to open streets to be able to produce the three open streets

I will also tell you, should we have any changes in our budget, our high priority is to preserve open streets.

And so we are looking for anything that might allow that to take place.

So that reduction is almost $111,000.

Thank you very much for that presentation.

Colleagues, are there any questions or comments for the COO?

Council Member Keshman.

Thank you Madam Chair, thank you COO Anderson-Kelher.

Can you just remind me what the O.P.S.

Yes, Madam Chair, Councilor Cashman, it's a little over $3 million for a department.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue.

And so with that I want to thank you for coming in to present your recommended 2026 budget.

We didn't go over this step whether I was supposed to change the slides or not.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Chigtai and committee members.

My name is Rebecca Malmquist and I have the great honor and privilege of serving as your city assessor for the city of Minneapolis.

I am joined here today by several members of my leadership team.

And once I get to the org chart slide, I will introduce them for you.

So let's just jump right in here.

This is just demonstrates where our department really lives within the city ecosystem.

And we are I believe, CEO, CEO Keller Anderson just referred to as clusters.

So we are in the internal services cluster, reporting to DCO Garnett Hoo Hoo Lee.

This is our current organizational chart.

We have made some minor changes as we have done some recruitment over the course of the past year.

Our number two position, the Director of Assessments, we've recently filled by Rob Williamson.

Rob, if you could quick raise your hand.

He replaced Nancy Wojcik upon her retirement.

We also have the manager of assessment services on the left Ben Bedard I don't think Ben's with us today.

And then we have chief appraiser Brian Kieser and he is not with us today because he is actually sitting on the stand testifying on one of our office buildings downtown in tax court today.

And then we have our three appraisal supervisors Brian Messer, Troy

Halter and our newest member Kelsey Turr so we just really rounded out our team in the course of the last month super excited that we are back to fully staffed

Quickly going over our mission values and objectives.

You know, our mission, it's been interesting over the course of the past over 10 years that I've been here that we've looked at our mission statement and tried to rewrite it, but we always come back to the same core things about the core work that we do and it's really around fairness and equity always and abiding by state law.

I think it's very important to include our department values in alignment with the city values because they are things that our team does talk about when we decide on what work we're doing and what way we need to go with when we have issues like, for example, budget shortfalls.

So our values are dedicated to meeting customer needs always, always, always.

And we also say exceeding their expectations.

are very serious about that whether it's when we get calls during the day or when we have concerned citizens that we exceed the expectations they have for local government.

We're committed to accuracy always, that's just the nature of our work and it's important to me that we're accountable for all the things that we do and that we say.

We're transparent and honest in all of our dealings and that we have a team of qualified and talented and motivated and satisfied employees.

Going into our objectives, we really have four main umbrellas.

The first one is property tax administration, and that is, again, about administering all the property tax programs that we handle, always that it's accurate, ethical, and defensible, and so that we are preserving the fairness in the distribution of the tax burden.

And then property valuations, as you know, we have to value properties every January 2nd according to state statute.

Then our next bucket is customer service and it's very customer service is very important to us while we are seen as an well on the org chart where internal services department our team are in the field each and every day working with residents and property owners is so customer service is extremely important to our department and making sure that we're educating property owners and all of our stakeholders so that they're fully aware of what's happening with the assessment and then how that impacts the taxes for our residents.

And our fourth bucket is really around our workforce.

We're super committed to providing resources for our workforce so that they can meet all their state requirements for their licensure, as well as that they have the personal and professional growth support that they need within the department.

They have requirements for licensure that they have to achieve and we're there to support them along the way.

It's important to us that our staff is engaged and motivated and that they enjoy the work that they're doing and the work that we do in the Assessor's Office, we are probably one of the least

I just want to share that our Outcomes Minneapolis is live as well.

This is just a little screenshot of some of the

Our indicators, our measures and indicators that are out there.

So if we look at property valuations, I'm going to really skim over these because I feel like I actually do have somewhat an advantage in this area that I come and report to you two to three times a year about all of our performance measures as far as the assessment and then local boards and tax courts.

So I've provided a lot of this to you already.

You've heard it this year.

And so I don't really need to go over it.

I just picked a couple of measures to just show to you here.

because I like to show where we're having some pretty strong improvement and this is the price related differential and this measures the equity, the vertical equity of our assessment, making sure that high valued properties are valued at the same measure as low valued properties so that there's not an unequal distribution of taxes.

And I'd like to point out the blue line there and I believe that's our apartment indicator.

We were out of compliance on this measure, you'll see, in the past.

and our team really, really did excellent work for this assessment and made sure that we were right at that target of 199.9.

So just indicating that our assessments are fair, whether we're talking about high valued or low valued properties.

Next is, this is our compliance with the requirement that we physically view all properties once every five years.

And so you'll see here that we are on

To I would let you know finish up our quintile assessment for 25 and be on target as well I believe that we were we started this morning in Hawthorne and We'll continue to make our way around the neighborhoods throughout the city this year that we were assigned to But that one is one of the ones that we are in a hundred percent compliance moving on to property tax administration This is some of our local board outcomes again.

I included it just for prosperity and

not prosperity, what's the word, stars with a P posterity, there we go, thank you but I've reported this information to you already where we landed with all of our local board outcomes

I do want to talk briefly about tax court because you'll see this later as one of our risks.

This is the amount of tax court dollars that we are retaining.

So you'll see across the line there that our target is 5%.

So if we have $100 million in tax court litigation that we would only lose 5% of that.

That's our target.

Our tax court amount of value under petition has increased dramatically over the past five years.

I believe since 2020 it's increased 54%.

and we're up to over $13 billion under appeal in the city which is a large portion of our $65 million tax base and so I think it's about 20% and so that is definitely a risk that we are facing especially as the tax court changes the rules around the tax court and how fast cases come up for trial now.

We used to have a year or several years to prepare for trial and now we're sometimes having less than six months

and so it just puts a much more strong burden on our department to be able to manage those cases and get them done effectively and so you'll just see that right now we are forecasting that we will have a higher degree of loss in our tax court outcomes.

I just wanted to share this one because these are some measures that we've added and that we are doing the work of collecting.

We're collecting work around our staff response time, making sure that we are

meeting taxpayer expectations and our expectation is all responses are answered within two days or less typically they're all within one day or less but we're collecting that data now so that we can report it to you in the future

Moving on to other outcome measures around workforce.

Here I'll just share with you some of the indicators that we include.

The first one being about our BIPOC and female representation in our department.

While we are still coming short, I think it's important to report on that every year just so you can see where we're at and you can know that it is a priority of our department.

Staff retention is also important to us because historically what we've been doing as Minneapolis is people want to come and learn and experience the vast amount of property types that we have here in the city but what they would do is they would come here we would train them up for three years and they would leave and go to a suburb where they were being paid more

and perhaps sometimes have less work.

And so we are very proud to report that we have 84% of our employees have been here with us over the past three years.

And so that's when I speak to how important the workforce development is, making sure employees enjoy where they're working and they feel safe and they feel supported.

We also think it's important to, instead of just looking at our current representation, looking at where we're coming in with our applicants as we continue to try to have our staff represent the community that they serve.

The last indicator there is staff certification and all of our staff, well 33 of our 38 staff have requirements in state statute about how much education they have to receive and the licensure levels they need to receive.

The SAMMA certification that I've indicated here is the highest designation licensure in the state of Minnesota and right here I think we're indicating just over 40%.

Super happy to report though that we just had a couple in the past few months so we are up over the 50% threshold.

I think 17 of our 33 staff members now have this designation which is excellent.

going on to our achievements and risks and things that we've learned, achievements here,

I say fully staffed is the first one but I'm going to back up and actually say the 2025 assessment was the first assessment that we set in our new KAMA system and we did it and we did it with excellence.

It was not easy, it was definitely a challenge, long hours, a lot of frustrating moments but our team did it and I'm just very proud of that.

Then I'll move into fully staffed and we were fully staffed when I first put this together

However, in the course of the last week we did have a staff submit resignation and so we will we will be losing one staff member at the end of the month Another achievement I would like to talk about is our legislative participation we are actively working with IGR and our

legislative liaison that works for our state professional association our staff have been down or in St. Paul either attending or testifying as needed and I think it's really important that the Minneapolis faces out there we've had a lot a lot of legislation specifically about only Minneapolis properties I feel it's important that our city our department is there to represent them

We are doing an excellent job implementing our field mobile technology and so that's a major plus as we look to eliminate as much paper as we can.

There's been some hiccups along the way, connectivity and things like that but the staff are out in the field today I believe with their tablets and so that's great news.

I also think it's always important that we offer our staff the option of

participation in our professional associations.

And we have Troy with us here today, who is one of the vice presidents of the Minnesota Association of Assessing Officers.

We have a handful of our staff that are state instructors.

So our staff are the ones helping educate assessors across the state.

and I think that's of great value.

Kelsey was just teaching last week a class on commercial valuation and so we're grateful for that.

Staff licensure and accreditation, I already touched on.

We're happy and excited about our staff moving forward there.

Another item is because of the archaic system that we used to have, when we went into COVID, each employee had to have a desktop computer and a laptop computer.

And that was just so they could access the system.

and so now then they also have a tablet.

So within the course of the last month we now have removed all desktop computers so we most staff have two devices and we're working with IT right now to come up with a single device solution and so that will help out CIO Cameron's team and our team as well as we don't have to manage as many devices and it'll be a cost savings as well.

And then I also think it's important that we recognize how much collaboration we have here within the city

with other departments, CPED, Reg Services, Clerk's Office, we have a high number of data requests, and then the collaboration outside the city across the street with Hennepin County and our surrounding jurisdictions and counties that we have, and with the state of Minnesota, strong collaboration and communication to make sure that the city is successful and informed about everything that's happening so that we can do our work.

When I switch over to the risk side,

COO Keller Anderson brought up the property tax shifts and I put this on here as our first one.

While we don't cause the shifts, we deliver the shifts and we are fully aware of it.

It makes us even that more dedicated and focused and concentrating on the next assessment that's coming up, making sure that values are accurate and fair so that the taxes are applied in the next tax year fair and equitably as well.

We're not forecasting what's going to happen with the next assessment, but I'm happy to report that our staff is already working on the next assessment and we're hoping for really good outcomes there.

Tax court litigation, I shared with you that already that we are seeing a slip in the amount of dollars that are being retained and a very large dramatic increase in the amount of value under petition.

Another risk is staff compensation and I believe last year when I was up here I talked about the fact that our staff did receive increases to compensation after a salary study which did make us over a budget and now other jurisdictions have seen what we've done and they're taking action so it's just this vicious cycle of which jurisdiction and cities are currently at the top of the pay scale so it's just something we always have to be aware of because it definitely impacts staffing

Rapidly changing technological landscape and I will speak to AI here.

We are about to attend our international conference next week and I would say that about 33 to 40% of the presentations are about AI and so our staff just needs to be aware of what changes that's going to make for us and bring to us and I will just say that we are out there, we're doing the work to stay informed but it's changing so rapidly that it's hard to stay ahead of it.

and then the other risk is always legislative outcomes and adaptability.

When I talk about adaptability, if the state passes statutes around classification evaluation,

It's going to impact our system and we're going to have to change systems and we're going to have to change processes.

So with every legislative session there's something that comes along and that we have to be adaptable to and to change.

And the other thing I would just like to mention under risks as well is just keeping our eye on local control for our department and the City of Minneapolis and maintaining the assessment functions.

Diving into our budget here, you can see that I believe we have a 3.1% overall increase over last year, $222,000 approximately, and that is

Let's say due to mostly the salary increases.

But I do want to take a moment and stop here and pause and just talk about the history of our budget.

So you'll see that in 2024 we saw a spike and then we came down and that was really due to the increases in funding for our canvas system.

And so that's why you'll see some variations there.

And then when we look at the far right column, our total budget this year being requested is $7.4 million.

And if we look at these groupings and categories, you'll see that salaries and wages and fringes comprise 83.6% of our budget.

Then contractual with our rent and IT, that's about $700,000, so it's 9.4% of our budget.

Our capital equipment is our CADMA system.

That's the maintenance fees, that's 5.4% of our budget.

And then the operating dollars, the dollars that we truly actually have control over,

is about 1.6% of our budget.

And so, I just really wanted to point that out here as we talk about where the cuts in our budget came from.

I also want to pause here to talk about where we're going to land at the end of 2025.

Going into the year we were forecasting that we were likely going to be under budget.

However, if you'll recall last year, we were over budget due to personnel.

but some of that money in that funding was for our CAMA system and the remaining bills.

Because we came out completely over budget, we were not allowed to roll any money over just because of finance policies, which makes sense.

But that put us behind because there were still bills to pay for the CAMA system and so that put us behind by $200,000 so now we are forecasting that we are going to be over budget this year, really just because of that last

payments that need to be made that couldn't be rolled over from previous year's dollars.

Our staffing, like I mentioned, we have 38 staff.

We had zero vacancies.

As of October 1st, we'll have one.

And then this is the recommendation coming to you is a reduction in our budget by $25,000.

So when our target was given to us, we did the difficult work of trying to examine all the places that we could take from in our budget.

But as I just went over with you, our discretionary dollars, because we only have one program, we don't have other buckets to pull funding from.

So it could have meant staffing.

and so I'm so grateful to Finance and the Mayor's Office and Office of Public Service that they listened to our concerns and this is what they've asked from us and we will

take these budget cuts from our professional services line and maybe some of the contractual and so when we need resources as far as consulting with an appraiser or other things like that professional development we will take the funding from there and so we don't expect that it's going to change any of the outcomes for our residents and we will absorb that

And with that, that's all I have to share with you today.

Thank you.

Thank you director.

Are there any questions or discussion from members of the committee related to this presentation?

I am not seeing any.

Thank you so much for coming in.

I will direct the Clerk to file that report.

And with that, we will move to our final presentation for the day, which is from the Arts and Cultural Affairs Department.

For that, I will invite Ben Johnson, Arts and Cultural Affairs Director, to begin that presentation.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Chug Thai, Vice Chair Koski, and Council.

I'm Ben Johnson, Director of Arts and Cultural Affairs for the City of Minneapolis.

I am here to brief you on the 2026 Mayor's Recommended Budget for Arts and Cultural Affairs Department.

In terms of the structure of where we are placed in the city, I report up to Brad Jelle, Deputy City Operations Officer in Development, Health and Liveability in the Office of Public Service.

Here you can see the Arts and Cultural Affairs Org Chart.

As you can see, we're a small and mighty team.

We have six full-time employees and no vacancies.

Our Public Arts team is led by Mary Altman and Talia Moore.

and our public programs and grants team is led by Addie Gonzalez, Cassie Garner, and Mina Manklebecker.

You can see our mission goals and priority objectives.

In addition to what you see here, I would just like to state that what we see as our main goal to be for the city is the delivery of cultural services to everyone that lives and visits Minneapolis.

Lives in and visits Minneapolis.

And to provide opportunities to artists and creatives that live in Minneapolis and who also want to work here.

We think about those opportunities on a local, statewide, national, and international level.

and they are here to service and advance support, stimulate and promote a diverse and active arts and cultural environment, recognize and draw on the full potential of Minneapolis' artists and arts organizations, reflect and respond to civic concerns and aspirations, and enrich the lives of the people who live here, work, and visit Minneapolis.

For our priority objectives, part of our job is to examine and understand the role of the city in the way it does or does not support, incubate, and amplify our many cultural ecosystems and diverse communities so that we can help create policies and programs that fill the gaps and future supports.

From our objective outlines in the Outcomes Minneapolis framework, our programs break down primarily into two categories.

and how we deliver these services that is first through public arts and maintenance and then also through public programs and grants.

In a nutshell, I would highlight that while we manage these programs and deliver these services, we are also in the business of championing Minneapolis as an important local and global art center with progressive ideas and supporting our creative investment in the arts.

We actively try to ensure that our programs reflect the global community that live and visit here and we think about ways to maximize resident participation through the arts.

Through management decisions to maximize our existing budgets, what is important to call out here is that of the following.

So as a newer department with a full portfolio of work and projects, we have focused our efforts to streamline our administrative operations and grant processes, and we have built these systems from the ground up.

We are strategically focusing on our limited funding on programs that will have the most impact that align with city goals and we have launched an RFP process for art specialists that allow us to have a list of consultants that we can deploy quickly when we have resources in the future.

for department-wide race equity impacts.

You will see some more data in some slides coming up, but one of the aspects that I'm really proud of is the way that we practice purposeful inclusion.

This represents a way of working that is centering the true diversity of artists in Minneapolis and our neighborhoods, and it really puts community first.

And we lead with the spirit of relationship building, partnership, and collaboration.

A new statistic that we have in our department is that 84% of our awardees are first-time recipients.

which I think is pretty great and special to celebrate.

This represents a huge lift for our staff who work one-on-one with each awardee plus those that don't receive awards to those that are thinking about applying to have a meaningful relationship to city staff and civic life.

This allows the creative members of our community to author the work that they feel is most important to our city as they often are the frontline workers and responding in the ways that we heal, transform, and celebrate the city through the arts.

Why this is important is that we try to help each artist fulfill and maximize their vision of creative work and what they do and not piecemeal their vision or have to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve their work.

This allows our artists and creatives to fully realize their creative vision and artistic capacity and it's how we help them achieve equity in this community and their work becomes symbols of the change that they hope to see in the world.

Some achievements.

This slide represents the extraordinary work that is being supervised supervised by Mary Altman and Talia Morman in our public arts program.

You can see that we are actively working on development of public art and engagement across the city.

I will point out there are three new public art projects were selected this year One is the 22nd Avenue pedestrian bike bridge.

There's City Hall and the Democracy Center

But one of the achievements that I feel is really important to bring to light is the work that the public arts team has done with regional Native elders to develop new policies and guidelines for Native American focused projects, which has helped guide and shape the selection process for the new artistic team creating a work for the public art at Awamniyamni.

It's a little hard to see on this slide, but those values are listed on the right side of the slide.

But to bring visibility to those values, I will state them here, which is quickly to recognize the lasting resilience and influence of Native people, cultivate collaborations, inclusivity, and shared success, center Dakota values, stories, and voices, build collective relationships to land and water, and support the growth of Native artists.

Some of the achievements in public programs and grants, just to highlight a couple of those.

First, we celebrate the selection of Poet Laureate of Minneapolis with Jenada Patrice for a two-year term, and we also shout out our partnership with the Loft Literary Center.

And we are actively working on a wall of poetry for the new City Hall, and we are in development with a new event called a Gathering of Poets, which will be a biannual gathering of poet laureates across the state in the Midwest.

We also distributed awards through our Cultural District Arts Fund program and our Vibrant Storefronts Initiative with announcing eight new vibrant storefronts this past week in downtown First Avenue, Loring Park in the heart of uptown and 65 project grants across the seven cultural districts.

We also responded to the Kohl Center for Dance Closure by working collaboratively with CPET to select a new operator for the Kohl's, which is Arts Nest and the Xenon Dance Company.

Plus we finalized the contract with Minneapolis Public Schools to sustain the former Kohl's Dance Education Program and distributed the Bridge Fund for Dance Awards to 41 awardees.

and we have done a lot of work to rebuild the connectivity of our art sector by creating ongoing intergenerational and cross sector arts leadership, networking and community building events that also promote our work in the city.

We did this successfully last month by creating a really successful art walk for our first five Vibrant Storefront awardees which helps bring visibility to the program and showcase our investment.

Risks and lessons learned.

There are a number of risks.

that really affect our work as we respond to issues both locally and nationally.

Just to highlight a few, I would like to state that the demand for our services, the resources, and the needs of our arts ecosystem far outweigh what we are able to provide.

But the little that we are able to provide is seen as a really important symbol of our values to our city as we support the arts, especially when on the national scene they have been built, they have been dealt

especially one of the national scenes that has been dealt within the cultural sector really crushing blows to the NEA, NEH, PBS, Public Radio, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and others.

And our community really feels that.

Our community feels it and they're feeling that their work is really even more important and urgent because of it, yet there's increasing pushback on public art and art projects that some feel that perhaps they are not necessary or controversial, activist-oriented or identity-based.

We've also noticed that the arts community really wants the city to be a strong leader to help support the arts community and that it wants to remind everyone that there are just people here living too and they're only human and they deeply feel the impact of the traumatic events in our city and it affects their ability to apply for and implement these projects and grants, which is also challenged with the heaving weight of gentrification, rising costs, and the monumental loss of philanthropy in the last few years.

Two things that I would highlight from lessons learned from this list.

One is that meaningful collaborations across departments and across the community really help to strengthen our work and build trust.

And in the short time that our department has been around, we are garnering a lot of traction in our community about how to best support our ecosystem with real care and attention.

And it's also our best path to help arts community be more resilient and sustainable.

From Outcomes Minneapolis, our performance measures in 2025, here's a quick review.

I will note that the 2025 performance measures are still in action, but our outcomes directly relate to the program.

So we look at the number of artworks maintained and commissioned in our public arts program.

We look at the number of partnerships, events, communities served through civic arts, our Polaroid program, arts networking, leadership receptions, all of our work in the music scene, and through our dance program.

Grants, we look at the number of awards and the funding level for the Bridge Fund for Dance, our cultural districts and vibrant storefronts program, and the QR code you see here will take you to 2024.

We just have a few little data points that we want to share with you on the next three slides.

So this is some statistics around, these are some statistics around our public art maintenance program and those artists that are under contract.

So you can see that we are actively stewarding and maintaining our public assets and the funds for those public artworks.

We don't have enough money to always fix everything all at once, so we get an assessment and we prioritize.

the works that will be treated, the ones that are in excellent condition, and the ones that will be treated in the future.

You can see currently that the 13 projects underway, 85% of our investment goes to BIPOC-identified artists.

You can see that we have those three artworks selected for this year and we're actively managing 15 projects to completion.

This slide, this is an aggregate of the grants that are awarded through our public programs and grants.

That's an aggregate of all of the Cultural District Fund, the Bridge Fund for Dance, and the Vibrant Storefronts Awards.

You can see from this racial demographic that nearly two-thirds identify as BIPOC and one-third as white.

I'll point out on the side that you'll see the level of demand for the grants and the actual awards, so we're experiencing a great demand for the services that we provide.

This is a graph that looks at all of our grants through the lens of gender demographics.

You can see that nearly 75% of our awards go to women and non-binary members of the community.

For performance measures, you can see there, as we stated just previously, there are four main ways to measure our success.

So we look at public arts, it's based on maintaining our art and our commissions.

For grants, it's about the number of grants we can get to completion and grant management and fulfillment.

For events, it's the number of galvanizing activities we support.

And for partners, it's the number of partnerships we manage to deliver the success for all of the above.

our departmental budget.

So you can see the adopted budget for 2025 in the third column.

And then you'll notice there's a bigger leap into 2026.

This represents two changes.

One, in 2026 there's a one-time line item of $300,000 for art preservation in George Floyd Square.

Also, there's the moving of the line item of the Bridge Fund for Dance from the Downtown Assets Fund into the Arts and Cultural Affairs budget.

This amount in 2026 reflects the 2020 proposed budget cuts.

That number should probably potentially reflect down in 2027.

These numbers do not reflect the public art capital budget which will be reflected in the capital budget hearing in the future.

So this is our budgeted FTE summary.

We have six staff and we have zero vacancies.

One change that I would point out is in the salaries in 2026 from 2025, there's a 0.3% of our public arts coordinator salary, which is in special revenues, which will move from CDBG funds into the journal fund.

So some program updates.

So we covered these earlier, but just to highlight quickly some of the items.

First and foremost, we champion the arts.

We foster sustainability, creative growth, and place making.

Our delivery of services is in the form of our programs, which is Vibrant Storefronts, Cultural Districts, Bridgefront for Dance, Poet Laureate, Public Arts and Maintenance Our metrics of success include tracking the number of commissions, grants awarded, partners engaged, and number of events I'd also state that there is a level of work that is about relationship building and community cultivation

And that is a lot of time that we spend out in community, meeting with artists, attending events, and being an active participant in the cultural life of the city so that we can see and feel firsthand how artists are being served and how audiences in our community is engaging with the city.

And it's how they're responding to the paradigm shifts that we're all feeling.

So these are the budget changes and reductions that are recommended in the mayor's 2026 budget.

So our civic arts program, we're looking at a $10,000 reduction in this budgetary line item.

This is the funding that's about connecting our arts community to civic life.

This helps us support any city or statewide gatherings, convenings, important conversation, and galvanizing events.

Example of these events include the National Independent Venue Association Conference, which is coming here next year, the work that we've done on the Minneapolis Music Summit and our music survey, the upcoming Chorus America Conference, the Seventh World Conference on Remedies to Racial and Social Equities in the Arts,

We're also looking to support the Flickr Festival which will bring 20,000 photographers to Minneapolis.

This past year we helped support the Black, the State of Black Design Conference, Artists for Understanding, Supposium and several arts leadership convenings.

our cultural district funding.

So in 2025 we have $100,000 per district.

In 2026 we are looking at a reduction of $105,000 or $85,000 per district.

We are recommending to end the ambassador's program which is $15,000 per district.

But this decision is partially based on the extraordinary demand that we're receiving in each of the districts and part of the role of this ambassador was to help cultivate demand and so we think that we've achieved demand.

For Vibrant Storefronts

This is a recommended reduction of $375,000 We had budgeted for 15 spaces and we're proposing to reduce that down to 10 spaces So a reduction of $250,000 Plus we had budgeted some support for marketing and branding all of our vibrant storefronts Plus we had some funding for ongoing downtown storefront activations on Nicollet Avenue which was part of our vibrancy efforts

This funding though still allows for us to manage 13 sites across the city and the remainder of the funds will be repurposed into our priority grant programs and we'll lean into more in our social media marketing to help with promotion and figure out ways that we can support the awardees.

For non-personnel reductions, we are proposing a reduction of $17,344.

This is the reduction in the funds that we have available for marketing research, design, surveys, web communication newsletter, consultants, and event management.

We also use this as a space for publications, strategic planning, advocacy, and the development of new programs in the future.

This is a slide just to notice a base budget addition in 2026.

This is a one-time only base budget addition for supporting arts preservation for George Floyd Square.

This budget goes directly to artist fees, conservator fees, moving and transportation and rigging, and temporary storage.

With that, that concludes my presentation.

Wonderful.

Thank you for that presentation, Director Johnson.

Colleagues, are there any questions or comments related to this presentation?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Director Johnson.

In the increase to your budget, I see about a million added for contractual services.

So that reflects the $1.15 million of the Bridge Fund for Dance Fund, which is currently in downtown assets.

It will be moved to our budget in 2026, plus the one-time only $300,000 for the George Floyd Square Arts Preservation.

I think that it's, sorry, through Chair Choctaw to Councilmember Cashman, this is one time only because that's the funding that we thought was needed for the preservation of everything that is related to the renovation of the street, and so that was our best estimate at the time.

So it's for the time of street reconstruction.

Okay, thank you.

Last question here, Vibrant Storefronts has a $325,000 reduction which is disappointing for me to see as someone who's seen the on-the-ground impacts of this program and I'm wondering what

What types of outcomes would be reduced due to this reduction in funding for vibrant storefronts?

Yes, through Chair Chigtai to Councilmember Cashman.

So that's a painful cut to sort of make.

But what it does help us do is sustain the impact of the 13 sites that we are investing in.

It's just a reminder that when we begin contracts with those awardees, it's a two-year contract that we make a commitment to, as opposed to all of the other grants that are just project grants.

So in terms of looking at the mix of the programs that we are offering, if I were to make a bigger or sustain that program, I would have had to have made bigger cuts in the rest of the budget and I really wanted to sustain the level of programs that we were offering.

In the current program?

Right.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Mr. Johnson for that presentation.

The department is doing some really incredible work.

Good morning, Mary Altman, Public Arts Supervisor, Arts and Cultural Affairs, Chair Chuck Tye, Councilmember Jenkins.

We are currently, in this year's budget, have conservators working with the artists and the caretakers to make a plan for those details.

So one of the ongoing discussions we're having is keeping

Memorial Active during street reconstruction.

So what would the artists like for that to look like?

And which works could be moved to a space where that could occur, you know, out of the right of way?

And then which works need to go into storage during construction?

What the artist's long-term intent is for those works in the future of the right of way?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Last year we started with five awardees.

We had plans to support 15 this year, but we were reducing it to five.

We had

applications and awards that were eligible for 10.

Okay, and then this was in the budget book but you didn't mention it quite during your presentation so I can follow up if needed but the transfer of about 1.2 million dollars for Kohl's Center operations.

No, thank you for that question, through Chugtai to our Council Member Palmisano.

So, that is the Bridge Fund for Dance program, and within that program we have a contract with Minneapolis Public Schools for $350,000 per year.

We have $450,000 for our Bridge Fund for Dance.

We are also starting a workforce development program to support more diverse and younger production tech with the Cole Center for Dance.

We also have funding for marketing, branding, supporting all of the activity of the awardees of this program and within the school system.

and that's how we're planning to utilize the funding is to contract it out.

Wonderful, thank you.

And then I put myself last in queue.

I just had a couple questions for you going off of what has been brought up so far.

So I'm really trying to wrap my head around this cut to vibrant storefronts.

I can really appreciate and fully understand the logic of I could either make a cut here or I could make a cut, far more significant cuts

to all these other programs that also provide a lot of value and bring investment to the public arts.

And so, you know, this is the choice that I made.

But I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

So help me understand, I understand that we subsidize storefront rent on a two-year cycle for all awardees of this program.

Council,

Thank you for that question, Chair.

Chuck Tye.

So, we receive the funding every year, and when an awardee receives the funding, they get three months in advance when they sign the contract.

From there, they are reimbursed over the rest of the year based on rent receipts paid and their deliverables.

So we manage it year to year, if that answers your question.

And to your question about, you know, you know as I'm projecting around potential fiscal cliffs in the future It'd be much more painful for us to kill a contract in a two-year contract than it is for us to reduce The amount of grant awards we give in the other areas and so I just wanted to balance that as best we can and also really look at the capacity of our staff to manage

the level of work that we do.

The contracts, you know, it's one thing to contract and identify the space and get the building owner involved in our process.

It's really labor intensive and then we're actually very engaged in them through the course of their time.

And it represents a huge investment of work on our staff to manage everybody and their deliverables.

Absolutely.

Now, so in last year's budget something I was really excited about was seeing that the Vibrant Storefronts Initiative was coming to Uptown and I think this is a really important piece of the puzzle in the revitalization of Uptown in particular around the Lake and Hennepin area

The Rainbow Building is a classic example of a chronically vacant storefront in Uptown for many, many different reasons.

But all that to say, I see a reduction like this and I'm wondering what type of impact that's going to have on potential contracts that could have come to Uptown if I'm making any sense.

Yeah, and I might invite Cassie Garner up here as well, who has a real detail of all of this.

But what I would say is that each opportunity is a real conversation about matchmaking the space with the capacity of the grantee.

And these are arts organizations primarily, or cultural organizations, and it's not a retail program, but it's about them having a galvanizing art space.

I'm pleased that we have three going into the heart of uptown.

We wanted more, we tried to get more, but it became financially impossible because we limit our rent up to $50,000 per grantee over the course of the year.

Some of them are much more, I don't know what

that Urban Outfitters spaces.

So wanted a place in that space and just kind of work it out financially.

And also in the process of all of the people looking at the spaces, some spaces are more attractive to others than some spaces.

So we tried to fill spaces, but there may not be interest in those spaces.

And then we have to make choices or we actually let the property owner make the choice of who they want in their space.

We ramp up all of the places so we don't make that choice.

We just make sure they're eligible and vetted so that they

that hopefully that our investment will be met in terms of making them successful.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Wonderful.

So ideally, we want to maximize and utilize all this funding.

And in many ways, I think about this program as medicine in the wound for areas that feel like they're very starved for culture space.

and but I'm really excited about the three that we have placed in Uptown.

Awesome.

So and then just real quick, can you can you remind me of the reduction to the cultural districts program?

I think that's an FTE.

Can you give me some background on that?

So for the cultural district program, it represents a reduction of $15,000 per district, which was the cost of each ambassador.

The ambassador was to be identified as an important member of that community who would organize all the arts and cultural organizations in that community, have quarterly gatherings to talk about collaboration, future programming, and

just what's happening in their community.

It's meant to be a community cohesion strategy as well.

But their primary purpose was also to just sort of cue up the idea of actually applying into the city and applying for these grants and then fulfilling the programs.

The grants themselves were to help support either existing or new festivals to be bigger or stronger, to help support cultural spaces so that they weren't displaced.

Oftentimes those spaces are the anchors for those communities as well as arts activation which is really about investing creative ideas for their neighborhood.

The demand was so extraordinary for our grants that it seemed a little bit like an over-investment in that, even though I really appreciate that we have arts leaders in our community helping support us.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Wonderful.

That's all I've got for you.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue.

Thank you for coming in to present your recommended 2026 budget and I will direct the clerks to file that report.