MINUTES OF THEJULY24. 2024 CITY COUNCIL SPECIAL MEETING  A SPECIAL meeting of the Hopewell City Council was held on Wednesday July  24, 2024 at 6:30 p.m.  PRESENT:  John B. Partin, Mayor Jasmine Gore, Vice Mayor (Virtual) Rita Joyner, Councilor (Virtual) Michael Harris, Councilor Janice Denton, Councilor Brenda Pelham, Councilor Dominic Holloway, Councilor (Absent)  Mayor calls the meeting to order, roll call begins.  John B. Partin, Mayor Jasmine Gore, Vice Mayor (Virtual) Rita Joyner, Councilor (Virtual) Michael Harris, Councilor Janice Denton, Councilor Brenda Pelham, Councilor Dominic Holloway, Councilor (Absent)  PRESENT:  Councilor. Joyner makes a motion to allow Vice Mayor Gore to participate remotely. Councilor Pelham seconds the motion. Vice Mayor Gore states for  record why she is participating remotely.  ROLL CALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham  Yes Abstain Yes Yes    Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 5-0  Absent Yes Yes  Councilor Denton makes a motion to go into closed meeting pursuant to VA Code $2.2-3711(A)(29) "Discussion of the award of a public contract involving the expenditure of public funds, including interviews ofbidders or offerors, and discussion oft the terms or scope of such contract, where discussion in an open session would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body. . and to the extent such discussion will be aided thereby,  Councilor Joyner seconds the motion.  ROLL CALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 6-0  Yes Yes Yes Yes Absent Yes Yes  Councilor Pelham makes a motion to come out of closed session, Councilor Joyner  seconds the motion. ROLL CALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 5-0 RECONVENEOPEOPENMEETING  Yes Absent Yes Yes Absent Yes Yes    CERTIFICATION PURSUANT TO VIRGINIA CODE $2.2-3712( (D): Were only public business matters (I) lawfully exempted from open-meeting requirements and (2)identifiedin the closed-meeting motion discussed in closed meeting.  ROLL CALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 5-0  Yes Absent Yes Yes Absent Yes Yes  Councilor Joyner makes a motion to cancel the interim Finance Director's contract for $37,000 a month to reallocate and reappropriate up to 330,000 for the commonwealth reporting and Finance director transition and associated training and SOP implementation, Councilor Harris seconds the motion.  ROLLCALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 5-0  Yes Absent Yes Yes Absent Yes Yes  R-1- Munis Financial System School Board Discussion Dr. Manker opens the floor with discussion with city council and school board to discuss the school board implementation plan. She gives the floor to Dr. Hackney to give a brief presentation. The school board begins to walk council through the implantation    plan and the timeline. They mention they have training an average oftwice a week, they have gone through chart of accounts, system admin, ledger project counting, budget module purchasing, and they are still going into training for general billing for cash management. They are going to add employee expense module and the plan is to go live July 1, 2025. They still need to go through training to set up payroll and HR talent management recruiting. They open the floor for any questions or discussion. Councilor Joyner asks how do they feel about going through an implementation of Munis do they anticipate troubles since there is no additional help? The response was ifthere is help available, they are not opposed toi receiving help. They do not have additional funds in their budget to go towards that. Mayor mentions to make sure they do this properly and thoroughly sO you don'thave to pay 2.5 million in clean up. Mayor recommends Dr. Manker and RBG sit down and talk about additional assistance and get back with council in a couple of weeks. Vice Mayor Gore suggests brining the sub committee together and Mayor says that's fine. Councilor Pelham says does anyone from RBG know how many additional personnel it would take to do the conversion. She asks how many it would take to implement a Munis system; Heather Ness answers she has not done any in depth conversations with the schools sO she does not know right now. Councilor Joyner says she thinks it would be a good thing for them to meet on a more regular basis sO everyone knows what is going on. The school board core: mission is to educate, and finances make things go, she wants to make sure that piece is right and they are in agreement with things and there are no surprises. Councilor Joyner asks the mayor to provide city manager with the directive to set up quarterly meetings, the mayor does SO he asks to include HRHA in the quarterly meetings as well. Councilor Denton says she will be watching because it worries her and she is concerned. Councilor Joyner asks about the timeline and asks have they missed a deadline for this, were they supposed to be further in on this or an operational plan done by now. The answer given was a deadline has not been missed. The current project manager is Peter Pilato. Adriana in the zoom chat asks ifthe chart account was compliant with state reporting requirements. The response given was yes they have built those based on the state chart of accounts website that they have to use to complete their annual school report. Further discussion was had between Adriana and the school board regarding the accounts and pulled cash. R-2- Project Management Office and Accounting Remediation Services Robert Bobb Group - Heather Ness begins her presentation with an agenda guideline of  No further questions were asked.    what will be discussed tonight. She mentions she requested this meeting a couple months ago to though tough some progress to date. She goes over key points such as sharing progress, future outlooks. Fiscal year 2024 is underway, the estimates are actually already completed and they had to get as close as possible for the pulled cash implementation. SOP's they are in final approval for budget personal property public service bank franchise tax SOP word documents and all ofthe respective departments of22. She mentions they have come to an agreement with the industry partners on the true up process in doing sO and in explaining the process, they have also taken the additional step with Russ of actually documenting an agreement with the process moving forward. Fiscal year 19 to 23 bank reconciliations are complete. For fiscal year 24 they cannot finalize those until the cities closes their books. She goes into further detail about other reconciliations with council. She goes over her PowerPoint that shows where they are currently. She mentions Robinson Farmer Cox has everything for 19 to 2021. The expected results she goes over security roles, password security controls and they are expecting 21 through 24 for financials to be aclean opinion but will still see the material weaknesses in there for the items because they are still going to be doing the manual audit. She gives a detailed definition of what a material weakness is with council. Heather mentions ifthere are shared passwords people to be able to add and delete with no audit trails or those kinds ofthings that would lead up to one Information technology weakness because they cannot alpine and that raises the risk of fraud or material misstatement. She lets council know she is always trying to find ways to do things for efficiently. She talks about the idea ofeveryone doing things the same through standard operating procedures. Councilor Pelham asks what is the beacon theater a departmental or what. Heather mentions they finished through 2023 manually because they are small because they are not on a big system. Heather goes through deeper detail of their progress and updates up to this point. She goes over repository updates; she mentions they are putting them out there and are now working with security to ensure that that it is not accessible to just anyone because there needs to be agreement on the whole process sO what will be available to everyone except for a small group will be just PDF's that are readon that they are going to figure out a security structure for the originals and also moving through the month of August for training. Heather moves into ERP implementations with Adriana as a second person to assist in this topic. She goes through the basics with council based on the slides  she previously provided to them.    Councilor Joyner makes a motion to extend the meeting, councilor Pelham seconds  the motion. ROLL CALL  Mayor Partin Vice Mayor Gore Councilor Denton Councilor Pelham Councilor Holloway Councilor Joyner Councilor Harris Motion Passes 5-0  Yes Absent Yes Yes Absent Yes Yes  Heather continues her presentation about pulled cash, says it is successfully in, it went in July 1st. City staff is now using pulled cash for all Fiscal year 2025. Testing for the balances are being tested this week and once that gets done, they will be moving through to bank reconciliation testing. Heather mentions the timeline for training, and it was requested to being early August and the city then caused the delay she states the city did not want to do the training the first dates that were available, they opted for the later dates that were available. She mentions ifyou read the status reports they put out every Monday this is newly identified items keeping them from moving forward. She mentions the fear is the risk here ifthey don't start the training until late August the earliest implementation for employee expense reimbursement isn't going to come until at least October 1st and their ERP consultants are only on contract through October 31st. She goes on to say that if everything goes swimmingly with no problem then they are good, ifeverything does not go swimmingly and things don'ts stabilize, they start pushing things back to October 15 to October 31 which will be the danger zone. Mayor asks what is the reason for the city doing it later opposed to now. Heather asks Dr. Manker what was the reason, and she gave a response of changing project manager. Mayor lets audience know the audio will go down temporarily for IT to reset the system. Mayor tells Dr. Manker to push her staff or if someone is gone to be able to do this training early on and not wait three weeks for the employee expense reimbursements.  *Audio Cuts out*  She lets audience know she is on page 33 ofher presentation discussing they have been delayed and they cannot take on anymore delays. Next actions are to complete    the remaining training. The earliest they can move forward is October 1. Heather discusses security workflow optimization and improving segregation ofduties improving internal controls. She goes through the remainder of her presentation and  opens the floor for any questions.  Councilor Joyner makes a motion to adjourn. Meeting is adjourned.  ADJOURNMENT  Respectfully Submitted,    Brittani Williams, City Clerk