 You're still texting. Izzy, where are we at? Connie Moore. Not in my schedule. You scheduled it when you teep on that minivan and sent two people to the hospital. Guess you was paying more attention to that thing than the road. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that just couldn't wait. Texting and driving. A killer combination. Recreation in parks. The days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk. But there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day, because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces. And it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day, because we know that for our community, fire's made life better. You steal text. I had on a daycare know that I'm running late. They charge if you're late. And I'm not usually one of those people to text and drive. And I was almost done with my text when that car came out of nowhere. You still appeared in all coming traffic. When I text message, it never got through. One text or call could wreck it all. I don't text it. Is this real morgue? Yep. Shut up, like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley identified you when you wrapped your car around that light pole because you was caring more about that thing than a room. How do you feel like doing that? Not anymore. No text messages worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa, run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. You steal text. Fizzy, where are we at? County morgue. Not on my schedule. You scheduled it when you tip on that minivan and sent two people to the hospital. Guess she was paying more attention to that thing than a room. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that Jess couldn't wait. Texting and driving. A killer combination. And tourism, out there. The creation in parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our work spaces don't have four walls, or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day, because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day, because we know that for our community, parks make life better. You steal text. I had on a daycare know that I'm running late. They charge if you're late. I'm not usually one of those people to text and drive, and I was almost done with my text when 10th car came out of nowhere. You still appeared in all coming traffic. And that text message, it never got through. One text or call could wreck it all. I'm still texting. Is this real, Morg? Yep. Shut up, like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley, identify you when you wrap your car around that light pole, because you was caring more about that thing than the road. How do you she like me? Not anymore. No text messages worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. You're still texting. Izzy, where are we at? Connie Morg? Not on my schedule. You scheduled it when you tip on that minivan and sent two people to the hospital. Guess she was paying more attention to that thing than the road. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that just couldn't wait. Texting and driving. A killer combination. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day, because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day, because we know that for our community, parks make life better. You steal text. I had on a daycare know that I'm running late. They charge if you're late. And I'm not usually one of those people to text and drive. And I was almost done with my text when 10th car came out of nowhere. You still appeared in all coming traffic. When I text message, it never got through. One text or call could wreck it all. Is this real, Morg? Yep. Shut up, like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley, I identify you when you wrap your car around that light pole, because you was caring more about that thing than a road. Is she like me? Not anymore. No text messages worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off on streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Storm Ordering Creeks web page. You're still texting. Izzy, where are we at? Connie, Morg? None of my schedule. You scheduled it when you tip on that minivan and sent two people to the hospital. Guess she's paying more attention to that thing than a road. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that just couldn't wait. Texting and driving, a killer combination. Recreation in parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, parks make life better. You steal text. I had on a daycare know that I'm running late. They charge if you're late. And I'm not usually one of those people to text and drive. And I was almost done with my text and then the car came out of nowhere. You still appeared in all coming traffic. And that text message, it never got through. One text or call could wreck it all. You still texting? Is this the real morgue? Yep. Shut up. Like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley identified you when you wrapped your car around that light pole because you was caring more about that thing than a road. You she liked me? Not anymore. No text messages worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa. Run off on streets, roofs, and parking lots and up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street gutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Storm Ordering Creeks webpage. You still texting? Izzy, where are we at? County morgue. Not on my schedule. You scheduled it when you tip on that minivan and sent two people to the hospital. Guess she was paying more attention to that thing than a road. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that just couldn't wait. Texting and driving. A killer combination. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, own passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, parks make life better. You steal text. When I handle a daycare, know that I'm running late. They charge if you're late. And I'm not usually one of those be able to text and drive. And I was almost done with my text when that car came out of nowhere. You still appeared in all coming traffic. When I text message, it never got through. One text or call could wreck it all. You steal text. Is this the real mort? Yep. Shut up. Like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley identified you when you wrapped your car around that light pole because you was caring more about that thing than the road. How new she liked me. Not anymore. No text message is worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks we run through Santa Rosa. Run off from streets, roofs, and parking lots, end up in our creeks through the storm drain system. To help protect creeks, keep your street cutters and roadside ditches clear of trash and other pollutants. For more information on the benefits of our creeks and tips on how to enjoy them, visit the Stormwater and Creeks webpage. You're still texting. Izzy, where are we at? Connie Moore. Not in my schedule. You scheduled it when you tip on that minivan and send it to people in the hospital. Guess she's paying more attention to that thing than the road. Making sure my wife picks up my suit. Sounds like a text message that just couldn't wait. Texting and driving. A killer combination. In recreation and parks, the days begin when the sun rises. Most of our workspaces don't have four walls or a desk, but there's a lot to be done to get this place up and running. It takes a big team to cover so much ground. Each space is unique, requiring its own special method of care and service. And it's of utmost importance to see that it happens each day because our workspace is your leisure space. And it includes 950 acres of Santa Rosa. It's the parks, the trees, the fields, the trails, special gathering places, community spaces, and it belongs to everyone. We work for our community. Striving to improve quality of life. We provide family experiences, friendly competitions, leisurely evenings, and places to bond with man's best friend. We create space for celebration, relaxation, and artistic expression. You can learn to serve a ball or learn to serve a meal. Take a walk on a path or walk the plank. We've got beautiful settings, space to show off our history. We have room to roam, to roll, or to run. We allow for the silly, the serious, the cool. We offer countless ways to work on your health. We keep our youth safe and teach them to keep others safe. We challenge people to want to challenge themselves. We foster creativity, guide athletes, hone passions. We allow for little minds to dream. And we'll keep doing what we do each day because we know that for our community, parks make life better. Welcome to our study session this afternoon. Madam Clerk, could you announce the role, please? Let the record show that all councilmembers are present with the exception of councilmembers Carlstrom and councilmember Oliveris. Thank you very much. Mr. McGlynn, would you introduce our study session, please? Yes, item 2.1, review of fiscal year 2016-17 department budget requests, capital improvement, programming funding requests, and community promotions funding requests. And I've got to, I have a, before I turn it over to Debbie Lochner and a lot of the other leadership team to present, I have a few opening comments to make. I think what you have in front of you is a responsive and responsible budget for the upcoming fiscal year. It takes to heart your tier one priorities of housing for all, achieving functional zero and homeless, Rosalind annexation, wrestling with the medical cannabis issues and dealing with our infrastructure. In light of that, I think it's, one of the things I forwarded the council yesterday is the results from some polling that were going around the Bay Area. This specifically done by the Metropolitan Transit Commission and looking at what was of concern and where they could potentially go to achieve some revenue to address the concerns. And chief among those concerns were road conditions in the Bay Area and affordable housing. And in fact, affordable housing was the highest area of concern in the survey document. And I think that really addresses where the council has provided direction to staff and what we're trying to wrestle with and bring solutions forward for the council to move the community forward. Having said that, I think that this still the issue that remains very difficult for staff and very difficult for us to plan long-term around and realize a vision around is the expiration of measure P. And so that does create a concern and uncertainty, uncertainty for the city, uncertainty for addressing your vision, uncertainty for the staff and the community. And I think you're gonna get an opportunity over the next 90 days, not only wrestling with the current year budget, but to think about the polling results that are gonna be moving from this Bay Area example that I forwarded you yesterday to very specific questions about the wants, the desires and the needs within the community at large. And so with that is just my basic introduction. I'm now gonna turn it over to Debbie Lochner to begin the budget presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. Today we're going to again go over the council goals and priorities of which our city manager just outlined our tier one priorities. We're going to talk about a general city wide overview of the budget. We'll talk about the general fund in a big picture and go over our FTEs, long range financial plan. And we'll talk a little bit about our transfer tax, our real property transfer tax revenue and how that is transferred over to the housing fund for housing and homeless services. And then we go through part of our department proposals today, the balance will be on the 17th of May. So again, to remind the overall great overarching goals the council has, there are six of them of which two is split into A and B. We have create a strong sustainable economic base, promote the city organization that is service sustainable and maintains employee morale, a financial sustainability, provide leadership for environmental initiatives, maintain and enhance the city's culture, historical and recreational assets, improve partnerships between neighborhoods, community organizations, schools and the city to support and promote thriving inclusive and diverse neighborhoods and commit to making Santa Rosa a healthy community where people feel safe to live, work and play. As our city manager mentioned, the tier one priorities are to reduce homelessness through a comprehensive strategy, develop a comprehensive housing strategy, housing for all, and including increasing housing, city-wide market rate, workforce, affordable, all those aspects of it attract housing to the downtown, do downtown and transit oriented and address rent stabilization. That's quite a large tier one priority. The third one is create a plan to address infrastructure and deferred maintenance throughout the community. The fourth one is to pursue current opportunities for medical marijuana, cannabis cultivation, laboratory and employment development, prepare for the impacts of legalization of marijuana. And finally, but not least, complete the Rosalind annexation and move to implementation. I won't read all of the tier two priorities, but there are four main tier two priorities which are implement our rental inspection program, ensure long-term revenue stability. This is primarily dealing with measures OMP, support the smart train connectivity, transit oriented development and the Southeast Greenway project. So with that, we'll get to an overview of the total city budget. And so city-wide, we have revenues projected to be about $354 million. And you can see how those are broken up, enterprise funds and the general fund taking the largest share of those dollars or bringing in the largest share of those dollars. Reminder that enterprise funds are self-supporting funds such as water, sewer, the sub-regional system, golf, parking and there's one I'm missing, but those are all self-supporting. So they charge fees to support the maintenance and operations of what they are managing. Then we have just some small other pieces, successor agency to the redevelopment agency, which is essentially a pass-through at this point for debt service. We have our housing authority, which the largest portion of their revenue comes from the federal government to support the HUD programs. And we have some special revenue funds and some other funds that, and I could give you examples if you want them. What we've done now is we wanted to show you city-wide. So we show you general fund and other funds for each department. What you have highlighted here are the departments that are brand new. So they, through a reorganization, these departments are brand new departments. So as you'll see in the presentation when we get to these departments, we haven't done a lot of comparison with past because they are reinvented. And so it's hard to compare when it's not the same thing. So overall, you can see that the general fund makes up about $145 million of the budget and the other funds bring in about $218 million. And then I show you also a picture so that because sometimes it's easier to see in a pie chart how the funds are broken up rather than just looking at percentages and high-level numbers. So a total-wide, city-wide expenditures, $363.5 million. Ms. Locke, I'm going to interrupt you just for a second. Let the record reflect that Council Member Carlstrom has joined us at the dais. Welcome. Also, there of course will be a great deal of information shared with us this afternoon. There is a good chance that I won't necessarily be turning my head and noticing comments or questions you might have at any one point. So please feel free just to speak up and move forward because I don't want you to lose your question. So we'll kind of become a little less formal during this presentation this afternoon. Thank you very much. So this is to just show you the numbers behind the expenditures by fund. So that's just another way to show you the same expenditure budget, but just by fund. So as we get into, we'll talk about the general fund and this is going to be high-level and you will see department-specific numbers behind some of the expenditures that you'll see. So you'll see large numbers and big increases but remember that it does go across all departments and all funds so we just want to talk briefly about the general fund as our main operating fund which is the city's discretionary fund. It's primarily funded with taxes, property tax and sales tax being the largest drivers of those tax revenues. You will see that the sales tax revenue is a lot higher than what we budgeted last year and what sales tax includes is the money from the triple flip and this is the last year of the triple flip. This is the last payment. We get a settle up payment in 16, 17. So this is the state, I don't want to say gimmick but this is what the state did when they took sales tax revenue from all the cities statewide. They used that to pledge as revenue for bonds and then they backfilled us and they called it sales tax but they tied it to property tax. So because over the last couple years we have seen a growth in our property values, our property taxes have gone up and as a result we've gotten larger portion of sales tax through that triple flip that's tied to property tax growth. Again, this will be the last year it'll next year flip back into property tax and then we'll not have to try and figure out how the sales tax is gonna grow on an annual basis. When you look at the sales tax just pure sales tax it grew at about 3.6%. So all this other growth in sales tax is essentially due to the triple flip. In 16, 17 we get a settle up payment of about $4.6 million that's one time money that is built into this budget. Can you tell us what are you projecting sales tax growth to be in the coming year? 4%. We have, it was, yeah. We have, it's property tax that we were, we had pulled down to 1% for a couple years and sales tax generally grows at 4% a year so we are projecting 4% a year. We are also cautiously watching the sales tax from the auto industry because we think there might be a little bubble there and we could see a drop in this revenue has not come forth yet but we are watching that sector of the industry to make sure that we're prepared if that does happen. So for the past year you said it's been 3.6% growth. About 3.6% was the growth last year. And we're not seeing that start to level off. We're still seeing pretty good growth. In fact, we are outpacing most places in California and in Sonoma County. So if you look statewide and if you look just Sonoma County, we are usually on the high end. Okay, thank you. I'd like to follow up on that sales tax because I'm looking at the long-term financial planets at our desk. I see the budget for 15, 16 sales tax and this is exclusive of triple flip, 32 million budget for 16, 17, 37 million. That's a $5 million increase over 32 million. How is that 4%? Well, no, it's 13.6%. Correct. But the, I don't know. I'll have to get back to you on that one. There's something, we at mid-year did recognize there was growth in this but we did not adjust our budget. So what you're looking at is the budget figure on the actuals. So unlike, it was a recent matter that we kept always on the water, proposed water budget. They kept compounding based upon the budget. We're actually going back to the actual on revenue. Yeah, we look at each year, we look at the actuals where we are to date. We do an analysis and try to project what our revenue is going to be for the next year and then we roll our tenure plan off of our projections. Okay, if I'm sure that's probably been double checked but that's a big jump, I just want to make sure you're comfortable with it. I am. Okay, thank you. So this is a picture to show you the general fund revenues by category. And then we have expenditures by department. And again, because there was a reorganization, so in administration you see that, that increased significantly, but that is also because the finance department increased by 52% staff-wise when we took on parking. So it's not a new department, but it is a radical change for that department. And that's why you see administration growing at such a great figure. Also, we have added some limited term staffing and some other stuff that you'll see within each administration department, you'll get a chance to see what has been added and how we are addressing those tier one priorities. And again, we do like to show you a picture because sometimes the numbers can be baffling and there's a lot of them. So overall, this is a picture to show you by department how the general fund spends its dollars. And then we also- Excuse me. Yes. The image on slide 15 and the information on slide 14 include the change in housing and community services to have the code enforcement. What this includes is every department's proposal for 16, 17 and when we get to housing and community services they can tell you exactly what's in their budget and what's been added to help them navigate through those processes. So even with the addition of whatever's coming forward to us, they will be at 1%. So there's gonna be, as we go through the process of each department there are different phases of where they need to be. And so honestly with the issues facing code enforcement we're in a development process to bring you back a fee structure to address that. I do not believe that we will be ready to premiere that in the budget cycle. It'll probably have to be an in-year adjustment. So right now as the budget stands, it is 1%, we're gonna be bringing forward you a fee schedule and adjustments because we have to build that and we're in the process of constructing that. Okay, I'm looking forward to the construction process. Absolutely. And we've done that before and when we get to that part you will see that in the housing and community services. It's just that we're gonna be bringing that forward as a conversation so that likely will change with associated fees to support a rental inspection program. In addition, okay, go ahead. I was gonna say in addition, this is general fund only and so before you wouldn't have seen housing and community services necessarily on the slide because they were primarily funded through federal grants. So this does reflect just the piece that is general fund. One other question on this chart, police and fire make up 57% of the general fund budget. Can you tell us how that compares to this year's budget as a percentage? I believe this year's budget, it was 53%. Just going from memory from the discussions we had over measure O and the percentage that we were looking at, but I'll have to get the right number. It should be real close. Okay, it seems like it was closer than 53 this year, but if you can get that information. I'll have to get that because I can't remember exactly what that percentage was, but I do have it available. Okay, so again, we do show the expenditures by category and as you will see there are increases in salaries and benefits as we always have, there are increases in those items. We have added some targeted positions to help make address some of the city's needs. And in the other, so benefits costs are primarily driven by CalPERS and healthcare. CalPERS does provide us a five-year smoothing of their rate increases, so you don't get it all in one year. However, healthcare, it's whatever the charge is, you get it. And as you'll see in our property, you see liability and property insurance increased and you'll see later when we talk about risk management, a 6% increase in our health insurance premiums equates to $730,000. So it's a small increase is a large impact on the city organization because they're large dollar price tags. Mr. Mayor, just quickly. I know that we are participating with the county in the healthcare sort of bargaining consortium. How is this number going to impact that? Will it, has it been brought up already? It will not impact this figure. I think you're talking about a longer-term planning effort to address this issue, but we're engaged in that. We're providing resource to support the effort, but it's not gonna impact this particular budget cycle, it just can't. It is a much more complicated conversation. We're looking at a variety of ways to impact that and we'll be bringing back our report to council once we have some recommendations. But right now it's those are ongoing conversations as the partners in that conversation will attest to. Great, I appreciate the information. This is one of those issues that comes up for me every year we do a budget and I just, it would be interesting. Well, and in addition council member. Your microphone. In addition council member, that is as you'll, as you're, if you look at long-term trend analysis, that's one of our chief areas of concern that actually eats away at our ability to do a variety of things, those continually rising costs around healthcare. In fact, we'll share with you if we haven't already that that's actually our biggest percentage gain. It's more of a pressing issue for us than even the PERS issues. I mean, healthcare costs just continue to exponentially grow. And I understand that we are somewhat limited in the parties with whom we can bargain and negotiate for provision of those healthcare services. But as always, it would be very interesting to have them present a justification for their rent increases to this council. Or potentially explore energy usage at some of those facilities. Okay, again, we like to show you the picture of the expenditures by category just so that you can look at it in a visual format. One thing that we wanted to just explain to you is our transfers in and transfers out and the overall cash flow picture. So on the right of this particular slide, you see the cash flow. So this is the general fund cash flow and we have about $200,000 available at the end of once we get through all the budget and you see what's in there. There's about $200,000 remaining unspent. What we show on the left of this slide is to give you the detail of what gets transferred into the general fund and what gets transferred out of the general fund. The general fund receives money from various other funds for services that it provides. So gas tax provides some money for some street maintenance, crew work. Measure M provides some funding. There's traffic safety funding, the Consumer Protection Act trust fund, which you will hear about more in the city attorney's budget is providing some funding to this budget. So overall, the general fund is receiving about $2.8 million from other funds to provide the services that the general fund is committed to providing this coming year. On the transfer outside, we transfer almost $2 million out to our CIP program. The biggest piece of that is $1.2 million that goes to ADA improvements throughout the city. And that's an ongoing project and has been for several years and we continue to fund that to maintain our good graces with the Department of Justice. We also do receive money from, we send money out to homeless and services and affordable housing. The bulk of this money would be the real property transfer tax, but well, it's actually about half and half general fund and real property transfer tax. And you'll see that in just a few minutes when we talk about the real property transfer tax, how much comes from real property transfer tax and how much comes just from general fund support for those programs. We also transfer out some money to parking enforcement. That's to pay for the staff that does the parking enforcement. The ticket revenue comes into the general fund and we support the parking fund, parking enforcement team with the monies that is collected by that revenue source. In addition, yes. If I could just, because it's my own point with last question. Is that part of the permits and fines? I wanna say it was $9 million and so on the previous. That would be part of the permits and fines, but there's a lot in there that it's not just parking enforcement. Because we hear a lot that you make money on parking. I hear a lot. So. I'd like that broken out. Overall, the way an enterprise fund works is we set the fees in order to maintain the operation and the assets that the operation has. And this is for all enterprise funds. So the parking fund manages all of our parking assets and they collect fees in order to maintain those assets for future generations, for us and future generations to make sure we have nice good places to park and that they're well maintained and clean. So that's. No, no, I appreciate that. I would just like in the formal budget to at least have a notation what the offset is so that people can see that easily. The CIP of 1.85, you'd mentioned the ADA portion of 1.2, roughly two thirds for many years. Do you know when that began? I do not. Okay. It's approximately 2008. Thank you. And then is this our total debt service, the $500,000? That's the general funds component. Got it. Thank you. So that was gonna be my next thing is COPs. That's the general funds payment to the debt service on our existing COPs. The information technology that is every department that is general fund funded pays an IT rate and this is the general funds total obligation to pay for IT services. And then there's some other small stuff, so. And just for the public's information, could you tell us what COPs are, please? Certificates of participation. They are a lease financing type of debt that cities can get. Can you give a couple of examples of where those are being used in the city? So one thing we did purchase is just not paid by the general fund. We did some COP issuances to build some, to build the facilities out of the golf course and the golf fund pays for those. We are, I'm not sure exactly what all the other issues were. There were the, they did some infrastructure throughout the city and there was a redevelopment component which got paid back when we settled the lawsuit. We paid back all those monies, but there was money that went for redevelopment projects. There was money that went to general fund projects and there was money that went to the golf course in a total COP package. And then we pay for it separately. And I can give you some more examples. So yes, and this is the ongoing mechanism under which courthouse square will be financed as is currently proposed. We're exploring other options, but this would be one of those where this would reside. Yeah, and that's fine if you can give us some other examples in addition to the golf course, that would be helpful. I can. Thanks. So overall, the general fund transfers out to other funds that provide services that the general fund's responsible for of about $5.4 million. So we want to talk a little bit about the staffing and as you can see the, so we show in the highlighted column, that's the change. So you see what was in place in 15, 16, and what the change was and then what's in proposed for 16, 17. This overall talks about every department. Again, we have two new departments. So we, or three new departments actually, we tried to show them together. So when you'll see EDH, the old department and then below you see HCS, the new department. Again, a big reorganization that went on and those staff got split amongst a bunch of different departments. And this one actually takes two slides to get through because there's a lot of departments. But to show overall, our request for 16, 17 is to have an FTE count of 1,265 and a quarter people. So we do like to show this also on a graph just to show history of how we've been staffed in the past and what we're looking like in the future. And just- Question. Yes. I note that the previous slides had authorized, I assume that this slide also means authorized as well. Yes. How many positions are filled or unfilled? That one I do not have an answer for right now and it changes pretty much all the time, but I can give you, I can give you a... We have a history though of what was filled for the previous years. Yes. We can show what was vacant and what was filled, but we'd have to pick a point in time. Well, I'd like if you're gonna give us authorized FTE staff summary, I wanna know what wasn't filled or what was filled either once fine. Well, the goal is to have them all filled because essentially in order for us to provide the service that you've authorized us to provide and given us the resources for, this is the staff that we say we need to do that off. So Council Member, are you looking for an overlay with this slide in the future that would, and we'll provide it this year that would mirror what the vacancy rate at the end of the year would be. So I'm trying to just so currently we have, so for example, on 15, 16, would the point in time be closed? I mean, what I think Debbie's trying to say is that vacillates month to month. So I'm just trying to figure out where's the snapshot that you're trying to get because we have tuition, it varies. I understand that I don't care when the snapshot is as long as it's consistent year by year by year because what I wanna get a grasp on is, yeah, the goal is to fill all of the budget but once our budget is based upon authorized staff and if there's unauthorized staff, that means there's excess money in the budget for various departments. That's what I'd like to get a better handle on. We'll try to answer that question. Again, some of this goes with the time of year, the nature of the recruitment, but we'll try, now that I have a better idea, we'll try to figure out how to answer that question. Okay, you understand, I'm just saying that the authorized positions drives the budget number and if that's different, I wanna know where it's. Yeah, and I understand what your concern is and we'll address that. So then we also wanna just show you the changes that were per the reorganization versus what we've added into the 16-17 budget proposal. Just so you can see, within the city manager's office, there was a reduction of seven positions because those went to the office of community engagement as a separate department. In addition, and you'll see each department will talk about their overall staffing adjustments and how that's in the budget for their departments. Again, you see housing and economic development in housing as an eliminated department, it has no staff, but then you have housing and community services and you have planning and economic development, which is, and finance where their staff went. So overall, you can see what happened based on reorganization and what is actually a new proposal in the existing, or that's before you, or will be before you in June. Again, that takes two slides. We also wanna talk to you overall about the changes in the general fund and most, while we added a lot of, we've added staff and I wouldn't say it's a lot, but we have added staff, many of these positions are funded through other sources. For example, in planning and economic development, they added a building inspector position, but they eliminated a contract that was providing that service. So as we assess our operations, if we find that we have sustainable ongoing need for staff, we eliminate the contract and change that to a full-time staff position. And that essentially has no cost to the general fund because we've just done a swap on how we're providing that service. So in total, we have added 10.6 positions to the general fund. A lot of them, like I said, are self-funded somehow and you'll find out about how these are funded when we talk about each individual department. As far as the non-general fund, we have overall added five positions in non-general fund departments. Now our long-range financial plan, this is something that we talk about quite often and I did put a handout on your page. I know you can all recognize it from here and probably read the numbers because it's the colorful paper. In addition, we did provide you with a comparison of budgets to actuals for as many years as we were able to get in our new, in our current financing finance system. Things are a little different in the new finance system, so we couldn't go back quite as far as we would like to, but we did give you a pretty good four-year comparison. Debbie, on this one, I was looking at last year's long-range financial plan and I'm wondering if you could comment on the differences just within one year. For example, the last year's estimate for fiscal year 16, 17, the total revenue was 144. The actual is 150 million. As you start looking, so for a one-year distance forecasting it out and once you get down to the surplus deficit, those numbers exponentially get quite large. Can you explain, again, that's just one-year difference because what I'm trying to understand is how accurate of a prediction of the future will this be? And I know when I've asked this question earlier, you were relatively new in the position and some of the variables may have changed. Can you share with me about the year-to-year differences with these projections? Year-to-year, a budget is really a projection of what's gonna happen. So we do our best to project our revenues and we're not always 100% accurate because we're doing our best to guess that. We do have some outside consultants that help us with a couple pieces of that and they're not always accurate either. So we take all that information and we do our best to project our revenues. What we do is then we monitor them throughout the year. If something comes in that's significantly greater, we mention that at the mid-year process to say that, hey, our revenue's coming in much greater than expected. So from the revenue side point, the finance department manages that pretty well and what we do is we each year, we do a reset on the 10-year plan. So we take what are our actuals when we come up with our projections for 16-17 and then we roll the plan off of the 16-17 numbers. So even though we may have not guessed or we may have been made really conservative in the past, we're not on that same path anymore because we have a little bit more certainty in where we're headed. We know what's happening with Measure P. So we roll forward each year based on new projections. So we do our best to tell you what happened and then we start over and move forward from that. So the assumptions are assessed at the same time. So if we see that sales tax is gonna go up 6% a year, we would make that adjustment and that is one of the revenues being one of our largest that we do have a consultant that helps us look at trends in the various industries so that we get the best projection we can and we try not to be too conservative which we did do in the past. So the variables that were used last year that created this exact same presentation last year were the same ones that were used to create this year's long-range financial plan. You might hear that correctly. The assumptions are essentially the same. They have not, we haven't seen anything to tell us that they should be different. At the most, we're watching the sales tax to make sure that we're good on that one because we know there could potentially be an issue and we're just watching the industry to make sure that we're prepared if it happens. Thanks. Real quickly, sales tax is monthly or quarterly in terms of your analysis. So we receive our sales tax on a monthly basis but it's paid kind of weird. So we get advanced payments, two advanced payments and then we get a settle up payment. Businesses pay their sales taxes primarily on a quarterly basis and they have 30 days to report. So the state doesn't even get it until 30 days after the quarter ends then by the time they remit it to us. So it's roughly quarterly so we can analyze trends. Yes. And we do monitor that one pretty closely. Ms. Collins. Do you think that not today clearly but sometime in the near future we could get a chart that had a graph on it that said, you know, this is what we projected and this is what the actuals were so that we can see the gap between the two which must exist. And I understand that. So you just want this in a chart? Yes, please. I would like it's easier for me to see what we're doing. It would also be helpful if we had, I don't know the technical term for this but when we're doing projections into the future if we had the goalposts for, we think we're this high or this low, you know, we're in this range for the deviation what you think is the accuracy of that projection. You know, often charts have, we're here but it could be this and it could be that. We sometimes refer to that as goalposts. Yeah, we don't really do that type of work. We could certainly look into creating some sort of a program like that. We try to give you the most likely scenario, not optimistic, pessimistic and one in the middle. We try to give you the one in the middle. Okay, I guess I'm just trying to say even for being the one in the middle, what's your confidence interval? You know. Well, I think we're trying to bring items forward that we feel confident that we can support, support and sustain for the long run. We can look, we can get in a conversation with the long-term finance committee about the problem that you've just, you've put forward council member. I'm always interested in making sure the council is educated about what the assumptions are going on behind that conversation but absolutely we'll look at that in more detail but what we bring forward is that this is where we feel comfortable and confident that you're gonna be making your goals so we're not in a conversation halfway through the year where I've been in other places. We've been there in other years. Where you're actually in the unenviable task of telling departments that they need to curtail their services or reduce services to meet a projection that's aggressive but I, again, we hear the concern and we'll get into a conversation with the long-term finance committee about how to bring that forward. Thank you. I think the other thing is that we're going through this projection and this part of the presentation won't change significantly year to year. We'll adjust to the commentary here but I also wanna make sure council's aware that you're gonna see significant changes in the future and how we do the budget presentation. It's gonna be much more about when we get to the department level there'll be some slides about the financial model but it'll be a lot of focus on performance. We're working through a process right now to and we'll bring those things forward in an active conversation through the year next year but the budget presentation will also have a heavy component performance metrics for each department and how we're doing on the core service thing because that is core service front because that is still the thing that I feel is not really informing the conversation. We're dealing with a bunch of numbers. We're not really talking about and a long list of projects in each department not really talking about how core service delivery. Right now there's nothing out there that tells you we address every pothole call within 72 hours and what does that mean? We've got to start to report that out on an annual basis. All right, so our next topic is the real property transfer tax. So this is an overview of the council policy for funding homelessness and affordable housing with our real property transfer tax. So I'm gonna, going into this, this is an example of a place where Debbie's gonna take you through the process without knowing where we're going long term in our financing. It is very, the assignment that we were wrestling with which was bringing more of the real property transfer tax into play is very difficult to figure out how to do. You're gonna see a presentation that shows what we do, what our current expenditures levels are, but without having physical certainty down the road, I'm struggling and will be open to suggestions about how to actually apply this as a regular policy change without asking the corresponding question because it's merged into the general fund, what service we're gonna curtail or change. I think this is one of these classic places without the certainty of knowing that measure P is in place. I am unsure how to approach this particular conundrum that is facing the community. So that being said, now we'll get into real property transfer tax. All right, so real property transfer tax is just a general tax on real estate transactions. It is actually authorized in state law, so every city in the state does receive $1.10 for every thousand dollars of value and that's split between the city and the county. So prior to 1990, that is the system that the city worked under. After 1990, there was a vote of the public that increased our real property transfer tax. It was, again, a general tax, raised that to $3.10 per thousand dollars of value at the home sold and $1.10 of that went to the county and $2 went to the city. So this is per thousand dollars of value at the home sold. In 2004, the council adopted a policy that established an annual transfer from the general fund to the housing trust and that transfer was based on this particular revenue source and the transfer was to be used for affordable housing production. In 2006, the council amended that policy, established a calculation for the transfer to the general fund and the annual transfer from the general fund to the housing trust is 20% of this revenue source and the funds according to the policy as amended in 2006 were to be used for homeless and affordable housing programs. So each year, the department estimates how much the revenue is going to be and we calculate the 20% and we put that in the budget as a 20% transfer to the housing trust and they have a various funds. So the housing and community services department then uses that money to help develop their budget request and they use that for homelessness and affordable housing programs as per council policy. Each October, the finance department will look at what was the actual revenue received and ensure that 20% went to that fund to make sure that they got the full amount that they were supposed to receive from the council policy. So in the 15, 16 budget, the adopted budget projected $490,000 was 20% of that revenue. And now I do know that that revenue is coming greater and greater than projected but we won't know for certain the final revenue number until October and there will be an additional transfer to their fund for these programs. But in 16, 17 taking what we've received to date and doing our projections, we project that the 20% transfer would be $735,000, almost $736,000. And 5% of RPTT funding is about $184,000. Why did you use 5%, I don't see it in previous slides. This was just to give you an idea of how much 5% is. So there had been talk about escalating, the council had been interested in escalating, potentially escalating the percentage transfer and this was just to give you a snapshot of what about 5% of that current estimate look like. Again, the challenge I have with a long-term commitment here is without long-term surety of where revenues are gonna be, it's very difficult to build even a step program which would go potentially next year to 25%, 30%, 35% without knowing where the long-term revenues are. That's always an option for council still. So we wanted to try to give you some idea of what a 5% increment increase could potentially look like. That's all that's for. I appreciate that. So just to sum up, if we go back to slide 31, when we basically almost quadrupled our take of the real property transfer tax, right, from 55 cents to $2 value to the city, no set policy per the next slide, slide 32, until we decided, the council then decided that there would be an annual transfer. It was basically discretionary prior to then. It was a general tax. It is a general tax that goes to the general fund, so council sets the policy. Okay, so then there was an annual transfer of no set number first, and then there was a set number of 20% just to be clear. I believe there was a baseline set. It was sort of, in the initial policy, it was something like anything over $3 million gets transferred, but it was- It was a sweep formula, so you had a fixed figure, as Debbie said, of about $3 million, so I believe we can get the exact number. And then anything that came in over that was swept into affordable housing. So it was, that's a peculiar approach. I think at least the 20% you get some idea of a regularity on this, that you're gonna look at this resource as providing some dividend, so I can only speculate that was the reason for the change is that a sweeping mechanism could, varies greatly year to year, is probably difficult to sort of depend upon, but there's a lot of unknowns there. No, I get that. Back to slide 34 then, 1.2 million roughly is 20%, so if we multiply that by five, we're looking at $6 million, and that's what various people are saying should, I mean, that's where they're starting their calculation of this real property tax. Again, I can only emphasize that it's a general task. No, no, no, I understand that. Council sets the policy. Of course, of course. But this is where the complaints, this is where the complaints are arising from. They stable, there's a voice out there that's, I'm not disputing that it's a general tax at all. I'm just saying that's where the basis for their argument comes from, thank you. So on this, Before you go to the next one, on the same point, I totally understand where you're coming from, Mr. McGlynn, but what's difficult for us, so if I were interested in incrementally increasing the real property transfer tax, $183,000 does not put any context to me, because I totally get where do we cut it? Well, if we were to tell you, yes, we wanna increase it, let's make it 25%. I'm guessing you would come back with us and here's how we would do it. So how would we have that conversation, even on a theoretical, what would going from 20% to 25%, how would we have that conversation? Well, so that's what we're looking for in this session. If there's a desire to go forward with that, we would then come back and say, this is our proposed. I do think you wanna look at the tire presentation right now, because I think in point of fact, council member, you can make an argument that we're already exceeding that rate with some of the one time and other initiatives that you've authorized, and we'll continue to authorize, I suspect going forward. So I think that that's the reason I would defer to get through the presentation, but absolutely this would be the time to say, we want to amend the policy, we wanna do the policy so that we could bring that back to you in a timely manner. So this next slide shows you the general fund contributions to homelessness and affordable housing programs that are not part of the RPTT transfer. So in 1516, the general fund paid $667,000 for these services, and in 1617, we're projecting to pay $787,000 for these services. And the next slide shows you the breakdown in total of how much we are providing to homelessness and housing services. Before you go to the next one, I noticed that this is on slide 35. Mobile bathroom and shower, the host trailer, there's no funding for 1617. I understand we purchased the shower, but there are still operating costs. Is that not being funded or proposed to be funded in 1617? We'll get clarity on that item for you. Each department's gonna have a budget presentation, but we'll address that. All right, thank you. Following up on a similar theme, it concerns me that the CHAP program budget is absent, and I don't know if that means it's coming from somewhere else. So again, there's still room even during the course of a fiscal year to address items. I believe that's under conversation by the subcommittee. We're not projecting that right now, but that doesn't mean we can't, we don't have some flexibility. I've always preached that we have flexibility, that nothing is frozen in time, and that you would be able to address some things, but I think that that's a conversation in the subcommittee. We've done a pilot program, we're gonna come back with that conversation. But again, if the majority of council wishes us to include it, we will try to figure out how to address those concerns as we move forward. But that's what these two sessions are about, to get your input and your concerns, so we come back with a complete budget for the hearings in June. Thank you. And could you also give us some more detail on the last item on this page, the staff support of $242,000? So then, just to show you in total how much the general fund has been providing to homelessness and affordable housing programs in 15, 16 is about $1.2 million. And we do know that $490,000 will increase. And in 16, 17, we're projecting about $1.5 million for those types of programs. So now our next part of this presentation is to talk about the department proposals. Can I stay on this one for just a minute here? Because it seems like we're dancing around this a little bit. We are more than doubling our PTT contribution to homeless and affordable housing with general fund money. If we want to increase our PTT contribution, it's gonna come out of the general fund somewhere. Are you suggesting that this would be a logical place to take it from? Well, I don't think we're suggesting that. I think what we're saying is that right now, because of the issues, the long-term issues that we're facing around the budget, we've been in a cycle of spending one-time funds when we have the resources to address some of these issues. This is merely illustrative of the fact that you are when you have an opportunity and you're spending one-time funds on exactly the issues that were covered by the real property transfer tax. It is not to say that you don't have the ability to reform or change the contribution distribution. This was merely meaning to be illustrative of the fact that you are actually spending more on these issues that has been reported through several outlets, assuming that you haven't been spending general fund. I think sometimes that gets lost in the conversation. I think my issue is, again, you can revise the percentage. It could go up 5%. We'd be happy to entertain those things. The challenge really becomes, what we were tasked to do is to figure out a long-term plan to raise the percentage. What I'm trying to tell council is it's very difficult to get into that conversation when I don't have a surety of where we're going long-term on the finances for the city. That's the conundrum in place is that without having that authorization down the road, projecting a 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% increase over time is a difficult task for us. This was merely to state, I think for the record it needed to be stated that you are in fact, as a council, investing heavily in these issues. And it actually, if you look at it at its base, it outstrips the actual council directive, minimum directive investment of 20%. And if we decided to increase the RPTT contribution, and we took that money from the general fund contributions, the one-time general fund contributions that we're budgeting for next year and put it into these same services, it would be calling it something different but we'd be doing the same thing, is that correct? I mean, again, I think it depends on, I think there is something to be said if you wanted to say we want to make sure the minimum investment is 25%, you know? I don't want to paint it that black and white. These become rules for the organization to live by moving forward, because again, in three years, or even as you see, even sooner than that when we look at the long-term financial plan, we've sent some holes in the budget and we'll need guideposts to make decisions and we'll rely on these directives to say, at minimum, you need to keep 25% transferring. So I think you can do both things concurrently. I don't think it changes this per se. I don't know if that's making any sense. There could still be a directive to us. You know, we want to make an inroad here, we want to change the formula, we want you to come back and raise it 5%. Even though you are investing more than this, this is the message we want to send that we want to continue to use a slightly different arithmetic here. So I don't know if that's being clear, but I'm trying to say that I believe you could still give us direction to make and, you know, change the baseline. It's your policy. You could say, I want to ensure that 25%, 30% goes to this activity. What I was having a hard time figuring out was this gradual increase when I don't know where ultimately we're going with some of our financials down the road. And that's the only differentiation I'm meeting. There's opportunity here. I don't want to shut down the opportunity. I was actually going to interrupt the Chief Financial Officer before we moved on. We're welcome to some input here, but we just wanted to show you that you are investing more. The baseline is 20%, a 5% increment equals about $180,000. But my issue is looking at the long-term finance, it was hard to say with any assurity what we could back without some counseling input on it was there a percentage, was you looking for a step 5% a year for the next couple of years? It's hard to forecast right now with the uncertainty of measure P, especially looming out there. Well, and we may have to make that change contingent on future revenues as well. Just to be clear, the additional general fund contributions listed on slide 36, these are one-time money. Yes. Thank you. Ms. Carlstrom. I didn't even get my hand up, you saw it coming. Mr. McMillan, did I just hear you say 5% increase in the transfer is roughly $180,000? Dad, as we forecast, remember, this is a variable based on what we think is gonna happen, but as we're projecting for next year, that would be about $180,000, correct? Great, I just wanted to double check that because as we, obviously, this is one of the areas I am very interested in seeing where we can improve and increase our commitment. I also think it's always useful to see those numbers in context. So when we talk about, okay, a 5% increase is about $180,000, what will we actually get with that? You know, is that, does that build a unit? So, okay, so again, the policy right now is to split this between, and this is why you might wanna have the convert, when we get to housing and community services, there may be follow-up that you wanna have on RPTT after we get into some of those specific conversations that have already been alluded to, but we'll take that and sort of try to figure out what, again, we'll remind you what a unit costs when we get to that part of the presentation and try to give you some concept. But what I felt was not being communicated was this council's commitment to do additional work in these areas. That was being lost. I wanna emphasize that the reason you're seeing this is there was some of the noise out there was implying that all you're doing is the 20% contribution. And what I would say is over the last couple years, last year and in consideration for this year is more work in this area than was actually being reported. More general fund resource, which comes from part of our general fund package, comes from real property transfer tax. And I felt you needed to see that because that is actually, it's a lot higher percentage even though it's one-time funds and I think that that can get lost, your commitment as a group to address these things needed to be recognized in this process. Thank you, Mr. McClendon. I absolutely appreciate that. This is, again, one part of our holistic approach and I cannot thank you enough for specifically calling that out. And I think as we move through this budget process, that's gonna need to be a continual drumbeat. The commitment from this council and the staff can get lost in the broader conversation. So let's just continue to tie that to, this is one piece of what we're dedicating, what's the overall impact that we are putting back into the community. So, thanks. Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Just my perspective on this, because I think the homeless programs that we're doing, I know we've done the significant commitment in the affordable housing, I don't think that's gonna go away. So actually I think it would be easier and to actually continue our commitment towards this is to increase that 20% to, let's say 25%. Because again, I don't think the dollar figure would change, but the expected funding source will stay consistent that might actually help the homeless and actually affordable housing and community events department actually manage that budget. This is a firm commitment, not just trying to find the rest of the funding absent that 20%. In other words, I think it's a strong statement to say that, yeah, let's increase that because those two priorities, I don't think are going away anytime soon. So I'd really encourage us to increase that 20%. You know, I'd like to comment, I think that this conversation is being generated by some myths about that particular funding source. And I was around when we were talking about increasing it and even then the conversation was that it was a dedicated amount coming from a certain source and that we were going to decrease, we're gonna change the formula. Had we not had some of this misinformation about this particular source and its history and it's actually that sounded like we were robbing the source or robbing from this pocket of money when indeed it was general fund dollars all along, that the conversation would be different. We wouldn't be so tied to this source of funds. We would be talking about what we're actually spending, what we need to spend, what we could spend, what we can't spend. It would go toward that conversation as opposed to being, we keep tying it over to this, the RPTT, which is erroneous. So it is a source of funds, but like the vice mayor said, and all the council members here, we have a commitment to this concept and that we need to talk more about that than where the funds are coming from specifically that it is general fund money and we're spending more on these services than we ever have before. Like council member Carlstrom said, I think we need to continue pointing that out. If I may, Mr. Mayor, I certainly agree with you. I also agree with the vice mayor, my colleagues. I think though that when something is a priority for a council, having a predictable dedicated fund is essential to providing a long-term effective services and by continually funding this with the leftovers, instead of putting it at the front where we funded because it's a priority, that's a problem. And I think that the department and the service providers need a reliable predictable source. If this is it fine, if we need to find it somewhere else, that's good, but it concerns me that we're using one-time monies which people can't plan on. So I would be in favor of your marking this. I would go further than 25%. I would say, what's our priority commitment to this subject? I think we need to have that conversation. I appreciate if it comes out of the general fund without another reliable funding source, we have a problem. But if this is really a priority, we should be funding it up front and not using the leftovers. So that's my concern here. So if this is the source, great, go to 40. If it's not, tell me where the reliable source will be. Well, again, going into next year, as it's scheduled right now, we would be meeting that goal. I think all your right to raise this issue, what I'm looking for is some direction on do you want to amend and we can bring back the policy? Do you want to amend the policy that is in place to increase the percentage? It won't, right? And again, that's up for conversation. I understand all of that. We can bring back the policy for an amendment conversation. It gets to the crux of what the council member was saying, that there'd be a reason for maybe making that commitment in those terms. Then when we come back to budget next year, we would know what that directive was. We would meet the directive or exceed the directive based upon council's contribution, direction. But right now I wanted to make it clear again that we are exceeding the current formula. If you want to open a conversation about formula change, I'm looking for council direction so that we can move forward to change the formula. I'd like to make that motion if we... You wouldn't make a motion. It's a study session, we can't make a motion. I think you would. I just know I... I just need some... We don't know where we're going on this. I was assigned a task about stepping it up. I'm having some difficulty around stepping it up. You know, it becomes, again, changing the percentage is a slightly different conversation, especially as we're looking at uncertainty in future years. So, you know, I'm just looking... And then we can talk about that percentage when we come back. But if there's a... It would be nice to hear individually if the council members would like us to do that. I just wanted to make sure it was clear that you are currently investing more, substantially more than the 20% that is currently the council policy. And I think that the need to mention that on a regular basis is important. Where my discomfort comes in dedicating or increasing the amount when we are already by being very proactive and intentional about that. That if we start to increase... If we dedicate the percentage inside the policy and then without having addressed the lack of certainly on measure P, we could put ourselves in a position of having to compromise other budgets in the future that would be equally painful. So I would prefer to have that conversation about a specific amount once we have a little more certainty into the future. But that's just one council member's opinion. I appreciate your opinion. And I think that if this is truly a priority, it needs to be carved out of the budget now. And if that means that we have to do some give and take in other departments where there's not the priority or if we have to go to the public and say, look, we have to have funding for affordable housing and homelessness, then those are steps we'll have to take. But I don't think you put your... I feel like we're holding the bake sale for our priority instead of making... In my home, when I have a priority, I budget it. I don't wait and see if I have extra money at the end of the month for it. If it's a priority, you budget it right at the top. So I like to budget it at the top. I appreciate that opinion as well. Let's move on. Did you need it now? Well, I'm kind of worried we're... I'm kind of need it. I need a general sense of where we're going since we've opened the topic. I'm trying to get a sense of what I need to do. Mr. McLean, I am comfortable setting a higher percentage. I don't know that I want to limit us to 25% though, but if that's where you need to come back and bring us data, I'm a yes on that. And you're talking about the RPTT that's specifically on this funding mechanism. Mr. Weisaki. I would agree with the comments if it's a priority, it should be treated as some. I would also look back to how was this change, this increase in the tax promoted to the public back in 1990, was there specific language as to where the money was going to be spent? Because that's a problem with a lot of the public's perspective. It's specifically the mayor at the time says he was uncomfortable with tying it to specifically lead to these things because it was a general fund. That is a general fund is a general tax. So I will say once again, there's going to be a variety of opinions on that. What I only thing that I can say is there was conversation at the time, there continues to be conversation today, but it is the council's direction that dictates it's a council policy, it's your decision, and it will be the decision of future councils about whether they want to revisit this particular policy or not. There is no, there's been no, it's a general tax. That means it's a general fund item. There is no subterfuge in that, et cetera, and so forth. I don't know, I'm at a loss, council member, to figure out what happened in 1999. I have heard a lot of opinions. I'm sure we can see the ballot arguments though. Well, I would, just based on recent measures and where the money's gone, I would like to see that. We can supply you the ballot language. Thank you. Mr. Corsi. Yeah, I'd like to see the ballot language too. And given that our long-range financial forecast goes into the red in a couple of years, I am uncomfortable with changing the formula right at this point. I think that we have made our priorities clear and we're living up to our priorities with the money that we're putting into this now is, as I said before, more than twice the 20% policy that we have for the RPTT. We're increasing that budget by nearly $400,000 next year with one-time funds. We recognize the problem. We're addressing the problem. Changing the policy at this point, I think, is premature until we have a better idea of where we're going with measure B. Ms. Combs. I thought you had it. I think I've already nodded yes. I was hoping that Mr. Wisehacky would clarify his yes or no because I didn't catch it. I'll clarify it when I get the information that I've requested. So I have some clarification for you, Council Member. In the time that this tax measure was considered, it did not need to go to the voters. There was no ballot language. And so where did the then mayor's quote come from? From the council meeting, which we've supplied you before. And again, I think there is a lot of concern about, and I suspect there was a lot of different interpretations about what was going on at the time. This is one of the issues that we wrestle with. The only thing that we can clearly articulate is that the council made some policy decisions related to a flat and then a percentage of the RPTT. And now you're wrestling with, do you want to alter that percentage, keep it the same? That's what I'm looking for direction. Mr. Vice Mayor. I think I've already, I'm supportive of this. And I guess for me, it's really almost irrelevant what happened in 1990. We can argue what was said, what wasn't said. Again, my position is our homeless efforts and affordable housing are our priorities now. And I think in order for us to walk the talk, having this expected revenue source, I think is important and something that we had to move forward on, at least to have the conversation to find out what those consequences are if we bump it 25 through whatever it is. And again, I think the challenge a little bit is, is I can pull $200,000 out of any budget. I think the, I'll be honest, the proof will be in the putting next fiscal year when we're facing the realities of the next fiscal when we're trying to make the gap up. That's the only, that's where I'm struggling is that I'm asked to forecast where to take 200,000. I think this is a question of what percentage makes you all comfortable. And then we will deal with the consequences of that percentage in frankly in the future years, unless you tell me 100% where then I do have to make active cuts. I'm not hearing 100% right now, but I'm hearing some desire at this point to look at this. We could bring back proposals. That's why we gave you the 200,000 increment. We'll look at the cost per unit conversation and show you what that looks like. But this is where I struggle is quite honestly, this will dictate next year, but what exactly is gonna be the impact? It's hard to forecast at this point. And I can totally respect that, but I'm also aware of other funding sources in this arena from the regional perspective, the emergency solution grants, we're taking a significant hit here. And in my opinion, we've made so much progress here. And if we don't identify the funding source now where it goes in the bucket of other priorities, that concerns me. And so that's why, again, I think, well, I've already said what I'm comfortable with. And I feel comfortable now knowing what the assignment is. Mr. Corsi. I just wanna make it clear that I do support increasing the percentage of the RPTT at some point. And I've had conversations with Mr. McGlynn about stepping it up over time in increments, but this is not the time with the uncertainty we're facing. We've got, we're looking at a $10 million hole in our budget in a couple of years. And until we have some more certainty whether that's going to happen or not going to happen, I'm comfortable with the money that we're spending now. Thank you. And I think where I'm coming from is that these funds are also subject to increase and decrease over a year, over a year. And one could argue in the future that the future councils can say, look, this is the money we're supposed to be spending on this. And that's the amount, and there we are. And the rest of it goes, it gets budgeted the way it would be budgeted. I'm more comfortable, actually, with the commitment of the council and what they are, what they have committed to currently and in the future. I'm less concerned about a specific amount. I would be okay with going with an extra 5%, but I, because it's clear how much that is, but we're already doing that. So codifying it is not as important to me as the intention and the dedication of the council in this cause. Mr. Wayslowski. I'll clarify as well. I do feel that this is a council priority and it is a need for us, but I am uncomfortable at this time for many of the reasons stated, but also I don't know where it's coming out of. This money's not gonna be grabbed from some funds. Some other program's gonna be hit. I am also very concerned with how the public was informed of the decision since it wasn't an election, as to why we are arriving at doubling our revenues. I do know since being on this council, Measure P, we told the public that we weren't gonna charge for parking at Howarth Park, for example. Six months later, we had a measure in front of us to charge for parking at Howarth Park. So we have some credibility issues, government-wide, not just this body, but we have to make sure that we're being straight with the public. So I would like to know what else was said in addition to the mayor at the time the revenue was proposed, or was it just, we can double our money, so we're gonna do it. Not sure we're gonna have those records. I think that we've tried to identify what the original intention was, but my guess is that there could have been that conversation around tying council's hands, and a policy, they said a number, and that the mayor at the time was uncomfortable tying the hands of future councils, and it was a general tax, so. I don't know, it's kind of hard to necessarily to identify all the nuances of council conversation from 20 years ago, or more. That's right, there you go, good point. So I'm not sure, Mr. McGlynn, do you, where do you find yourself as far as direction at this point? It seems decidedly split. Maybe we need a motion. No, I can't do that. I can't have a motion. We need one, doesn't mean we can do it. So my suggestion is you just bring back the council policy for amendment, the council can decide at that point with the additional information, whether you wish to increase it to 25 or some other percent or leave it as is. That's what we will do. Thank you both. When you bring it back, can you give us flexibility in the notice? Yeah. Thank you. That's absolutely. And will it be placed in context with the overall budget? That's why we needed to, I mean, again, that's the dollar amount that I'm trying to give you. It's hard to forecast what would be next year the exact impact because there are a lot of variables in play. There are variables about where we are, where we are in terms of potential revenue measures out there. It's hard for me to speculate on that dollar amount. I mean, if you were giving me an assignment to come back and capture the full cost of the real property transfer tax, then we would be looking at a very different, I would be looking at budget the current year as I just wanted to demonstrate that we're committed to already in the budget process, a figure that puts you well over the 20% marker. So we're feeling confident that as long as it wasn't gonna, the direction wasn't gonna be, give me 50% of the real property transfer tax in year one, we didn't really have an issue in the current year. I think it's always gonna be an issue depending on what's going on, where we are in subsequent years. And so for me, there's two conversations. There's the conversation, did you wanna take a stab, which we will bring back for a formal conversation in vote with changing that percentage? We'll put it into the context of what's already forecast in the budget so that you're all comfortable with that, and then you can make a decision about how you wanna do that. Where if you change it, where the impact is gonna be, I suspect, is in upcoming fiscal years, not in the current fiscal year. Well, I appreciate that, but I'd also like to view it in the context of my earlier request for authorized full-time employees versus actual full-time employees, because there might be some cushion that there might be a trend from previous years in the departments. I'm just wondering how that fits in the context here. Well, again, you know, understood, understood. Okay. Okay, so our next, we're going to get into the various departments. This is the part where we split the presentation into two days. So I do wanna provide you before we get into the individual department proposals a couple reminders. First of all, the benefits cost, you will see benefits increasing, and that is primarily driven by CalPERS and health insurance. There are, you know, always different things that change your benefits, but those are the primary drivers of cost here. In addition, there was a reorganization, so some departments you'll see comparisons with prior years, other departments you won't, because they didn't exist in prior years. And so just keep that in mind that you will see some big changes in their current year budgets because things have been reorganized. Yeah, before we move into the individual budgets, we'll take a five minute specifically, very clearly, five minute recess. Thank you. And to begin again. All right. Let's not begin again. Let's continue. So just as we go into the department proposals, just a couple reminders. I've told you about the benefits being driven by PERS and health care and about the reorg. In addition, I do want to remind you that IT costs, while you will see an IT budget, you will also see IT costs in all the budget. So you see IT budget twice, essentially, because we do spread across all departments. And one other thing, in the past year, we did take on a project within the finance department to look at everybody's budget and how they were budgeting for their, what was called capital projects and looking at if it was truly a general fund project or if it was an ongoing operating expense. So you may see some bump up in expenditures within the line items for that change in how we recognize what the departments are doing with some of those resources. Can I ask one question based upon your statement? What other departments such as IT are allocated citywide and can we see the formulas behind such allocation? So IT is, actually, we have cost allocation plans for all funds this year. We're in the final phases of doing that project. IT has a cost allocation plan. It is put together by the, and we have one for the administrative departments. We have expanded that program so that we actually have some for all departments and all funds. So we know when we trade services across funds, how we can charge for that and make sure that we're keeping those funds whole. The cost allocation plan is about this thick. So I'm not sure you want to look at the whole document. We do have some summary tables that we can show you how it's allocated, but it's all allocated based on particular items. For example, HR is allocated based on FTEs throughout the city because that's how their services are derived. And each department that they set, how their services are spread amongst the departments based on the services they provide citywide. So it is. That would be a good start. That's summary. If there's other questions, we can go beyond that. Okay. So we can provide you the overall, how the departments spread their costs, what those form, it's not a formula. It's just percentages and stuff, but we can give you that. What's the basis of reasoning? So what we are talking about today will be all the administrative departments. And then we'll talk about information technology, planning and economic development and recreation and parks. The study session on May 17th we'll talk about fire department, police department, housing and community services, transportation and public works, Santa Rosa water and our overall capital improvement program. So the first budget item that we will talk about today is the city council budget. The city council budget is essentially, I guess we could call them programs, three programs you deal with administration, which is the city council, the city council is the legislative and policy making body for the city. So there is a large legislative or administrative component that you all provide for us. In addition, the council does elections and community programs. The administration's about 46% of the program. You'll see elections this year is a much larger percentage of the budget because we actually do have an election coming up that the council's budget pays for. So overall we look at how the budget compares to last year and there are some highlights that we'd like to point out. So when you look at the non-council member salaries, if you recall over the last year we did add police services as security for council meetings. So this is really where we are charging. You'll see the non-council member salaries and benefits, those are to capture primarily that staff that provides the security for our council meetings. The other non-council member salaries would be the in-kind services that we provide for the community promotions grants. So that gets captured also within the budget here. Professional services, like I said, that's gone up significantly because we do have an election and we need to cover that. So we have a council election and we've also included a budget for possibly two ballot measures. There may be one coming from the community, there may be one that the council chooses to put on when we get some results and see what we're looking at. The other thing is to highlight really is your other miscellaneous and that again is primarily driven by election costs. There's about $35,000 in there for printing and the stuff we need to do for elections. And then there's various dues and conferences and travel that's included in that line item. Mr. Mayor. Sure, let's go. If I may, I want to thank you for the assistance with scheduling that is now occurring. Mr. City Manager, it is really helpful to have the office staff be as responsive and helpful with regard to scheduling as they have been. It has made a major difference to me. I assume it's helpful to the other council members as well. I would like to point out that members of the Board of Supervisors have two and a half staff members that they select to assist them. And we do not have any staff members that we direct. And they serve fewer people if you figure that a Supervisorial District is about 60,000 and we at large serve about 170,000. At some point, and I appreciate that it's a very delicate conversation, we need to be able to have at least a half-time person that we select to work with us as our aid. And while I don't expect it to come out of this year's budget, I would like for us to have a council conversation about this for a future budget. And again, I want to be, I don't think I realized how helpful it would be to have such an excellent staff member as I now have working with me on scheduling. And while I have wondered about this, it has really brought it to the fore in my mind that in addition to scheduling help, we simply need some staffing help that we select in the way that the Board of Supervisors does. Thank you. Is this a motion for a future agenda item? Not here. No, not until, when you get to Mayor's and council members reports, you can handle it then. Seem the right place in the budget conversation to give a heads up that not this year, but I think that we need to be thinking about future council members. And I think you may have had an item you wanted to discuss at this point. Well, when they, you know, when we get, after the preface, are you ready for it? For, I mean, are you there? Are you more comment? What I wanted to mention that does not show up in this, in the budget items this year is the sesquicentennial. And although perhaps easier to put on than to say the 150th anniversary of the city of Santa Rosa is coming up in 2018, there has been an informal group, myself included, meeting on a regular basis, discussing possibilities, bringing members of the public in, ascertaining various non-profits and other groups' interests in participating. There is a high level of participation expected. What I needed to get was a sense of the council's appetite for an official budget item for the sesquicentennial. I know we have, there are so many pressures right now on our budgets. This is a, this only happens once. These kinds of celebrations that the last one was almost 50 years ago. And there probably won't be another one for another 50 years. So, you know, we have a general sense of, that's probably a good thing. And I was at the last one. I don't think, you probably weren't born yet, were you at the last one? You probably get that a lot though. So, I'm needing to get a sense of the council's financial commitment to this in two years. The, although there is a category for community promotions and we anticipate looking for some funds, those have to be spent in the year in which they are requested, which will be next year. There is a, you know, the council could, after some conversation, decide to dedicate all the funds for what we think is a reasonable budget, both in kind and cash. We're not, we've had to do the best budget we could come up with. And right now it's a little bit, not quite as firm as I would like, but we were looking at between $150 and $175,000 of both cash and in kind to be expended in the next couple of years. Part of the problem, of course, is we have no staff. We have no staff member to try to direct this effort and it takes, given it's a community-wide celebration involving many, many people, trying to do many, many things and with no one person to call, it is a, and it is the city's celebration. So, I'm looking for some direction. I'm looking to be able to, when speaking to other, to non-profits that are looking to become involved and other organizations, the JC, the library, various libraries, actually, the county, and it just, it's growing and growing and growing and one of their questions is what is, who do we contact if we need information? And to date it's been Suzanne Shepard and she has enough on her plate and so we are looking to, I am asking the council for a conversation about its financial commitment to this effort that will be happening in two years. So, I'd like to hear some thoughts. Ms. Collins, do you have? I'm just nodding. I agree, we need to be planning ahead for the sesquicentennial and we need to budget it and we need to budget it this year and next. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. Yeah, I would also agree and I think it's an opportunity for some public-private partnership knowing that the junior colleges having their 100-year anniversary and I think there's some leverage their collaboration there that we may be able to mitigate some of the costs and I know, I'm familiar with some of their fundraising efforts so I think it should be a public-private partnership but I think we do need to be involved. Thank you and they are at the table. Mr. Corsi, give us some clarification. Are you talking about a future agenda item where we'll be able to look at the budget and take a look at what we're actually buying with this? Well, that's what I would probably look to staff to answer a question of how we move forward with a completely, this is virtually not unexpected to me or to others, certain others but clearly to this body and to staff an unexpected budget item and it is so I'm not sure exactly how much direction we can give and the council has control over its budget but it is, I didn't want to, would it be good to have one figure and everyone says yes, let's go for it right now and be done with it in this year? Yes, would it be okay if there was a commitment to splitting it in half and splitting part between 15, 16 or 16, 17 and 17, 18? I would be okay with that as well but I need to be able to let organizations and individuals know the city's financial commitment to this so that they know how to plan and how those partnerships will work. I agree that we need to be part of this and we need to budget the funds for it but we also need to know where those funds are kind of coming from, it's a one-time expenditure. I imagine it's coming out of one-time funds where those funds are not gonna be instead, so. Exactly. That kind of information I'm looking forward to talking about. Okay, so maybe I could make that request to staff if we were to, well maybe it would be good to ascertain the council's, take their temperature as to whether they want to do this in one shot or split it between two years, two budget cycles. Can I just ask a clarifying question and last year we appropriated $14,811 towards this. What did that go to? So we are in the process of spending about half that right now. We are looking, it is some promotional materials, a logo for instance that not only we would be using but other community members and organizations could use given certain criteria. So we knew we needed to have some branding, we needed to start with some branding so we could start to appear and to be more professional and yes, this is really going to happen. So we have yet to spend it all but we're about ready to pull the trigger on spending a fair amount of those funds in promotional materials. And the rest of it, for instance, I'll just give you a basic need. Excuse me, we had an organization come to us, actually it's the Historical Society of Santa Rosa and they said we have some people that have come to us, that's the society and said we have a great program that we think would work very well, it's not developed yet, but it would require a site and we charge for our sites and so this would be kind of in a sense in kind but it would be a cut if Finley is used for a particular event and we don't charge them for that, that would be part, if we chose to do that, that would be part of that money. It's hard for me to determine what's cash and what's in kind, which departments would be hit the most and if it's our facilities, there would probably be recreation and parks. So I don't mean to be unclear but it's really hard to know on this day how exactly those funds would be used. So if I may request something, I think I'm a little concerned just in terms of this is so open-ended, I don't know what the request is so I don't know how in the next six weeks to actually manage the request. I think Mr. Mayor we can sit down and have a conversation about this because it does have organizational impacts. Again, I'm not sure what the plan is, what the goal is, what we're trying to celebrate. I think it would be better to bring back a celebration idea to the council, have council vet that celebration idea and then we can strategize about where resources might reside for that instead of fixing a plan to a specific number that may or may not actually be an accurate number because as you rightly noted, there are potential costs and operational needs that again may need to be really thought out in terms of just honestly going through the issues around the Amgen tour is right now fresh in my mind about cost and cost allocation and expectations and so what I would appeal to the council is we want to as a city obviously celebrate this as a quintennial but I think if we could sit and talk about this in a way that is again in the utmost emphasis of flexibility to figure out what program we're shooting for so that we could bring that program back for our conversation with council about it. I just, it's so open ended, I don't even know how in the next four to six weeks to fit that in with everything else we're gonna be trying to do to get to a number. I think we'd be better off hearing that the council, if this is something council wants us to pursue in general terms and then we can start to work on the more specific parts of the conversation. I am concerned about adding a staff member. I'll be honest about that because I'm not sure operationally where we are in a context especially when we're having conversations about vacancy rates and a lot of other things. I am somewhat concerned there might be, this is a space where sometimes you contract with somebody to help you get through that part of the process so I'll be honest, I'd like to have those conversations if there's a general council will, which I suspect there will be, to be involved in the planning process around this. That's just my two cents in the conversation. I appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Waisaki. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and thank you for that clarification. I would just, I'm in general agreement, perhaps we should be setting something aside but I don't wanna buy a pig in a poke if you will. As this is a promotion, perhaps our economic development departments, some of our folks that have been putting together our promotion, they should be involved with this. Let me just reiterate, you have a long, tall order for your economic development team of two to accomplish in terms of housing and economic development tasks and so I need to really understand better that before I start farming out there promotional, there is a role for them to play. I'm just reluctant to say that this is, they own this particular thing because I think you want to deliver on the housing and you wanna develop and deliver on jobs in the community and I've got a team of two right now and so I really need some time to assess it, Mr. Waisaki. It's not to say no, it's to say, I think there's a way for us to address it and we'll be involved in it and we wanna be involved in it. It's merely a suggestion of a resource we can draw on. I'll leave you to sleep with that. And I appreciate that and it was not our intention to bring to higher city staff. The contract concept has been floated before but I mainly, I didn't know when and I thought, well, during the budget time would be a good time at least to put this up the flagpole and see what happens and I appreciate the council's willingness to consider it and that we will bring back more information and something that's more substantive that you can consider and ask questions about and we'll do our best to give us full report on the recommendations that we've received to date. So thank you very much. All right, so just to let you know, again, the council is funded 100% by the general fund. Some of the highlights of what's in the council's budget, again, the primary, the increase of $465,000 is primarily due to the election cost in November of 2016 and that is for two possible ballot measures, the city council election plus print services and in addition, there's some slight increases to salaries and benefits for non-council members for having police officer attending your meetings as to help provide security. Some of the accomplishments and, you know, the council gets a lot of kudos for what's been accomplished over the last year. Obviously, you adopted the 15-16 budget and we thank you for that and you finalized the council goals and priorities and reminding you again of the tier one priorities are reducing homelessness through the comprehensive strategy, doing the housing strategy and all that. So again, I'm not gonna read them all for the third time. What we would like to also provide, you know, that there were a lot of, the council provided a lot of resources and commitments of funding for programs, such a, well, I don't even need to go through them, but there were a lot of things that we did over the past year to target some strategic investments throughout the community and making sure that we're dealing with some of our infrastructure needs. We did settle a lawsuit that we had with the Department of Finance, which, and along with the Hyatt sale, provided some proceeds to the general fund. We established, you know, your new homeless service program with host and created several pilot programs with that to see what's working and how we can better deal with homelessness, created a rent stabilization and medical marijuana committees, subcommittees, made a lot of progress with our Rosalind annexation and, you know, also continued the partnership with the violence prevention program. We continue to implement the recommendations of the open government task force and one of the big pieces of that was hiring our community engagement director. And again, we've initiated the housing series to help develop the housing action plan. So if there's any questions on this? Ms. Loftner, just for clarification, oftentimes when we talk about the, inside the marijuana arena, we talk about opportunities in the medical marijuana industry, et cetera, but the preparing for the impacts of legalized marijuana. Can I assume that we are preparing for the impacts of the changes of the medical marijuana arena as well? Because it's oftentimes looked at as an opportunity there, but an impact on the other side and I see impacts on both sides. So I assume that we're talking about impacts, both current impacts and some of the unknowns. And then of course impacts of potential legalization. That is correct and that's consistent with one of the tier one priorities. Excellent, thank you very much. Ms. Carlstrom. Oh, I was only going to offer that if memory serves, I think staff crafted that statement because there was unanimity amongst us as far as implementing the medical marijuana rubric, but some hesitation with respect to adult recreational use, which would be on the ballot. So I think that was the intent of prepare for because I think four of us were like, yeah, go for it with the legalization and there was some internal angst. I agree. I just think that I think that it's important as we talk about the impacts that we talk about the impacts. And as we all know sitting here, there are impacts currently. And so I just, it's not all roses. Thank you. Mr. Mary, can I just ask a question with respect to that? As we look at sales tax projections, our medical marijuana sales tax revenues forecasted and included in some of our numbers. At this juncture, no, we're working with some consultants to start to look at that, that obviously can continue to be potentially an option for the council to consider its own initiative in the future. You might only have one bite at that apple though, depending on when legalization comes, if it comes. But we're working with consultants to build some modeling about that. But it's not really, we're building this program. It's not really, we don't really have ability to project the way it could be. But so there is learning going on on that front. Absolutely. And I very much appreciate that. I know that the subcommittee has really appreciated the staff's work on digging and drilling down into that issue. Just for the council's purposes, I think what Mr. McGlynn is referencing is that a number of communities across the state have elected to consider additional sales taxes on medical marijuana sales. There's a ballot initiative at least coming from Oakland and maybe Berkeley too. So several communities and that maybe something that we think about as we enter into election season, given some of the dire circumstances we may or may not face, it wouldn't be a heavy lift, I don't think, to put a tax on the ballot. I haven't fleshed this out, but I just wanted to throw that out there and put it in people's thoughts. Well, there's also a Senator McGuire sponsoring a bill right now that has a 15% cap on it, I believe. But there's some issues about, we may have some follow-up conversations around this topic. There might be a reason that you might consider getting in queue, because if you have something on your slate, you potentially have a voice at the table when statewide conversations go on. And there is statewide conversation going on right now with likely some numbers attached to it in terms of attacks. So making my sesquicentennial ask even easier every minute. We'll see. Am I being selfish? Thank you, go ahead, Ms. L'Hochter. All right, the next budget we talk about is the community promotions budget. And we have a list of those community, the requests that got and how much got funded from each request. So if there's questions on this, we'd be happy to answer that. I do know that our mayor does sit on the selection committee for the community promotions. And so just wanna let you know what got selected and what is how it got funded. And just as per usual, it is always a difficult task to either to cut some of the budgets for various reasons or to say no to certain requests. I might point out, and this has to do with, maybe this would be a future discussion perhaps, but the funding has been 125 for almost 25 years now. And it seems maybe it would be time, and once things settle down a little bit in the next year or so to have a conversation about increasing that. We did decrease it for during the recession, but then brought it back up to what was even then an old number. So it's something that we should consider, I think in the future to kind of modernize that amount, but we have lots of needs on our plate. So I'm not looking to do that today. The next budget we talk about is the city manager's budget. So city manager, last year you looked at the city manager and it included the community engagement director as a separate division with it just housed in the city manager's office was always a separate department this year. We have separated it out as a separate department. So you will see the city manager's office no longer contains the violence prevention partnership. It is administration and the city clerk's office. The city manager's office provides oversight for all the city departments and works very closely with the governing body. And the city clerk is responsible for administering all the city's legislative process, the elections and records management programs. The general administration is the bulk of this department. It's close to 95%. You will see a large reduction in a lot of their categories because there was a reduction of, so seven FTEs went over to the office of community engagement. However, there is one added FTE, so net the city manager's office decreased by six positions. The added position is for the police auditor position that has been added to that department. For the most part, there aren't a lot of big changes. What you will see is you will see the professional services while it has decreased dramatically. A lot of that is because of the violence prevention partnership. But in addition to that, there was some recruiting services, some funding for that, that had been housed in the city manager's office. We have moved that back to our HR department where recruitment services should be centralized. So the funding is now back in the HR department for some of those executive level recruitments that were being managed by city manager's office in the past. In addition to that, there's in the overall CIP O&M projects section, you see that there is a budget of $35,000. This is for the city clerk's record preservation program. So they're looking at trying to preserve some of our more historical records and making sure that we are properly storing those. And this is the tail end of a project that we've been working with to deal with our document retention and record preservation. So the city manager's office is all funded by the general fund. As you can see in the past, they were funded, they had measure O funding, but that was for the violence prevention partnership, which has moved to the office of community engagement. So I've kind of told you all the different highlights of what's been changed in their budget. So I won't go over that again. We have been working on, there was some additional funding that had been provided. So at mid-year, we provided some additional funding for polling work. That process is still underway. We will be coming back to the council with a study session, not sure exactly when yet. Likely that will be after the budget hearings so that we can tell you what the results of the polling is. In addition to that, there was $75,000 provided to work on the rent stabilization program that had been directed by council. And those recommendations did come forward to council on May 3rd. There's been a lot accomplished by this department in the last year. Of course, there've been the recommendations for the budget. That is a huge project for all of us to work on. It is the city manager's budget. So we work very closely to make sure that we get a comprehensive budget that covers as many needs as possible in front of you. In addition, we've developed some more reporting stuff. We're working on the sunshine ordinance that is still a work in progress managed and distributed all the meetings for the council. That's a big project. The city clerk does an amazing job to make sure that the public is well informed of everything going on within the city and knows when the meetings are and what's gonna be on those agendas and making sure we all get those through and on the agenda for you. So kudos to that department for keeping us all on track. The record preservation program that we talked about is a big deal. We do have some records from the 1800s and we wanna make sure those records are preserved and maintained properly and not in improper storage as they get older, they need a little bit more care. So, and in addition to that, we responded to over 170 requests for public records. Just to point a clarification, I'm not sure why we have the, I'm gonna ask staff to look at this, why we have the police auditor as an FTE because the police auditor services are contracted. So I just wanna make sure that the council is aware of that. And in fact, I also wanna take the time to recognize that we're going to lose a long-term employee out of the city manager's office very, very soon. Mr. Chuck Rogalia, who's been working in the city manager's office for over a year now. And due to budget considerations, we will not currently be replacing that position. So in point of fact, the number of positions for administration is going down by one and one substantial contributor to the city's visioning process and has made significant progress on a lot of the council initiatives over the last year. So now you get to listen to somebody else for a while. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the office of community engagement and Jaime Peña Herrera is here. Mayor, city council members, good afternoon. I'm pleased to introduce to you the newly created office of community engagement. Right now we have allocated seven FTEs to the department, including myself. One of them is, sorry. One FTE is allocated to the community engagement aspect of the department. The other five are allocated to the Valence Prevention Partnership. One of them is funded through the CalGrip grant that we have. Just a quick update on the community engagement coordinator with second round of interviews for that. Likewise, for the Valence Prevention Partnership, we have a community outreach coordinator second round of interviews and for the manager for the partnership, the closing of that recruitment ends at the end of this week. Just a quick update on that. So in our role, the office of community engagement, if I had to summarize, we are a bridge between the community and the city. And to do that, we utilize the key tenets of open government, transparency, participation, collaboration. And to do that, we have a series of tools, including the cap and the members that are part of the group. As you well know, we are lucky to have a highly committed group of people that are excited to work on different priorities with us. And at the same time in our department, the partnership is in charge of administering and managing the partnership strategic plan as well as the choice grant program. So our budget, because it's so new, is a little hard to compare, especially on the community engagement aspect of things, but consistent with our financial, our finance department's direction of increasing at 3% on our annual budget. 70% of our budget is allocated to the violence prevention partnership, 20% to community engagement and the rest to the, it's coming as a general funding mechanism to complement the choice grant program. So one of the highlights there, it's related to the professional services, about $605,000 are allocated to the grants and the rest of that it's allocated to the strategic planning process, a community awareness campaign that we're planning. And there's another item, the scorecard that we're working on and I'll tell you a little more about that in the next slide or so. So that's just a breakdown of the total budget and the general fund allocated to the budget. Debbie alluded to right now the department is housing both the community engagement and the violence prevention partnership and the highlight that I was alluding to is related to the scorecard, which was approved back in April 27th by the oversight committee as well as the community awareness campaign related to the partnership and the strategic planning process that we're about to embark in August. Thank you. We're proud to have moved forward with the scorecard. Some of you are aware of that. In fact, I'll be meeting with you soon to update you on some of the work that we've been doing in the last few months in an effort to create a tool for us that would enable us to look at violence from a much comprehensive view if you will that would help us address violence almost as a public health issue as opposed to a uni-dimensional crime related activity. The scorecard enables us to see what else is going on in the community with our youth. It's not just related to a specific incident but it looks at socioeconomic aspects of the community, education, healthcare, civic engagement in a number of key indicators. We have 17 of those. We have 50 partners that are sitting at the table reactively looking around the community to see who else is missing. So we're very proud of the work that we've done. We're anxious to share that with you. A lot of progress has been done with regards to that. We've also been working on the implementation plan for the next 10 years. So we're looking at this long-term violence is something that we need to be vigilant about. I remember distinctively when I was the co-chair of the Cinco de Mayo event many, many years ago and how far we've come. And I was participating in the Cinco de Mayo event a few days ago and I stayed there until nine o'clock. No incidents, tons of people, a lot of kids, families, and so we've come a long way. And so like I said, I'm proud of the work that we've done with the partnership. Obviously it's been a collaborative effort. We also work very closely with the CAP and we have a strap-plant meeting coming up next month. So we're excited about that. The idea is to align the CAP's energy behind our city council goals and find a way to complement the work that we do and also work together on the different initiatives that the city is working on. So we meet on a monthly basis and we are excited about that work as well. We've also conducted five meetings at the beginning of the year. We provided a report last week on that related to the CAP and some of the input that we got and some of the recommendations that we have moving forward. We'll come back to you with the work plan for the CAP and tell you more about that. And last but not least, as you know, we've been working on the implementation of the open government ordinance. We've asked for input from our community. We've gotten a lot of good feedback. So I'm anxious to come back to you with a second draft and I'll be with you to update you on the different elements that we recommended to be included in the ordinance. So that's all I have. Excellent. Council questions? Thank you for the presentation. I'm sorry, Ms. Carlson. I do have some questions. Thank you for the presentation. I'm very glad to know that we have a new department. I want to go back though, a number of slides. I think one of your very first slides, the seven members of the department. Back more, there we go. So I need you to unpackage this a little bit for me because I appreciate where the crux is coming from on how this department has been staffed. Are these seven new FTEs? They are existing FTEs. They have been reapportioned from other departments. This department used to sit within the city manager's office. It was really hard to segment out in a conversation. This is the beginning of some transparency as I stated from the beginning of the creation of the position that the director of the department would have the violence prevention partnership under them as well as the community engagement a manager under them as well. And so those are the positions. I believe there's an increase in one position that's due to a grant related funding item, but that's coming out of the violence prevention group. Okay. And the violence prevention positions, are they funded by measure O? 100%? Yes. Okay, I imagine that's a pretty large portion of the violence prevention measure O share, is that correct? Well, I mean, you're gonna see in the parks, recreation and parks department, there's a share in the recreation and parks and department as well as a share that is in housing community services that addresses neighborhood revitalization program. All those positions were approved through the oversight board as was directed. So they've been reviewed and approved. Thank you. I just want to make sure from a global perspective that your department does not become consumed by measure O and the violence prevention partnership. And that's what the numbers look like right now. And I can appreciate that that's because we're not staffing you yet on that community engagement side, but that was the purpose we're creating your position. And we have a very effective model of utilizing existing services and promoting collaboration amongst them in the violence prevention partnership. I have no problem having a point person and point people for supporting those efforts, but I need to make sure that as your department gets built out, it is not the measure O violence prevention partnership department. It is the community engagement. And yes, we're working with CAB. And I see those efforts. I just will really be looking to see people on that side of things. Because I remember community engagement coordinators in years past being completely overloaded and overwhelmed and quitting because it was too much. And we still only have one person to do that. Well, you're going to have two. But again, as council set priorities early in the year, one of the clear priorities that was laid out in the priority setting was additional staff for community engagement. That did not move forward as a priority item for council. We're cognizant of that. I think that that is something that we wrestle with on a daily basis is that we're trying to accomplish some really discreet stuff. We're trying to partner across the organization to get to beef that up. But it is, it is, I will not state that this is going to be the Portland model and it cannot be the Portland model. It is not staffed nor funded in the way that the Portland model is. We're working on ways to do that. I think at the end of the budget presentations, one of the things that we're going to be alluding to is how we bring some resources to bear and how we get the cab to help us make some decisions about a neighborhood streets improvement program, which I think we find exciting and should council agree to do a pilot program in that funding mechanism, we would be excited to participate in that. But no, you're not dis, your eyes do not deceive you. It is slanted towards one side of the operation in terms of staffing. But I would also say that that group has a long track record of working in the field that they worked in. We're right now trying to find the titular leader of that part of the organization so that that high make can spend some more time on the other side of the operation, which is the engagement side. But at the end of the day, there will still be two staff members in the community engagement side of the operation. And I appreciate your comments and your concern. One way of looking at this is the partnership is it's really a community engagement tool. And we want to maximize that relationship as well. I appreciate that. And I know that we, as I stated, and please understand where my comments are coming. I mean, I served on the measure of subcommittee. I was on the mayor's gang task force before it was the violence prevention partnership. I absolutely appreciate the value of those tools. My statement comes only there. It's rare that we get a chance as a council to witness the birth of a new department and spending a year in the local government task force to create your position. This is how I would like to see your department develop. And so I just needed to kind of state that global perspective. There was, right. Actually, it was the slide you were on. If you'll go back. Thank you. Oops, sorry. There we go. There we go. So just if I may, I wanted to remind you the measure of $635,000 of that is just the choice grant program. And that does pay for one of those staff members. So if you look, they're much closer than you think. Absolutely. And I appreciate, again, there are a lot of overlaps between what the partnership, what measure, oh, the choice grants, what they're doing and the effect they're having in the community. But I also am aware the, you know, the mayor's getting prevention task force became the violence prevention partnership because there was a shift in what we wanted to be talking about. And your department is another shift. So let's just, I wanna make sure that shifting continues. Thank you. Mr. Weislake. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just, I do have a couple of comments. I'm a little concerned about build out and what that means. Cause to me, that means more resources. So I'm, Mr. Mayor. There is no proposed additional resource at this point in this department. So it'd be very similar to Portland starting, last night, starting out strong, kind of withering away in the fourth quarter and over time, et cetera. That wasn't the Portland I was, was citing. I am all, thank you. Couldn't resist. Cause I bring that up cause I'm concerned that choice grants are one half of the budget. And to me that's, those are very good programs and I want to see more going into the community, to the kids as opposed to going into more positions. Cause as was stated last year by one of my cable pointees that community engagement should be inherent in any staff member, any municipal government employee. It's inherent in the position. And I know it's easy for me to say being up here, but you need to expect public participation and feedback. That's just a statement. I'm also still somewhat concerned, not necessarily concerned, but violence prevention has come from gang prevention. And to me, violence prevention sounds more like a general policing statement, which I'm fine with. But this was a very specific measure, measure over gang prevention. Now, how is that, to me it seems like mission creep. And that's, it just, I don't know. I look forward to the scorecard discussion. It's no secret that I've viewed gang crime statistics generated by the city with skepticism in the past. I know gang crime isn't the only measure, but it's a big measure. And that is why I feel why measure of that passed. So I look forward to that discussion. Coming forward. Ms. Combs. Thank you, and delighted to have you on board now. Good department. I'm looking forward to watching it expand over time as we are able. Is administrative staff for this department included in this budget? I guess, can you be more specific? The staff is the staffing model as it's structured. Okay, so there usually is an administrative staff member who attends cab meetings. Is that part of this budget or some other budget? Yes, we're in the process of hiring the community engagement manager and that person will be with Hime. They'll be figuring out how to manage that part of the conversation. But are you talking about from the city manager's office the administrative time spent? Sometimes there's a person who types things up, makes photocopies, answers phones. I'm trying to figure out where that person is in this department. Well, that person will be on loan from the city manager's office. And the IT services will be on loan at this time? Yes. Okay, because to me those two are actually a major part of outreach and engagement. And we're, as I said, we're trying to build this department and we're taking baby steps to do so. Okay, is the budget for cab in this department? Yes. Did we see a line item for cabs budget? Not at this specific report, but I can get some. Okay, I'd like to see cabs line item budget. I was a fan of participatory budgeting. I know that it didn't rise to the level of urgency that housing did, but I think that it needs to inform our conversations about this department. Well, I think one of the things that you heard last week, Council Member, is that we're beginning a process that I think will, through the CIP program, will help us start to pave the way on that front. I also think that we're gonna have some, you will see some things that I believe will excite you about the fall coming out of the conversations with the cabin and are gonna be on the agenda in the future, which may not rise again to the level of some of the other models that are floated out there. I think will be a significant progress for us as a city. Okay, I look forward to that conversation. Will the specific choice grant approvals, choice grant items be listed separately at any point in the budgeting process? Will we, at what point do we know who's funded under choice grants? Who's not? Will we get the list? Yeah, we can get our report. So those actual grant programs, they are applying now. They don't get decided until October. So once they're decided, we can provide you the list of what was offered. It is in the annual report on Measure O. Okay, so we have folks now funded that are in the process of reapplying and we will hear that conversation more fully in the fall. Correct. Okay, thank you. That's what I wanted to know. I appreciate very much and look forward to moderated but high expectations. Thanks. Thank you, Council. And thank you for the report. Thank you. Ms. Lochner. Our next department would be the city attorney's office and we have our city attorney Caroline Fowler here with her team. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. I want to introduce Catherine Marco, our office administrator who keeps things running for us behind the scenes. So do you want to move the slides? So our organizational chart in the proposed budget this year is for a total of 14.90 FTEs. As you know, for the last several years we've been requesting an increase in staffing in our office, which hasn't been able to be provided. This year we have a unique opportunity lining up with the council goals and some specialized funding that we have that can be used for those purposes which I'll talk about a little bit later. Our department is made up of administration which is Catherine, assistant city attorneys and the proposal to include one new deputy city position, legal secretaries and paralegals. As you're aware, our office provides legal services for the city. This includes a variety of services such as reviewing, evaluating and recommending disposition of all claims filed against the city, defending litigation against the city and its employees, approving as to formal contracts, surety bonds, ordinances, resolutions and council policies. And we review the city council planning commission and board of public utilities agendas for Brown Act compliance. We provide legal advice written and orally to city staff. We advise all of the various departments regarding franchise agreements, the landfill issues, water supply, water quality, land use, seek one other infrastructure issues. We provide advice on employment issues that the city deals with. We prosecute city code violations. We oppose release of weapons that are seized by the police department. Those are from either domestic violence situations or from people with mental illnesses. And then we also represent the police department when pitches motions are filed, which are motions in the criminal court context seeking to look at officer personnel records. So 100% of our budget is spent on providing legal services. And as Debbie mentioned before, that cost is allocated out amongst the various departments. Here is a breakdown of expenditures by category. Again, as Debbie said, most of this is salary and benefits. You'll see a large reduction in vehicle expenditures. That's because our office does not really utilize the pool cars, which is what that fee was previously used for. And the operational expense increase relates to the addition of some additional staff, which would require computers and licenses for our computerized research. So expenditures by fund, all of the city attorney's funding comes through the general fund. Some part of it does come from the enterprise funds who also pay their share of the cost. So for the budget highlights this year, we are asking for two FTEs to be funded by the recovery of penalties and fees that we received in a consumer protection action. You might recall some time ago, we prosecuted the Lana Motel case. And through that case, we received statutory penalties that are required to be used only for specific purposes for consumer protection. Typically our office is not directly involved in consumer protection matters. And so it's been challenging to utilize those funds in the past. Now with the city's council's goals, with respect to housing, the rent stabilization program and the enforcement of code enforcement. This gives us the opportunity to utilize some of those funds to hire a deputy city attorney that would support the enhanced code enforcement. When you heard the presentation on code enforcement, they mentioned that there are approximately 20 cases they would like to see move forward into receivership. This position would also be able to support the rent stabilization program that you're currently putting into place as well as other city code prosecutions and the rental inspection program. With respect to code enforcement, we found and there's a growing number of cases where typically those are resolved through the administrative hearing process which imposes fines on the property owners when they don't comply. And it's now become necessary to take further steps such as pursuing legal action to actually eliminate those problems in the neighborhoods. And we'll be talking to you about some of those specific cases in the near future. The accomplishments for our department include, we recently resolved a personal injury case that was filed against the city in a junior college. The city was dismissed without payment of any funds and we recovered $47,000 in costs that we had to expend in defending that case. We settled a 10 year case against the city with resolution of an $80,000 payment to the city. This is one of the bonding cases that you may recall. We've talked to you about, our office also represents the CUPA which is the Certified Uniform Program Admin Unified which deals with the hazardous waste in our community. So we do prosecute some environmental related claims with respect to underground tanks and other types of hazardous waste spills or problems. We've obtained dismissal of a number of unlawful seizure and excessive force cases brought against the city with no recovered paid by the city. And we have another one that we have resolved with the payment of waiver of cost. We've also had a number of sidewalk cases. We've also settled those with no payment other than a waiver of costs. Generally the city's costs are very low in those types of cases because we're exempt from paying filing fees. You will recall that we also settled a wrongful death case for a payment of $212,000 which for that type of a case is a very good recovery. My office has been working with the Medical Marijuana Subcommittee and the Planning and Economic Development staff as we work to understand the new laws and implement your direction on that. And we've assisted in preparing the sunshine ordinance, sequel review and review of the courthouse square documents and then again, the updated smoking ordinance which was passed in 2015 to extend to multifamily use and also revising the parking ordinance to allow for additional expenditures that relate to courthouse square. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Council questions. Mr. Corsi. I'm glad to hear you're gonna be getting some extra help, but I'm wondering about paying for that with fines and penalties. Is that a sustainable plan or is this a temporary? So this is the, it's not general fines, it's a very specific fine that was recovered as part of the Lana Motel case, which is approximately $280,000. And so that funds for several years. The expectation is that as we start our rental inspection program and these other programs, the receiverships that the city would be awarded its attorney's fees in those cases. And so through the proactive action on that front, we would be replenishing that as it goes on, but the current funding that exists in that account would fund these two positions for at least three years. Okay, so. So we're looking at it in each of these instances where we're getting more engaged. We're looking at what the sustainable fee structure is to support these positions long term. And the choice council may have to make at some point is that the fee may actually have to accelerate. There might be an adultery rate that gets covered. The legal team gets covered by their current funding source, but we're gonna have to have some conversations as we go through those fee assessments about what you wanna do in your approach. But we're gonna bring back those types of rental inspection programs, which cover the costs across the gamut from every department's involvement in that. And you'll have to tell us where your comfort level lies. But the idea is that when we bring something forward, it's gonna have a sustainable base to it. There may be opportunities to, as I said, step into some relationships and rental inspection or some of the other costs around rent stabilization, maybe examples of that. The reality is that we need some assistance in the legal realm from the beginning in some of these circumstances. So it's better for us to get staffed up. And then as we go through the fee structure conversation, address that as we bring it forward. So the Lonomo tell case provides some startup funds for the fee. Yes. Okay, that's great, thanks. Mr. Westhawke. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Question, is a deputy city attorney considered higher on the organizational chart than an assistant city attorney? No, unlike the city manager's office, for some reason a deputy city attorney is lower than an assistant city attorney. And is that statewide or is that just us because it is not consistent? Different offices have their positions defined differently. That's how those job classifications were created some time ago. Sometimes they have levels, you know, attorney one, attorney two, senior assistants. I mean, there's a variety of ways in which it's done. Okay, I appreciate that. So 280,000, three years funding, including benefits for two positions? There's also some additional funding that was maintained in that account, which was also recovery of attorney's fees, additional interest and some other types of penalties that aren't as restricted. Okay. The assistant city attorney, excuse me. My nomenclature, right? Last week, we in your absence were left with without guidance on real estate tenant matters, landlord tenant matters, as well as parliamentary advice. Who would be stepping into that role since Ms. Rawlings who's usually done that capable in the past is no longer with us? It would depend on the availability of the attorneys. Generally, Ms. Dillon usually comes. She's in the past work with the planning commission, but now her assignment has changed and she's working primarily in the position that Ms. Rawlings had done with the utilities department. So depending on availability staff, when I was away at the city attorney conference last week, Ms. Casa Grande was here. No, and she did a fine job. However, her background by her own admission was not able to give us necessary guidance. I think that's universally shared, at least, and no knock on her. She filled in as capable as she could. I was a little uncomfortable with that meeting, not having the proper guidance. Do we have a succession plan so that doesn't happen in the future? Well, there are attorneys who are capable of filling in. There is not an attorney in my office who is interested in taking my position. Can you speculate why that, to me, I would hope that every department has a deputy in the city that's willing to take on the position. Well, it's not always assumed that a deputy fills the position when you fill the top level position. You hopefully get the person who is most qualified for that, but you can't force people within the office to commit to take a higher level position if they're not interested in that. But we do look for those. I try to train all of my staff to be able to cover any of the legal work that's required for the city. Thank you. Mr. Corsi. Just one follow up to that. Will the new attorney position, will he be looking for somebody who has a background in housing and tenant issues? Yes, we would be looking for somebody primarily that's had experience in code enforcement and hopefully some housing experience. It doesn't necessarily mean that this particular attorney will do all of those things. For example, right now it's Sue Gallagher who's our newest attorney. We hire her from the county, has had that experience. She's currently sitting with the housing authority, so it may be spread across different attorneys who have the best expertise to work in those problems, but by freeing them from other responsibilities that allows all of those services to be covered. Thank you. Sure, Mr. Osaki. Quick question, was Ms. Gallagher, was she available for last week's meeting? No, she was not. She was attending the city attorney's conference as well. That was well. Thank you. Ms. Combs. Yes, I'm looking at your expenditures for information technology. And I recall, though I don't recall this specific details, that there was some interest in increasing automation or technology use within the department. Previously there had been a conversation about this. Does this reflect that interest in increasing kind of the automation availability, tracking records, things like that within the department? Yeah, we do do that, and we're looking at opportunities. Do you do that this specific increase? I think as Ms. Lochner replied to is based on the increase in the IT budget and also an increased need for computers with two new employees and the license for our legal research. But this is an upgrading an overall department approach to using information technology? No, not specifically. Okay, thank you. Other questions, counsel? Or just a comment, over the course of a year, we hear individual settlements and seeing them at one time is rather impressive. So I'm gonna offer my appreciation for an acknowledgement of a long list of accomplishments. Thank you very much. Ms. Lochner. Our next department would be the Human Resources Department and we have the interim director, Ronda McKinnon and her team. Good afternoon, mayor and counsel. Well, I come today as a pretty happy person. I've had this opportunity to work in the Human Resources Department as the interim director and I have to say it's been an absolutely wonderful experience. I'm meeting and learning a whole different aspect of what our city provides and extremely impressed with our staff and all the department heads that I've been working with and our budget team who I'm not a numbers person and I've been doing budget for the very first time to this depth and Veronica and Shelley have been just absolutely wonderful. So this whole city just pulls together when you need them and I really appreciate that. So here we are, Human Resources Department. We are allocated 21 positions and we're basically split into two programs. There's a Human Resources side which contains the Employment Services Department complaints, I'm sorry, you heard that part, it contains the Employment Services Department and the manager is Brigid Donnelly who's sitting up at the top of the stairs also extremely helpful in this. And then we've got the Risk Management Department or program basically which the interim director or the interim risk manager is Nathan Barnett who's sitting next to me. So next slide please, we're here. Oh, labor. One aspect I didn't share with you is the Labor Relations Program so we do have one person in our department that's tasked with doing all the contract negotiation which is Paul Carroll. Right now he's sitting doing 10 tables worth of negotiations. The Human Resources program is contained the labor relations like I already talked about. Employment Services which is recruitment and classification and compensation. So we're in charge of all the recruitment in the city and the classification studies and assigning the compensation. Evaluation and performance management. You'll see a little bit further in the slides that'll be asking for some money so that we can purchase an online or a web-based performance evaluation system. We're trying to get to a time where we are gonna be paperless and we'll have electronic routing. It sounds really, really fantastic. And then also what we do a lot of work on and we're revising a lot of our policies right now so policy development and interpretation. So a lot of departments rely on us to provide the policies and right now we are doing a lot of work to make sure that all of our policies are current and then that we're gonna have them posted in an area in which the employees can easily access all those policies. So we're working with IT to help us with that. And then also we are regulatory body so we are tasked with compliance to be compliant with the state, federal, city rules and regulations, city code and the charter. And then I think all of you have met in that townly, she's in charge of our organizational development and she provides probably 90% of the training that we conduct in the city. And besides that, a lot of facilitation and mediation. In the risk department, currently the risk is quite a large program. You'll see that the bulk of our budget right around $32 million. They handle all employee benefits, the wellness program, workers' compensation, employee safety, OSHA, drug and alcohol testing programs, work on the city insurance programs. So we're constantly in negotiations regarding all those premiums. We also ensure that we're compliant as far as insurance requirements in the contracts and we have all of our ADA compliance requirements. So everything in the city regarding ADA risk has a heavy involvement with that. And in this program here is where you'll see we're asking for a position for a safety analyst and we feel strongly about having a central point of contact for the safety and currently we have a decentralized program and we want to make a centralized program for safety. So expenditures by program, general administration, you can see risk management is 92% of the total budget, which is over $30 million. And the rest of our budget is basically salaries, it's for employees. Excuse me, I see the 21 FTE total. Can you give me the breakdown between HR and risk management? So risk management has six positions or seven, six positions and we'll be adding the one safety analyst. Yes, and the rest then we've got Annette Townley and then Paul Carroll and then the rest are human resources. Thank you. So expenditures by category. Here we are with salaries and benefits, you can see we are a percent change of 9.1%. And that's basically the cost of adding one position and then the regular costs of benefits that have gone up across the board throughout the city. As far as benefits, again, 13.9% increase that's directly related to the rising healthcare costs. Basically that's the same type of increases that you're gonna see across the city. The professional services, this is an increase there, you'll see it's 31%. And what we've done is we've transferred some funds from the city manager's office to the HR department so that the HR department will be solely responsible for doing all the executive recruitments and those executive recruitments are usually contracted with a recruiting firm. So the cost of that typically a year runs about $60,000 but it's something that we don't always have an idea of how many we're just projecting and how many department head level positions that we'll be replacing. We've also, that performance management software that I was talking about, that's another $60,000 that's added to this line item. And then also we added some additional funding for negotiations for next year. Currently this year we've contracted with the attorney's firm to help us with the fire contract negotiations. Next year we're anticipating if we do the one year contracts with everybody, we'll have all tables open which includes the police and fire. So we've added funds to the budget so that we could have an attorney firm help us with those negotiations. I guess a good thing is we've turned back $770 for our vehicle expenses. So we're not using that. Every little bit helps, right? Other miscellaneous, I think all the other categories are basically standard increases that you'll see throughout the city. And Debbie, is there anything in particular you think I should hit on that? One thing I wanted to note here is as I talked earlier you see that the insurance premiums and claims has gone up 2.7% and on the next slide you'll see again a 6% increase in just our healthcare premium is close to $735,000. So just want to point that out as these are large dollar amounts and very small percentage increases create large dollar increases, but overall it's not a large increase in that line item but we felt it was important to highlight that. Could I ask about the safety and wellness position? How does, I mean, I may perhaps it's obvious and I would make an assumption about that their work would help reduce our claims, but what was the impetus and how is it handled now and how will it be handled in the future? This top and then enough to have a full and FTE. So I'll start and Nathan can jump in if he needs to fill in for me, but the safety position is basically we've got safety officers throughout the city. So most departments have one safety representative and this group is expected to manage all of the safety compliance issues within their department. And we've had a little bit of loss as far as continuity with all those positions because they're basically working within their own departments. When Cliff was working here, he started reinstituting some monthly meetings. Is it monthly or every monthly meetings with all of the safety personnel to talk about what the compliance issues are, what they're seeing out in the field and start identifying how we can move forward as far as making the employees safer at their job, understanding what the safety concerns are and trying to mitigate any of those. So we expect that having this safety person and being that one point of contact will bring some consistency throughout the whole organization and give those representatives at each department somebody that they can turn to that has the expertise in this and this is their job full time and that can help them work with all units in the city because not everybody has a representative to bring us into a place of compliance in areas where we might be slightly lacking and also give them some support because they're also working a full time job while being responsible for the safety aspect. So anything OSHA related, they jump in and help us make sure that we're OSHA compliant. So this will bring us that consistency and we think that in the long run, we've asked for a three year limited term position and we're expecting that by those three years you'll see some direct results of that person and their interactions with other departments and we're hoping that we see a decrease in workers' calm. Great, thank you. Okay. So we're gonna move on to the next budget which is the risk management and the insurance premiums and I'm gonna turn that one over to Nathan. Thank you mayor and council members. So we'll go down line by line. City health, as you can see, our change is 6.2% and I kinda wanna put a perspective on that. In 2015, and the plan, in the city health plan, not inclusive of the Purge Health, we actually had 763 employees enrolled. As of 2016, there are now 827 employees enrolled. Within this plan, there's also different levels of coverage. Will there be a single, an employee plus one or an employee plus family? There's a lot of switching around that's changed in numbers, it's increased our exposures. Along with that, the 64 members into the Purge Health plan is actually an 8% increase. When we compare that to the outside sector, the private sector, which is looking at 11% increase cost of board, according to our surveys, the 6.2% is less, a lot less. One of the other cost drivers is pharmacy costs. As you read the newspapers, you'll see that pharmacy costs are greatly increasing and that's also affecting our premiums and our cost per claim. All right. Purge Health, which is our safety officers, has an increase of 0.5%, it's pretty flat. The next line item is workers' compensation. Workers' compensation, we have a decrease of 3.1%. The majority of that decrease is the fact that we now have a more robust return to work program within the city. All the departments are pitching in and putting people back to work sooner and safer. Our experience mod went from 98% to 93% last fiscal year and our wellness program now is benefiting our employees to return to work safer. Dental and vision, this is for all city members as safety and non-safety. There is no rate increase. The rate increase is constant, the current rate is constant until 2018. The 2.8% increase is based solely on usage of the program. The next line item is liability. The 1.8% goes along with our ability to pay claims and our responsibility to pay claims. City Attorney has already mentioned we did have one pavement just recently and above $200,000. That does affect our premiums going forward as part of our loss history. And then recently within the pool, CalTip, who's our transit provider, we had four large losses to exceed our self-insured retention. Not the city's losses, but our pool's losses. Other benefits, next line item. Can I have a question for you on the next slide? I know last year Council funded a wellness program that was expanded from just public safety to all employees and I wouldn't anticipate a huge return on investment the first year, but where might we see some anticipated savings on this slide 91 in future years? I can jump in. So as of the first three months of this year, we've had 264 participants and I think the best way in which we can compare what we would hope to experience as far as success is what we've seen over in safety. So it's still a little bit early in safety. It's only been a couple of years since we've implemented the program, but already we've seen a decrease in injuries and we've seen high participation rates. So the fire department has 81% of their personnel that's participating in the program and the police department has 61% of their personnel participating. There's also, they've added some components this time around that they didn't have last time so much as the biometric screenings and a lot of our employees are participating in that. So we'll have some overall results. Right now we're setting a baseline, but we're expecting that not only are they gonna be healthier and probably paying attention to what they're doing as far as possible injuries at work, but maybe a happy workforce too that we're looking forward to. So there's a lot of components that we're expecting to see. So, go ahead. So I totally get that, it's the right thing to do for all of our employees. I guess my question more is, will that translate into any budget items here? Like, could we hopefully anticipate a reduction in workers' compensation claims in future years? Is that where we might see that benefit? That would be our best anticipation, yes. And we have, we do have some of the numbers and we have seen that happen over in safety. Great. Here, I'll give it to you. Thank you. Here's one. Rhonda was mentioning in safety and our numbers in safety, when the plan was implemented in 2014, we had 27 claims of the major body parts which include back, low back, neck, shoulder and knee. These are injuries that usually can disable someone for a long period of time. In 2014, 15, we had only 19 of the same apartment. And then from, in 2015, we went down to 15 injuries. Good. Excellent. Go ahead. Okay, other employee benefits, 3.5%. That includes unemployment insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, retiree health administration. The only rate that has changed would be the unemployment costs. The unemployment costs are the driver for the 3.5% increase. The life insurance, miscellaneous disability fees are set to through 2018. Those are not affecting this number. And the retiree health administration fees are set to 2017. The next line is sub-regional earthquake minus 12.1%. That is basically based on the fact there's been no occurrences to have our coverages. There's been no earthquake activity. So we realized a decrease in our premium. And the final line is property. Good question. Excuse me, if I may. Earthquakes, I assume that our policy has a large deductible just like a regular homeowner's earthquake policy does. Yes, sir. Do we have a provision of sinking fund for such a, since the premium went down, are we putting that aside for the large deductible that could be required? That would be within the sub-regional system. So they do have reserves. Okay. And on the final line, property and fire. One of the bonuses and also what hurts us in our premiums is the fact when property prices go up or our assets go up and our equity goes up but our insurance also increases. For the 10.9%, our property values have recovered with the economy. In 2015-16, our property values were $631.1 million. Recent assessment was $637.8 million. A difference of 10.9% and it affect our premiums. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next slide. I think this is just another slide explaining the funding and budget highlights. So the human resources budget has increased by 17.1%. It includes a $65,000 additional funding to HR to administrate the, like I said earlier the recruitment and contracting with recruitment firms. $60,000 of one-time money for our web-based performance evaluation system that we're proposing and an additional $15,000 which we've added into the training budget so that we can provide more training for the employees in some areas in particular that we're looking at is some investigative training. So managers have an opportunity to understand how to speak with employees as far as gathering information when we're doing some discipline processing. And the risk management budgets increased by 3.1%. It includes the insurance rates so the combined city health insurance what you just saw. The liability insurance increase, earthquake reduction, and the workers' compensation decrease. So that's something that we're obviously really proud about and expect that we can continue to see that number go down. And adding in that limited term, three-year safety analyst. And our accomplishments continued. Implement a city-wide miscellaneous wellness plan so that happened over this last fiscal year. It's in full strength right now. We've in risk management done a lot of work as far as outreach. So we talked about that safety position which we're looking forward to and also risk is going out and doing a lot of meetings with individual departments talking about how to file workman's compensation plans, getting something online so they can do it electronically and making it more understandable so supervisors can report it correctly, gather all the information immediately. Also, they've put cards in every single car so that every time or when there's a collision they open the glove box and they know exactly what to do and who to call. And then the Human Resources Leadership Team has become fully staffed, pretty excited about that. And this is Brigid's writing. We are driving change and initiatives resulting in enhanced workflow and service delivery. Yes, good job, Brigid. That's what we're doing. And we've successfully and immediately responded to the classification and position updates required during the organizational reorganization. So that was a big, big project when they've made some changes as far as the combining PED. Today. Mr. City Manager made those changes. So that was a considerable amount of work for the HR staff to take on and they're still plugging away at it but I think they're like a 96% complete on that. And with that, I think we are open to question. Oh, I have more, more accomplishments. More. Where's my other piece of paper? So good for us. So specifically we worked on the economic development and housing and community services. That's what I was talking about as far as all the work that the analysts and the techs and the seniors were working on over this past, I don't think it was since January. The parking division moved into the finance department so that was also some updated job descriptions and reclassification work. And then in community development, the change to planning and economic development. So we established new organization codes, job description updates, retitles, ensuring that all the classifications are being paid accordingly. And then we've also been working on reclassifications if it's necessary. So, do I have more? Now questions or comments? Council, any further questions? Good job. Thank you both. Great, thank you. Thank you for doing that. The next department is actually the finance department so you get to listen to me again. So in the finance department, we have a lot of different programs we manage. We of course have administration. We have financial services, which is the budget and financial reporting. We have purchasing revenue, which is the utility billing and meter reading functions, payroll and benefits, parking operations and management, parking enforcement. And we also have the successor agency. I'm not gonna read you the descriptions of what each of those items, each of those programs provide, but do you wanna highlight the fact that with the reorganization, we acquired parking and successor agency from what used to be the economic and community or economic development and housing department. And those names come easier as I say them more. But that did increase our staff our whole department by 52%. We did take on a whole new team of employees and it's been really fun. So you will see that overall we've had a lot of increases in our budget. This lays out which programs and how much of the budget they come from. Primarily I wanna tell you the revenue department is primarily funded with water funds and parking of course is funded with parking funds and successor agency is funded with successor agency funds that we apply for on our recognized obligation payment schedule each year. So we do have some other funding sources within the finance department now. As you can see this table is gonna be all over the place with an increase of 52% of our department. Of course our salaries and benefits have gone up dramatically and I can give you overall with the highlights I'll give you that more information on that. The one that's interesting to note here is utilities. As a small finance department we really didn't have a bunch of power needs but with the parking program there are a lot of power needs so we increased by over 2000% in that one line item. Most all the increases you see are related to absorbing the whole parking team within our department but there are some other changes which I'll address in the budget highlights. We do wanna show that there is a small revenue offset for our general fund programs. That would be everything other than those other funds I listed but the general fund programs we bring in just a very small piece of money to help pay for our programs. Overall we are, there's a significant change in here so it's hard to say how the percentage of how everything's funded but our department has gone up a huge amount so I just won't go into that. Overall we talked about the reorganization. What's included in the general fund piece is a portion of a technology application specialist. So this is a position that will be residing in finance. This is a position that was given at mid-year but will reside in finance but it is an IT position so as an IT will hire a person to help us provide us with some of our technology support needs primarily for payroll and the timekeeping system. That is then allocated out to all funds because we're an administrative department so when we have a cost we allocate out that costs to the other funds. In addition to that we have a limited term administrative technician which you talked about before. This is for the, to support the H2O program and the other programs that we have within our revenue division that are managing those for the water department. So what we also have in this budget is $50,000 to do an overall PCI compliance audit. We have not done one in the city but it is very important that we establish a baseline and we prove we are PCI compliant so that we can make sure that we are not paying extra merchant fees on our credit cards because you have to be PCI compliant in order to not pay extra fees. We want to just assure those merchants we are PCI compliant. In the most cases we are not the payment processors so the PCI compliance is not on the city but we do accept payments throughout the whole city of credit cards that are not going through a PCI compliance system through another vendor so it's a city responsibility and we are just going to do that audit to make sure that we are all in compliance and if not that we can address that but I'm pretty certain we are. We have gained some efficiencies by eliminating two positions within the parking operations aid workforce and these positions are eliminated through attrition. We have an overall plan within our parking fund of what our staffing model should look like. We are working over time to get there and not laying anybody off but just doing it through attrition so this is a piece of that. We've changed the way we operate and we do need less staff and we are close to where we need to be now but this eliminates two positions. In addition to that there are two projects that are listed in our overall budget in parking. We have $1.7 million for garage nine repairs and we have $465,000 that contributes to the reunification of Courthouse Square project. This is the piece where we did the ordinance amendment to allow for the parking funds to build on street parking and this is the cost for the Courthouse Square piece. Debbie, could you remind us which is garage nine? Garage nine is the one over there by the state building. That way, that way. So that one had some major repairs that we needed to do on it and we found that out when we did the assessment for the solar project. It's the second oldest garage I think in the city. No, downtown, helping the city. So as far as our accomplishments, we've done a lot of work within payroll to make the changes necessary. The biggest one was the providing sick leave to temporary and part-time employees and that required a policy and some changes and programming within our system and making sure that we are ready to manage and maintain that program as according to the new law. We have migrated public works onto a centralized procurement system called Planet Bids and we're working with other departments to bring them on board. This gives us more visibility in the vendor community. It also allows us to track what's happening with each bid so that you can see who pulled documents, who saw documents, who decided to respond and who not so we can follow up with those vendors that decided not to put in a bid, find out why and ensure that we are providing every opportunity for all the vendors to participate in our business and make sure we have a lot of competition there. In addition, we have a purchasing technician position that was added last year that we've been working. We updated the job description and we've been working with getting that recruitment done. This will allow us to better utilize the higher level skills of the buyers for their work and allow the purchasing technician to do some of the more easier work such as amendments or just when you're amending and adding a year to a contract that doesn't necessarily require a buyer. You can do that with a lower level staff. We wanna maximize the skills of the higher level staff for that higher level work and make sure that we're doing things appropriately amongst our staff. Mr. Mayor? Sure, Ms. Kalshaw. Can I just wanted to ask a couple of questions about the Planet Bids program. I think that that's great. Finding new technology to implement the system, totally great. Is there an opportunity for any aspect of that to be public facing? It is public facing for them. Anybody can sign up and it's very visible. So that's why we like it so much is we can get data and the public can see what's going on and we can easily answer questions if they wanna know how many people looked at it. They don't have to go in, they can ask us and we can just easily go to the website and find out. Great, so the information that's available to us will also be available to the public. I'm not sure if all of it's available. Some of it's just data that might not be but I can certainly find out more about what's available to the public and how they can view that. We can get you that information. For example, the actual bids themselves aren't publicly available until we award a contract. Okay, that was probably the crux of my question. Just as we're moving towards making more information available earlier to folks, this just seemed like an interesting place to plug some of that in. And then secondarily, I wonder if that tool couldn't be utilized for my favorite pet project of tracking overages? Not that particular program, but we can certainly track overages based on contract amendments. I remain interested in that data, thanks. So we also successfully converted to a new version of our utility building system. This one has been a long time coming but we were a beta test site so we were allowed to get some of the fixes we needed into the system that will benefit everybody that belongs to, that has that software. And being a test site helped us get our needs met and we had a very good, a very long and great process but it took some time. But it's been successfully implemented now we also are able to provide for the help to others and the other programs that we have, the Change for Kids and those programs they're all able to implement through the new program. It was a massive upgrade but it was really big. We have worked on doing paperless real-time reporting in our garages so they can use their smartphones and they can track what they're doing with their smartphones rather than having to write it down on a piece of paper so that is allowing for a great efficiency within the parking system. We've also centralized our communication center so if somebody calls, oftentimes we can help them on the phone because we have a camera on site and we can see what they're doing and help them and if not we can dispatch somebody really quickly to be able to help them by having a centralized system. We did also complete the parking meter housing upgrades and that was an installation of secure electronic locking system and it replaced 11 multispace meters with 89 single space meters in the railroad square area. These are also all credit card enabled unlike some of our older ones that will only still take coins but we're working through getting that. We also did the city's first design build RFP for the solars on the rooftops of the garages which is I think a great thing. We tested it, now we know how it works and we are starting to see more interest in that type of work and again using planet bids to make sure that we get as broad a reach into the vendor community to get as much competition as possible. Ms. Lucker, I have a question for you. On slide 107 you mentioned that you've implemented some efficiencies and I'm curious and that you through attrition are going to slowly, your staff will be scaled down somewhat and this is maybe the private sector coming out in me and I don't want to appear or sound callous but if you've achieved these efficiencies what are the employees doing in the meantime as you wait for the attrition to happen? So achieving efficiencies takes some time. Just like the cell phone thing where you can go and say where you are in the garages that took some time to implement and then once you've implemented you need to make sure it's working before you really decide whether you need those employees anymore. We have an overall staffing model that says the service we want to provide really takes this kind of staff. We're not quite there yet. There's some other things we still need to do. So as we're doing these and positions become vacant we're assessing them and saying do we need them? Does it fit within our staffing model? Is there, what's the reason and is that the right position we need? And we do this throughout the whole finance department. Anytime there's a vacancy you assess that vacancy and make sure that's the resource you need in order to accomplish the service you told us we would provide. So within the parking and relatively new to parking but within there they do have an overall plan a strategic plan on how to get there and they're just not quite there yet. So those employees are still being used. What we do when we get a vacancy sometimes we'll fill it with a temporary employee and while we're assessing the need. Excellent, thank you. Council, any other questions? That's right, thank you very much. So you're not quite done with me. Our next budget really is the non-departmental budget. This doesn't have a lot of line items but some of them are quite large. One of the largest ones is animal shelter fees. And so that I like to point out every year that is a large cost to the city. And there are different, this is run by the county, we pay the fees. I believe there was facilities that were redone this last year and so that increased the fees that was all agreed on ahead of time but we will see some increased fees for that. We have debt service is also another very large item here. So this is what gets obligated to the debt service fund. So we have a bunch of different debt service and this is be primarily our pension obligation bonds. So you saw earlier we have COPs but we also have pension obligation bonds. Those are both big obligations of the general fund. So that's kind of the big highlights of that and you can see a comparison of year to year on by category of what's in there. What you see as far as salaries, that is primarily funding that we put here to pay for when people leave city service and we have to pay out all their leave balances. This, because we don't know what departments those are gonna be in, we put it in non-departmental and then we will move the budget as needed when people leave departments. So that's a year in kind of settle up accounting thing we do to make sure nobody goes over budget because of leave payouts because we've budgeted it here. The benefits that is CalPERS pays a benefit of we're limited to the IRS limitation on what benefits are but there is what they have a side fund that funds those employees that earned a higher benefit in retirement and our obligation to pay for some employees that have earned above the IRS limit is $10,000 a year. We have professional services in here, debt service again. The debt service has actually gone down and where the reason it's gone down is because we actually paid off one of our lease obligations which was for the finance software that does all our accounting and payroll. So that got paid off last year. Again, we show you the liability insurance which is the general funds obligation to that. The other miscellaneous what we have there is a budgeted underspend for salary savings. So we essentially put in or it's a cent, it's budgeted underspend for the entire budget. It typically ends up being salary savings within departments for vacancies. So we typically see about $1.3 million a year of expenditures that we, in a good year, the recession, we have to kind of kind of go all over some of those because we had a lot of people leave and a lot of different things happen during the recession but typically in a typical year about $1.3 million of our budget is attributed to vacancies. So we try to budget for that and so that's what that piece is. So again, non-departmental is two different funds, debt service fund, general fund. So I kind of went through what all the different changes were. One thing that I do want to note here is again on how we changed the budget for what we considered projects before, one of those was we have a sales tax service that will go out and find where the state may have misallocated sales tax and we pay a piece of our recovered revenue for that service. So we budget it in here but there is an offsetting revenue for that piece just to show that we pay the consultant but we also do get some revenue recovery for that. Council, questions on non-departmental? Thank you again. Our next department would be information technology and Eric McHenry is here. Mayor and council, good afternoon. Thank you. I will talk a little bit about the org chart structure on the next slide but as you can see we're split up into the conceptual areas of administration, development, customer service, GIS and PC replacement. Our head count remains at 28 which is two above the last year and we'll talk about where that head count growth came from so next slide. I want to talk a little bit about what we do in IT and whenever I talk about IT it's a bit challenging because we do operate in an environment that isn't public facing usually. We do not always usually talk to the council directly about what we do but we have a big impact on the staff efficiencies and that's where we take the most of our work sort of behind the scenes. Software development and support those are mainly the people that you might call programmer analyst and web developers. They support our applications. So when you hear about IFIS, when you hear about Accela, when you hear about MySaneroza, the website those are the people that work to support and develop those solutions. One thing nice about our city and a bit unique about our city is that we tie together our applications. If you've been to some other places around you'll find that you have one application be it a financial application that doesn't share data perhaps with parking or perhaps doesn't share data with fleet. We do a lot of work in IT to make sure these things talk to each other so that we can have sort of a comprehensive and automated views and data flowing back and forth. So these people do a lot of that work for software development and support. The customer and network support many of you have engaged that service through our help desk. They help support the desktops, the iPads, the smartphones and all the servers and connected devices. I was interesting, we have over 5,000 support requests annually and that's quite a few and those typically coming over the phone or over the web or over someone just popping by to say hey, can you help me with my smartphone? I don't remember my login credentials. I don't know how to do this or that or that. We take great pride in responding quickly. In fact, in next year's talk, we'll be talking more about our metrics that as the city manager talked about, a lot of us are looking at metrics now that talk about sort of what is the average time to do this? How are we delivering our city services? I can tell you right now that we're running at about a 13 day average to working day average on all of our service requests across all of our aspects of our business. So we're trying to get that down to around 10 or so. So that's a big deal for us is responding accurately and quickly to the requests that our city staff has. GIS, a lot of the mapping service that you're seeing with what I'm gonna be talking about a little bit more later around our open government, digital government, looking at some of the data that you saw a few weeks ago, looking at the code enforcement data. A lot more of our data is now being represented spatially, in other words, by map. And the GIS group is a core group to make sure that we can take that stuff about our community, about our services and put it on a map to better inform the public, better inform you, better inform our city staff and decision making. PC replacement is our bread and butter. You know, we have, actually it's not 800, I got that wrong, it's closer to 1,000. I can tell you right now it's 1,092. We have active as of today. And those are the PCs that we replace. And what we do with the staff of about one is that we buy these PCs from Dell and we have a process by which Dell configures the PCs before they arrive here to our, kind of our core configuration. And then we actually just customize that and send out to the department. So we tried to put in place a very efficient system a few years ago. It's running smoothly, we're quite proud of it. It's one of these things we don't talk about a lot because it's working so well. But I gotta guarantee you that if you were here five years ago and you were a department head and you had a bunch of PCs arrive on the floor sitting in boxes for a week or a month waiting to get delivered. It's a dramatic difference from now when we contact you and say your PC is ready. We're gonna come to your office today or tomorrow and we'll replace it for you in an hour or two. So we've really streamlined that process and the PC replacement project and I'm really quite proud of that results there. Next slide. From our expenditures, they're kind of boring. They're pretty flat. Like a lot of departments, we have a lot of labor costs. We have by the department's GIS customer support. Most of our investment is in software development, is in customer support. It's mainly labor. Next slide. Looking at the deltas, the year to year changes. Again, it's pretty flat with the exception of salaries. So if you look at the bottom line, it's about $566,000 and that comes from new positions which I'll talk about next. Everything else is pretty much flat year on year. We're driven mainly by new positions. Next slide. We have two funds. We have our core information technology fund which is our core business. Then we have a separate fund for technology replacement and it's actually PC replacement. Is that correct? I think so. And so what we decided to do a number of years ago is we said let's not have, have and have not departments. Whenever we buy a PC into the city and that PC is expected to last for five years, let's put away one-fifth of the cost of that PC every year into a replacement fund. It's very similar to what Fleet does. And so that fund we use to pull from to buy our PC so we always have a steady stream of revenue income expenses to be able to keep our PCs at the right level. I'd like to take you back to slide 122, if you will. Just to ask a couple of quick questions. What happened with your utilities? It's gone way down. I was sort of afraid you were gonna ask that. I'm sorry, it went so fast, it made me alert. It comes through our allocation and I've been told it's through Sonoma Clean Power. But go ahead. I'm happy to hear that that's what's happened. Right, well, we have seen some savings in power because of the Sonoma Clean Power. I don't know why it's particular to IT but I know that we've done some work within where the server room is that could have contributed to that as well. So it's a couple of different things. The professional services line. I'm just trying to hit the top one. I'm gonna talk on that one of the next couple of slides. Then I will. There were a couple of two initiatives that were launching that consume professional services fees. Thank you. One more. Our additions for FY16-17 are two. One is that in the mid-year budget we added two positions. You added two positions. One was to support the Excel software and the other one's to support payroll. Those actually start on July 1st, 2016. And those were the two key ones as a city we identified were crucial for technology. Director Gowan and his team are really struggling to make sure that the solution around permitting land use is as effective and efficient as it can be. They wanna have reports. They wanna have public-facing information. We have to clean up a lot of data. And this first one is there to support that. We wanna make sure that that back-in runs successfully well so that the front-end of their operation can serve the public efficiently. The second one is for a payroll system. And it's as CFO Lockner, I just called her Debbie, it's kinda hard to... As Debbie said, payroll is incredibly important for us. It's very complicated. Whenever there's a bargaining unit change, whenever there is a legal issue, whenever there is a payroll related, we have to go in and recode all of the relevant pay information. It takes a lot of time. And so this person is to help support that, also help take a look at some efficiencies down the road in potentially a new payroll or timekeeping system. The next bullet is the one you're asking about. We have two really exciting initiatives that we're proposing to be funded for FY16-17, Smart City Initiative and Digital Government. The Smart City Initiative is one where we've realized that as the largest city north of the Golden Gate, we have to have the infrastructure in place to be able to develop really exciting digital public-facing services, right? I wish I could say today what those are, but we don't know. And in fact, I come from a background where it's okay not knowing exactly what you're gonna develop. You talk to your customers, you talk to the public, and we're gonna start developing something, a pilot in 2016 and 2017. The first part of it though is we have to lay down some infrastructure. And we know very well that the Wi-Fi here in our public areas is not strong. And one of the initiatives here is to see if we can figure out a way, potentially through a public-private partnership to deploy really good municipal-sponsored public Wi-Fi. And I don't mean that the Wi-Fi that is throttled at a very low rate that you can barely get on. I mean, really good Wi-Fi that we as a city of our size can be proud of in our gathering areas. We've talked about providing that Wi-Fi connectivity from when a resident or a visitor steps off the smart train over there and comes through the corridor into Forrest Street, into Courthouse Square, similarly for up in Coddingtown too. And also then after that in our public-gathering areas. This is kind of the seed that project. We're gonna be putting out a request for solution to some of our technology partners who say, hey look, we really want to do something to enable these really interesting novel, public-facing digital services. What should they be that'll ride on top of the infrastructure? So anyway, I will stop talking, but I get really excited about that one. One thing I'll touch on before I leave off that one is that there was a report in the press Democrat that said that the Santa Rosa Market, which is a general Santa Rosa area, rated 122 out of 125 metropolitan cities in cellular coverage. This is the market. So this is Santa Rosa, Windsor, Petaluma. So basically we have really poor cellular coverage. And as you all know, people are now consuming data more with these mobile devices than they are with landlines or fixed line, even in their homes. And so one of the components we are looking at is related to this is how do we as a city make it easier to get higher speed data connectivity in our city? That's not something we can do ourselves. It's working with the carriers and working with our zoning and working with our community. The digital government project is the other one that I think is gonna transform how we talk about what we do. The city manager has talked about it a number of times. You saw a little bit of it in the code enforcement presentation where we finally had some very, very rich data. I have my iPad here and instead of me trying to come up with reports, looking at data once a year, I can look at the live data on my iPad that talks about the core metrics and measurables that are important for the IT department. We're rolling this out also with police department, fire department, HCS, PED, transportation and public works, everyone, HR, and so over the next year, we're gonna be coming up with ways to describe what we do in very measurable conversational bits of data, not raw data, but data that's relevant to y'all understanding and our public understanding what are we doing with taxpayers' money and how do we manage it more efficiently? So we're really excited about that. We've made some great progress this year and that 125,000 is to carry that on next year to the next sort of cohort department, cohorts of departments. Okay, next slide. I won't spend a lot of time on the accomplishments, that's sort of in the past, but I'll just touch on a couple of them. You know, we have to have a strategic plan and we've had one for a number of years. We're gonna be broadening that strategic plan to also cover the digital government plan to figure out how to be rolled forward with our digital government initiative and also how do we incorporate smart city? What does that mean as a city? The PC hardware replacement, talked about that a little bit already, the PC replacement program. The microfilm for PED and MicroFish is huge. We just brought to light over half a million records that have been on microfilm from the 70s and older and those records were not accessible by anyone other than the PED front counter staff going through an ancient microfilm reader in the corner of the office. Now those are available over the web internally. We may at some point make them available to the public as well. The increases in efficiency have been huge, plus they're now, they have metadata, they're searchable, it's wonderful and we're expanding that now to MicroFish also. We have cabinets of MicroFish over there and down there and over there just in the way which no one can access. So it's actually really intriguing if you're into information and see all this stuff all of a sudden come out from under a rock, right? It's really cool. For Accela, permitting just kudos to the team that worked on that, which we were involved in. I'm helping Director Gouin and his team. The last time I looked, because I really have to give you some numbers, I think we, since January, so about a year, it's over 7,000 building permits, 1,300 planning projects and 1,500 engineering permits running through this new system. And if you're like me, a system person, we turn on a new system, the measure of success is did that operation keep running relatively effectively? Did they get back up to speed and more efficient than they were before? So we're really excited about that and we're gonna keep pushing on that the next year, next one. The mobile device security and management, I don't talk about that much, but for the first year, we were hit with a ransomware attack, which is where our computers said, give us some money because we've locked your files. It's really important for us to make sure that doesn't happen again. And so we spend a lot of time locking down our network, trying to stay ahead of the hackers in the malware, not just on desktop, but on the over 800 mobile devices that you all carry around. These things used to be dumb devices, now they are very portable portal into our network, which we have to secure in a way that allows us to also enable mobile applications. So it's a bit of a dance there, but we're spending a fair bit of time making sure that we're getting that tweak just right. I've talked about the digital government initiative and the technology around that and the data sets and whatever. Next slide. Oh, and I guess the website. We're gonna be coming to you in a couple of hours and proposing a contract award for our vendor to start work on the public facing website. I cannot tell you how excited that is. It's been the most drawn out and complicated award process that most of us have been through, simply because we had a lot of great vendors and it was really hard for the team to pick the best of that bunch. And we finally did and we're gonna come talk about that. And then the real work starts, which is turning the website on and getting customer community engagement, public engagement into it. And it's gonna be a new thing next year when we talk about this. We'll have some really good results to show. All right, that's it for IT. Any questions or comments that you have? Council, any questions? Ms. Carlstrom. I just wanted to say thank you very much for your work, both with the wifi access, which we know is an incredible impediment to engagement in the community. And not that we don't provide it, but that the cellular coverage is so terrible along the coast and it definitely impacts our citizens. And I am so excited to see the website come online. And I wanted to just give credit where credit is due. I have noticed a lot more usability on the website, even just in recent months. There's a lot more newly populated feeds on the front page. Information is coming to light in a way that I haven't seen before. So I wanted to just give you that feedback. I really appreciate it. It was one of the biggest aspects of the open government's report. So thank you for taking that on. And I really look forward to the results. Other questions, Council? Mr. Waisaki. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Mr. McHenry for your report. I would like a little more detail in the professional services. You gave us the detail regarding 320,000 or so of the 420,000 increase. So apparently there's another 100,000 increase in addition to the previous year is 1.3 million. So it's comparatively speaking to salaries and benefits. It's a big number. We'll bring it back to you in more detail. Other questions or Ms. Collins? At some point it would be nice to have a conversation with you in this department about the steps toward the open by design government processes, the community engagement processes. I've been reading a New York City guide for improving open government and government responsiveness, including for emergency procedures. So I'm wondering at what point do we have those kinds of conversations? We will be having future conversations on exactly these topics. However, they are engaged in a website redesign and several other initiatives, but it is on the plate to have additional conversations. And as I said earlier, you're gonna see a significant change in next year's budget presentation. And it's gonna be, it follows in the footsteps of transparency, open data. We're currently working with Socrata to bring some of this online. Some of you've seen some of the piloted stuff. It's gonna get much more refined and more direct and lead to when the website is upgraded to some more transparency and being open by default. Thank you very much. I appreciate the work that you're doing with this. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much. And before you move on, Ms. Luthor, I'm gonna make a brief announcement to the members of the public that have begun to come into the chamber. We have two more budget discussions to go through. Plus we have another potentially 45 minute urban water management plan discussion. We are, we'll be lucky if we start our regular meeting by five o'clock. So I just wanted to give you a little heads up. We are, we're running late. A lot of conversations about budgets today. So, and we will be moving our closed session to the end of our council meeting because of the late, late hour. So, Ms. Lochner. Our next department is planning an economic development. Director Gouin is here. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome. And I have to give credit to Veronica from Finance for helping me out through this process and also Megan Basterner who came over from the police department as an ASO to help us get through our budget process to get to this point. So thank you to them. So we have 50 people in our department and there's eight different divisions that we support and I'll go through those here on the next slide. Basically our administration that oversees and supports all the functions. We have the advanced planning group that is looking out to the general plan identifying things that we can do ahead of time before development happens, sets policies. We have our building inspection and plan review. Those are key operations that we have within to keep things moving in terms of checking plans, making sure they're up to code and then in the field making sure they're being built correctly. Our economic development division as mentioned before, it's a two person and with a support on that team and they have a huge task of developing what our economic development initiatives are working with the housing program, looking identifying places we can I did an increased job creation and business attraction and retention. Back to the planning side, we have an engineering division that is looking at all the underground infrastructure and that's a division that moved over from transportation public works and part of this reorg that you've been hearing about throughout the day. Then we have the planning development review which is the planning department, basically that people think of the your typical planning part when you bring a set of plans in to see if it's something that can be done per our zoning and per what the council developed in the general plan. Our permit services is essentially our front interface with the customers and so that's a key area that we've addressed over this past year through some of the mid-year budget adjustments that we'll talk about here in a few minutes. So as mentioned before, we did have a reorganization this division is fairly new. We have some changes that are made but in general, the way this is broken down is we have four people in that original general administration. All of our department IT costs are lumped into that one general administration. That's why the cost, the dollar amount there is higher than most. We have our six people in our permits service division. We have six people in our building plan review and that cost includes the staff but it also includes some consultant costs that we use to help supplement the activity and the flow of work coming through the operation. Our building inspection has six people and our planning development review has 11. And again, that cost also reflects consultant funding to help us manage the peaks and valleys that we were currently seeing through the operation. Our advanced planning department has three and that includes the additional ask in this current budget and 11 people in the engineering division. So again, these 11 individuals came over from Transportation and Public Works into this division and again, that was part of our process improvement plan to bring all of the development functions into one under one umbrella so we can speak with one voice and work with our development community and ensure consistency. And as I mentioned before, our economic development team is a total of three people in there with some additional work with the chamber that I'll talk about in a minute. This slide has the same information just broken down separately. If there's questions, I can talk to that later. As part of our budget, the general fund side of our operation, we do have some revenues. So our permit fees that we do collect cover a little bit more than half of the general fund request that we have for, from the city. The other aspect of what we do is we have two other revenue sources. One is the Center for Tourism Bureau, I'm sorry, Center for Tourism BIA, Business Improvement Area. And that's revenue generated from hotel stays and hotel tax. The other one in the economic development fund, that one primarily is a money that is used for things like the Tour of California that gets funded back through donations and repopulated so it gets rolled over each year to fund those events. So a couple of highlights that we have, I won't talk about the reorg anymore, I think you've heard quite a bit about that. If you have questions, I'd be happy to answer them. This budget that we're bringing forward today has an additional city planner as I talked about before and again that's to address some of the long range planning initiatives that we have that primarily deal with housing. How do we get ahead of this? How do we look forward in terms of changing zoning, working on the general plan update and a lot of policy changes that we're looking at over the next few years. We have one administrative service officer so again this is a need that we have in the department. This year we were fortunate to have the help from the police department to come over and support us through this process but we do have revenue, we do have budgets and things that NAISO can help us through to identify where we can tighten and also generate additional revenue. We have $145,000 for a pilot economic development program that we're working with the Chamber of Commerce and we talked a little bit about that in the economic development subcommittee earlier on Monday. There's $65,000 in overtime and again this is to write, essentially write size our overtime budget because of the increase in workload and I'll talk about those numbers in a minute. We are, staff is working in extreme overtime to try to keep up with the demand and keep up with the hour. So this is that balance of bringing on consultants, hiring new staff and working existing staff over time to try to deal with these influxes of workload that we're seeing come through the office. We also have money in there for department outreach vehicles for the inspection services and our services applies. This slide essentially talks about previous budget adjustments that were made back in 2014-15. One of the big ones in that, that was a $200,000 budget for a demand impact fee study that's currently underway and you'll be seeing more of that coming up here in the next few months. In 2015-16 we had additional need as well to our budget process. The one I'm gonna talk about next on the next slide is the one that you just approved in mid-year and this is one that we put into action very quickly. So there were staffing that we put into effect right away after that action was taken. We started recruitment, so we got those people on board as quickly as possible to help. We also have consultant plan check services in there and one of them you'll see today to approve that contract to get those consultant services added to our ability to get projects out. And then the queuing system that we're working with IT on that we'll hopefully roll out here shortly. May I take you back to slide 137? And I apologize if I missed hearing this at either a subcommittee meeting or here. Can you tell me about the 145,000 for the pilot economic development program with the Chamber of Commerce? Sure, and I'm actually gonna have Danielle, our economic development manager come down and talk about that. Good afternoon. So the pilot program that we're proposing is between the economic development team and the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce to focus on a couple of key programs. First is our downtown attraction and retention campaign really focusing on downtown as our urban core and job center and hopefully housing center. The second is to support our industry clusters. We wanna create industry groups for technology, food, possibly cannabis in supporting the industries that are here existing or emerging and the Chamber and city staff would be working to form these industry groups. And the benefit of this industry group beyond sharing information and making connections is to use the data that comes out of this for business attraction, targeted business attraction focused on supply chain. Thank you. These sound like admirable programs and I think you and I have talked in the past about having our downtown be a charming place. So I'm hoping some of the resources might go toward the eye of attraction and retention to downtown. How much of the 145,000 goes directly to pay to the Chamber and how much of it is our share of doing activities? The 145,000 goes directly to the Chamber. And does it? It covers staff, it covers marketing activities, it covers participation in specific attraction activities, industry cluster, development support. So it covers Chamber overhead as well? Yes. Combination of program and services. Okay, I'm willing, I'm always willing to purchase specific excellent services from the Chamber. Because the Chamber also funds a political action committee, I object to funding the Chamber for general overhead and certain other aspects of their activities. I think it's an inappropriate use of public dollars to have money that will drift into a pack. The general, let me be a little bit more clear on that. The administration piece is focused on one staff person who will only be working on the business attraction and development efforts with the city. It doesn't go into their general overhead cost allocation plan, it buys specific staff time of one individual for very targeted tasks. I guess I will need to see more details about this particular program and how the money is planned to be expended. And obviously we know if you put money in a well, different people can take out at the other side. So I need to make sure that we're not backfilling some other activity. Well, if you notice the dollar amount, that this is a budgeted item. So this would be, we actually want this input so that when we bring back the contract, because this is obviously not a staff level decision in a contract, this is a item that would have to be brought back for council review. This is just the proposed and see if we're in a good space to attack these issues, we want the input and then we would be bringing back a contract for services. And I want to be really clear, this is a relatively small dollar amount compared to our overall budget. And I like the orientation for retention in our areas expansion and retention are important to us. I just want to make sure that we're not funding their pack. Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you. And I'll add to that that again, this is a pilot program. So we'll be working with the chamber to work out these details. And as the city manager mentioned, we'll bring something back for approval, but we're looking for creative ways to expand the capacity of our economic development team to have a much further reach than we currently do with our current staffing levels. Mr. Mayor, I'm just gonna jump in. I have to ask the obvious question, which is if we're going to fund $145,000 to the chamber, couldn't I hire you a new staff member? Yeah, so that we have thought about that and looked at how we can best utilize $145,000. And so it's one staff member, but it's also additional services that we're gonna get. So again, this is a pilot study to see how we can stretch those dollars even further than a single staff member. If it works, that's great. And we're gonna have identified specific metrics that we can measure as we move through this process with the chamber. And we'll bring that back to the council and we'll talk about that but I think you're right. We definitely don't want to put money into one individual. What we're asking for is a program approach. No, I appreciate that. Could I not give you a new FTE whose job is to implement these programs? And not that I can act you know laterally, but. We would procure an FTE but we would have no program budget behind it to be able to do kind of the industry cluster support that we're talking about or that focus business retention. So we are getting some actual materials that would be in addition to the 145 if we were to take it in-house. Okay, I have to ask the question. And then it leads of course to the 500K for consulting on the permits. When you come back, I would appreciate seeing how many permits they've been able to process for us. What does that equate to on a per dollar figure? And then the logical extension of if we just increased your budget 500K, how many staff does that give you and how many permits can we process in-house? Yeah, absolutely. And as we talked before, it's a fine balance. It's something we're struggling with in terms of ongoing workload versus the peaks and valleys. So as you can see in some of the accomplishments and I'll just jump to that slide since it's a good lead-in. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for that. I'm going to back up slightly. One of the things that started all this was I've been fortunate enough to work with this department for almost a year now. And it started with a process improvement action plan and that started developing this framework of how we want to move forward, how we want to change the culture, how we want to change how we interact with the community, the development community, the residential community, everybody from a standpoint of how do we get things done in Santa Rosa? And that's focused primarily on housing but it's also been focused on how do we encourage our economic development businesses in terms of their expansion and growth. So that was done and basically what that did is it outlined an entire program of things that need to be accomplished and that was going to take money. It was going to take money for staff. It was going to take money for services and programs. But we also felt that there's a lot of things that we could have done in-house and we did do in-house without additional resources. And so that's a big bulk of the first few months were is to change our culture, change our process, change how we interact with the community as they come in the dorm. Some of these things included the pre-application meetings. It looks like a small thing but this is one thing that we've gotten rave reviews about from everybody that's been through it and essentially what that means is somebody can come in with an idea, a project, it's something that needs to flush out a little bit more but we have decision makers from every division from fire, water, planning, building and engineering to sit down and talk through what those issues are to try to give them certainty in the process so they know what they're up against and how they can move quickly through the process. Again, that saves us time because when they bring those plans to us, they're more complete and we can actually get them through quicker so less staff time dealing with them. It also saves them time and money on their end so that's something we're proud of doing and we're gonna keep pushing that. They've actually become so popular that we're struggling with having to schedule them out pretty far out so we're gonna look at resources that we can try to increase the availability of those. We're trying to get efficient with our time as well through mobile device. I think you've heard this about from other departments. We have inspectors in the field now that are collecting data with mobile devices. The goal is to transmit that electronically, decrease hand input information and also decrease potential errors. We completely changed our permit system which was a big deal. Again, this is gonna lead into making things more efficient over time but it will also allow us to get more transparent and get that information out to the public through various tools that you have seen. So basically what we're seeing here is last year we were essentially the record high in terms of our permits coming through our door. That was, so everything I've talked about, we're fixing the ship as we're flying 100 miles an hour. This is, we've got an enormous number of permits coming through the door and this year in the first three quarters we've seen a 10% increase from last year of that record high. So the numbers are massive, they're huge, they're coming through quickly and what we're doing is prioritizing the best we can and we're prioritizing housing and we're prioritizing affordable housing within housing. So we have multiple layers of prioritization in terms of staff and availability. So the consultant costs that you see, essentially those go very quick because the amount that you saw there basically addressed about 12 master plan subdivision projects that came through the door all at once, so we were able to put those into the consultant mix, have those run on a parallel track while staff dealt with this other backlog that was coming through the door in terms of residential permits and in commercial and housing projects. With those increased permit applications, are you asking us for more staff? What we're doing right now is evaluating again, part of getting an ASO on board is to help me evaluate what that revenue impact is so I can come back to the city council, identify that additional revenue, appropriate that money and try to get resources to help me address the issues. So that's a constant ongoing effort that we're working with finance on to make sure we have the revenue to support this. So I think one of the foundational things that's been a discovery during this process is that this department cannot work without an ASO and the ASO helps the department head actually go through and start to evaluate some of the issues that we were wrestling with almost on a continuous basis about how do we manage contract employee versus full-time employee, making sure our revenues are where they should be. I mean, I'll be honest with, I'm not sure how this department actually worked without an ASO. And I think that that's one of the foundational issues. It's taken us, sometimes it's the simplest thing that is actually the answer to a lot of questions. And one of this is to get some of the staff out of, excuse me, some of the back to the planning and engineering work and out of the business work of the department. And that I think will provide some more clarity on some of these issues that we're wrestling with moving forward about what's actually a sustainable level of activity that we can depend upon and how we're staffed to meet that sustainable level of activity. May I ask, do we have, and forgive me again for just not knowing this, do we have a system where folks who are in construction can just phone in, say very early in the morning and schedule inspections automatically on the phone system? We currently don't at this point, and that's what the queuing system was that we got approved in the mid-year budget. So it's gonna do multiple things. It's not there yet. It's not there yet, but that's a goal. And we wanna do multiple things. We wanna have a scheduling appointment so people know when they can get in and talk to us. We wanna have move people on the appropriate lines so we can move people through faster. And we wanna allow scheduling appointments later in the day. So have a time blocked out in the afternoon that we can have the right people there at the right time for people to answer past questions. And within this context, what's the status of the hub? So I think we're in, we're looking at that particular project. I probably will have a future conversation with council around the hub, but I will say the project itself is under review and evaluation. I think I've also, the other thing we're looking at is what are our opportunity? Things have significantly changed in the downtown environment over the last 18 months. And so there might be some additional conversations that we wanna have about this campus itself moving forward. Thank you. And with that in mind, everything we're doing is going towards that hub mentality. So even though we're not in a different building at this point in time, the queuing system, the process that we're setting up, the pre-applications, that's with that hub mentality to try to centralize that service and give our customers one point of contact as they move through the system. Through the mayor briefly. Certainly. I just wanna lend you my on-the-record support for increased staffing because you've seen the fees come through and I'm gonna speak specifically to our medical marijuana work. The fees coming through just for the cultivation permits alone, I understand are in excess of 50,000, but the work that's gonna go into supporting there, there's five other licensure types that are gonna require interaction with the city. Well, and I think it's that level work. This is really complex, complicated work and not to have somebody available to help the business operate in that department. It's been a challenge to date. It's only gonna get more complicated as we move forward. Mr. Wesselke. Thank you. And just I'll try and be brief. Permits coming through the door of the reference are still, construction has rebounded and is doing quite well. Is that fair? We're definitely seeing the permit activity, yes. So, and we don't have any idea that our fee schedule is comparatively to our neighboring jurisdictions because I hear that complaint all the time. It's too expensive. It's too expensive. It's too expensive. Yet, we've got a record number of permits, what I've heard. And so, do we have? So, we are gonna be looking at our impact fees. That's one big part of the discussion that you're currently hearing is our impact fees are high. So, there's a study in our way to look at those fees and how those affect construction. But from a standpoint of building permits that are coming through that we're seeing that activity has increased and people are getting work done. And it's not just cost. And what we're hearing is people say the cost is one thing, but it's the certainty in time. So, it's turning things around and it's making sure people know what they're getting into. I just want to add my voice to some of the business attraction comments being made. I've always thought that the businesses that are startups or brand new businesses, they're attracted to a quality of life in the area and that we have that in spades. So, I'd like to keep focused on that. I will look for the details coming through. I do thank the staff for what they have done. I see the two of them up there nodding their heads. And should we not be looking to budget for our sesquennial, the 150 year anniversary in this area? Because it was relatively minor. And this to me seems like an area we might want to investigate bringing that back to. Well, again, as I said earlier, I think the staff is completely open to figuring out how we deal with the sesquentennial. I think the question is sort of what we're looking to do. And the mayor and I will work together to try to figure that out and bring back something that's... I appreciate that. I would think part of it would be community engagement with all of our eclectic residents and what we have. Because what you see come out of Railroad Square sometimes is an instant success. And I don't mean to just... But I am just hitting on them. I mean, in terms of their creativity. We have a lot to offer in this community. We all know that. And I would hate to see us miss the boat. Thanks. So just to close up our accomplishments, we've got, I wanted to talk, acknowledge the fact that we are developing a local hazard mitigation plan. And this is an important document really to address what the local hazards are in our community and how we're going to address those. And it also sets us up for potential grant funding. So we are... This is key to get this in place so we can position ourselves in various ways for funding. On the community development side, to your point, we are looking for new opportunities, new partnerships in partnering with the Center of the Chamber of Commerce to develop the Downtown Association. And so that's the Downtown Advisory Board, Economic Development Task Force, the Parking Task Force, Marketing and Advocacy. So we're part of all those discussions and we're in those discussions and we're working through those and to try to figure out how we can leverage those resources to do exactly what you just mentioned. We did host the Urban Three Strong Towns and Downtown Value Per Acre Analysis that the council heard. And we're going to be looking to take that information and incorporate that into a lot of different products that we bring forward to you such as the Housing Action Plan and others. The out there campaign was developed, if you haven't seen that, it's outtheresr.org. It's a great, great place to go check out what's going on in Santa Rosa and also featuring some of our local artists and writers and musicians. We had our seasonal Custom Shop Banners campaign and we also have a current campaign going on now that's acknowledging some of our influential leaders from Santa Rosa's past. If you've seen them around there, the yellow banners, if you look closely, you'll see some history there is from what got us where we are today. And then a little plug for what's coming next. We do have the Tour of California coming up May 21st. I invite everybody out. It's gonna be a full day on May 21st, Saturday. We'll have a Pro Women's Race, a Pro Men's Race and the Rose Parade all in the same day. So it'll be an exciting day downtown in Santa Rosa. And we currently do also have a recruitment going on for the Planning and Economic Development Director. Just want to make sure everyone's aware that that is out. And so we have a lot going on in our department. You can find information about all this on our website and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Goen. Questions, Council? Thank you very much. Just a note to the members of the public that have arrived. We are currently involved and have been since noon an extensive and in-depth discussion on our budget. We have one more department to go through and we have one more study session to go through as well. My guess is that we will now probably not start our regular session until close to 5.30. That's just to give you all a little heads up that we are running late due to the nature of this budget discussion. So you may want to plan your late afternoon accordingly but we are a bit behind schedule. So our final department for today's study session and reminding the public that we will have a follow-up study session with the remainder of our departments next week, Tuesday, is the Recreation and Parks Department and with us is the Director Nanette Michael and her team. Thank you, Mayor and Council. And I think that this picture above you says it all. Beautiful park, wonderful day in Santa Rosa with kids engaging in healthy activities that are good for their bodies, minds and spirits and that's what we do in Recreation and Parks. Our organizational chart is built around 10 business units. Those are called out there on the org structure slide. There's a total of 94 full-time equivalent regular employees in the department. I want to take a moment to mention before I get too far into the presentation that I believe most of you heard that there is another reorganization afoot and that is that facilities maintenance will be transferring to the Public Works Department and so this presentation was put together prior to that decision and so we'll be working over the next several months so that once the July 1st time comes along we will think that that transition has been completed. So I'll be presenting that information today to you but just keep in mind that there's gonna be another reorganization transfer of those duties. So the descriptions of the different organizational business units, they really focus on the core services and programs that are provided by each of those units. Under administration we do the typical business and personnel aspects of the department with Jason Parrish, my ASO, he assists with all of that but we also house our marketing and outreach, our public art program and a very robust volunteer program for the entire department. We also administer the permits for both park special events as well as city-wide special events through that unit. Howarth is called out as a separate business unit because it's a very special regional park. It has the attractions during high season, the amusements and it's our only park that is actually staffed. So we call that out as a separate business unit and that also includes our summer camps. Community centers, we have Finley Steel Person and Bennett Valley as well as our historic sites as well as some of our clubhouses and also Rosie the trolley. And so we are busy all the time keeping those doors open to the public and making sure that those facilities are scheduled robustly for our community. In Aquatics we have our two centers and those are year-round outdoor recreational pools. The Park and Landscape Maintenance Division is busy and we wanna thank you again. We'll highlight the eight additional groundskeepers which we received during this current fiscal year that sure made a difference as far as trying to keep up with very busy public park system and I think getting back to being able to implement some of the specialized maintenance services such as aeration of sports fields, it had been many, many years since we'd been able to do that routinely and we really think that's making a difference now so we're glad to be putting those tasks to work with our new staff. The golf course is of course operated under two contracts, one for the restaurant and one for the pro shop and course but of course we oversee that contract through administration. Neighborhood Services is a combination of General Fund and Measure O and of course we're focused, a very targeted focus at at-risk youth and their families to make sure that they have positive activities to keep them healthy and safe as well. The last three business units, we have our sports program and part of that is direct program service and part of that is the use permit. There's a lot of work that goes into issuing permits to other providing organizations that are actually doing the sports programs but that group oversees that all as do they oversee our tennis program. In park facility and planning, that's where we are providing some administration for both parks and facilities. I think most of you have met our new deputy director, Jen Santos and so we're busy to look into the future, have viable concept plans and then work those through to design and construction. And then last but not least, facilities maintenance. There are about 115 city buildings that are overseen by the facilities maintenance general fund operation. So here's by the numbers as far as the total budget and how the percentage of that total budget is applied to each of those business units which I mentioned. The largest of course is park maintenance at 25% and that makes sense because there's a lot of activity that goes on there. It has the most staff assigned to it as well as some very robust contracts such as the mowing contract. Here's how the budget breaks down by category and we want to point out the categories that seem to have perhaps the biggest percentage changes. Anything over about 10% would be considered, you know maybe something we should call out to you. And so the first of those is the utilities budget and what we found in this year's preparation is that the water budget in park maintenance had been too high basically. We studied 10 years of historic actual use. We factored in new rates and the rate models with the water department and we came up with a calculation that identified that we had been over budgeted in that department. And so we took a deliberate reduction of the water utility bill there. So that's one big change. Otherwise you see the liability and property insurance, the dollar amount is very, very small but that is because we pay a certain proportion of insurance at the golf course as well as through measure O and then those rates went up and so you see the increase. With the indirect costs are our distribution of the city overhead again to the golf and measure O programs that went down so you see a change. And then you see the capital outlay budget which is a big difference. That was one time money this year. It was $100,000 for pool filters, some soccer goals. And so we don't have the need for the one time money for those same projects next year. So you see the $87,000 difference. However, we do have one project plan for next year and that is some automated irrigation controllers and that's the $13,000 number for next year. So overall a small decrease in our budget and again attributed primarily to that correction in the water. So as we mentioned, there- I'm sorry, I know we're trying to be mindful of the time but it seems to me it was only a short time ago that we were even having news trucks visiting parks and filming grass being brown in parks. So I just wanna confirm that the water rate discussion, the water rate change still enables us to have those parks that should have green grass, yes, we believe that we have budgeted that way. Of course we adhered by the stage one drought requirements but that did not prevent us from watering our turf or irrigating our landscaping and so we feel very comfortable with the budget that we've derived for next year and we will not be having deliberate brownouts unless something were to drastically change on a state level. Sure, Mr. Waisaki. And I'll also be mindful of the time. Specifically golf course funds but maybe some other special enterprise funds as well. Will we be able to see that the golf course is paying its way or to the extent that the general fund's subsidizing it? All I see is the expenditures on this side. Well, I can speak to that. There is no general fund subsidy included in this proposed fiscal year budget for the golf course. Except for perhaps the debt service to the clubhouse. No, that is paid for by the proceeds derived from the operation. Well, so it is paying its way. The budget that's being submitted is 100% enterprise. No general fund. So there continues to be some needs for the golf course that we're going to need to figure out how we address at a future date. There is a 30 year old irrigation system that is in place. 45 year old irrigation system that's in place. So while it is, we may have to have future conversations about how we address some of those other infrastructure items moving forward. When that comes back, can we also have an analysis of the fees relative to other area golf courses as well? Sure. As a mechanism for paying for that increase. Thank you. Okay, so because we do have user fees involved in our department and our delivery of services, we wanted to show you how much we've been budgeting for revenue offset for next year. So it's just a little over 3.8 million that we're budgeting in total revenues that come back to the general fund, which then lessen that burden on the general fund in needing support for the department and its activities. So here is a slide by the various funds. I've already mentioned the general fund measure O and golf course as being the primary funds. Other funds include such things as art in lieu. We also have about a dozen landscape districts where there's self-taxing and that is contained in that line item as a combination and then of course capital improvement. And so the changes, as I mentioned, the general fund by and large, that's that irrigation correction. Measure O is going up a little bit and that's because on our 10 year implementation plan that was adopted, we included adding a new after school site starting with a new fiscal year and very excited about that. It'll be in Southwest Santa Rosa. And so that's why you see a bump up there with the golf course. The reason for the decreased budget is again, our portion of indirect costs, the city's indirect costs as well as I think that's the main thing that went down. IT rate had gone, we're completely outside of that. They are providing their own IT system at this point with the new contract model. And so that's just some minor expense adjustments there. And with other funds, I would just say the 17,000 decrease that's primarily with our public art fund. We had sufficient appropriations in some of our projects so we didn't need to ask for additional monies for next year. So some of the highlights, it's a pretty status quo budget but we are increasing some of our part time positions to some modest hours added to two part times who are currently at half rate and they would be going to a 0.8 FTE. And then one of our recreation coordinators is at 0.75. And so we're able to add some additional hours to bring that position up to a full time equivalent. And the way we were able to do that it's fairly cost neutral but over the course of the year when we had vacancies as Debbie had mentioned, you use every opportunity to reevaluate do I need that very same position or perhaps there's a different position that we could hire instead that would actually bring us the services that we need a little bit more. And so we did that through the year. We ended up hiring some lower paid positions during the year in lieu of other positions. And so we were able to get that funding internally in order to bump up these part time positions. We also reclassification next year, one of our recreation coordinators reclassified to arts coordinator. And you'll recall that that was a recommendation contained in the public art master plan. And so we're really excited that we can propose that implementation to you for next year. And then here's an example of where we had a vacancy of an admin secretary and instead of hiring that in kind, we made a deliberate decision as we evaluated what we needed the most and we hired instead a lower paid facilities attendant but it brings us more of the services that we need. The other change is the minimum wage increase. And so that went into effect January, $10. It moved from $9 to 10. And so we needed in the current year's budget, of course we'd budgeted part of what we needed going through June, but we need the rest of the additional increase starting July one to then get us through for the full year. Other highlights is that park assets are being combined with park maintenance. Two years ago we did an experimental breakout of our park asset. We created a new division to study it. And park assets means the playgrounds, the benches, the trash cans, the furnishings that go into a park. And so we broke it out and we studied it and after two years of sort of studying it, we said really it needs to be glued back together with park maintenance because wall to wall, that's what the parks are. They're turf, trees, landscaping, but they're also these amenity packages. So we're bringing that back together. There are some increases proposed for professional services. One of those is to consider the restoration of the Zag public art. And the other is an increase because our weed abatement contract, those costs increased. And you'll be seeing that contract later on today on your regular agenda. Can you remind us what the Zag public art is? I will do my best. So the Zag public art is the neon light installation on the bridge that spans the greenway or the creek across from the Hyatt. And it's an unusual and interesting situation in that the artwork was installed as a requirement of the hotel when they received their... Well, actually, that's where it becomes a little ambiguous. The artwork was installed and owned and owned by a private individual on public property. And so it's been a process to sort of detangle ourselves from that. What's happened is basically the project, the piece was abandoned. That allowed us and formally the city was able to capture the ownership of it after the abandonment. I think that's what happened. Checking with legal to make sure I've got the right terms. And that's allowed us the opportunity to assess the project and figure out how to move forward. But it was a convoluted process for everybody. The opportunity to get through the process was afforded actually by the sale of the Hyatt. And it helped clear it up. Some things that I don't think would have ever been resolved about who owned what in any one particular is one of those conversations, sort of like the real property transfer tax from earlier today. I'm sure there was a lot of conversation at the time. We're sort of in the place we are now and we're trying to figure out how to manage that relationship as it relates to right now. It's been a while, but does that light up? And will we see it light up again? It's broken and that's why we're looking at potentially restoring it. It will light up again. If it's restored, yes. And so the $70,000 is sort of a place mark number. We're still going through the process of assessing it and figuring out what the costs will be to restore it. But it's our desire that we pursue that. Thank you. Okay, and so then we already mentioned the water reduction to historic actuals as well as the projected use at the projected rates and the afterschool site. So a little bit of progress on funding that we have received previously that was additional of the eight groundskeepers, thank you again. The pool filters at the two aquatic centers, again those were one time monies, but those are in place and doing their job keeping our pool water sanitized. We also finished the soccer goal project with one time money and we have purchased the trash receptacles with one time money. Installation is still proceeding on those receptacles as we have time for that. And the last thing that was additional in the current year budget was some money to help us work with Luther Burbank home and gardens to ensure that the collection is protected and assessed. And so that is still in process. Excuse me, was, help me with my recollection, the eight new groundskeepers, were those considered one time monies? Ongoing. Thank you. Music to your ears, right? Other special projects during the year, we had received mid year, 14, 15, money for the council chamber roof. It has been repaired and it no longer leaks. That's very good news. 862,000 in general fund support towards Bear Park and Gardens. And so as you know, the general fund money that we received allowed us to fulfill the master plan and include the combination kitchen restroom building without the 862 from the general fund, we would not have been able to include that in the construction contract. And so that project's under construction. I have a question about the contract and the completion of previous, maybe it was kind of not a contract with land paths providing services at Bear Farms. And do we have an update on that? Has that? The update I can give you is that we're in discussions on a potential operating and management agreement. For the future. For the future. But the past services that have been provided under what might not have actually been a contract. Correct, it was more of a verbal. Yeah. And it was considered an interim use until such time that the full construction project took place. But as you know, the master plan includes those gardens as a continuing facet of the operation. So we're in discussion with land paths on that. And it also might measure, it might factor into that just a little bit in the future as well to help support those operations. Is there a building that might or might not have been offices still in the plan? No, the adopted master plan did not include office buildings. Thank you. Okay, so underway and we're hoping Bayer actually has a grand opening or a ribbon cutting in the fall. And so right now we are on time and on budget and let's hope that continues. $800,000 for the Prince Gateway Park restroom and splash pad. So once council approved the $800,000 funding, that's when design began again. And so we are happy to announce that it's designed and it's bid and later on this evening, you will have that on your consent calendar to approve a construction contract. And last but not least, the service center. So again, that was mid-year consideration a year ago, $2.5 million. And the progress on it is that we've finished the design and we have done the bid. And so it's a question as the city manager said of assessing all the options and deciding how we would best want to proceed. However, because there has been a bid, we will be needing to bring an agenda item to you in June to have that discussion. Well, actually, I think there's some changes on that front. There was a bid protest filed and we have decided to, as we assess our options and the timetable is not addressable in the short period of time, we're actually suspending all the bids at this point. And so if we go back out, we will have to have a conversation with council before we go back out. So, but because of the protest and the nature of the protest, we've canceled the bids at this point. At some point, yeah, I mean, I think in reality it had to do more with the scope of the project and where we're going in the future. But right now, once we received the protest lodged, it became apparent that not only did we weren't gonna, we weren't gonna make the June deadline anyway. And so we're formally canceling the bids as they stand right now. Right, so a few accomplishments for the year for Recreation and Parks. And I took the time to go through the business units, as I mentioned, core services, the day-to-day bread and butter of the department, but a lot of projects that we've brought to bear during the year, we think are added value services for the community. And so such things as a picnic area in Doyle Park, a new playground at a place to play through the efforts of staff writing a grant to help receive that. The donation from the Santa Rosa Park Foundation, I mean, that was fantastic to be able to receive that check and be able to order the new locomotive. And it's under construction, so that's very exciting and we'll see that later on this year. And the other grant that we had success with during the year, which was the Housing-Related Parks Program Grant and giving us about $700,000 that we can put toward the design of the north portion of Rosalind Creek Park. New play features and net climbers at Howarth, and not to mention a brief appearance by weed-eating goats, if you missed that. A dog park at a place to play, newly relocated, enjoyed very much by our human friends as well as our canine friends. And there's too many to mention, but the programs are really beloved by our community. And some of the highlights with programs were just record-breaking attendance during the year. And so this is not an all-inclusive list, but we wanted to just have a few shout-outs, neighborhood services. Those programs, we have wait lists for them. I mean, they're very, very popular and I think they're making a difference. The fairytale ball that was basically your parent-child dance, and it was fantastically received by the community and got really good press. And then you just see, again, the movie nights, standing room-only types of events. So we're very proud of the recreation team that brings those to the community. Through the mayor, I just wanted to add kudos for those youth-oriented activities. I have tried to enroll for a number of them. And their book, their song, The Egg Hunt, the Halloween Trick or Treating, it's fantastic and I'm really proud of our city. I happened to be there last summer when the movies in the park aired Frozen and it was insane. But it was so much fun, just so many people. And I was really, really proud of our city and then the way it brought people out like that. So I just wanted to congratulate you guys on those great programs. Any other questions or comments, Council? Thank you very much. Ms. Lockner, your final? Yes, just one brief reminder that we will continue this study session with the remainder of our departments on May 17th, where we will talk about Fire Department, Police Department, Housing and Community Services, Transportation and Public Works, Santa Rosa Water and our Capital Improvement Program. Excellent, thank you very much. At this point, we're gonna take a five minute recess and then continue with our next study session. Welcome back. Mr. Turtle, could you introduce our second study session please? Yes, Mayor. Item 2.2, the 2015 Urban Water Management Plan presented by Jennifer Burke, Deputy Director for the Water Department and Rocky Vogler, our Senior Water Resources Planner. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Sawyer and members of the Council. We're here today to give an update on the development of our 2015 Urban Water Management Plan. With me here today is Rocky Vogler, who's our Senior Water Resources Planner and he's gonna be presenting an update on the majority of the contents in the Urban Water Management Plan and then I'll be doing an overview of the Urban Water Shortage Contingency Plan and the changes we're proposing. Also wanted to let the Council know that in the audience, we do have Jim Cannell with West Yoast Associates who is the consultant that's assisting us with the preparation of the plan and he's available in case any super technical questions come up that we can't answer. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Rocky and he's gonna walk you through the Urban Water Management Plan portion. Mayor, Council members, happy to be here this afternoon. Our mission statement for Santa Rosa Water, protecting public health by sustaining water resources infrastructure in the environment and that is precisely what we're doing by preparing the Urban Water Management Plan. So the overview for the presentation today, we're gonna provide a little background. I'll talk about the requirements for the plan. We'll look at the contents chapter by chapter in a very high level overview. We'll get to the meat of the plan which is really the demand and supply projections as well as the shortage contingency plan that Jennifer will be presenting and then we'll look at next steps. So the Urban Water Management Plan, really what it is is it's kind of a long range planning tool and it really assesses the risk that the city faces in terms of water supply versus water demand. And so this is required by state law and what we do is we evaluate what our current water demands are and we make a projection based on those current water demands when we look at things like population and employment growth. And we also look at the supply side and we look at what our reliability is in terms of water supply from the water agency, our groundwater recycled water as well as our conservation program. The Urban Water Management Plan is an important tool that we use if we have to do water supply assessments per Senate Bill 610. And this is a living document every five years we come back to this and we update it and we look out into the future over a 25 year planning horizon. So the Planning Act, this was back in 1982 Urban Water Management Planning Act came into effect. It says that any urban water suppliers that supply more than 3,000 acre feet of water per year or have more than 3,000 customers have to prepare and submit a plan on a five year basis in any year ending in double zero or five. In addition, these plans are important because we don't qualify for state grant funding if you don't have a plan. So there's an incentive here to prepare one of these from the grant perspective. In addition, what we do with this again is we look at the adequacy and reliability of our water supply and verify that based on existing conditions moving out into the future we're going to have enough supply to meet our projected demands. So new requirements for 2015 every five years the state water code gets updated, DWR has some new requirements. So very briefly, deadline is extended to July 1st, 2016. The same thing happened back in 2010. We talk a little more in depth about our water conservation measures. Although this requirement, Santa Rosa has been doing this consistently so nothing new for us. We have the opportunity this time around to submit electronically. We talk about our water distribution system in terms of the losses in the system. Again, not a new thing for the city. We talk about water savings from codes, standards and ordinances. There's slight wrinkle on the change of the definition of a water feature. They've now segregated pools and spas from water features which are things like recirculating fountains. So they are affected differently by the new conservation and prohibitions regarding conservation. Last thing, we have optional appendixy that the city is providing it's regarding our energy intensity and how we use energy related to water. And so we've taken the bait and we're gonna go ahead and supply that information. So key components. Number one, we talk about public participation. This is part of the process right here and right now. We've had ample opportunity to meet with the BPU subcommittee and we've been to BPU study session. And after tonight's meeting, we'll go back to BPU for a recommendation. We'll come back to the council for a public hearing and adoption. Jennifer, I'll talk a bit about that. Other key components, water service area and system description. We just talk about the physical makeup of our system. We look at our existing and future customers. We kind of break it down by customer type. So we look at commercial versus residential and some other ways that we dice that up. We look at our water demand projections and we compare that to our water supply availability. And at the end of the day, we also include current and future conservation efforts. So in terms of the contents, as with most large documents, we'll provide an executive summary. Chapter one really kind of sets the stage, talks about the background and purpose. It also provides some legal legislation language, the legal requirements for the California Water Code. We include that information. We talk briefly about Senate Bill SBX7, which is the Water Conservation Act of 2009. I'll talk a bit more deeply about that as we get into a bit later in the program. Chapter two, plan preparation. Again, it's just we look at the metrics. We discuss things in terms of acre feet per year. We talk about coordination and outreach and the basic qualifications for folks that need to prepare a plan, as I previously mentioned. System three gets into just the physics of the system, whereas our water system, what are its boundaries? What does our population look like? What are our demographics? And chapter four, we start digging into our water demands and we look by sector at single family, multi-family residential. We look at commercial, industrial, institutional as well. We look at where we've been historically and where we're projected to go through year 2040. We talk about our water loss estimates. That's the difference between the amount of water that's actually produced and what is actually sold. And we get into our conservation savings and there's passive and active savings. Passive savings is related to things associated with the plumbing code. It's built in. Active savings relates to the city's ongoing conservation programs like cash for grass for example. Chapter five, we get into SBX seven. So back in year 2010, we started this process by analyzing four different methodologies and we picked the one that was the best fit for Santa Rosa. And what it says essentially is you have to save 20% of your water by year 2020. I'll talk a bit more about that and give you a couple of graphics. In addition, in chapter six, we talk about again water supply. So we look at the water agency sources, groundwater, recycled water conservation as well. In chapter seven, we get into water supply reliability and that really is information. Once we do our demand analysis, we provide it to the water agency. They collect all of that information from the water contractors in this area and then they crunch the numbers and look at what the aggregate demand is gonna be for all of their water contractors and then they look at their supplies and run some modeling scenarios to assess how much water they're going to be able to supply us in different sorts of conditions. The normal year, the single dry year and the multiple dry year scenario. Chapter eight, which Jennifer is gonna talk about, that's our water shortage contingency plan. That's our roadmap for how we save water up to a 50% reduction in supply. Currently, we're in stage one mandatory 20% reduction for the city. Number nine, chapter nine is our demand management measures and really the nuts and bolts of that is our conservation program. So we go into great detail and talk about where we've been in the past, what we're doing currently and where we project that we're gonna be in the future with our conservation related activities. And then chapter 10 is really, you know, it's a formality in terms of discussing plan adoption and submittal and implementation. We have a public hearing and we discuss how you can get a copy of the plan. So that's really kind of the overview of the plan itself. We also have appendices that are background documents that are gonna be useful for ancillary information. Again, as an example, we have our water energy intensity calculations that we've prepared. That'll be appendix N in this series of appendices. So getting into the meat of this thing. What the figure or the graph in front of you is illustrating is what our projected water demands are going to look like over the next 25 years. And so you see two lines on this graph. The blue line is the work that we did back in year 2010. And the orange-red line is what we're doing currently in 2015. So what you're gonna notice here is that the lines are relatively parallel to each other and that's because the population in employment growth estimates are the same in 2010 as they are in 2015. And that's because we utilized the city's 2009 general plan numbers in this process. But the difference between these two lines really is because we now have five more years of data. And so our baseline or our starting point where we're basing our projections from has changed. Back in year 2010, we had a 10-year baseline that went from 1997 to 2006. And we took the average of all those years water demands and that was the baseline that we projected from. Now in 2015, we've updated that and we have an approximate 10-year baseline where we take years 2004 through 2013. And so you can see that we're starting from a lower point on the vertical axis. We're starting at 22,638 acre feet for the 2015 projection versus 27,030 acre feet back in 2010. When these demand projections were completed, we did not yet have the full years worth of actual 2015 data. So that 22,638, I just wanna let you know that that is a projected number. We have actual totals that I'm gonna show you in just a second. So SBX-7, the Water Conservation Act of 2009. Again, what this said is everybody has to reduce their water consumption by 20% in year 2020. There's, it's a 10-year timeframe started in 2010. So we have a check-in and interim check-in point here in year 2015 where we have to save 10% of our water relative to the baseline. So these targets were adopted in 2010 and our interim target was 136. Our final target was 127 GPCD. That's gallons per capita per day. So we take the total water use in the city and that's for all customer classes, including commercial, industrial, institutional and we divide by the total population in the community and that's how we get that GPCD metric. We have a regional alliance that was formed with the other water contractors in the area. So we have two ways that we can comply with this regulation. We can do it on a regional basis or we could do it on an individual basis. I'm happy to report that we passed both of those tests for the interim 2015 check-in with flying colors and that information is detailed in the plan. So we did an update in year 2015 to just double check that we were on track. There were some population numbers that weren't available in 2010, namely the 2010 census data didn't come out until 2011 after we had our 2010 plan in place. So we use that data to go back and just kind of do a gut check on what the calculation was and we had a very slight adjustment. So our final 2020 target now instead of 127 GPCD, it's 126, so very close. So let's look at per capita water use and what has been happening over the last 20 year period. You look back in 1995 and 1996 and you can see that we were approximately 160 gallons per capita per day and then over time that number has slowly been coming down and I'd like to think that a lot of that has to do with the robust conservation program that the city has been implementing now for decades. You can see as we approach years 2009 and 2010, we get down into the low 100 range. We actually dip below 100. There's some economic downturn that's playing into that. We had in year 2009, we were in a stage one voluntary shortage condition because of the drought. We had a little bit of increase going to years 2012 and 2013 and then again in 2014 and 2015 we've dropped. So here in 2015 our actual GPCD is 85 gallons per capita per day. So going back to the previous target of 136, you can see that we're well below that and in fact the orange line on the graph is our year 2020 target. So based on our projections where we to return to normal conditions where there is no drought restriction, emergency regulations in effect, we would anticipate that we would be in roughly the 114 GPCD range again versus the target of 126. So we're fairly confident we're gonna meet our goal. This graph is a little bit similar to the two parallel lines that I just showed you and what is similar about it is the projections from year 2020 out through year 2040. Those numbers are the same. What's different here is I mentioned previously that we didn't have actual 2015 data available when we worked on the previous demand projection but now we have it available. So you can see in year 2015 16,539 acre feet. That's how much water the city used collectively in that year and again we're well below our target of 136 GPCD and when you look at year 2020 we get to our projection if you do the math and take the 24, 149 acre feet and you divide that out in terms of the total population, number of days in the year and so forth. We estimate that we would be at 114 gallons per capita per day well below our target. So everything that I've just talked about in the last few slides has been demand side. So if you're an economics buff now we get to the supply side of the equation. Existing supplies per the restructured agreement and that's the contract that the city assigned with the water agency all the other water contractors back in 2006, city has an entitlement of 29,100 acre feet per year from the water agency. We also have two groundwater wells that we produce water out of and we can produce up to 2,300 acre feet of water per year from that source. Recycled water here in the urban area is used to offset landscape irrigation so we have about 140 acre feet per year on average that we can provide and of course we also have our water conservation efforts which helps to lower overall demand. With water conservation we estimate that we're in approximately the 2,000 acre feet per year range that's how much demand gets decreased. Future demand, thanks. So now what's happening is we're taking the line which represented the demand and we're showing the supply with the bars behind it. So again looking at year 2015 that was the actual figure for that year, 16,539. And of course the bar is going to match exactly that demand because we didn't have more water supplied than we could use. But when you get out to years 2020 through year 2040 you'll notice that the aggregate bars as they stack up is greater than the demand. So we're projecting that we have sufficient supply to meet each of our demands in five year increments. The various colors you see up there, the blue is the water agency, green is our groundwater supply, yellow is water conservation. We have a very thin bar at the top in purple which is our recycled water. And again the black solid line going across all the bars is our projected water demand. Can I ask a quick question? Why is the rate of growth between 2015 and 2020 much steeper than the other periods? It's not. What you're seeing in this graph is our actual demand in year 2015. If I reverted back a couple of slides you would see that what is projected can you go back a couple more, one more, that one. So before we had a complete data set for the year 2015 we had to project based on previous data what we thought our water demand would be in year 2015 and that's the 22.638, the first point on the orange line. And so you can see that that demand as it increases each five year increment is a steady sloped line. It doesn't have that steeper and then shallower slope to it because the other graph that you just questioned is actual water demand. Well it's actual for the one point in time. Why wouldn't we adjust for the correct rate subsequent? I mean you're starting point on this graph here is different than the actual. I understand that it's projected in actual. Why wouldn't you extrapolate from the actual rather than go back to the projected? That's doesn't, it seems like apples and oranges to me. Well this is a multi-year process to get the data put together for this plan and if we were to wait until year 2015 had expired and we got actual demand data for year 2015 we would fail to get our plan submitted to the state by July 1st of this year. And so what we're trying to do here is we're trying to illustrate that a couple of years ago when we worked on the demand projections we're showing you what we projected for year 2015 and now in this graph we're showing you where we actually came in in year 2015 and keep in mind the drought and the ever increasing emergency conservation regulations handed down by the state has really depressed this number. If we weren't in a drought right now in 2015 you would be arguably much closer to what I was showing in the previous slide. Yeah, so. I follow that, but I'm going to defer. Yeah, sure. Thank you, Council Member Isaki. So one of the things that we're doing here is we're projecting out what the average demands would be. And so it really is important that we are planning in a way that we are planning for average or normal demands. We will have years like we've had the last two where we might be under drought conditions. We will also have years where we will have ample supply and could see customers really ramp up their water supply. So from a projection standpoint what we're really trying to do is make sure we're capturing what the average water use will be and we're planning for that appropriately. Again, we'll see years fluctuate. This particular year in 2015 we had to include the actual data because that's required by the law and we do believe that that water use is severely depressed because of the behaviors that our customers have implemented. They're great behaviors for responding to a drought and we're very grateful they're doing those, but we also recognize that probably some people won't want to continue not flushing their toilet every time they use it or they won't want to continue having their grass be brown and they'd like to have either low water use plants or maybe even return to having turf. So we want to make sure that we're planning for those activities and that customers can go back to using water in a conservative and water efficient manner eliminating water waste but not necessarily requiring that they're gonna continue to do these emergency drought behaviors through the projection of the general plan. When we need those emergency drought behaviors to come into effect, that's when we implement our shortage plan and we ask our customers to do it. So that number is pretty severely depressed in terms of actual compared to what normal demands would be. I guess my response would be the very first action. I certainly understand people would not want to not flush. I mean, I don't want any further into that. That's plenty for that. But every other type of behavior listed seems to me to be a good change in behavior. Yes, and we want those sustainable behaviors to remain and those are incorporated into our demand projection. It's just those short-term emergency drastic actions that probably won't remain and we want to make sure that again we're projecting for normal conditions. I don't see that reflected in the demand. I mean, I don't want to argue the point at length here but I don't see that in the demand after 2020 because you're reverting back to pre-drought numbers. No, those aren't pre-drought numbers. Pre-actual 2015 numbers. Correct. They're non-shortage conditions, non-drought response numbers. And I guess we shouldn't be too concerned because that means the city will have plenty of supply. If anything, we have a cushion. Right now, yes. But maybe the salmon don't have quite such a cushion. No, we worked closely with the water agency and this meets all the requirements of the biological opinion plus what they can provide. So these numbers, what we provided to the water agency and what they've provided back is their supply is what they believe they also can supply for us going through our general plan as well as all the other water contractors. Last question and maybe you're going to cover this. Everyone in this community basically gets their water or most of their water, 90% of our water is coming from the Russian River watershed. What is the, what about rural water supply and demand projections? Are those similar fashioned or are they the same type of restrictions? Are they sharing in the wise use of water? So there's a couple answers. So there are some rural communities and customers that are using groundwater. And so as we're going through and developing the sustainable groundwater complying with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and developing a groundwater sustainable agency. Some of those, depending on how much they pump will be incorporated into those requirements related to that. Customers that are, or not customers but citizens that are not customers of a water retailer but are perhaps diverting water from tributaries. They have certain water rights and those water rights sometimes can be curtailed in the last couple of years during the drought. There were some restrictions and those are continually changing related to the state water board. So those are regulated by the state water board. So does that answer the question you were asking? It pretty much does. I mean, I, and I appreciate it. I don't want to believe with the point right now. Ms. Collins. Thank you, mayor. So still looking at page 15. Can you give us a rough idea? I think I heard you say you're using the 09 numbers because obviously the census figures weren't in yet. So is this page 15 also based on number of people estimated from 09? Yeah, it's based on what the general plan provided in its population projection. So again. Whenever that happened. Well, it happened in year 2009. Right. And so it's not just the population. It's also the projected growth and employment because there are water factors associated with that as well. Okay. So it's both manufacturing jobs and residential. And just to remind me roughly, what can you, do you have any of the population figures for any of these years? Just roughly. I can, I can tell you at build out. We're projecting 237,000 people. Is that 2030 or 2035? It's 2035. And in fact, that is why the line on the graph in front of you kind of flat lines at that point because we don't have any additional information to go out to year 2040. Keep in mind, this is a living document. We're going to come back again in five years and update this. And this is one of the precise reasons why. I understand. And groundwater, I'm eyeballing it. It looks fairly narrow as part of supply because we guess we didn't need to use as much in 2015. But it looks like about 2025, 2030, maybe that the groundwater part is about the same. I may not be looking at the chart quite right. Are you anticipating groundwater availability to either be the same or increase? It looks like you are. What we're showing in year 2015 is exactly how much water we use from each one of those sources. What we're showing in the other years is how much water we could use based on those supplies. And so with Santa Rosa and our two wells per state requirement, we can use up to 2,300 acre feet per year. So what you're seeing there in years 2020 through year 2040, that green band does not change. It just concerns me that we're counting on there being that much groundwater in the future. So I guess in five years we'll update it. We will, we've had ample information that we've collected over the years on levels in our groundwater wells. And even though we've been in a prolonged drought every year, water levels over at our two production wells on Farmer's Lane return to our teasing conditions. So we have a great location, even in years of drought. And generally we use the year the wells are turned off and groundwater levels are recovering. So you're feeling that our aquifer recharge is sufficient? We've got a great location for those two wells. Thank you. Last slide I'm gonna speak to you about before turning it over to Jennifer is just a brief update on water conservation. So again, I think it's important to recognize the intense and really creative effort that the city has gone through year after year to develop a new and interesting conservation programs and adapt those programs to fit the community and really to get the most bang for the buck. And so the city has been at the forefront of this and we've gotten statewide recognition as a result of our conservation programs. We signed on to the California Urban Water Conservation Council MOU back in the late 90s and during our conservation program since that time we've spent over $20 million on conserving water. And just some of the program highlights we've had over 50,000 toilets that we've replaced in the community and we just recently had a grant that the city received at the beginning of the year and we had 5,500 toilets that got snapped up in a couple of weeks. Our green exchange program has been wildly successful. We've had over 3 million square feet cumulatively that we've replaced with low water use landscaping and we also have some other programs such as rain water and gray water rebates. So next slide is getting into the shortage plan and Jennifer, we'll take it from here. Great, thank you, Rocky. So a required element of the Urban Water Management Plan is the Urban Water Shortage Contingency Plan. There are certain requirements related to the plan. It has to provide information on how we will respond to a water supply shortage of up to 50%. So whether that's through drought or water shortage conditions or through emergency conditions. We have to include the types of prohibitions that we would put in place and the different methods that we would use to make sure that our community reduces consumption. We also have to explain how the utility will remain financially viable. So those are the requirements in the Urban Water Management Planning Act. And we have had a shortage plan in place since 1992. We've updated it various times over the years. Most recently we updated it back in 2010 when we did our 2010 Urban Water Management Plan and we had taken into account lessons learned from the 2009 water shortage that we went through. And that was the last time that we had to implement our shortage plan prior to just recently. And so we incorporated changes. So as the council is well aware, we've been under some drought conditions and we needed to implement our shortage plan back in 2014. And since that time, we've had some lessons learned and we really want to make sure that we're incorporating those lessons learned and some additional flexibility into this next update of the shortage plan. So to that end, we are proposing that we would include two new shortage stages. We currently have five, which are named a little funnily. They're stage one voluntary and stage one mandatory. And then we have stages two, three and four. What we're proposing is that we would have seven stages, stages one through seven. We are also proposing that we would have some minor changes to the various water use prohibitions, basically moving them around a little bit into these new stages that we're proposing. We're updating the allocations that would be provided in the later stages, based on the most recent water use data that we have. And then we're also proposing some changes to the water shortage charge and excess use penalty. In terms of the stages, you can see in blue, we're proposing an addition of stage two, which would be this 11 to 15% and stage four, which would be the 21 to 25% supply shortage areas. Basically what we're trying to do is make sure that we have more flexibility in the earlier stages to allow us to respond to water supply shortages. When the state took their action and mandated conservation and gave us all conservation targets, we realized that we had some pretty broad ranges in our plan. We had ranges in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. And we really feel as staff that having that additional flexibility in the beginning to get community wide savings is going to be very helpful. So that's why we're recommending those changes. In the later stages, stages five, six and seven, we will be giving our customers allocations. So we still think those are the appropriate levels at 30, 40 and 50%. In terms of the water use prohibitions, again, these are pretty much the same prohibitions that are in our plan right now. We've just sort of organized them to go with these new stages that we're proposing. At all times, our water waste ordinance will still remain in effect. Our water waste ordinance prohibits any breaks or leaks in the water delivery system. And it also prohibits any runoff from irrigation on private side customers. And then water waste ordinance is in place at all times. And then we have the various prohibitions in the various stages. So stage one and stage two would be voluntary stages. And we're looking at requiring who, again, those would be the two voluntary. In stage three, we'd be looking at all the previous prohibitions plus limiting irrigation. So that's currently what we have in place right now. What we have, the stage one mandatory win right now is about equivalent to what would be in the stage three or stage four in the new proposed plan. For stage four, we'd be prohibiting operation of all ornamental fountains and water features. And then stage five is where we really get into requiring new demand to offset or new construction to offset their demand on a one-to-one basis as well as prohibiting filling of new swimming pools. In stages six and seven, the new construction must often set demand on a greater ratio. And really that's when we're getting into very severe stages when we're having a water supply shortage of 40 and 50%. In terms of the consumption limits, we are doing community-wide reductions in stages one through four. So the intent is that as a community, we get together, eliminate water waste, implement water use-efficient behaviors, and achieve a community-wide reduction in water use. So those that are doing everything they can, we say, great, keep it up. Those that maybe could do a little more, we're here to help. We can tell you how you might be able to do that. And those that maybe aren't doing anything, we'd really like them to eliminate water waste and implement water-conserving behaviors. When we get past that stage, sorry about that, these four stages, then we're getting into a 30%, 40%, and 50% reduction in water supply, and we'd be giving allocations to our customers. These allocations are based on the most recent couple of years of water use. And you can see that the customers that take the biggest reduction in use are the dedicated irrigation customers. So we're really focusing on limiting outdoor water use and saving that water for truly public health and safety needs. So indoor water use for bathing, for cooking, for toilet flushing. You can also see that we're trying to also maintain to the extent we can the economic vitality of the city. So the commercial, industrial, and institutional customers get a little bit more, but still a pretty big cutback. And then health and safety is a priority. So we wanna make sure hospitals, convalescent homes, doctor's offices have the water they need. So they do have the least cutback in terms of giving allocations. So we also wanted to recommend some changes to the water shortage rate structure. The water shortage rate structure is really designed to protect the financial vitality of the department, of the water department, and encourage customers to reduce their use accordingly. If customers reduce their use accordingly with the allocations they're given, they won't see an increase in their bill. As a matter of fact, they'll actually see a reduction. For those that don't follow those requirements, they will see a pretty dramatic price signal to encourage them to meet their allocations. One thing I do want to make sure that the council is aware though, and you'll see that in just a minute, for those that are extremely low water users and really can't do anything less, if they can't reduce their water use and already meeting their allocations, they will see some small increases based on that water shortage charge that we're gonna talk about in a minute. The first line of defense that we do have is the Catastrophic Reserve. It's available for us to help deal with those financial, those reductions in revenue if needed. Back in 2009, when we implemented our water shortage stage one, we did need to rely on the Catastrophic Reserve because we did see a pretty strong reduction in revenue. This year we were very lucky and that we knew we could tell that the drought was coming and we made some very proactive decisions in our department for budgeting purposes to make sure that we kept some of the excess fund balance that we had and used that to help us get through the drought. So we haven't had to quite tap into the Catastrophic Reserve yet, but it is still there as a line of defense for us. In terms of the water shortage charge, so right now we have a water shortage charge in our higher stages that's a 10%, 20% and 30% charge. It is added on to the usage charge of the bill for water. What we're proposing is that we would have no changes in stages one and two, but that we would bring on a water shortage charge a little bit earlier in stage three and that we would have a 5% water shortage charge in stage three, a 10% water shortage charge in stage four, 15% in stage five, and then stages six and seven would be the same as what we currently have in our shortage plan. Again, the numbers I know are different. The reason- Can you distinguish between adopted rate and uniform rate, please? Sure, sorry about that. Yeah, so the adopted rate is the currently adopted rate. So right now for single family residential, we have two tiers and for our commercial customers, we have a single uniform rate, so it's just no tiers. And so what would happen in the first four stages, we would add on the water shortage charge to that adopted rate. So whatever customer class you're in, it adds on to the usage charge. And then when we get to allocations, we'd revert to the uniform rate because customers would be given an allocation and if they're over that allocation, they'd have an excess use penalty to try to give them a price signal to reduce their water use. So the tiers don't really make sense anymore. More and more in those higher stages. One thing we wanna make sure that the council's aware is that this is a tool that we are looking at. And so it's a tool that we wanna have available and would be completely optional and at the discretion and recommendation of both the board and then discretion of the council to adopt. So kind of like we have right now, we have the ability to use the Catastrophic Reserve. It's a tool that we have and it's the council's direction whether or not we would use that. So we wanna make sure that's very, very clear. So we'd like to have that tool available if needed. So we worked with Bob Reed with the Reed Group who's our rate consultant and also did our demand fee work and he did an analysis for us really looking at the effects to the utility if customers do reduce their water use per the requirements of the water shortage plan and how that would affect our revenue. Again, this is required. We need to do this analysis as part of the Urban Water Management Planning Act. And I know this slide's a little busy but the big thing that we're really showing, that's probably an understatement, maybe a lot busy. The big thing that we're really trying to show is that as you can see in the one, two, three, third column where it says stage two voluntary, you can see that we're using quite a bit of, we're having quite a big deficit. And if we are able to implement that water shortage charge in stage three, that really starts to counter that deficit. And we show that here in a much better, easier to read graph I think than that really busy chart. But basically showing that, we'll need to use the catastrophic reserve to some extent, but if we bring that charge in at stage three, it really reduces the amount of the catastrophic reserve that we would have to use and the amount of CIP appropriation that we would have to reduce. As I mentioned before, we also have an example bill here and that if customers are able to reduce their water use and stay within their allocations, we're designing this, so it's a price signal that actually encourages them to reduce their water use. They'll have a reduced bill. For those that are unable to do so, it also has the opposite effect in that there's a price signal to really encourage customers to reduce their water use per the water shortage plan because there is that shortage charge plus excess use penalties as we get into higher stages. In terms of the excess use penalty, this is not designed to really bring in revenue for the financial vitality of the system, but it really is designed to encourage customers and give them a price signal when they're not staying within their allotment and it's only comes into effect in the higher stages, stages five, six and seven and if they're over 100%, but within 150% of their allotment, we're suggesting excess use penalties of 10, 25 and 50% respectively in the various stages. These are less than what we currently have in our shortage plan right now and then for water use that's over 150%, we're proposing excess use penalties of 20, 50 and 100% in those stages as well. We also have a few other components that are in our shortage plan, such as information on tools that we have if customers are violating various parts of the plan, they're either consistently overusing their allotments or they're violating some of the water use prohibitions over and over again so it gives us some opportunities to be able to either go out and put a restrictor on their meter or mandate that they have a water use audit and implement water use efficient, high efficiency fixtures. There's the ability for customers to come in and provide a request for variance if for some reason they're doing all they can, they can show they're being very efficient. We can look at those things. So that's not changing. Again, the implementation authority, this plan does not happen at our discretion. It comes in front of both the board and the council with one exception and that is in a catastrophic event or an emergency, it does give a little bit of ability for the director to implement a stage but then come back to the city council at the very next opportunity that we can so. But every time we've implemented this plan, it does go through the process where it goes to our board and then comes to the council for consideration. And we're not really, we're not making any recommendations for changing to the water usage monitoring either. So what we brought forth here today and the recommendation on the water shortage charge and excess use penalty is what we did work together with the water conservation subcommittee of the Board of Public Utilities and then with the full board and study session and it was their initial direction to go ahead and keep moving down this option. In terms of public participation and Rocky mentioned earlier, it is a big component of the plan. And so we have had a number of water conservation subcommittee meetings with the Board of Public Utilities getting input from those board members as well as having some public attend those. We did send out as required the 60 day public notice to inform the surrounding cities and the counties and the county as well as the other water districts in the county that we are preparing our plan. Again, we've been working together very closely with the Sonoma County Water Agency. So even though we did that formal notification, we've been having lots of discussions in developing the plans together. There's a bill insert that's currently going out right now that has information regarding the development of the urban water management plan. And we have a dedicated website which is srcity.org slash uwmp. And that has all the information on the development of the plan so far. And when we have the document available, we will be uploading that onto the website as well as having it available at City Hall at our building the municipal services self-filling on 69 Stony Circle. So we'll have plenty of opportunity for folks to review the plan. In terms of next steps, this was tentative but we now have confirmation of what our schedule is gonna be. So the BPU, we will be bringing the document to the BPU for their consideration on June the 2nd. And we will be bringing this back to the council by a public hearing on June the 14th. Because it is a public hearing, there are certain public noticing requirements that we'll be adhering to. And those notices will be in the press Democrat. And then once the document is adopted, it is required to be submitted to the state by July 1st. And so we will be submitting it to the Department of Water Resources and they will be reviewing and letting us know if we've met all the required components of the plan. And then the copies of the final document will be available. And you know, that was a little lengthy but this is quite a big document just so the council knows this was last time and it's probably gonna be bigger this time because there's more requirements. So we did wanna try and run through the majority of the big pieces of the document for you. And now we're happy to answer any questions you might have or any comments that you might have. Thank you. Regardless of the length, I appreciate the clarity of the information. Thank you. Council, questions? Mr. Weisoki. Just one real quick. In the spirit of Mark Twain, whiskeys for drinking water, for fighting, how are you gonna put restrictions on water meters? So in terms of the shortest plan, it's a flow restrictor. So it actually makes it so that minimal flow comes through. It's a tool that we have only used if someone is clearly in violation and not doing what they're supposed to and really violating the prohibitions or excessively using water. Are there questions, Ms. Combs? In our materials, there's another option, an option where the 5% is essentially skipped as a step and in stage four, you go right into the 10%. Were you gonna talk about that or were you just leaving it there for our information? So we brought both options to the board and the board really directed, because it was a study session, so it wasn't recommendation, but they really directed that they felt that was the version that we should present to council. So we have that here as backup slides and we're happy to walk through it basically by starting the water shortage charge at the higher stage at the 10%. It really does have a much bigger impact on the need to use catastrophic reserve as well as really needing to reduce the CIP appropriation. So from a staff standpoint, we are not recommending that. And we did work through it with the BPU. And again, their direction at this time was they felt that this was the option that really should be considered, but happy to pull that up if you'd like us to walk you through. Thank you. Other questions, Councilor Ms. Carlstrom? Anything? Okay, I'll move to public comment at this point. Mr. DeWitt. Hello, my name is DeWitt. I'm from the red zone of Roseland. I don't know how many of you remember the red zone. Looks like none of you remember it. It was actually an area of Roseland that was called out because of toxic contamination of the underground aquifer. Why would I bring that up right now? Because basically it wasn't fully addressed as time went on. And now as you look at these components to an urban water management plan, first and foremost on number seven, public participation. The people that lived out in Roseland were quite concerned about how things didn't go the way they thought they would. I actually believe you've been doing a good job in terms of water conservation and perhaps looking towards the future. But one of the things that's really important here is it's the city that's been spending the money on the conservation. On slide number 16, you folks have spent $20 million so far on your water conservation projects. That's a big number. I'm hoping it came from a profitable situation and not the ratepayers having to subsidize the water conservation. Now I bring this up along with the public participation because if you involve the public and teach them these techniques, you can save on what you're trying to do. And in the future, plan for an even better situation where you might not have to put those penalties on. But if you have to put the penalties on, they need to be really harsh because right now a lot of people still waste water. I see it often. People just look at it like, hey, no big deal. The only way that you can actually make it a big deal, that's on your page 30, your excess use policy penalties, excuse me, is the people that you find who are wasting the water, hit them hard financially. That way they'll believe that it really is something they should take care of. That's what they understand. They don't understand the good feeling of like, oh, we're all in this together and we're gonna take care of things. They understand when it hits their wallet really hard. Then they're like, whoa, this is serious, I'll take care of it. You might think, well, no big deal. A leaking toilet that just keeps leaking and leaking in a facility that they leave open, such as a restroom in a restaurant and they never take care of it, they won't until you hit them hard with the financial penalty. And this is real. It's happening right now, right around here in various businesses that we could go to and look at, but who wants to go to the restroom now? We don't want to. Main thing is, please, go ahead with this, but keep in mind that you folks have been the ones paying the big dollar. It should be the water wasters that are brought to task on this and you'll have a really nice urban management plan if you involve the public early in getting this thing going. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Jerry LaLongberg. Here we go. I'm Jerry LaLongberg. I have a home in Santa Rosa. I just have a question because I'm here and I'm interested in this, having to do with the high use commercial water users, are you addressing the cannabis growers, the indoor cannabis growers? How does that specific, how is you articulate their water usage? How do you monitor their water usage? And are they charged at rates similar to what the ordinary household is? Thank you. Thank you. Those are all the cards I have on this item. Do you have a response to the cannabis question? The hard question. So yes, in response to the question, so right now, are water use projections taken to account the general plan? So whatever zoning and requirements are allowed, that projection, including information for commercial use is in there. In terms of looking at the cannabis information, we have been working in the water department to get an understanding of what the water demand would be, what the water use is. We are looking at the appropriate rates that would be charged, what customer category they should be in. So all of that information is being looked at. If general plans, if the use is currently consistent with the general plan, then it's incorporated. If that use is different and the general plan is changed, then we would be redoing demand projections to incorporate that. So as Rocky did mention, it's a living document as things change, as different industries are prevalent in our city. We do update the demand projections to take that into account. Great, thank you very much. Council, any final questions? Thank you very much. Thank you. Moving into our regular meeting of the Santa Rosa City Council, which was scheduled for four o'clock, the first thing I'm going to do is move to public comment. Denise Joaquin, she's not here. Dwayne DeWitt. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. At the study session about housing that just occurred last week, it was brought up after some students from the junior college marched here and basically complained that there's not enough housing. A gentleman from the audience, an attorney by the name of Conasek, stood up and said, well, maybe the junior college could put some housing together. And the junior college used to have housing for students. There was a dorm on Salem Avenue and there was a dorm on campus. And over the years, they switched up and took that out. The housing bond that was passed for veterans could be something helpful to both the city and the junior college at the same time. In a public-private partnership, the junior college has $400 million that was passed for a bond for them to do some bricks and mortar activities. If the council were to take it upon themselves to reach out to the junior college and say, we know there's a number of veterans on campus, some of whom are having housing difficulties, is there a manner in which the two agencies, the city working with the county junior college, community college district, could address the needs of housing in the future. We won't talk about the past. We don't know what's there in a sense. We do know there'll be more students coming on that campus who are veterans. That's already occurring. I was at today's meeting over there. There were some veterans talking about some issues. The approach won't go forward though, unless somebody champions it. I don't believe Mr. Conasek will come back to champion it. He just made the statement perhaps in passing. But if someone from your subcommittee on the housing situation were to reach out to the junior college and say, look, what's possible? Not necessarily like go with an idea of what you want right away in a sense, vision it. What is possible? There's a lot of money that's available that housing bond passed for veterans has been giving money out already. One of the writers of that bond is here in Santa Rosa. The organization Vietnam Veterans of California helped to get that passed. They'd been looking at some property on West College Avenue, Sonoma County Water Agency property. So I'm just basically asking that you folks give this a look. I know coming from me you'll be like, well, that's suspect. But here's the idea. The junior college has opportunities. The state bond passed. This is a chance where you could take the lead as you're already doing in a sense. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Final call for Denise Joaquin. Okay, moving on. We're going to move our closed session to the end of our council meeting tonight. So you won't have to be dealing with any break there. Could you report on our study session? Mr. Tardo. Yes, Mayor. We have completed part one of our 2016-17 budget request in this afternoon's study session, as well as the urban water management plan. Thank you. Thank you very much. Moving to presentations 6.1, Carmelita and Dave and all sorts of people. Welcome. Thank you. Mayor, sorry, members of the council. Just a quick opening remark. One of the cornerstones of your first-tier goal, Housing for All, is one of your longest-running affordable housing programs called Section 8, The Housing Choice Voucher, funded by the federal government. The voucher program provides $1.5 million a month into the real estate economy in rent subsidies that helps 2,000 households, families, live and work here in Santa Rosa. So today we just wanted to take a few minutes to recognize the program, because we just received the Housing and Urban Developments High Performing Agency Award. And it isn't the first year we've ever received it, it's the 10th year in a row. So we thought we'd just take a little bit of your time, a full decade of operating the program. And the credit goes to the program manager, Carl Merlita Howard, program specialist Rebecca Lane, and the team sitting up there, but not of least as the housing authority itself. And so Chairman Downey wanted to just say a few words before we send more remarks. Thank you. Welcome. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, council members. I'm sure that you're all familiar with the concept of doing more with less. And it's my privilege to recognize the esteemed team of people who have dedicated their time and energy to doing more with less in providing a low income and affordable housing to members of our city. I look forward to continuing to work with this talented group of people as we continue to creatively deal with challenges that change all the time. This has been a very rewarding experience. And I'm just so grateful to staff for all the work that they do and in our transparency with this particular service. And with that, I would like to introduce Carl Merlita Howard to continue to say some words on this committee. Thank you. And thank you for your service as well. Thank you. Good afternoon, Orsit, good evening now, Mayor Sawyer and members of the city council. My name is Carl Merlita Howard from Housing and Community Services, and I manage the Housing Choice Voucher Program. I'm proud to present to you today that's being passed our 2015 Housing Choice Voucher Program High Performer Award. This is the 10th year we have received this award and are very proud of the accomplishments that we have achieved because of our distinction of being a high performer. This award means that we have met HUD's requirements regarding our waiting list and eligibility information of voucher holders, housing quality, standard inspections and financial monthly reporting. We also receive extra points for the concentration of areas of poverty, which means that our voucher holders are spread around the city. We are very proud of that. This high performing distinction allowed us to be successful in competing for the HUD vouchers. These vouchers are for our homeless veterans where the Veterans Administration provides supportive services. When we started, we started with 25 vouchers in 2009. This year we have 365 vouchers allocated to the city. Two weeks ago HUD informed us and called us that there are 24 extra vouchers that are available for us to use in 2016, which brings our total to 389. This means that we are the 10th city in California with the most HUD vouchers. It speaks of how many homeless veterans we have in our county. This award also help us compete and be awarded the Family Self-Sufficiency Grant. For 2016, our award is 64,000 to help our section eight participants become self-sufficient. Thank you. Thanks to the extra computers that the city have, we are holding a computer class to help them work the computer and try to get jobs and complete resumes. So we'll be working on them with that. This distinction allowed us also to continue to receive funding and increases on a yearly basis. Our budget from HUD this coming fiscal year is almost 24 million dollars, and our monthly payments to landlords is 1.5 million. This shows us that the voucher program is a powerful player in the local economy here in the city. We are respected by HUD officials and are always asked to speak to different housing authorities on our best practices so they can use us as model. Our request to HUD Washington to increase our payment standards to 120% for our homeless veterans was also granted. This means that we are allowed to go up to 20% more than the fair market rents that were set by HUD. This permission lessens the burden of our most vulnerable clients in finding housing. We continue to house almost 2,000 participants in a tight housing market. Thanks to the initiatives that you, our city council, has done in the past and present, we are proud to note that Santa Rosa has built more affordable housing than any other city in the North Bay. Although available units are scarce, we are 100% list up on our regular vouchers and are working hard to house all our HUD-VASH participants. We know we have to be creative to find housing and we were successful in collaborating with the Veterans Administration, Sonoma County Board of Supervisors with Supervisors Shirley Sain and Catholic Charities to make the Pomsin Hotel be a reality. So, last week, we have housed all of the 60 units available to us to our homeless veterans. We want to thank Akash and Jenny Kloss who modeled this endeavor from San Francisco. We also work with Sonoma County to find the house to get three houses that were available and were not being used to house also our veterans' families. This year, as part of our goal, we are working on an outreach program to landlords. We feel lucky that with your support, we have a community that is accepting of our program even though we hear some negative stories from time to time. This month, I am happy to announce that our application for our waiting list is open. This is really important even though the wait list, the wait is six to eight years because HUD has not allocated us new vouchers since 1998. We have sent information regarding our waiting list to all our residents through the water bill insert. We have ads in all the newspapers, the Press Democrat and LaVos and are going to different events to advertise and give out application forms. We went to the Cinco de Mayo celebration and we gave out more than 500 applications that night. So that's really good. Anybody interested can also go to our website at www.srcity.org slash section eight and print the application form. The form must be postmarked by May 31. All of this, of course, is made possible because of the commitment of our section eight team who are here today. They are dedicated, sensitive to the needs of our seniors, low-income families and the disabled. It is their passion and attention to the details of our files that allow us to be recognized. Thank you, team. Lastly, thank you City Council. Thank you City Council and our Housing Authority Board for your continuous commitment and passion in making the city of Santa Rosa a better place to live by finding housing for all and make it possible for residents to afford to live here. Thank you. We have our partners here today and I would like to invite David Koski here to talk to you about his journey as a HUD VASH voucher holder. I'd like to talk a few minutes about what PHA and HUD VASH voucher meant to me after 32 years of addiction, my first eight years of sobriety was spent incarcerated in California State Prison upon my release. I was homeless, I had no place to go and one of the first person I met was Kim Valadez in the HUD VASH program and through her and the PHA, I was able to establish a home and with intense case management, go back to school and I was certified in drug and alcohol counseling and now I help other veterans working for HUD VASH as a peer support specialist and none of that would have been possible without a place to live. I doubt I could have went to school and got where I am today being homeless and I think PHA and HUD VASH are everything they've done for me. Thank you. Thank you. Jenny Kloss who collaborated with us at the Pomson Hotel will now speak. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, council members, thanks for having me here. I represent Akash Kalia, the owner of the Pomson and I had the pleasure of working with your housing authority staff while facilitating the conversion to permanent supportive housing for veterans and homeless and I'll tell you, if someone would have come to you and said, listen, we wanna do a program that's gonna involve two branches of a federal agency and a few departments of a county agency and two city agencies and a nonprofit and a private business owner, you would have thought it was the beginning of a joke and you probably wouldn't have bet that it would have happened but after about 18 months of real collaborative work, we did make it happen and people have asked a lot for all of us to talk about how we got this done and I keep coming back to a few different themes and your housing authority is really at the center of all of them and the first one is that this is the kind of thing that happens when people say yes because it's really easy to say no and to not try to do something. It's much harder to say yes and figure out how we're gonna get it done and people talk a lot about government being barriers to progress and my experience with your professionals was completely the opposite. They can do, they are pros in every sense of the word. Mission-driven, you should be very proud of them. We are very lucky to have had them as partners and it wouldn't have happened without them. The second thing is that it's really a model of how much we can do when we are working together and collaboratively and we did, with this kind of project, we did sort of invent the wheel on this and I'm not gonna say it was easy, we can do it better next time but every time we had a hiccup, we just got together in the same room or got together in the same conference call and again, your staff was really instrumental in making that happen and the third thing, which I've almost forgotten and I'm not sure why, is that, and this is something Helge Lemke told me once when I first started on the school board, she said, you can get a lot more done if you don't care about credit and I think this is again, is a model of that where there are not people who are, who dug in trying to claim credit here, they're just about getting it done and so we could be really proud, not just of the end product but really the process there. So I just wanted to really commend your staff for the great part of this project and the great part they're still playing in this project and the work that they've done. Thanks. Thanks Ms. Close. Congratulations, thank you. We have no staff briefings this evening moving on to city manager's report as he enters the chamber. Nothing to report, thank you. City attorney. Thank you Mr. Mayor, I just want to let you know that we have now submitted all the briefing in our petition before the CPUC regarding the Jennings Avenue at grade crossing and the administrative hearing judge now has approximately 60 days to issue her tentative opinion which the parties will then have an ability to comment on so hopefully we'll get a positive outcome to that in the near future. Outstanding, thank you very much. Moving on to statements of abstention, council members, anything to abstain from this evening? Excellent, and now council members reports, who would like to start? Mr. Corsi. Yesterday was the Sonoma County Transportation Authority meeting, I'll make this brief. There was this budget items, looking at a projection of a 3% sales tax increase for measure M over the next year. One of the reasons I was asking about our projections is because it differs from ours, but obviously county wide sales tax is not doing quite as well as city sales tax, which is good for the city. Also yesterday was the Economic and Development Subcommittee. Hold on a second Chris, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Yesterday we had the Economic and Economic Development Subcommittee meeting. It had a good discussion about the proposed pilot project with the Chamber of Commerce about both retention and attraction of business, particularly to the downtown area. Look forward to having more discussion about that and one thing that we didn't get into yesterday was the costs and the contract. That'll come back to us in the future. That's all. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much. Mr. Weiss. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Last Thursday I attended the Sonoma Clean Power Board meeting. It is the two year anniversary since it has begun service and quite a report, happy to report as of March 31st, 2016 we have unrestricted funds in Sonoma Clean Power of almost $35 million. All loans, startup loans have been paid off. Power is the rate charged to customer average is 2% less than PG&E. Our procurement costs for that power averages about 78% of PG&E's cost. The differential is the transmission costs and other tariffs we pay to PG&E. So there's also $3.5 million in local programs in this year's budget. Very, very proud to be on this board as it is producing cleaner and cheaper power to our local residents while also stimulating our local economy. Excellent, thank you. Any other reports, Council? Ms. Colms. Yeah, first I think that I mentioned during one of the study sessions earlier, a conversation about at some future time that we have a conversation about Council members and staffing and I think I was informed to come back at this time to make a motion that sometime in the future we talk about staffing for Council. I think my second is not here right now. So I would need a different second to have that come forward as an agendized item in the future. So the motion to have a discussion, to discuss putting on the agend, to discuss the concept of Council appointed, Council appointed staffing in the future. So the Board of Supervisors have two and a half staff members each. They only serve, or I shouldn't say only approximately 60,000 people. We're responding to the needs of 175,000 people without staff backup. I don't believe it's, this budget cycle should be the conversation, but I think that at some point we need to have the conversation about having staff, at least part-time staff. Looks like it's not going anywhere. I don't doubt it's a need with this budget. If it's not gonna be in this budget cycle, let's hold off a little bit. I just wanna get it in the agenda list. Any other reports? Unless you have, Ms. Carlstrom, did you want to second that motion now that you've heard? Yeah, I don't have any problem having it come back as a conversation topic. It's certainly been something that had been on my mind. Thank you. I also wanted to mention that I've been appointed to the Chair of the Regional Planning Subcommittee on Housing that we'll be looking at best practices for the Bay Area on Housing. I'm certainly taking our list of 24 items to those meetings as well. Had the good fortune of really noticing how diverse our community was this week. I had an invitation from a joint meeting of Laotian and Thai community members. I had a wonderful opportunity to present a proclamation to Cinco de Mayo, a little wet, but always a fantastic event. Well attended, the San Francisco Consul from Mexico attended personally, which I thought was quite amazing that on Cinco de Mayo, he would choose to come to Santa Rosa and experience our event. It was fantastic. And then was able also to go to a South Asian philosophy program to honor the impact of Southeast Asian philosophy in our area. I just really became aware again of what a fabulously diverse community we have and how many different cultures bring good things to Santa Rosa. So just wanted to report that one out. Thank you. And congratulations on your appointment to chair. Any final reports, council? Okay, thank you very much. Moving on to approval of minutes for April 5th. Any corrections, council? Hearing none will be accepted as submitted. Moving on to consent. Mr. McGlenn. Item 12.1, Motion Contract Award, Prince Gateway Park Spray Ground. Item 12.2, Motion Fifth Amendment to Professional Services Agreement, California Code Check Incorporated. Item 12.3, Motion Contract Award, City of Santa Rosa Railroad Square Parking Management Plan and Progressive Parking Strategies. Item 12.4, Motion Contract Award, City of Santa Rosa website design and replacement services. Item 12.5, Motion Contract Award, Reed and Rubbish Abatement Services. Item 12.6, Resolution City County Payment Program, CCPP authorization. Item 12.7, Resolution Accept Finale Park at the real property offered under the terms of the revocable offer to dedicate park property and park development agreement. Thank you very much. I have no cards on these items. Council, any questions? Mr. or questions? Mr. Corsi or comment? All right. Couple of these consent items, I didn't want to let pass without comment. They both were mid-year budget adjustments last year. They're coming to fruition. I think it's good news on both of them. The Prince Gateway Spray Ground is coming in at quite a bit less than what we budgeted for it. And the contract to redesign our website is a huge step forward. I was, I'm not gonna say lucky enough, I was honored to participate in the committee that reviewed the submissions on that. And it was a lot of work. There were quite a few people. I think there were, we had 12 submissions and 10 people on the committee representing staff and the community, people on the technical side, people on the open government side, people on the user friendly side. And we had a real thorough look at all of those submissions and it came down to a few that were very close together and I think we're gonna have a great new website when that happens. So thank you for indulging that celebration. Absolutely, good comments. Thank you. Ms. Carlstrom, did you have any comments? Oh, I thought you had your hand up, I'm sorry. Well, since Mr. or Vice Mayor Spryton has the item, I'll comment and you can comment before you move the consent calendar. Congratulations on the Spray Ground. You know, it's really, it's been sitting quiet for too long and I'm looking forward to hearing the kids using it and laughing and screaming and yelling and enjoying the water that they did for at least a short period of time a number of years ago. So I'm really happy that that's moving forward. And also with the, our website, that's great. I don't expect to hear necessarily the screaming of Glee that the splash pad may offer, but who knows? It just might. It's been a, at times, a painful experience because it's just so much information. So I'm really happy that both of those are moving forward. This is a good list of consent items. Ms. Colms? Well, thank you. I was, I was waving a little bit over here. Oh, I'm sorry. I really agree with my fellow council members on the Spray Ground. I think it really shows an ability of our city as we're coming out of a hard time to get some maintenance things done. And I think it will highly benefit us to have eyes and children playing and a lot of activity at that location. It's right over here near us. And I just think the symbolic value of having the kids at that point is fabulous also. Obviously the open and transparent government needs of the website are wonderful. But I also wanted to note that in this package is a proposal that involves progressive parking strategy. And I think a number of us have talked for some time about progressive parking strategies. And it's very nice to see it as yet another thing we as a council are getting done. So thank you. I appreciate staff bringing this forward. All three of these items are really quite remarkable. And I'm delighted that we're doing it. Great, thank you. Mr. Vice Mayor, comment and motion. I would also echo many of those comments. These are all very positive things. I do have some two questions. One on 12.1, the spray park. In the staff report, it talked about, actually no, that's 12.4, 12.1. I know council had allotted 800,000 for the park, the upgrades, and it came in a lot less. So I guess my question is, are the costs that are included here, the total cost of it, or are there another $200,000 worth of expenses that we could anticipate? Mayor, sorry, Vice Mayor Schroetelm and council members. Colleen Ferguson, Deputy Director of Capital Projects Engineering, and it's my pleasure to introduce his first time as having an item here in front of you, Chris Katbagen. He's a relatively new project engineer with our teams. And this is his project. And he will answer that question. Welcome, Chris. I think your question was, will everything be covered under that $800,000 budget? Well, more specifically, we authorized 800,000, but the engineer's estimate came in at 550K. I'm just wondering, that's $200,000 is a big difference. So are there some other costs that we'll be seeing? Or is about the 600,000 complete the park? Well, the additional costs past that $500,000 will include inspections for construction. And contingency for the project, depending on what we find out there that we may need or may not, depending on how the construction goes, we do have underground construction to do in addition to the above-ground work. So always a bit of a mystery. Thank you, Recreation and Parks Director Nenette. She might just remind me that design is also part of that. And the construction of the prefab restroom facility that the contractor will place on the site. And that it's not the supply of that restroom is not included in the contractor's bid. The city needed to order that in advance so that it could match with the timing of the construction moving forward. So we're requiring that separate from the construction contract. So I'm guessing anticipated costs may be closer to the 800K versus the 600 on this item. You are correct. Thank you. That's, I just wanted that clarification. And then on item 12.4, the website in the staff report it talked about the maintenance and support, one item or one paragraph it talked about that was included in the price of 10 years of ongoing maintenance and support. But then the next item, we have a chart of ongoing costs that will be budgeting. And I'm just trying to understand get clarification on that. And while you can, Mr. McHenry, maybe you can talk about the maintenance and service or maintenance and support of 5,000 or a 5% yearly increase for the next, well, about seven years. Every year goes up by 5%. Is that industry standard? That's about right. The baseline amount for maintenance and support. And by the way, just to put that in context, what maintenance and support in this case is it's hosting of the website. So website hosting plus 24 by seven support. It's a big deal for our city. We've never had 24 by seven support before an issue. So an annual increase of three to 5% for support and maintenance is not out of the ordinary. And so again, in this, so that those are gonna be ongoing. So the first comment about the award amount includes design implementation, training and 10 years of ongoing maintenance and support. The maintenance and support is not included in the original contract. That'll be an ongoing budgeted item. Yes, that's correct. Thanks. Any final questions council? All right, thank you. Mr. Vice Mayor, you have this item. So with that, I will move consent items 12.1 through 12.7 and wave further in the text. Second. Thank you. I have a motion and a second and your votes please council. And I have six slides. Thank you very much. Moving on to our first report item of the evening, 14.1. Item 14.1 report, introduction of an interim ordinance to impose a temporary moratorium on rent increases. And I believe the city attorney is going to need an action item before we actually get to the item. Thank you. So it's indicated on the agenda. This is a start item, which means it did not appear on the preliminary agenda. And so we need a vote of the council to add this to the agenda tonight. Thank you. I'll entertain a motion. So moved. Second. I have a motion and second your votes council. And I have five eyes and one note mayor Sawyer voting no. And now we can move on to 14.1. A mayor Sawyer and members of the city council, the item that we're considering at this time is introduction of an interim ordinance to impose a temporary moratorium on rent increases. As you'll recall last May 3rd, last week the council provided direction for a rent stabilization and just cause eviction ordinance and directed staff to proceed with the preparation of that ordinance. The council also asked us to bring forward the preparation of an ordinance to address the interim moratorium on rent increases. This action tonight is to prevent landlords from increasing rent over this percentage, over a 3% amount while the rent stabilization ordinance is being drafted. The recommendation that we have before you is that the council directed staff to bring forward an interim ordinance to impose a temporary moratorium on rent increases in order to prevent rental increases exceeding 3% while a rent stabilization ordinance is being prepared. Thank you, sir. I have a number of cards. Any questions or yes questions at this point council before I move to public comment? Seeing none, I will move to public comment. Anne Seely followed by Mallory Spilker. Hold on, hold on. Let's wait for your mic. There you go, you're on now. Good evening. Now I'm on, okay. I want to compliment you, mayor and council for taking on so seriously. You've been giving really serious attention to the housing deficit and its human cost. I have watched many councils sitting up at this dais and I've never seen such a dedication to taking care of a crucial issue like this. The temporary moratorium before you today is part of that sincere effort to protect the affordability that is in peril, local landlords might be offended at the implication that they are going to be villains in jacking up rents on their units. I think we all understand though it's not necessarily the local landlords, it's investor groups who own apartments, it's people who live out of the area who might direct their property management agencies to increase the rents in preparation for the dire event that they can only increase the rent 3% per year. Please do enact this moratorium. Thank you. Thank you. Mallory Spilker? Up here. Hello again. Hello again. Mallory Spilker, executive director for the California Apartment Association North Coast Division. Our association represents housing providers in the city of Santa Rosa and surrounding Sonoma County. We encourage you to vote against the rent moratorium today. This temporary regulation like rent control is a distraction from the core issue at hand, a fundamental lack of housing. We urge you to forego implementing anti-business policies that have proven to fail in other communities and will further divide this city. Enacting a moratorium today is essentially drawing a line in the sand between the city and our housing providers implying that you do not trust the city's housing providers. This is yet another step toward driving rental owners out of the rental housing business and out of Santa Rosa, ultimately tightening vacancy rates by eliminating rental units. This interim measure is counterproductive to the end goal of housing our community. Your focus should not be limiting the housing we have and a rent moratorium will do exactly that. You claim to want community stability. Then please don't drive our community housing providers out of Santa Rosa. Thank you. Thank you. And Robert Gebhardt and Robert will be followed by Keith Becker. It's Robert here, Keith, followed by Denise Joaquin. Hi guys, Keith Becker, local landlord and property manager. Couple of days ago, I read an anecdote about rent control and starfish in the press Democrat. And in that vein, I want to offer my own metaphor from Wild Kingdom. In the early 1900s, almost 40% of the American population were farmers and ranchers for that community. Wolves were considered to be predators universally hated. It was acceptable. It was considered necessary for anyone and everyone to eliminate wolves, simply protect farms, families and cattle. By 1930, federal agents had killed the last indigenous gray wolves in Yellowstone. But when wolves were removed from the equation, the natural ecosystem got knocked out of balance. Elk lost their primary predator and their behavior changed. They expanded their territory. They started overgrazing river banks and valley floors, their population boomed. Overgrazing along the streams, decimated cottonwoods and willows causing a crash and beaver populations. Coyotes obliterated populations of numerous smaller, less aggressive animals. Without the influence of the gray wolf, the physical appearance of Yellowstone actually changed due to defoliation and the behavior of other animals. Ultimately, park planners realized exactly how undesirable, how unsustainable the situation had become and they brought wolves back to Yellowstone. Wolf reintroduction corrected the balance of the ecosystem. Elk no longer casually wandered in the open. Like how his impact was diminished, equilibrium was restored. Riparian cottonwood, willow and aspen trees are forishing areas that had been overgrazed for much of the last century, leading to the beaver's return to the natural habitat. The ecosystem is reestablishing its necessarily complex integrated equilibrium. I certainly don't want to belabor this analogy because landlords are not gray wolves and this is not Yellowstone. But regarding your proposed plans much closer to home, making such a dramatic and a severe change to our housing ecosystem has the potential. It actually has the probability of predicating an entire series of unintended consequences. And like the decisions made by Santa Rosa City Councils in years past, decisions that limited new construction and that have brought us to this point, your decisions today may very well be judged and found lacking in years to come. Please reconsider the process, the concept of rent control and how it will affect our local housing ecosystem. Thank you. Thank you. Denise Joaquin, Denise will be followed by Dwayne DeWitt. Is Denise not here again? Okay, so Dwayne DeWitt. All right, there you go. Followed by Enrique Yarsi. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt, I'm a renter. And I was looking at the facts in a number of activities going on today. One is that the population has grown a bit. We're up to 173 counted. That's 2,000 people growth in the last couple of years. But it turns out we also have 2,000 homeless individuals that may not be in that count. So we have a rental housing crisis. And I don't believe it's actually dividing the city. I think the city's actually already divided in one sense. And that's that we have 41% low income people in our city. And then we have 49% above the moderate rate. So we're in a difficult situation. And I came here last week and gave you an anecdote about my current rental situation. The landlord that I mentioned had come up from the South Bay and bought the building, raised our rent mine at the time. It started just three short years ago. It was 936. And right now I'm already up to 1350 after two rent increases from the landlord only owning the building for 16 months. Now it's been sold on the 22nd of April and the new firm is out of Novato. That other person was from the South Bay. So I don't believe it's the Santa Rosa landlords. We know they got heart. We know they care about us. It's those outside predators. It's like those wolves, you know? And I understand the environmental analogy that was given to us. And a 45 day moratorium isn't going to upset the ecological balance. It's actually going to just give us a little temporary time for folks to have a greater public discussion about this. And that's what's really needed. Not the back and forth with the different business organizations casting us versions one way or anecdotes from us renters coming another. Actually a community conversation where we look at what we have and we say, how can we make it better? Keep in mind, it's the taxpayers that provide most of the affordable housing. Last week, the county gave $300,000 to Burbank Housing to build 79 units, which will be over in Roseland on Burbank Avenue. That is the culmination of $22 million of various taxpayers' money that's providing that. It isn't the open market that ever provides affordable housing anymore. That was already built years ago, and now people are just using it as a market situation. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Henry King, followed by Courtney Cox. I'm learning to turn this off. Go delicately. Thanks, Troy. Hi, council. My name's Henry King Yersey. I'm the VP of Diversity of SRJC. A lot of students would have liked to make it here, but we have finals soon, so we have to prepare for that. I strongly support the moratorium, and I strongly urge that y'all vote for it, because it's just a really important thing. That's all I'm gonna say really. I really urge you to support it. There's just a lot of stuff going on, and this would really help out a lot of people, a lot of Sonoma County, and we're all waiting for that break. Stuff is really hard right now, and I am definitely attesting to that. Growing into being an adult is really hard, and I'm starting to feel it, so help me out. Bye. Thank you. Courtney Cox and Courtney will be followed by Nicolette McGowan. Hi, my name is Courtney Cox. I'm a student at SRJC, also going through finals, and I just wanted to urge you to vote in favor of the temporary moratorium, because it's important. I think that anyone, this is temporary, and anyone who's opposed to it really is just, it's a knee-jerk reaction. It's just unnecessary, and it's causing a disruption to what we're trying to do. It's the foot in the door that we need to start making radical change, and I hope that you guys all consider all of everyone who's out there who can't be here today, but who definitely have their eyes and ears open, their minds open, and they're watching you, and they're hoping that you make the right decisions. Thank you. Thank you. Nicolette McGowan, followed by Ava Grannam. Hi, my name is Nicolette McGowan. This is my son, Justice McGowan. We strongly support the rent moratorium. We're very excited about this day and this time. This is gonna mean so much for so many people. I do wanna point out that we have a lot of respect as a community for our city council members, and I've never heard you once say that you're not going to build, so it's unfair to insinuate that the rent moratorium or our rent stabilization and just cause eviction policies that we've been blessed enough to have you vote in favor of. It doesn't insinuate that you're not going to build. I know that you have beautiful plans for our city in general, and we thank you for that. This is truly a blessed day. Please vote in favor of the rent moratorium. Thank you. Thank you. Eva, followed by Kalani Raposa. Good afternoon, you guys. So I'm probably still not gonna be able to touch on what I wanna talk about, but I wanted to come and say hello and thank you for everything that you're doing still. Really, I wanna say that this moratorium is necessary, and with all of this sweat and tears and everything else that has been put into these efforts, I really believe that it's useless without something like this to really back up what has been going on in anticipation and all the conversations and people are scared, it's human, you know? And I keep thinking back to all my economics classes, like it's happening and people know it's happening and so people on the other side who are renting are suffering even more, and it's heartbreaking to watch it happen, and I just really hope that we can work together and make this positive all around because without, you know, kind of sowing the little rips we've made along the way to get here, it's not gonna be worth it, so I really hope that we can do this. Please vote yes. Let's vote. Thank you. Kalani, followed by Jerry Lalone. Hi, my name's Kalani Raposa and thank you for allowing me to speak. I work on solutions for the homeless students at the GEC and when I think about this moratorium, I think that there's gonna be more homeless if it's not voted on. What we have now that we didn't have with the first wave of homelessness, we have an opportunity to create a contingency plan and create a stop gap, but if we don't, there will be a second wave of homeless people and we can't afford to not vote for the moratorium and to do nothing about the current homeless problem now because I fear it'll double. Now I have a good friend of mine, he's a small business owner, he grew up here in Santa Rosa, he's been here all his life. Occasionally I help him in a shop and he hates that I come here and advocate for homeless people because he feels like they've taken over his parks, they've taken over the city and we argue back and forth and today he told me he realized that his lease is up in two months and in two months he's gonna be living on a month to month lease and everything that he's worked for as a small business owner can go away just like that and he could be in a tent next to me in Camp McKayla. Now he's partnered up with a gentleman that started a small business with him, he was employee number five at Loganese Beer Company. Now my buddy doesn't know that his business is gonna go that far, but it could. Now what would happen to Mr. Reggie if he were to lose his house when he was crafting beer in his garage fast forward 20 years later, the biggest distributor in the world that partnered with Heineken. Now those dreams are huge and lofty and my friend is just a little guy but he deserves that shot without having to worry about losing his house every night in the next two months. So I'm really asking you to consider that and if you don't vote for the moratorium then please throw every resource you have into addressing the homeless problem now because it is like the grapes of wrath out there. It's getting violent, it's getting ugly and it's getting terribly difficult. There's a spirit of Tom Jode in every single one of us and I ask that you dig down inside of yourselves and find it. We're not just faces, we're human beings, we're struggling and we can give back if we've given the opportunity to and we don't have to worry about where we're gonna lay our heads the next day. I always have extra time and I don't know what to do with it so just thank you for hearing my words. Thank you. Jerry. Thank you. Beth Streets. I'm Jerry LaLondberg, I have a home in Santa Rosa. I'm ebbing between anger and despair and hope and I tend to be a very hopeful person. What I see every day in my job, person to person, face to face with people who are homeless and people who have lived through this crisis or living in this crisis is horrible and I try to help them move forward and I try to give them the encouragement I need and I find myself describing the advocacy for homelessness that I'm doing to some of my clients and I want to say how proud I am of what the council did last week and I want to personally invite all six of you to please vote for this moratorium tonight. I think you need to step up. I think you have some solutions and you have a position that can make a difference. You guys are doing that now and I appreciate that and to the apartment owners and to the folks who are speaking against this, there are realistic descriptions. To say that the apartment owners are gonna leave or gonna get out of the business is bullshit. It is just, you know, Santa Rosa is the fourth hottest housing market in the country, labbed in April. So don't tell us that kind of stuff. Tell us what would really work so that workers and people with disabilities who only make $920 a month or people who are on retirement social security can have a place to live in this country and in this community. That's the solution that we need but we're looking at 40% of our population. I don't know what the answer is and I don't assume, you know, I absolutely know that every investor and particularly business owners in this community are the people that we need because you're the smart people with the money. So let's use your money to house the people who work here and to house the one third of the homeless people who cannot work. You know, in the 10 year homeless plan that's what it says is we need to find solutions, get those folks on SSI. Let's do that but let's find them housing, permanent supportive housing that they can afford. We're talking about the Palms and then I recall that Gayla Barron last week and talking about the earthquakes said there were 13 hotels in 1969 who lived in those. Those are the kinds of things that we need to create but not at $481,000 a unit which is what the crossroads is costing you, $38 million is $481,000 a unit. So where's the solution? I don't know what the solution is and I'm here to stand with you to find one. Thank you. Thanks Jerry. Beth Streets and Beth will be followed by Denise Wuckey. Good evening council members. I ask you to please reconsider this moratorium. It does have ramifications that I don't think you're aware of. We are almost six months through this year stopping me from raising rents. When my rents are already below market, can and will have a significant impact on any capital improvements that I intended to do. And my capital improvement projects are big money. They're good jobs in our city. For me to do my parking lot is a $250,000 project. I won't be able to do that. Your moratorium does not have a specific timeline and when this topic came up last year for conversation, it went from 45 days to potentially 180 days which will then carry us throughout the year. Again, you will impede us as landlords and managers and property owners to do capital improvements to maintain our properties and you are only going to impact a very small percentage. And I think that there is a big public service that needs to be done before any moratorium is in place. People really believe that this affects all units. They don't understand that it does not affect all units and it's only going to affect a very small amount and there's going to be battles. There's going to be arguments. It's going to get uglier because well, why is this unit not rent control and this one across the street is? We all know the answer but the consumer does not and that's not going to help them or help the situation. So I really would like you to just step back and reevaluate this before you institute any moratorium. Thank you. Thank you. Denise, those are all the cards that I have. The Steam Council members. My name is Denise Jackwin and I live in Santa Rosa. I live in Orchard West Senior Apartments in Northwest Santa Rosa. I want to say that I am in favor of the moratorium. I feel that it is the other side of the rent stabilization ordinance that you're evaluating that the two do need to go together and that the moratorium will continue to protect the lower income housing that has been identified by being protected that the lower income housing, we actually have it already and it needs to be protected with adoption of the moratorium and the adoption of the rent stabilization. And one thing that I want to tell you what happened in my community is that we stood up for ourselves. We got together, we were talking and we say, this can't go on. We can't continue to live here. And as we watched trailer after moving van after moving van take away our neighbors, we said, hey, this is enough. We became brave and we came down here and we stood up for ourselves. And before this issue, I did not know who my city council people were. And it took me about three meetings to finally identify who was who, but now I can name you all on one hand. Well, seven fingers. And that what this issue has done is created a real community in Santa Rosa. We're all connected. We're connected on social media. We're connected on Facebook. We are here to support the council. We are here to support you in the future as you go forward on this issue and to support you in November. And again, I am here to support the moratorium. Thank you very much. Thank you. Those are all the cards that I have. I'm bringing the item back to the council. Council, any final questions before we move forward? I asked you because I'm gonna need to have a motion before we discuss. So I'm going to start with your question. We had discussed a week ago having a look back where if a, that went to January 1st to so that individuals who have already raised rents 10% don't raise them an additional 3% during this 45 day period. I don't see the look back in the ordinance language and I'm just wondering if it can be added or if there's an issue with regard to why it was left on. My understanding is that's because that would be part of the rent control ordinance, not part of the moratorium. Can it be made a part of the moratorium? That's not really part of a moratorium. A moratorium means that you hold rents to a certain place, not that you roll back the rents. I'm not talking about rolling back rents. I'm talking about having the moratorium include a look back. That is a rollback. Well, you're saying you want the rents to be what they were January 1st? No, I'm saying that if rents were raised between January 1st and today, that that raise is considered part of the 3% increase, which is not the same as a rollback. It's a look back. So when we look at the 45 day period of 3%, we're saying don't you can't add 3% on to an existing rent increase made between now and the 1st? Okay, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about the other comment. Yes. Then you could, if you wanted to amend section two, add at the end of that sentence where it says no landlord shall increase rent by more than 3% in a cumulative 12 month period. And I think that was language that we had had in the original version that was presented to you. I'm not sure why it wasn't included. It was and it had been in a different version and I just wanted to make sure that we could add that language to this version. Yes. Okay, thank you. Mr. Corsi. Just include that when you introduce the item. Tell me when you need me to make the motion. Okay, thank you. Thanks for that clarification. I want to follow up on the question. The cumulative 12 month period, would that be able to go backward or would that begin on 30 days from our vote tonight when the moratorium begins? So if you had already done an increase within a 12 month rolling period, then you couldn't do another one. If you did one 12 months ago, you'd be able to increase it by 3%. But if you did it say two months ago, you would not be able to increase it further. Okay. I want to stay on this for just a second because I think it's important for us to understand and for the community to understand as well. All of us have received numerous emails from people who have said that our actions on this item will cause them to raise their rents to as much as they can get at this point. So I want to know with the moratorium and or with the rent control ordinance, what will landlords be able to do? They would be able to increase the rent by 3%, up to 3% within a 12 month period if that's what you add to the ordinance. Okay. So if they've already increased it, like I said, two months ago, they would not be able to increase it further. And that would begin, I'm sorry. I just want to make sure I understand. Yeah, so this is a regular ordinance. It's not an urgency ordinance. So it would become effective 31 days after the second reading, which will be next week. So that would be June 18th, I believe. And then you would look 12 months back in either direction, 12 months, yes. But between now and then they could do whatever they feel is necessary with their rents. Yes, and then you would address that the second part when you have the rent control ordinance. As I understood it, you indicated that you want to roll the rents back to what was in effect on June one, I'm sorry, January one of 2016. So that would pick up if somebody did that during that period of time. Thank you. Can I ask a question, a terrifying question? If someone hadn't raised them 5% and you could only allow 3% and it goes back to January and they've got a contract, what does that do to the contracts and do they have to refund the 2% or does it grandfathered? That I would need to look into. That was a lot of ifs in there. Well, I did receive an email from a landlord who said there were increases since January. In fact, perhaps even in the last 11 months, let's say 10 months, what does this, how does this affect those signed contracts, et cetera? And that's, well, that was the question. If somebody has a long-term lease in which there's already pre-agreed increases, I believe that they would be protected from this. Primarily this relates to people that are on a month to month tenancy. So people aren't giving 30 days notice so that they can jack up the rent or under basic landlord tenant law they have to give notice to increase the rent. If you have a one-year lease, generally you set the rent for that entire one-year period in the lease or if it's a longer period, lease you might have increases already in the contract. And so I don't believe that this would override that if it was a long-term lease, but I will confirm that for you. Okay, just there was some confusion in by some landlords. I just want to get some clarity with that. I appreciate it. Thank you. If there are no further questions, I will entertain a motion. I think I have the motion. The motion is to introduce an interim ordinance to impose a temporary moratorium on rent increases in order to prevent rental increases exceeding 3% in a cumulative 12-month period while a rent stabilization ordinance is drafted and waive further reading of the text. Second. Thank you. I have a motion and a second. Discussion council, any final words before the vote? Well, I would like to say that once the ordinance is in place, as we have discussed it, going forward, individuals, there are still some fine points around capital improvements, fine points about having a history of low rent that we are discussing. Individuals who are in those situations would be able to come forward with an application to have a rent that is slightly higher than 3% based upon what we had discussed previously. Right, and that is required by law. It's not part of the interim because this is only a temporary 45-day ordinance, but under the rent control law, you are required to have a due process procedure where a landlord can show that they have good cause to, for example, if they made a major capital improvement to increase the rents more than the allowed amount in the rent control ordinance. That will be discussed as we discuss the language of the ordinance, but I do want to say that I think it's very important for us to push pause right now. I think a lot of people are afraid of things that maybe they shouldn't be afraid of or anticipate more than they, more than is coming. So I think it's very important for us to push pause on the rent increases now and allow us, the breathing room to have a full discussion of how to move forward with the stabilization ordinance. Obviously, I believe that we have a problem with displacement in our community. I think the data supports that we have that problem. And I hope that we can move forward to prevent displacement, thank you. Thank you. Any other comments, Councilman? Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you. My position hasn't changed from last week based on what I have studied about the impact that rent control has had on other communities. But an additional thing that I know many members in this community are working on regarding our homeless population. It's using that evidence-based housing first model. And I think continuing in this direction, with that housing first model, we're trying to develop some strategies. How do we encourage landlords to rent to this population? And I just think that's a big part of us, I think, addressing the homeless population. So the things that I've heard people say in their experiences, that's all very true. And I wish there was that easy answer. I don't think rent control is that. And unfortunately, I think one of those unintended consequences is it's gonna be very difficult to recruit landlords to help us with our housing first model. That's an evidence-based approach that's gonna start helping, I hope, address some of our homeless situation. So there's just a little bit more information that hopefully some people will consider. And if there's some way we can work around that, I'd love to hear what the potential solution to that would be. Thank you. Mr. Waisaki. I'm just going to reiterate that my position hasn't changed as well, but in response to my colleagues' comments, new investment is not curtailed by this. This is all pre-1995 housing, and it's all based upon the feeling that the city of Santa Rosa has become anti-business. And I would, I'm sorry, ma'am, you may not want to agree with me, but I would at least, and I know you don't agree with some of the people here that are in a lot of pain. But they are in a lot of pain, and there are fellow community members. So I'm just going to leave it there right now, but I think we have an obligation as a government to help them out. You might not agree with us, and I'm sorry you don't, but we have a lot of people in need. And so that's why we're going to hit a pause button right here, at least my vote is. Thank you. Any other comments, Council? Well, I will be consistent in my vote. I am concerned with the ramifications. I think of rent control as a bit of a firecracker, so I would have a hard time shortening the fuse. So I will be not in support of this moratorium. And I do hope that at the end of the day, it would be, I hope that all of the, my concerns that I feel about these, this strategy is not realized, but I fear that because that would be great. If I'm hoping that I'm wrong in the next year or two or three, I sincerely hope that I'm wrong and that these things don't come to pass. But if they do, it will be hard on even more people, perhaps, than in our current situation. So I'll be voting no on the moratorium. So your votes, Council? And I have four ayes and two noes. Council member, the Vice Mayor, Schuett-Hellman, Mayor Sawyer voting no. Thank you, Council. Can we clarify this comes back for a second reading? Yes. Is that correct? Yes. So we didn't have the second, we didn't have the first reading before. This is the first reading. This is the first reading of this ordinance. So it'll be on your next week's agenda. Thank you. Thank you for that. Mr. McGlynn, 14.2. Item 14.2 reports, Santa Rosa water fund to fund loan by the purpose of acquiring Laguna treatment plant buffer property. Linda Reed, interim director of water department presenting. Welcome, Ms. Reed. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Sawyer and members of the council. This is a fund to fund loan council item. Typically for our property purchase, we would not be coming to the council. We do fund an annual amount in the annual budget for property purchases. And it would be under the Board of Public Utilities purview as to whether or not to buy a piece of property. In this case, we are actually coming to you for the fund to fund loan agreement and not the property purchase per se. The sub regional treatment plant serves the city of Santa Rosa and its partner agencies. And as you can see from this picture, it is out off of Yano Road and it is surrounded by rural properties. And we have made it a practice to buy buffer properties around the plant. Currently all the properties that are shaded in yellow are owned by the city. And the property in question is the red one. The owner approached us with a very reasonable offer and we had recently bought the two properties across the street from that property. And so we are out of funds in the sub regional system to acquire additional property. We do have funds in our local wastewater system. So this request is to borrow funds from the local wastewater system and use that in the sub regional system. This is advantageous to both funds because we do have a available balance in the local wastewater fund as part of our 10 year long range plan. We are using that balance down as rate offset for the next five to 10 years. But in the meantime, we do have those funds available. And so this fund to fund loan would pay off the purchase price in five years. And so we would still have those funds available for what they're intended to be for. Right now the city's current portfolio is earning about 0.77% interest. In this case, the local wastewater agency, local wastewater fund will pay 2.5% interest, which is cheaper than we could borrow it for somewhere else, but more than the sub regional system is getting. So really what's before you is that the water and finance departments and the Board of Public Utilities ask that you approve a fund to fund loan from the local wastewater system to the sub regional system for the purchase of buying the property. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Great, thank you. So just for the public's knowledge, fund to fund meeting, two city fund, one city fund, loaning to another city fund, fund to fund. Correct. Thank you. Any questions, Council? Mr. Weisauke. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. How was a reasonable offer? How was that conclusion arrived at? Jill Scott, our right away agent is in the audience and she could answer any very specific questions. But in general, we get an appraisal for any property and then we negotiate just like anybody would to purchase property at a reasonable price based on the appraisal. So we just get one appraisal, not two? Usually what we do is get one appraisal and I do a market analysis of my own and compare the appraisal to the market analysis and then negotiate with the owner for the property. Is the price by whatever metric you're using that we're paying for this property, is it lower than the price for the other properties that we just recently purchased? It's in line with the other properties we just purchased. In line, does that mean more or less? Well, they're different sizes and different things but some have houses, some don't so it's not comparing apples to apples but overall the purchase price is close to the purchase price comparable acreage and per acreage amount. Okay and thank you, I appreciate that. I know you can't divulge exactly what it is and this land would lie, the property would not be used for any other purposes, it's just a buffer zone. At this point, this piece would just be used for a buffer property. I am in the process of looking at uses for all buffer property, the proper uses for it around the looping and treatment plant but at this point it's just buffer property. Okay, last question. Is it possible this could be, this and other properties could be a composting site at some point in time? Could be. A composting site at some point in time. We are looking at the compost site right now which will be back to you and not too long regarding that or to be P you first and then to you. Thank you, that's fine. Mr. Corsi, are there any buildings on this property? There is a house and a barn and an outbuilding on this property. And if we purchase it, what would happen to those buildings? So we're purchasing this property with a life estate. So the owner in it now will be living in it until we take the remainder once that life estate is over. At that time, we think we would use the barn for storage. And as far as the house we don't know right now maybe for office space, we've thought but it's not a permanent plan yet. That's part of the plan that I'm looking at for all the property around the Laguna Tremont plant. Okay, thank you. Ms. Combs. This may be the obvious question but what are we buffering? I mean, are we buffering for smell? Are we buffering for chemicals? Are we buffering for noise? What is it that we're buffering for? So it's a little bit of all of the above. The plant itself is, as you see, kind of an industrial type of operation. It runs 24 seven. So there are lights that are on. There are noises that happen. There can be smells associated with it, odors. There's also a chicken farm nearby. So it depends. But there have been instances in the past when property surrounding a existing plant gets bought, gets developed suddenly. Somebody says, but I don't want to live next to that. And it's like, well, but you bought the property. So we're just trying to avoid that situation. And you'll be coming back to us with possible land uses, other than buffering in the future. In part, I'm... It probably would go to the Board of Public Utilities unless it involves some rezoning or some other thing that would require change to the general plan. Okay. I understand we have opportunity sites. But I have mixed feelings about making this be an opportunity site for unless it would be very temporary emergency housing. But I'm thinking about it. I'm hesitant though, because of the need for buffering. So I'm looking forward to that future conversation. I think other questions, Council, before I move to public comment. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. Duane DeWitt from Roseland. I'm never an advocate of taking any housing out of the housing stock. It was nice that Mr. Corsi asked about the buildings on the site. People are living there. So the way these things work often is that you pay top dollar because people are living there. And then you tear it down. And then I'm thinking, well, wait a minute. It was an asset at one minute. It was paid a lot to get something. And then down the road, destroyed. That's what happened at the bear farm. All right? And you may think, well, why do you keep referring back to that stuff? Because this is a pattern that the City of Santa Rosa staff embarks upon. Not necessarily our elected officials. It's city staff that have this outlook like, well, we got deep pockets. We'll buy up whatever we want at whatever price we think is reasonable to them, but often not reasonable to the people who live in that general area and see that the appraisal is often higher than they can show other properties of similar size, similar use, residential, rural residential type stuff. So there's a dilemma here. What I'd like you folks to do, and I know you'll say, well, that's not a part of this right now, but in a way it is, is stipulate to staff whenever they decide that they're gonna find a residential unit that's occupied that they find a way to replace it. If you're gonna knock it out of the housing stock, part of your goals are to maintain the housing stock. So they should come to you also with a proposal of how they'll make sure that another housing unit is available elsewhere for these folks that'll move out. Typically their response is, well, we're paying market rates so those people are gonna be well off enough, they'll be able to find another spot. But we're in a tight real estate market and has happened before, like when they knocked out 17 housing units on Stony Point Road, all those folks moved. Nobody's still in Roseland. They couldn't find spots. So this is something to think about and I know it goes beyond just buffering some compost, smelling type things. I like compost in a way though, I grew up around farms. That's what Roseland was out there. So long story short, please if you're gonna pay top dollar for a housing unit, maybe they could save that house and move it elsewhere, not just tear it down, which is their typical approach. Thank you very much for your time. Sure, Mr. Waisaki, a question. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Based upon what I just heard, thought came in my mind. Many, many people in our community think that our real estate prices, of course they go up and down, but we're nearing the top of another bubble or top of another rise. Now that this is a life estate and they came to us, I'm thinking that perhaps the seller thinks that there's another rise time to get the good money while it's to be had. Tell me why we're not buying at the top of a market in your opinion as opposed to waiting for prices to adjust. It's kind of impossible to say if we're at the top of the market or if we're not, things are leveling off. We have seen that recently. I don't believe that we're at the top of the market yet for these and I don't believe that we have paid. This was not such as like an eminent domain situation. This was a willing buyer and a willing seller and someone that came to us and we negotiated the price. So I believe that we got a fair price, that we paid a fair price for the property. I don't believe we paid over a fair market value by any means and it's not my opinion that we're at the top of the market yet. Does that answer your question? It kind of does. What factors in your opinion that we're not at the top of the market? I know it's an imperfect science, we're all guessing. Just looking at what's happening with housing prices recently, it's been BPUs per view to buy buffer property around that area and we have had some of the pieces that we've really wanted to get that are very close to LTP become available, mostly because people are getting elderly and they'd like to move. Again, I don't believe that we paid over a fair market value for the price. What's the total price? I think you can see that in the resolution, we don't want to disclose terms and conditions but we do have a not to exceed price of $600,000 in the resolution that will allow you to make an estimate. Other questions, council? Okay, so we'll just entertain a motion. So I believe I decided I would move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving a Santa Rosa water internal fund to fund loan for financing the purchase of buffer property adjacent to the Laguna treatment plant and waive further even the text. And I need a second. A second. Thank you. I'll just make a comment. Mr. Waisaki actually mentioned something that I find interesting. It was my question about our future use. I think that there is a fair amount of land out there and I think that we will find that this program of acquisition for buffer may well lend itself in the future to other uses that will be beneficial to the city of Santa Rosa and our rate payers and perhaps even more than that. So I'm supportive of it. I'm glad you asked the question about the compost site because goodness, we need one. So any other comments, council, before we vote? All right, your votes, council. And I had six eyes. Thank you very much. Mr. McGlynn, 14-3. Item 14-3, report, press Democrat building row vacation, request to summarily vacate approximately 756 square feet of public right-of-way for Mendocino Avenue and Ross Street occurring beneath the press Democrat building footprint for the property located at 427 Mendocino Avenue, file number, VAC16-002, Patrick Streeter, senior planner presenting. Are you going to introduce Claire? I am also going to introduce, just to set the item in context and we will be brief. We know it's, you've been running late today or long and late, I guess. Just to set this item in context, so the right-of-way vacation is a tool and it's a tool that staff has recently presented to the council as a tool to use to incentivize housing sites, the development and investment of housing sites. And that was on April 19th. We presented that as one of many other tools that we'll be moving forward with to explore all the different ways to incentivize housing. We also that night had an opportunity to consider a specific opportunity to pursue vacation of right-of-way to incentivize housing and that was the DTURC winery apartment and the council at that night adopted a notice of intent and that allows staff to proceed with the process. So that item is under consideration. Tonight it's a little bit different. It's the same tool, vacation of right-of-way, but it's to incentivize or make a downtown commercial site project ready. And obstacles or challenges to making investment attractive to a site come in many different shapes and sizes and forms. And so tonight we're gonna learn about why this is important to this property to make it attractive for future development. Thank you, Mayor Sire, members of the council. The item is for an application of vacation of right-of-way and it's to clear a portion of city-owned property that's beneath the existing Press Democrat building on Mendocino Avenue. And so currently there are portions of the right-of-way from Mendocino Avenue as well as Ross Street that are underneath the building footprint. So vacations of right-of-way are determined, the process for vacating those parcels are determined by the California States and Highways Code and it allows for a summary vacation so there's no necessity for resolution of intent. In the case of a summary vacation, the council could just make that action in a single meeting. And that's available when a project has not been used for public purposes in the last five years. In the case of these two portions of right-of-way, they've been sitting beneath the building since the expansion to the building was built in 1974. So they haven't been used for a public purpose in that time. With, if this vacation of right-of-way is granted, there'd be no change to the existing sidewalks or curbs or width of Mendocino Avenue or Ross Street. So the Press Democrat building is located in downtown Santa Rosa. And the portions that are to be vacated are a six-inch strip of right-of-way along Mendocino Avenue as well as a three and three-quarter foot extension of the right-of-way along Ross Street. So they're very small slivers of the building but because they are public property underneath an existing building, it makes it very difficult for the building owner to negotiate with lending agencies or anything like that because clearing title for that property is quite difficult. So considering the fact that the right-of-way has not been used in the last five years or even longer, it's recommended by planning and economic development that the council by resolution approve the summary vacation of right-of-way for Mendocino Avenue and Ross Street that's currently beneath the footprint of 427 Mendocino Avenue. Staff is available for questions and the project applicant representative is also present. Thank you, Ms. Combs. Thank you. Sounds like an ups in 1974. Do we know if it was an ups in 1974 when the building was expanded? And if so, were dollars transferred to have the right-of-way either on our part or on the part of the building owner? Was there anybody involved at that time? There's no record of what discussions were had at the time of the construction, but there wouldn't have been any financial transfer for the granting that wouldn't have been granted the right-of-way would have just existed and the building would have sat on top of it. So there'd be no financial exchange associated with it. Staff's general consensus in reviewing this project is that that should never have taken place of a building sitting on top of right-of-way. It's an ups. So roughly what is 756 square feet of downtown property worth? That's not a question I'm prepared to answer at the moment, but you'd have to take it into context that it's a six-inch strip of property and a three-and-three-quarter foot strip of property. I'm just, we've had 756 square feet of public property taken by some kind of ups and I'm trying to figure out what's fair to the public in terms of what downtown property is worth. Well, also to, the city never actually had a financial investment in that property. So there's two ways that the city can hand over existing property that's under control of the city. One is through a vacation of right-of-way, which we have before us tonight. Another is through the sale and disposal of surplus property. So that's typically when the city has surplus property that they have real estate that they have interest in. And then the city would want to determine whether or not there's value in that. Did the city pay for that real estate at the beginning? And then should it be due compensation afterwards? It would be interesting bidding on this piece of property. In that case, the applicant would have to have an appraisal and look for similar sites in order to judge the value. In order to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for sidewalks, did we have to expand the sidewalk in any way? Did we have expenses associated with adding width to the sidewalk because this property impinges upon that area? The expansion of the building would have taken place before the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the future, should the project be redeveloped? It would be within the city's purview to require a dedication of land to make a compliant with the act at that time. So the city's not prevented from reacquiring that right-of-way in the future associated with a new development. Can you help me understand what you just said? Yeah. So, because to me, that's where the expense is. We're going to have a future expense to make sure that sidewalk is the proper width. But that expense would be shouldered by the developer of the property. That's the way we typically do development in the city is when a new proposal comes in and it goes through review our engineering and development services would look at its compliance with ADA standards as well as the general plan, street width standards. And if it's not in compliance, then it would be conditioned to dedicate that right-of-way to the city. So I can hear the person coming to the planning counter and saying, all I want to do is re-carpet in pain. The inside of this building that I've just bought, is that going to trigger having to do the ADA compliance on the sidewalk? No. So just because a property changes hands doesn't mean that we'll get made whole. It's tied to the structure itself. So even today. So they have to take the structure down in order to, for us to know? Help me with this, please. It's based on a certain percentage and the type of alterations. I don't think just painting and carpeting would trigger it. But they always say that when they come to the counter. Remodeling the front entrance or you're doing something to the structure itself that would likely trigger the need for that. Okay. I need to think on that a second. Thank you. Mr. Corsi. Do we know if there are any other properties in this block or anywhere in the city that have this similar problem? There are other sites where people have either with the city's permission or inadvertently built over public right-of-way. And that was one of our concerns about setting a precedent. This is, I think, a unique situation in terms of this building and its location and the potential economic development. I think there's probably much better and higher uses that the city would recuperate sales tax and other things from this site if it were to be sold. So I think that's the economic benefit that staff is talking about. And you mentioned, I forget whether it was Claire or Patrick, but the phrase project ready, is that generic or is there a project proposed at this site? We do have an applicant representative here, so I don't want to speak for his intent, but as presented to staff, the application that was the intent is to address a challenge for selling this property or doing something with this property. It looks like the applicant would like to speak. Mr. Herd's coming down. Good evening, Greg Herd. I'm a principal with BKF engineers in Santa Rosa. Our client purchased the property a few years ago or within the last year or two. And as part of going through the survey process of what he figured out what he actually bought, it was discovered that Mendocino Avenue, when the building was built, it encroached on Mendocino Avenue through a oops component. There's an agreement between the city of Santa Rosa and the owner that runs with the land to allow that encroachment to occur until such time the building is destroyed, demolished, is redeveloped, then the property on Mendocino Avenue would revert back to the city. You couldn't rebuild the building on that strip of property. So we're going through trying to refinance it and that agreement shows up in the Tata Report and causes some concern for any lending institution to loan money that's secured by a building that if the building burns down, you can't build it back for what they secured or the security for the loan. In doing additional survey work, there was a decree in 1892 that dedicated property to the city along Ross Street. Nobody has discovered it until we surveyed it. The building's been over that since the building, the building was built, it was never known that it was over the property. We discovered it through some extensive title search which made it even more important to get the property clear from the encroach or the encumbering the city property so that it would be framed clear so that we could find a lending institution to loan on it. If this passes, we will have the ability to secure a loan to commence and explore development opportunities. But right now, we can't do anything on it until it's cleaned up. In terms of fair market value, I think it goes from four inches to down to a quarter of an inch on Mendocino Avenue. I don't know how to value that and I don't know how Ross Street was created. It happened back in the 1800s and we discovered it and the title found out about it and it's on the title report now. We're asking that it be abandoned if a development were to come forward as the planner has indicated, if one were to come forward, it doesn't preclude the city from requesting new right-of-way that's conducive with the general plan and zoning for whatever improvements would eventually or may be needed for Mendocino and Ross Street. You could ask for the ultimate width of those streets if it's ever needed. The developer's fine with that. It's just we can't get out of the starting gates until we have clear property. There is no proposal for a project at this point. At this point. Thank you, Mr. Heard. Ms. Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have been chuckling over this item. I have a very hard time classifying it as an oops. I think it was probably done deliberately and I appreciate the owners currently would have not been a part of that. So why are we not talking about simply granting an easement? I think as Mr. Heard expressed, there already is a written agreement between the property owner and the city, but as he said, that is not apparently sufficient for the lender. Mr. Heard, do you have additional information? I can appreciate that they would like very much for you to own that building free and clear, but you took it. There is a current agreement with the city on Mendocino Avenue that allows the building to be on there. How it was built, how it was constructed is 1970s. It was discovered after it was built that it got built in the wrong spot by less than a foot. I hope that's acceptable tolerances today. It may be back then it was. There is an agreement that the city says that's okay, you can leave it here. If the building is removed, destroyed or fire or major remodel on that portion where it is known that it's encroaching, it cannot be rebuilt there. So if I'm a lender and gonna lend $10 million and have it secured by a piece of prop, by a building that if the building were to fail in an earthquake or anything like that, the lender has lost his security. I appreciate that. My question is, why are we not considering an easement as opposed to granting it free and clear when an easement is an also enforceable legal right to that property line? It's your guys, it's the council's prerogative if that's what they want to do. It complicates our lending in a delays and then a potential investment. Okay, I'm not unsupportive of what you are trying to get done here. I have to ask when I'm giving away. And yeah, it's six inches, but I would be interested to see what the property appraised for before and what it appraised for immediately after that unlawful taking of public property. I'm also chuckling at Ms. Fowler's comment that there might be a more commercially viable and public use that this building could be put towards. But I just want to put that for the council's consideration that there are other legally enforceable mechanisms to make it so that they can do what they want to do. Thank you. Other questions, council? I'll entertain a motion. Oh, another question? Yes, it does, does, I would have thought that the piece of paper they have was functionally an easement, but it sounds as if it's not actually an easement. It's actually a license agreement. Usually when there's a long-term use and there's a structure that's different than an easement. So I believe what it is is a license agreement. So if it were an easement, does that solve his? I don't believe so. Do people loan money to a building on an easement? I couldn't speak for the lenders, but usually easements are for access for ingress and egress and not usually for building onto somebody else's property. If we, how do we maintain a record of our interest in having a follow-up if the building is removed? How do we maintain a record of asking for that? If we do as we are requested and there's a decision to 10 years to take the building down, many of us won't be in the seats. What would trigger us to know to ask for the width of the sidewalk to be restored or similar needs to see might have? Any new development and the planning staff would look at what public improvements should be required as part of the property. And depending on what it is built, they would determine whether, as Mr. Hurd said, and staff has said, whether there's a need to widen the sidewalk, put in curb ramp, whatever would have a nexus to the building or whatever project is proposed. I wanted to follow up if I could on the issue of the easement and could we consider an easement? I'm sorry, I don't have the language in the zoning code with me, we can look it up if it's important and that's fine. But there is a policy in the zoning code that speaks to structures in an easement and it's caused great grief for a lot of applicants trying to have allowances to encroach into an easement and there's a zoning policy that is very clearly written and doesn't allow any flexibility and I believe staff has looked at that and we had to reject that as an opportunity. But it's one of the things that we typically look at. We look at all the different options to and try to direct the applicant towards the best, most successful option. I'm sorry, Claire, Ms. Hartman, would you go back? You rejected it because it would make the applicant's life difficult? No, we look at what is the mechanism, what was brought before us as the applicant's request and we look at what is the appropriate mechanism to facilitate that request and in this case, the request was the vacationer right away but we looked at alternatives to that and there is a city zoning policy and I'm sorry, I don't have it in a staff report but we can look it up before you act on this item if you want me to. And we spend conversations at length discussing that about its clarity and that structures are not allowed in easements. I see what you're saying. It's an undesirable use. Other questions, council? Can I entertain a motion at this point? Who has the item? Thank you, Mr. Weiss. I have it and... I did all have the comments after the motion is read and I get a second, assuming I get a second. I'm gonna resist any comments or jokes or you name it because there's plenty of room here for it but I will introduce the resolution of the council. The city of Santa Rosa summerly vacating approximately 756 square feet of public right away occurring beneath the footprint of 427 Mendocino Avenue. File number of VAC 16-002 and wait for the reading of the text. Second. Thank you, I have a motion and a second. I would love to see this really great opportunity site developed into something more useful. I really would, I can't wait to see another project come. I would love to, I would hate to try to go through and do surveys on every property in downtown Santa Rosa and find out where the mistakes are, why, when, how and where and quite frankly, in a case like this, this best use of this property, I couldn't wait to see happen. That may perhaps we could eliminate yet another dead zone in our downtown. So with that, I'll be wholeheartedly supporting this vacation of right away regardless of what happened 42 years ago. My vote. I have six lies and one no. Council member Carlson voting five eyes and one no. Council member Carlson voting no. That was just, that was for me. I know you did it. Yeah, I know. Thank you. Moving on to our public hearing, Mr. McGlynn. Item 15.1, public hearing authorizing submission of the 2016 to 2020 consolidated plan and the fiscal year 2016-2017 action plan to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Nancy Manchester presenting. Welcome, Nancy. Hey, good evening, Mayor Sawyer, members of the council. The item before you today tonight authorizes submission of the 2016 to 2020 consolidated plan and the fiscal year, excuse me, 2016-17 action plan to HUD. So the plan identifies housing and community development needs for the term of the plan and is required by HUD in order to receive federal funding in the form of Community Development Block Grant, CDBG, Home Investment Partnerships, which we call home and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS or HOPWA. The last plan submission covered 2014 to 2019. However, transfer of HOPWA funds to the city from the state necessitated earlier out of cycle update. The dates of 2016 to 2020 were chosen to align Santa Rosa's schedule with the other HUD entitlement districts in the area, which are Sonoma County and Petaluma. And eligibility to be an entitlement jurisdiction is based on population data provided by the Census Bureau. So Santa Rosa being the principal city of the metropolitan statistical area is one. Other cities with populations of 50,000 or more like Petaluma is another. And then urban counties with populations of at least 200,000 excluding the population of entitled cities. It's a little trivia for you. So this item relates to Council Bill 1.2, create a strong sustainable economic base, evaluate housing initiatives, housing for all. So the first tier of the consolidated plan goals is to increase the supply of affordable rental housing for low income households, provide housing assistance and support for low income HIV positive persons and their families, preserve existing affordable housing stock and provide housing and services to special needs populations. Second tier plan goals, which would move up in priority if we were allotted more funding, would include an increase in access to home ownership, funding for public facilities or improvements and economic development activities. So you can see the annual funding amounts here, almost 1.4 million in CDBG, including program income, $551,000 in home, including program income, and $396,830 in federal funds for HOPWA. As I mentioned earlier, this is a new funding source to Santa Rosa, but it's not a new federal program. It was formerly administered by the state of California and is now administered by the city of Santa Rosa. And that is because the population, the concentration of the population served by this program is here in the city limits. So outreach for the program was a 30 day plan review period, a 30 day plan review period from March 30th to April 30th and that included two public meetings on April 30th and today, community meeting ads and public hearing notices in La Voz and the press Democrat, mailed notices to over 300 developers, service providers, nonprofits, housing professionals and multifamily property owners. We emailed notices to city council, housing authority, community advisory board, continuum of care and assorted, affordable housing developers. We had noticing on the city's website the housing Facebook page and the community engagement Facebook page. The full consolidated plan and the executive summary were made available at a variety of locations, including the city manager's office and the main library. And the executive summary was made available in both English and Spanish. One of the items in your staff report mentions that we had not received any comments to date. However, we did receive a comment from Habitat for Humanity and that will be included in the submission to HUD, which we'll go in a couple of days. So you have reviewed the funding amounts and I wanted to point out that Fair Housing Services is a new provider this year to us. They were chosen, Fair Housing of Marin was chosen based on its responsiveness to the RFP. It's alignment with the analysis of impediments that you can read at the city's website if you care to. They met HUD's fair housing requirements, comprehensively and they will help us prepare for changes to the HUD fair housing tools anticipated in 1718. And Council Member Combs was on the review committee. Did you have anything to add? Just that these points are completely accurate. This was the most responsive to the RFP of the applications and appeared to me to be the most comprehensive with regard to its approach to fair housing. One of the features that this group offered that the others didn't was testing, which means that they will intermittently ask if a unit is available based on having an accent on the phone call, for example, so that they can confirm that there is not over-discrimination going on. And I thought that that was a unique and excellent addition to the program. Thank you. Thank you. So the recommendation is that the Council by Resolution authorize submission of the 2016, the 2020 Consolidated Plan and the fiscal year 2016-17 Action Plan to HUD, approve the fiscal year 16-17 funding allocations for public services, fair housing and hapwa funds in the amount of $619,908 and authorize the city manager to execute annual federal funding agreements, HUD forms and other documents required by HUD, which are required to implement the Consolidated Plan for its four-year term. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Ms. Manchester. Council, questions before I open the public hearing? Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation, Nancy. I was looking through the presentation and all the attachments and I couldn't find what exactly is face-to-face doing? And are they hitting the tier one first tier of the Consolidated Plan goals? They are a tier one goal because they provide, most of their services are provided to those at risk of homelessness or homeless that are HIV positive and their families. So where would one see, there was virtually no documentation as to what that $396,000, what that contract, what they're actually doing. And the reason I'm asking is just they may fit into many of the other efforts that we're doing, but I haven't got a clue as to what they're doing other than what you just said. So it'd be very helpful for me to know what efforts are they doing and there might be some partnership opportunities that I'm personally not aware of. I apologize that oversight was not in the staff report but I'd be happy to get that information to the council. That'd be great. Thanks. And also I know I talked to Dr. Gwine about this too. The no comments on something as important as this. How has it been in previous years when we've done this in the past? And I'm saying it from the framework, it looks good on paper, all these outreach efforts, but if you're still getting no one, we may need to change some things. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that strategy, getting more public comments on this important document, especially with as consistent as it is with some of our council goals. You raise a good point. And in past years it has been common to get no comments whatsoever. This year we got one, so that's a 100% improvement. I like your optimism. And I think there'll be plans in the future to work with our community engagement colleagues and try to increase that outreach so that we do reach more people and hope to get more comments from the public. Yeah, I would encourage that. Thank you. This comes. I also think it would be appropriate in the future as we moving forward if we sort of maybe schedule this or ask the subcommittee on homelessness to look at the spending recommendation and make comment out of the subcommittee. I'm not the subcommittee chair. I'm just saying perhaps we can ask if the subcommittee would like to take that up. Maybe we should get through the item before we, and they're not sure. Is that just a casual question? I've noted that for the future. Okay, other questions before I open the public hearing? Seeing none, we'll open the public hearing. I only have one card. You needn't have filled out a card, but I will entertain the card that I have first, Mr. Dewitt. Thank you, sir. My name is Dwayne Dewitt. I wanted to thank Vice Mayor Schwedhelm. Those questions are quite relevant. I used to go to some of these hearings, and I realized it didn't really matter. At the time, there was a little bit more money, in a sense, percentage-wise being given out, and various nonprofit organizations involved in the process would come and jockey for the opportunity to get some of the funds. Before I go further, I want to clarify one thing that was mentioned to me. The housing that I mentioned on Burbank Avenue, the 79 units to be built, affordable, that's in the county, but it's being built because it's going to help the city, and it's called Crossroads. And earlier, a gentleman spoke named Jerry, and he pointed out that he'd seen more recent documents than me, and the price is up to $38 million. So you take $38 million and divide it by 79, and that comes to $481,000 and 12 for a housing unit, and that's a rental. So basically, what we're looking at here is a drop in the bucket. Those numbers are really not enough to help as much as we need, and one of the main goals is to provide, to increase the supply of affordable rental housing for the city's lowest income households. So what I'd like you to do is approve this and go forward with it, but also ask the staff now, if they would begin a process that involves the community earlier rather than just this one hearing that they hold, and as you saw, no one even knew to go to it, perhaps, and involve the community in it to discuss how we can find ways to increase the federal funding to have Senator Feinstein and the replacement for Ms. Boxer have our congressperson, Thompson and Huffman and others pay attention to this really expensive place to live now and start to give more money. This amount of money really hasn't changed over the last decade much. I used to go to these meetings and I was always surprised at how little it is, and there's really a need for a lot. So I know you have some professional lobbyists in Sacramento also. Perhaps it's time to push on them to also get some things from the state in this very, very difficult housing climate with very expensive costs. Thank you once again for all your time and all the good things you put in tonight. One last word, the 750 square feet there, that's the size of a housing unit. All the best to you. Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. Those are all the cards I have. Would anyone else care to address the council at this point? Seeing no one rise, close the public hearing, bring it back to the council. I'll entertain a motion as Carlstrom. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll move resolution of the council to the city of Santa Rosa authorizing submission of the 2016-2020 consolidated plan and the fiscal year 2016-2017 action plan to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and waive for the reading of the text. Second. Thank you, I have a motion and a second. Any final comments, council? Here are your votes, please. And I have six ayes, thank you very much. Thank you. We have no communications. Do we have any cards, Madam Clerk, for public comment? I have no further cards. So, we're not adjourning, we're recessing for closed session and if there's anything to announce, we'll reconvene there in public session and I'll check to see if anybody here is still here for that, if we do. Thank you, Madam State Attorney. Bill Texan, is this real more? Yep. Shut up, like with real dead people. Oh, I got to text Ashley. Ashley, identify you when you wrapped your car around that light pole because you was caring more about that thing than a room. Is she like me? Not anymore. No text messages worth a life. Over 90 miles of creeks run through Santa Rosa, run off on the streets, roofs, and...