Is this Budget Office in your thinking at all for whatever's been talked about still committed to compensating residents for their time and participation in the budget engagement sessions when these reconvene?
I want to shift now to the Board of Pensions. I understand the dire importance of strategically investing our Pension Fund so that it is healthy and hopefully soon fully funded. I also understand that the Board of Pensions has worked hard for a long time to fund and stabilize our Pension Fund. And I want to applaud all of those tremendous efforts. However, I think we would all agree that a healthy Pension Fund should not come at the expense of our values. And, in fact, the City Council has worked with the Board of Pensions at least three times, as I understand it, to direct our investments in ways that hold to our values. 2013, the Board adopted the Sandy Hook Principles to condition their investments in gun and ammunition manufacturers. In '21 the Board divested from private prisons. In '22 the Board divested from Russia and Russia-related institutions. That said as far as I understand, the Board of Pensions provides little transparency around its specific investments because the pension is invested in outside managed funds that are changing constantly. This is concerning to us. And I am curious as to what efforts are being made to ensure that our Pension Fund is not invested in other ways that do not align with our values or in some cases in ways that directly oppose the work that we're doing in the City, like investing in climate change, accelerating fossil fuel industry, gun and other weapons manufacturing folks, corporations actively union busting here in Philly, war bonds and foreign armies. Can you speak to that?
I can speak to -- thanks for the question. I can speak to all the things that you mentioned earlier such as private prisons, guns, so on and so forth, that we have a database where we run our entire portfolio through that database to identify any specific investment that would violate any of those prohibitions. So, for example, if we're invested in an S&P 500 fund, I'm going to say it might be the S&P 490 fund, right, because there's 10 stocks that are eliminated either because of the Sandy Hook Principles or Iran or other prohibitions. Concerning fossil fuels, we work closely with Councilperson Gilmore Richardson on an ESG resolution and she insisted -- I won't use the word insisted because the Charter empowers the Board to do the investments, but we worked in collaboration. We worked together with all of the Council to pass a resolution unanimously to incorporate the ESG principles that Council Gilmore Richardson and us worked together to draft into our investment policy statement. So what the Board does, they take all of those into consideration in every investment decision they make. I will comment on what you said about transparency. This Board is more transparent than any other public pension fund in the country. Our investments go on our website every month. Our Board meeting is a public Board meeting. In fact, it takes place tomorrow. You're invited to come over and watch. Every single investment is discussed and reviewed at every single Pension Board meeting. So I would actually object to your statement that we are not transparent concerning our investments. We are extremely transparent.
Your objection is noted. I would like to come back around for the second round. Thank you.
The Chair recognizes Katherine Gilmore Richardson, Councilmember.
Quick point of information based on the information that was shared, Councilmember Jones. I just wanted to thank Councilmember O'Rourke for his question. We did work together and I'm really thankful to the Pension Board regarding the climate risk disclosure. And I don't know if you recall the private prisons resolution as well. That was years ago when I was still a staffer for former Councilmember Blondell Reynolds Brown, so we have worked with you all on both of those issues. And I just wanted to say thank you for the question and for the work that the Pension Board is doing to ensure that our investments line up properly.
You're welcome. It's very important to the trustees to try to ensure transparency. So if there's anything you think we're not being transparent about, please let us know and we will try to increase that. It's very important to the trustees.
Thank you very much. And I'm sure we haven't invested in Truth Social, correct? Hopefully not. Some of you will catch that later on. And so, I just had to provide just one piece of information. One, I know that Councilman O'Rourke talked about a couple times the budget engagement process in the community. And so, has the Administration figured out what that looks like because as you mentioned, it would be held off indefinitely until they figure out when you will resort to engaging the community? But have no fear, City Council is here. We're starting our first budget hearing at South Philadelphia High School with Councilman Mark Squilla. Then I have one on the 29th with Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, so we continue. We sent out a request for collaboration with Members about a week ago so we can go on the road and make sure the community has a say-so on what we're doing. And so, I just wanted to update you on that process as the Administration move forward their process. But we're already on top of it. And so, I'll give you an update as we move forward. All right. At this particular time I want to acknowledge Councilmember Jeffrey Jay Young.
Thank you, Mr. President. For Finance, just a couple of questions about your systems and data. Can you tell us how well does our current system integrate with other systems, other municipal systems that we have and if there are any compatibility issues that hinder data sharing or reporting?
So I can speak to our finance -- so OPAL is the project that will replace our current financial and purchasing system so I can focus on that in the response. There is some integration between the systems currently, so there is information that flows from our professional services contracting system. Those are the opportunities that have to be RFP'd. It's called ACIS. It does set up encumbrances, essentially the budgetary amount for that contract within our financial system called FAMIS and expenditures flow back. In addition ADPICS, which is where the bids that have to be competitively or the lowest responsible bids that Procurement does is in ADPICS as well as any of the purchase orders. That is very tightly coupled with our general ledger system, so it sets up encumbrances as well between those two systems. And PHLContracts is to a certain extent probably last I think, but integrated to a certain extent. There's a lot of integrations though that don't happen right now that we hope to be able to do in the new system and that we know that we'll be able to do in the new system. So one of the biggest gains will be the submitting of the invoices upfront, right, like I talked about earlier. In addition, there's some front-end processes of approving various things related to reconciliations or adjustments and payments that happen outside of the system through memos or emails. And also with grant funding as well, that will all be captured in the new system.
Thank you. And I ask that because we've been getting inquiries from our NACs in our Districts and basically saying that because of some issue with Finance they're not getting funded from the Department of Community -- what is it, the Community Development or whatever department the NACs are under. So it's taking them essentially like months to expedite, to get their invoice and payments to the NACs. They are our smallest organizations on the ground that are dealing with the everyday issues of people and I'm just trying to figure out what we can do to expedite the money that is allocated for our NACs programs?
Okay. If you can send me the details, I can follow up on that and figure out what's holding up the payment and see if we can speed it up.
Thank you. The other question, what are the key performance metrics for our current data systems and how do they meet our operational needs?
So I don't know if we have metrics directly tied to the financial and procurement systems about the performance. For our HCM, our Human Capital Management System, we do have performance metrics on how that is performing from a perspective of how quickly are we able to enhance a system and how many defects are we resolving. For our other financial systems, there's various -- within the departments, right, or within budgets, there's various performance metrics around contracting or payments, right, and they are proxies I guess you could say for the systems, right, because the systems are here to support our business processes. And our business processes are about getting contracts conformed and in place so we can do our purchasing and paying our vendors, right, at a core and producing our financial statements, right. So there's performance metrics tied to those business processes but both within the Finance Department as well as the Procurement Department and the CAO's Department. That's how we measure the performance of the system, how well are we able to perform our business process that the system supports.
Thank you. I mean, I ask because we have a performance-based budgeting system and I think every dollar that is allocated to some government function should have performance measures associated with it, so that's why I asked that question.
You'll see -- sorry. You'll see as you look at the budget detail that departments are broken down by program and each program has measures so they'll be there.
Thank you. One more question for this round. How do we ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data within our systems? One issue we've gotten is that the Revenue Department has kind of missed payments from people, right, or they say they've been applying payments -- they've misapplied payments I'll say. And so, how can we assure that data is accurate? COMMISSIONER McCOLGAN: Thank you, Councilman. Most recently we did hear about a system issue that caused some payments to be applied to a future period as if it was an estimated payment. And once we heard that, we were able to identify those accounts and make the adjustments to those accounts. I'm not sure if that's the specific scenario that you're referencing. We also have circumstances where someone may send us a check without a specific payment voucher and the information they provide us isn't detailed enough for us to fully understand where they want that applied, so we'll apply it based on whatever information that we have available. It may just be the owner name, property address. It could even be as little as the P.O. Box that they directed it to, and we will apply that payment. And then later on if we learn that that payment was misapplied after asking for proof of payment, we will make sure that we move it to the right account. But I think that probably the former issue that I mentioned --
Yeah, that's the issue. COMMISSIONER McCOLGAN: -- is what has come up, and that is now corrected in our system.
Thank you. Yeah, we had a senior call us who received a letter saying she had a $2,500 credit on her account. And as she was inquiring about it, she was told that someone made a $4,000 payment on her account, which means some payments were applied to the future rather than to her past payment agreement that she was on. So I just want to make sure that that issue gets cleared up. COMMISSIONER McCOLGAN: Thank you.
And thank you for working on that. COMMISSIONER McCOLGAN: Yeah, we received that feedback through our customer service team and understood that it was an issue and quickly identified it and corrected it.
Sorry. One last question I have on this round. We get a lot of calls about just the customer service aspect of Revenue and how it is very difficult to get someone on the phone to discuss their issues. We have a lot of seniors in our District, so coming downtown that's not feasible. There are no more mini City Halls in North Philly for them to go to. So using the telephone rather than an online system is much more convenient for those folks. So how can we ensure that those residents feel like their government is being responsible to their needs by answering their questions via phone? COMMISSIONER McCOLGAN: So we certainly would like to be able to respond to customers in our call center faster than we have been able to recently and we don't want them to have to come downtown or to any satellite office. The challenges that we've faced has been short staffing, but we're working very hard with OHR to address that issue. We're just onboarding over 40 employees that will help us bolster the staff in that area. We created a new onboarding training program to make sure that our -- that was implemented last fall, to make sure that our staff are as prepared as possible to provide the best customer service to taxpayers. We constantly realign resources as we're able to based on volume in the area of contact. So, for example, if we have longer wait times in our call center, we may be able to reallocate staff from our email unit or another unit, so we're constantly doing what we can to reduce the amount of wait time. We implemented a new call center about two years ago that allows us to give customers the option to request a return call so that they don't have to wait on hold. I think that now that we're hiring this cohort of staff, that will help us close the gap in the long wait times.
You're welcome. The Chair recognizes Councilman Jim Harrity.
Thank you, Council President. I only have really one question for the Pension Board. What is the percentage of City workers who do contribute to deferred compensation and how can we encourage more of the City workforce to contribute?
Thank you for that question, Councilman. We have an excellent deferred compensation plan, and recently we gave a couple of seminars to the new employees in the Mayor's Office and we had people on the spot signing up for deferred comp. We have our representative from Nationwide here today Brad Nice. I'll ask Brad to come up here. But concerning deferred comp, we have currently over 25,000 participants in the deferred compensation plan; 19,737 active participants who are contributing. Some people leave their money in there and stop contributing from time to time. We recently approached approximately $2 billion in the deferred compensation plan. Nationwide does seminars. They go to the airport different shifts. They go to various police districts various different shifts, so they're giving presentations around the clock in order to try to encourage people to participate in deferred compensation, especially newer employees who may not be in some of the older pension plans. They know how important it is to have that additional contribution piece of their retirement. So that's how many people, over 23,000. And, Brad, you have some historical comparison for that, don't you? (Witness approached Witness table.)
I do. Thank you, Fran. Brad Nice, Program Director for the City's Deferred Comp Plan. Thank you, Councilmember, for the question. I started working with the City's deferred comp plan back in 2006 and there was approximately $420 million in assets at the time and approximately 13,000 members, so the growth that has come with the plan up over 25,000 and approaching $2 billion has been really impressive over that time, a direct effect of the Board, their support in promoting the plan as well as the pension staff. As a matter of fact, I just got done putting together our annual review for calendar year 2023. And 2023, we conducted over 350 seminars around the City with over 8,000 attendees of City employees that attended those educational workshops.
Councilman, I'll also add just as a side note, the Philadelphia Parking Authority who are members of our pension plan but previously had their own deferred compensation plan asked to join our plan because the fees in our plan were considerably lower than what they were being charged. So we've had what, Brad, approximately 1,400 people or so from the Parking Authority come to our plan?
500, so they all came to our plan and they're paying fees that are probably 11 percent of what they were paying in 12 their deferred compensation 13 provider with the Parking 14 Authority. 15
Nice. 16 Okay. Thank you. 17 Thank you, Council 18 President. 19
20 You're welcome, Councilman Harrity. 21 The Chair recognizes 22 Councilmember Nina Ahmad. 23
Thank 24 you, Council President. 25 I do have questions about the Pension Board. First --
Could you do this first, Chairwoman? Just for all the Members --
-- please speak into the microphone so our tech guy won't come out here and make a loud presentation again. So I want to make sure everybody speaks into the microphone because we have a