 Vice Mayor Alvarez. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. All right, let's go ahead and kick it back off. I believe we're starting with our information technology department. Yes. Good morning, everybody. Just wanted to say hello and just go over the quick agenda for the day. We're going to start with it work our way through the rest of the departments and conclude with our capital improvement program today. So next slide, please. I'll turn it over to Brian ticker our chief information officer. Thank you. All right. Good morning, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Alvarez and city council members. Really excited to talk to you this morning. I'm Brian ticker our chief information officer for the city. And today I'm going to talk about our two different funds that we have within it. So we have a main fund called our information technology fund, which is where 30 of our 31 positions are budgeted in terms of salaries and benefits. This is also where most all of our IT infrastructure costs are budgeted, as well as our enterprise software. We have about 32 vendors that we purchase enterprise software from. And so that is all bundled up in there as well. We do have the changes this year shows here about 5.8%. Most of that about 330,000. So that is in salaries and benefits. Partially from the MOU changes this past year, as well as some others that I'll talk about a position that was added from PG me settlement funding that I'll talk about in the future slide. We also have about 85,000 of that change is due to increases in software support this year. Our other fund, the technology replacement funds is the replacement fund that went into place in about 2013, where we replace PCs throughout the city that includes PCs laptops, tablets and terminal devices. There's over 1300 devices in that program right now. The changes there really are due to increases in the cost of that equipment, as well as some salary increases that are part of that program. Next slide please. So this is similar information but broken down by program. We have our administration where there were some changes this year in terms of costs. Some of that is in salaries and benefits once again, as well as liability insurance has gone up some of our overhead costs have gone up. We have one additional need in there that for 20,000 that I'll talk about in the future slide as well. Our media services group and our GIS the next two really most of those changes actually almost 100% of that is due to salary and benefit increases is really what the changes there. Our IT development is what we also call our application services group so that's the main group that support software in the city. And that's where that $85,000 increases that I mentioned that we're paying software vendors. The rest of that is salaries and benefits. Our IT customer support group is really others know it as our operations group really responsible for supporting the infrastructure, the IT infrastructure in the city, the telecommunications email and all of the servers and such. That one once again is also salary and benefit increases there. For our PC replacement program. The other side showed the full fund that included salaries benefits as well as the hardware costs. This one here breaks it down to the 205,000 that we see here is specifically to salaries. And really we have one full time equivalent in that position but we also charge from our main IT fund about $25,000 this year from our main IT fund where people are budgeted in IT but they still work on the PC replacement program so of that $47,000 change about 25,000 of it is just so that we can account for people's time better so we're starting to charge time into that fund there. The CIP and O&M projects that's really where we budget for our telecommunications infrastructure, the cost that we pay for AT&T and Comcast and Sonic and such, as well as our firewalls and our Wi-Fi, different technologies. There's about 400,000 there also in public education and government funds that we get from franchise fees. And then 520,000 of that is from our PC replacement costs, the actual cost of the equipment. Next slide please. Well some of the highlights I alluded to a couple of these previously but during the February 15th council session with the appropriation of the PGE settlement funding, there was one limited term, three year limited term media services technician position that was approved. We're moving forward with that that recruitment is currently underway and it actually closes in about two weeks. It's open right now if anybody's interested in applying. We also converted one vacant position that we had that was a senior IT position, senior IT technician to a network systems analyst, we did that also as part of the February 15th mid-year adjustments that went to council. And the reason for that was to have based on really our changing needs within IT to be able to better support our back end infrastructure that our network systems analysts do. We have two additional needs this year. One is a request for $20,000 to have a firm work with us on a cyber security assessment. With cyber security, I'm sure you all read it in the papers and online and whatnot, but it continues to escalate in terms of cyber criminal activity as well as really creativity of cyber criminals and how they go about trying to cause issues with people's systems and causing financial loss as well as bringing down some of the infrastructure. So we're doing everything we can there. We do a lot today with cyber security, but we'd like to have an outside firm come in and assess what we're currently doing and make any recommendations on areas where maybe we can improve and do better there. And then the last additional need here is for 15,000 for ongoing citywide aerials. And so what happens there is we, it costs actually $60,000 roughly to have somebody fly the city to get aerial imagery that we put into our GIS maps that are available both internally as well as from the public view of map viewers. And we already have been budgeting $15,000 a year, but because it costs $60,000 a year, if you can bear with me here, we're basically trying to double that to where we'll be budgeting $30,000 a year so that we can fly aerials every two years. Given our current budget right now, we can only fly them every four years and we've gotten feedback from the public as well as internal staff that due to, you know, unfortunately some fire damaged areas as well as with all the building activity and other things going on that we really need to keep those updated about every two years. So adding this $15,000 will allow us to fly the city every two years and incorporate that into our maps. Next slide, please. So some of the accomplishments this year we've first one on here that's mentioned as we've partnered with the planning economic development department and finance to develop an online application and review process for short term rentals. And so to date, I know there's been over 250 short term rental applications submitted. Almost 200 of those have come in through this online portal that we've helped work with pet and finance to build out. We've also done a lot of work with housing and community services this year. One of the things that we've done is deploying an online public registration portal that's been used for signing up for the waitlist for our section eight housing opportunities, as well as a couple of rental assistance programs that came out this last year that allowed the public to register online and it's really saved housing hundreds of hours of work from having to process paper applications previously to be able to have all this online and we've got some good feedback from the public as well to be able to submit their applications online. We also worked with finance and HR this year to upgrade the city's finance HR payroll system. It's actually our largest system in the city. And every time we upgrade that we try to keep it upgraded about every two to three years, but it's a large undertaking to be able to upgrade that given how many people it reaches and the impacts of that system. Another system that we worked on this year too was we developed a system work with fire to help vegetation management and to better track what's going on there so there's several other ones as well with some those were some of the key ones. Next slide please. So challenges for us really within IT cybersecurity I've already mentioned but it continues to be an issue. We, like I said, we have a, we do take it very, very seriously we have implemented some required internal training citywide. And now we also introduced things like multi factor authentication and some other technologies to help with this but really we want to continue our focus on everything we can do to mitigate risks and and address our vulnerable vulnerabilities with cybersecurity. Another challenge that we have is really around emerging technologies which, you know, to me I find it kind of ironic because one of the things within IT that excites people that work in IT is being able to see all of the new technologies that come out and be able to watch it advance but it also is a challenge because we also don't want to just throw out our older technology we need to optimize our investments there as well. But we also have to really strike that balance between our existing technologies maintaining them as long as we can, but still looking to the future and making sure that we can address the needs of our internal internal users as well as the community on their expectations there so so really trying to find that right balance of the two, and then support and maintenance so within IT, approximately 55% of all of our staff time is really spent on support and maintenance. We have over 225 servers. We have, like I said, over 1300 pieces of, you know, equipment, PCs and whatnot, as well as over 100 different software applications whether that be third party or in-house built applications and so support and maintenance to keep all of that running behind the scenes. Hopefully, you know, we want to minimize disruptions as much as possible so a lot of people don't really see everything going on behind the scenes because we're trying to keep things going but there's a continued challenge there to maintain the systems we have especially they're becoming more and more complex and a lot of departments are looking for new technologies to kind of expand what we're able to do so that is on there as well. So those are the slides we had today. We're looking forward to working with you all and working with the members of the community and our departments to continue to offer additional digital services and moving forward into the new year. That's all I have for today. Are there any questions? Thank you so much, Brian. And first off, I want to say congratulations on the new gig, officially stepping into that role. Thank you very much. Council, do we have any questions on the IT department? Council Member McDonald. I just have one question I know this came up during goal setting was around our website and making it maybe a bit more user friendly, not a bit more maybe more user friendly and making sure that there's the option of going in and having things translated but it's actually much more like out front. I'm not sure if this fits under the IT department or if that's something in communications but I just wanted to see where we were at or if that's on anyone's radar right now. Thank you for the question. Yes, it's definitely on our radar. We're actually have been in communications with our CERO office, our communications and intergovernmental relations office. One of the things we're currently working on is upgrading our current website to what they call a platinum hosted platform which will help us for emergency response and to be able to quickly scale it, better scale it for increased activity there. So the first thing we're doing is getting it on this platform that will allow us to have it more stable and then we're planning on adding to it from there. We are like I said talking with our CERO department, we have talked to our hosting vendor and we are planning on this upcoming fiscal year to rework the website to do a really a redesign of the website and to add some of these additional tools to it. So it's definitely on the radar this year, this upcoming fiscal year. Thank you. Member Rogers. Hi, thank you for your presentation. So I've also received some feedback about the water portal and I'm not sure if that is on your radar or if you have looked into that but that it is not so user friendly. I know it's something that we want to encourage more people to sign up for but if it's not user friendly, then I'm not sure that more people will want to sign up for it. And I'm hoping that with the market coming on Wednesdays that we can get a push out there and get more people to sign up. But we need it to be more user friendly. Can I just ask by the water portal, are we referring to the water billing portal where people make their payments? Are we talking about the water information that's on the website? The portal where that. Council Member, are you referring to the water smart portal where individuals can go or property owners can go and evaluate their water usage? Yes, sir. Okay. I will take a note of that and we'll look into that piece of it. Thank you. Any other questions from Council? Alright, thank you so much, Brian. Thank you all. Okay, next up we have our Planning and Economic Development Department and we have Claire Hartman as well as Kate Goldfine here to present their budget to you. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council Members. I'm Kate Goldfine, Administrative Services Officer for Budget for the Planning and Economic Development Department. Next slide, please. Alright, this slide shows your over your changes by fund. In the general fund, the $2 million increase is attributable to a few causes. First, six new positions were added. Three permanent positions at mid-year and three limited term grant funded positions for a total of $1.3 million. As the other departments have noted, salaries increased department-wide due to our MOU agreements. $170,000 of code enforcement salaries were returned to the general fund from the Administrative Hearing Fund, which can no longer support them, and I'll discuss that more in a moment. And finally, $475,000 was added back to the department's services and supplies budget in two key areas, professional services and conferences and training, plus other smaller supplies categories. In the art in lieu fund, the budget decreased as we'll use existing funding to finish out a few large projects, including the mural on Garage 3 on Fifth Street and the installation of the Unum Piece in Courthouse Square. We're also continuing implementation of the public art program strategic plan, which was adopted last year by the Art and Public Places Committee, and existing budget will also be sufficient for conservation and maintenance of existing projects. The Santa Rosa Tourism BIA fund, this has rebounded well coming out of COVID restrictions. So total revenue in 2021, two years ago, was only $255,000. So we budgeted $350,000 in 21-22 shown here anticipating some bounce back. Through March of 22, we've already received 459,000 of revenue. So we're comfortable budgeting at the pre-COVID level of $500,000 for 22-23. And then finally, the Admin Hearing Fund and Admin Hearing process. So this was established back in 2010 to hold property owners accountable for code violations by charging fines and penalties for non-compliance and cost recovery for staff. In 2017, the county assessor stopped allowing fines and penalties on code cases due to case law from Southern California. And since then, we've only been able to collect cost recovery, which has dramatically decreased that revenue. So between 2010 and 2017, up to 50% of code enforcement staff salaries were charged to that fund, which helped offset general fund costs. Since 2017, when that changed, we've been decreasing staff charges to the Admin Hearing Fund by 5% annually to utilize fund balance and to lessen the impact to the general fund. Finally, this year, we anticipate using most of the fund balance. So we've moved all the code enforcement salaries back to the general fund. That 103,000 in the 22-23 budget will cover the contracts for Admin Hearing officers and a small salary and benefits budget for the code enforcement staff to charge actual time spent on Admin Hearing case preparation. Next slide, please. All right. This slide shows expenditures by program for all funds, and I'm going to focus on the large changes. And of course, I'm happy to answer questions on the smaller items as well. So starting with permit services, an increase of $246,000, 23.9%. This is primarily due to the movement of the code enforcement manager to permit services where it was upgraded to an assistant chief building official. Merit and COLA and benefits increases for existing staff and restorations of services and supplies at about $45,000 round out that increase. Moving to building plan review, that increased 30%, nearly $440,000 as a new building plans checker position was added in February at about a cost of $156,000. Existing staff merit, COLA, salary and benefit increases, and those increased as well. And then finally, the division's services and supplies were restored, including 171,000 of professional services and conferences and training budget. In advanced planning, a senior planner position was moved from planning development review for an increase of $182,000. And again, existing staff salary and benefits costs and restoration of professional services round out that increase. The engineering division increased $610,000 primarily due to the addition of two new positions mid-year, a development review coordinator, and a civil engineering technician, that's about $284,000. Existing staff salaries and benefits increased another $150,000 and services and supplies increased $172,000 primarily to restore professional services for development support. The code enforcement program here includes both the general fund and the admin hearing fund and charges decreased due to the movement of that code manager, assistant chief building official to permit services offset somewhat by salary and benefit increases. The neighborhood revitalization program increase is solely the result of an oversight in the 21-22 budget, a fire inspector from the fire department charges half their time to NRP, and that charge was not budgeted in 21-22. It was corrected early on and accounts for the increase. And then finally in projects, ESRT BIA fund expense is budgeted here, so $150,000 of that increase is for that program. The department has two other projects funded by direct fees, advanced planning, which is used for general plan updates and funded by the advanced planning fee, and that increased over last year. And technology projects funded by the technology fee, which remains steady. This is offset by decreases in the art fund as I described in the prior slide. Next slide please. All right, this slide summarizes the position changes between fiscal year 21-22 and 22-23. As mentioned yesterday, an assistant city manager position was moved to the city manager's office and the head director position was restored. Those six new positions that I discussed earlier were added, including the three permanent positions in building and engineering at mid-year, and then three limited term positions and planning that are charging out to grants. Next slide please. Okay, I also described this in the previous slide. So professional services and conferences and training budget were restored to the department, which is supported by development revenue. As were code enforcement salaries due to the decrease in admin hearing fund revenue. So I'm happy to answer any questions or I can turn it over to director Claire Hartman to discuss accomplishments and challenges. Council, do we have any questions on the budget? Let's hear our accomplishments and then we'll come back. Good morning everyone. My name is Claire Hartman. I'm the director of planning and economic development. And I get the privilege of talking about our accomplishments and also talk about our challenges. So before I get into these, I thought it would be useful to understand sort of our department's budget strategy and the context in which we need to develop this strategy. So the directive for this fiscal year is to have a flat structurally balanced budget. So as you can see with across the departments, we're restoring a lot of our professional services training existing staff support services. But we do need to lean into the future about what we will need for additional needs. So here's our strategy. First, we're going to focus on filling our vacancies. Like other departments, we have quite a number of vacancies. We have 15 in PED. So we'll be focusing on filling those and also training those new individuals and onboarding them providing them mentorship. Many of our new recruits are from out of the area. And so it takes a little bit more effort to get them on board. But once they're on board, they'll be up and running and helping us produce our work. The other thing that we focus on is really identifying what is our most critical, most urgent needs. And as you saw with our mid-year requests, those were our most urgent needs. And those were in plan check and inspection and also, frankly, leadership for the department. So thank you for those mid-year allocations. Next, we're prioritizing our additional needs across a long-term strategy. So we do have long-term strategies in terms of how we want to staff, how we want to offset staffing with professional services, technology support, and the like. And so we do have a long-term strategy. So when the opportunity does arise, we're ready to find a match funding with those additional needs. We're also relying on interim measures. So as you can see with those limited term positions that Kate just talked about, we're trying to get as creative as possible looking for one-time monies. Not only oftentimes one-time monies is for a project, but we're also finding grant opportunities for staffing. So trying to stay on our toes and creative about how we can offset our needs with even a flat budget. We're also looking at third-party vendors for our services. And we're looking for these in areas that are new to our department. So we're even looking for them in, say, the engineering department where maybe we would have planned check in-house. We're really trying to open it up and same with planning. We've already had a very successful program in building using third-party services. And then lastly, and probably most importantly, is really trying to get a better balance of looking at revenue offsets with our core services. So in the coming year and maybe into the next year, we will be working on a cost of services study for the department, but also across the development services program. And we'll also be looking at a development services strategic business plan, trying to build alignment performance metrics and to get those things connected with more transparency and also with more strategic moves. So when we do have opportunities to fund our program, we know exactly where it needs to go to fill the gaps of service. And then that's our core services. But we also need to look for funding for our strategic moves. So such as policy support or technology advances, we will continue to need those. Those are a little bit, those are usually associated with non-funded or non-fee service. And so those are a little bit more challenging to funds sustainably. But we again are being very creative and being very successful in looking at how we can leverage partnerships with the community that grants and looking for one-time funds. So with that, I'm going to go into accomplishments. And one of the things that I'd like to focus on today is our accomplishments with housing production. It's been a banner year. It's been incredible. We have issued 1,404 housing permits this year. And the last time we even came close to issuing this amount of permits was probably back in 2005. And I think back then it was 1,200 units. So it's been quite a long time since we've produced this many housing units in the city of Santa Rosa. And it has been a heavy lift and it's not just PED. It's with our development services partners. It's with fire, water, transportation and public works. So it's quite the lift, but very commendable. We have a great mix of housing in this batch. We have 257 in single family, 1,052 in multi-family. We even did another great year of accessory dwelling units at 95. And really, really commendable is our push on affordable housing this year. So we have issued permits for 472 affordable housing units. These are units that are affordable to lower incomes, very low, low and moderate. In addition to the 1,400 of housing units, we are plan checking right now and hope to have issued by this summer by June, another 450 units. Those will also count to what we call the RENA cycle. RENA is regional housing needs assessment. And that's our city's allocation for how many units we should be targeting to meet our housing needs. And as you know, our current cycle, we are in the last year of that cycle. It's a seven-year cycle. Our goal was about 5,000 units. Today, we have produced a total of 3,920 housing units. And I'm happy to say we have met our housing targets for market rate housing and actually we exceeded them already as of this day. We've exceeded that target by 341 units. So congratulations to the City of Santa Rosa for meeting that target. And again, considering all the setbacks that the city has uniquely had on top of other more global issues, that's a great job. We do have more work to do with affordable housing. We will be falling short. We had a great year this year. A lot of that depended on unique one-time funding and also, quite frankly, a big push to prioritize affordable housing. So all of that combined, we did great on affordable housing this year, but we will probably be about 1,500 units short in this current cycle to meeting our affordable housing needs. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the challenges of continuing the momentum of housing production in our challenge slides, but I'm going to move on to engineering development services. So engineering development services. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. So engineering development, excuse me. I want to talk about the busy year that engineering development services has had. And just as a flagship permit, we have processed 1,500 encroachment permits. And what's, most of those are dry utility permits from PG&E, which I can tell you aren't very exciting permits, but what is exciting about this and why it's on my accomplishment slide is the way we're processing permits. So we are trying new things. We have to get smarter. And this is an example of one of those permits that Brian Tickner just mentioned, which is we're working with IT to be smarter about not just intake, but processing and keeping the permit activity completely online. So not coming in just electronically through emails and attachments, but keeping the service online and actually issuing it online. So even though we do 99% of all of our permits right now electronically, we do very few types of permits completely online. And so this is one of them. And it's been, it's been a great role model. We also have permits in building and planning. And then we're going to expand the permit base as we, as we can move forward. In addition, planning has been supporting the housing production movement by entitling 506 housing units, half of which are affordable. We're getting a lot of affordable units thanks to state legislation. There's a lot of interest through by right by right. It doesn't mean planning is not involved. There's still that pre application process to make sure they're eligible and they're well quick to go through that process. And then lastly, and not without a great importance across organization is the lift that we've done this year to really keep moving on time and on budget, which is not to be undervalued. A general plan update and a comprehensive one at that. So it includes all the elements. It includes engagement in different ways includes climate action plan update and a housing element. So we have completed the alternatives phase we're nearing that and then we'll be going into a preferred alternative. And we have produced surveys, videos, virtual open houses, and we've been out and probably seeing our team out there and many, many public events. Now that we can go out in person, it's been fantastic to increase the engagement on this important effort. We've also made progress on our draft housing element and missing middle initiatives that will be folded in ultimately to our general plan update, but it's on a slightly tighter timeline because that's a required element. And so ahead next slide. We've also been busy in our advanced planning team, completing our house hazard mitigation plan updates to our density bonus program. As many of you know we rallied and put forth your short term rental urgency ordinance. We're also making progress on some downtown historic surveys mentioned our success in gaining grants. These grants will support our housing work as well as our cannabis program work. We have already secured and selected our development services constant services consultant. And then our economic development side of head. Very successful year. They produced two strategic plans one for the economic development team and one for the public arts program. In addition, we've distributed a million dollars in childcare resiliency grants to 180 providers, which will serve over 6000 children. That's going to have a great big impact on our community and also on our business community. In addition, we've made a despite the setbacks of covid we're actually coming out of it but despite all that we've been very successful moving our arts and culture programs forward. As mentioned before, and there's a lot more to come in in this next year. Next slide. So challenges I'm going to talk about challenges and I'll start with housing since I started with housing or accomplishment because while it's a fantastic accomplishment and we want to keep it up. It's also a challenge. It is a heavy lift. We also have plenty of other types of land uses that we support loads of small businesses that we support and our residents that are also doing remodels. And we need to make sure that we care for all of our customers and move them all forward. So first with housing production. I what I see as challenges for that moving forward is going to be keeping the momentum up, keeping the incentives up. What we have produced in terms of policy in terms of permit streamlining prioritization all that's working as you can see the numbers are coming forward. So you we know we can do it when all arrows point to that we can we can rise to the occasion and do it so that's been great. The challenge is keeping up that momentum and balancing that as a core service with our other services. The other challenge I see is the expectation that we have, as well as our community has on increasing the transparency of what we do. The real time access to what we do the production of it performance of it, and also to be able to engage with it better so that's also another thing that we would like to put energy into. It's challenging when you're trying to use your limited resources. And just to keep in mind, just in terms of perspective, the heavy lift that we did this last year, it was about three times more work than just in housing units about three times more work than we had done any of the three previous years. And we had a flat budget we were working with a flat budget. And that's one of our challenges. So as you can see, we're leaning into technology, but with that we need to figure out how to fund those technological moves. I'd like to dive into some of the key areas where we would like to put some effort into and we will need to figure out how to do it. On our administrative side, we have a lift for hybrid meetings, we're still doing virtual meetings. We will move into hybrid meetings. And we, again, we need to fill vacancies. And then we need to figure out how we're going to do that effectively. And within our means, we need to update our website. And we need to be better about our public records access and performance when people need those we need to be able to have a great system in place. And that is supportive and gets that accomplished. In terms of department technology, again, Brian talked a little bit about that, his team is going to be quite busy because all departments are headed into technology. If you don't have staffing, we're going to make it streamlined and smarter and more on our customers where they can self help fill in all the blanks, do the checkboxes, have guides for the system. And then talking through the system, that is going to be our best cost savings. And so there's going to be a lot of requests for IT support. In terms of plan review and inspection, I talked already a lot about that. And again, when we think of plan review and inspection, we have to think about it globally across the organization. So that's why I really want to spend a bit of time on that cost of services study, but also on the business strategic plan with that team. Because we do need to come up with a way where we can collectively together know how to move the service forward to the level that we all would like. And in terms of code enforcement, our challenges there is the expanded initiatives that are added to code enforcement are getting us into challenges with performance and performance impacts and expectations. And I'm feeling that a bit with the short term rental urgency ordinance right now. Again, we'll fill vacancies and we'll figure out we'll research third party leveraging and we'll figure it out but we will have to move forward and improve our service there. And then one thing that we also have to balance things that are required of our department. We have a lot of requirements about planning we talked about that. But also we're going to be adopting a building code and the readoption of our all electric ordinance this year and that has to get done it has to get done by the end of this year so we'll balance our work around that next slide. So this is my last slide for this. This is moving out of our core services challenges and into our strategic initiatives. So again, we are really glad that we do have an economic development strategic plan. There are no implementation dollars associated with that we have our existing team, they're fantastic about leveraging and networking so what we will do this year is do put all our energies into that. We are ready with ideas if we had funding opportunities but for for when you don't have that and you're looking at a flat budget, you just need to get more creative and start networking and seeing what you can do and some of the interest there is data collection in the first days. We talked about development services strategic business plan. Another one is how Santa Rosa this one is grant funded. We need to get it kicked off this summer. And this is going to help us with technology so $500,000 grant from the state will leverage that with some existing staff and it and head and what we're hoping to do over the next 12 months is really produce that transparent portal for our housing construction so people can access it, follow along with it. And, and also increase the number of permit applications that can go through that online permanent system like we talked about. Downtown Santa Rosa same thing. Our challenge there is to shout out about how much construction is happening it's amazing if you. Have the opportunity to go through downtown but what we'd like to do is really showcase it broader really build keep building the momentum for a downtown housing efforts. And we talked about online permitting and then data metrics so those are my and those are the challenges that we're moving into and that's the ends of my presentation I'm happy to answer questions. All right thank you so much Claire I'll look to my colleagues to see if there are any questions. Member Rogers. Thank you for that. I was just going to say I'm happy to see that we are. Trying to find a solution with the technology. And streamlining the process for the permitting process to make it easier. I know that initially it might be difficult for people to grasp on to. Going through the technology part of it but when we get developers that do this often I think it will be a lot easier. For them to get the permits and get people out there which in turn will make it easier for us and maybe although we may be transferring it to it staff. We won't need as as much staff. Is the way I look at it I don't know if it works out really that way. But no it doesn't work out that way but maybe that's the way that I look at it. It will make it a lot easier for us. In addition to I also want us to not lose sight that we're going to need to look at the short term rental urgency program again and that we're not done with that. Because it does need some looking at. So we need to keep that on the on the forefront that that is still a problem in our community. And that is it's not resolved and we kind of put a band-aid on it for the time being. But that is something that we're going to need to look at. So I'm still hearing concerns regarding that so thank you. Council Member McDonald. Yes thank you. Council Member Rogers for bringing up the short term rental. I did receive a notice actually from two short term rentals. I thought I wanted to think actually the department for that notice. It was letting me know what two houses in my area were just approved as part of the permit process. So I actually really appreciated that transparent communication as a neighbor. And agree that the response time specifically on complaints on the weekends needs to probably have a look at that. And I know that we just received something from our city manager on communication that's going out around this issue. But it's probably one of the top comments that I get as a community concern around these issues. So it is a very real issue. I'm not sure if the ordinance includes that if a short term rental that's been approved. And has so many complaints and problems that there's a way to revoke that permit process. I'm not sure if that's part of our communication that's going out to folks if they're applying for that. The other one that I'm not sure if this fits under yours is the mobile home park. And making sure that we are looking at the cost of that and the increases that we are charging. I do see this as a vulnerable community that has limited funds a lot of times. And so making sure that we are taking a look at that. And that's something I know city managers communicated that they're looking at. But I'm not sure if that needs to be put to a top of a priority under housing simply because that's one of the big community concern letters that I receive. So that's very important to me that we're looking at that. And then just further wonderful job on how many permits we're doing as far as housing. You know shout out to all of you. But wondered if maybe you could give us an idea of how many of those houses were rebuilds from the fires of 2017 and 2020. If that has been part of that streamline process for those folks that have lost homes or had damage to their homes. I know that you've done some significant work on making sure that that process is cleaner. So I was wondering if maybe you could give us those numbers today. Great. Yes. I'd like the chance to respond to that. Thank you for those comments. Councilmember and the also the questions. So short term rentals. We've prepared a message for you. You should get it shortly. It summarizes sort of where we're at with short term rentals. The good the bad and the ugly about the program. We did launch the urgency ordinance. And it we did attempt to support it with some temporary staffing assistance and our existing staff. And it has been a challenge to stand up that program. So we are looking at really a more concerted effort to address not just the permitting but the neighborhood communications and the enforcement. So you will hear from us shortly about some of our ideas about how to approach that over the next several months and to bring back some opportunities to address those issues. We're also monitoring. We have an ability to talk about revenue offsets to support new programs. We're also monitoring. We're also monitoring. There's a pilot. There's a pilot right in our hands. Right. Short term rental. So we are monitoring. TOT tax. That's coming in that specific to short term rentals. And seeing if that can be a match to. This new program. Permitting enforcement and making sure that we have good communications. And again, if it's not city staff, we can do that. We can do that as well. So we really want to make sure we have an informed program. We move forward with it. In terms of mobile home parks. Yeah, I do believe housing and community services. I believe they're going to be presenting today and they can speak to that. But I believe mobile home rent control ordinance is in their work plan. And in terms of rebuilding. Yeah, I thank you for the question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up because that is a, in addition to those, to those units that I mentioned. So we actually don't get to count any of those rebuild units when we're looking at fulfilling our Rena numbers. It's a, it's considered replacement housing. Right. So. But I can say that we have achieved probably about 82% of all of the lots that were impacted by. The remaining ones are, we don't have a rebuild center anymore. And this last fiscal year, that was another thing that became a challenge is we dissolved the rebuild center, which was supported by professional services. And we absorbed that, that remaining work. That remaining work is a challenge because those are the tougher lots. The owners are, they have the highest challenge, which is why they haven't rebuilt in this time period. And so we're working with those, with those residents in particular, and our building team does a great job working with those particular customers. Thank you. Council member Fleming. Good morning. Thank you, mayor. Wonderful work from head as usual. I do have a couple of questions. One is while I appreciate the floor, budget. I think this is, you know, department that could always benefit from, or often benefit from increased resources. And so I wanted to ask you specifically around. Code enforcement. What kinds of resources do you need? And it's not just specific to short term rentals, although I do get quite a number of complaints about that. But there are just a number of, you know, the number one thing that you need to do. And I get the impression that there's just quite simply is not enough of them. To respond to the level of. Calls for service on this count. And so, you know, I know that, you know, you're under a lot of pressure to bring us forward as well. And I know that there are a number of, you know, I know that there are a number of questions about that, but there are just a number of, you know, the number one thing that people email me about is that they filed a code complaint and that it takes a long time. You know, you're under a lot of pressure to bring us forward as a flat budget and to not ask for more resources. But can you elaborate on what it would take to increase turnaround times, whether it's technology or, or individuals. Thank you for the question. And yes, it's all of the above. We are at the very top of our additional needs list and request was a code enforcement officer. And so, you know, I know that we're under a lot of pressure to bring us forward, but because of a, of a compilation of additional initiatives. And even the introduction of something like short-term rentals. While it's new and important and timely and really affecting our neighbors. Vitality. We still function on a protocol of life safety issues first. So, you know, what we want to do is make sure that we are able to respond to additional code. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to be doing in the same day. And by adding the additional initiatives, that's what that we're always going to do those first. But it starts to erode our assurance that we can do those. But by adding that additional code officer, you get that assured. And then you can also add the, the initiatives. The other thing that helps with things like this is the technology support. Obviously. FAC's are being implemented. They have been coming out lately online. But while we hire temporary staff through salary savings to support the phone calls and put the FAQs on the website, you really need professional planning and code staff to work with the customers in the neighbors to get those projects to completion. So those are our challenges there. And then also with records, And that can vary our staff as well. So another one of our top priorities and our asks was on the admin side. So because without our administrative staff, we can't really get a handle on our public records responses. So to be clear, did you ask for everything that you needed to meet those needs or I mean, because what I don't wanna do is like partially fund it and then find out later, you know, that we're only really improving by increments. So the way the budget process works is yes, the staff of every department puts together their additional needs requests, but we put it together in pursuit of an organizational directive for our budget and the organizational directivist flat this year. So while we can express our needs, we really, and which is important because you should plan forward and you never know when opportunities come up. So we need to be prepared with when there's a funding opportunity or a new idea, you're implementing your plan. But at this time, there's just not that revenue offset that we can go grab and support those additional positions. Well, I appreciate that that's the organizational directive. I think that that's a decision that the council should be making around whether or not we wanna move funding from one area to another because a flat budget assumes that each department has always been funded adequately and that everybody takes and gives in proportion to their shop or their part of the city. But that's just, you know, that's a fallacy in and of itself because some departments have baseline funding, while others are dependent on the whims of the general fund and the council. So what I'm really trying to get at here is what I want a direct answer about what you need, not what the organizational directive is around a flat budget. And I understand if that puts you in a tough spot, you don't have to answer, but I really want, you know, going forward, helping us to understand what the needs are irrespective of the budget and then let us decide what we wanna fund. And I'll defer to the city manager. There's a more appropriate response, but yeah. We did put forth, I'll just say we put forth over a million dollars in additional needs asks. Excellent, okay. I just wanna know if that's enough to meet the needs. Yes. Okay, good. Thank you. Well, I'm sorry. Yes, it's enough to meet the needs. No, we did not receive that additional needs allocation. So hence my budget strategy summary at the beginning because without, that's the easy fix, right? You have enough revenue, you can provide me everything we need, but outside of that, we have to get creative and that's where we're at. And I appreciate both approaches to it. I just wanna make sure that we know what it is that you would like, frankly, what every department would like so that we can do our best to give you the tools that you need to succeed. The other question I have for you is around, continue, you mentioned that we met our market rate housing arena allocations. Congratulations, that is no small feat. I'm curious to know how far we've gotten on the affordable side. Okay. So on the affordable side, our target was out of about 5,000 units in the arena cycle. Our target was about 5,000 units, half of which were affordable. So specifically 2,471 units, that was our target for affordable or below moderate income units. We were gonna be short about 1,500 units. We did almost 500 this year. So that was 2,000 over the previous six years. So you can see that we did very little in the early years. Of course, we did very little housing in the early years of all levels of housing. And then we started off with like 126 total housing with maybe no affordable housing. And then we worked our way up and we were building initiatives and also building prioritization policies and streamlining and also dovetailing with state legislation for buy-right housing. So specifically, where do I have my? So specifically in our cycle, we did 1,041 in very low income units, 671 in low income units, 759 in moderate income units. A lot of those are excessively drilling units. And then the remainder were in market rate, about 2,600. And included in your budget asks are all the resources that you believe you need to be successful in meeting our renails at all affordability levels? Yeah, I mean, we're gonna struggle again this through this next cycle. Because as I mentioned, while we focus on housing, we did three times the amount of work this year and we didn't add any additional staffing. We struggled to maintain our professional services. We asked for one-time funds. Now we're asking for it to be back in the budget. All that is getting restored and put back. We aren't expanding our staffing levels to meet that demand. So the challenge there is to move into technology. And again, we're reaching for grants that support that. So again, there's no general fund to get. We will still need to do the work. The expectation is there. We just need to be diligent and as creative as we can. And when the opportunity does come up to offset with revenue such as through perhaps our cost of services study or our revenues increase and we can go grab that and attach it back to development services, that's how we're gonna have to function within this type of fiscal reality. Okay, all right, thank you. Council Member Svethelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Really appreciate the presentation, Kate. I really appreciated the way you talked us through the budget because you answered many of the questions without having to be asked. So I really appreciate the thoroughness of that. And Clare, it's almost like I feel you're almost selling the department short with the list of accomplishments because I think back to what your department has been experiencing pretty much since 2017, just nonstop in the fact that we've accomplished what we've accomplished. It's due chiefly in part to the creativity of your department. So I really want to applaud your efforts. And one of the interesting things too that I've heard from any members of the community, you know, when we talk about reigning numbers about the bills, some people think that, you know, the city of Santa Rosa builds housing, we don't. It's the policies and procedures and the creativity that's been generated from your department that have allowed us to secure a lot of these different housing starts because you've been creative. And I as, you know, as I'm on council have really appreciated how you're pushing us to look at this in a different manner in those 1400 building permits that you talked about or really need to be applauded because not everyone can do that. So the question I had is similar to what council member Fleming was talking about with code enforcement. It's my understanding that we're pretty much complaint driven code enforcement process for the city. Is that accurate to describe it that way? Excuse me, yes. Our general protocol is complaint driven, yes. As opposed to proactive and calling through the neighborhood, yes. And so I was just asking, I'm not endorsing this for this year, but it would be helpful from a council perspective. If we did want to change the process that we're going to be proactive versus reactive, I get that would take additional resources. But it'd be interesting to hear if we change that model that the city has been in for years, what would that look like and what type of support would head need to actually enable the change of that system? So again, it's not a request. I'm not gonna ask the city manager, hey, let's have those numbers now because I know that'd be a significant change in the way we have operated in the previous decades. But so I just like to throw that out there to see what would a proactive code enforcement operation look like. Thank you. Any other questions from council members? Council member McDonald? Just a quick clarification question. I know that they talked about it briefly yesterday around how much money we're getting from our taxes on the short-term rentals. But I'm not clear if the money that we're receiving from that is going back to support those ideas of a more proactive approach on code enforcement or just code enforcement in general. And if maybe we could take a look at that for this next year to make sure that the staff is supported in those efforts. Thanks. Thank you for that council member McDonald. That's one of the things that I have asked staff to look at when we talk about implementing new initiatives. If it does have a funding mechanism attached to it, I would like to see how we can attach staff to that funding. Thank you. Council member Rogers? Hi, clarification. At the beginning of your presentation, am I correct? Did I hear you say that you had some vacancies in filling those vacancies? Will that not help with the work that needs to be done or? Yes, exactly. That's our first budget strategy is fill our vacancies. So that's why I wanted to start with that. And we do have 15 and they're all very, very important to us. So we really made a concerted effort to do great recruitments. Some positions are harder to fill than others. So we've had to go out a few times. But, and then the other still, we're looking at, it's just a, it's a tough job market for us to hire from. And so we are looking at people who are newer in their careers or just starting out. And so there's going to be a bit of training involved to get them on board. But, but we are getting great candidates once we get them. And so yeah, we, our first strategy is to fill those positions. Yes, definitely supportive of the department. And I think that that is a wonderful strategy is to fill the vacancies that you have, because we can say you can have 20 more vacancies, I mean, 20 more positions, but if you can't even fill the vacancies that you have allotting additional, FTE is not going to help if you can't fill the FTE. So I think that that is a wonderful strategy to start off with. Thank you very much. Any additional comments? Okay, we'll keep moving. Thank you so much, Claire. Look forward to more information as it keeps, excuse me, keeps coming forward. And I know you're working on a dated dashboard that you can hear from our questions would be really helpful for council and for the public to be able to track where we're at in real time on our housing development. Thank you, Kate and Claire. I'm sorry, just going to introduce the recreation community engagement department will be up next. Thank you, Jason, go ahead. Good morning mayor, vice mayor and members of the city council. My name is Jason Parrish. I'm the administrative officer for recreation and community engagement. I'll be going over the finances for the two divisions and then turning it over to our two deputy directors to discuss their accomplishments and challenges. Please advance the slide. So as you can see, recreation and community engagement share both general fund and metro components. Within the general fund, you do have a balance of one time funding that was approved in 21-22 that is not present in the 22-23 budget. That's balanced against increases in minimum wage for our temporary employees, as well as COLA's for our regular employees. And we also had turnover in several key strategic positions, including the deputy director of recreation and the violence prevention manager. Within the metro fund, you see that change taking place. As well, we are fully funding our choice grant program, which is equivalent to over $800,000 in the coming cycle. We also have the turnover of the violence prevention manager, which we look to fill in the coming year. And you also see a little bit of increase within the minimum wages for the children that receive the services out of our measures of fund. What's new this year is with our Change for Kids Fund is an exciting new and evolved partnership with the Burbank Housing. That allows us to receive dedicated funding for a number of our after school sites provided by the neighborhood services section and recreation within the community, which we hope to bring stability to the program, as well as overall expanding services within the metro, as all three funding components work together to provide the total program that the council and the city manager has asked us to provide. If you could advance this line. So within our programs, what you're looking at is general administration is actually made up of recreation administration, including myself and the deputy, along with the community engagement program and the general fund. So the only reason it shows a reduction is because the council had approved a large budget of one-time money for 21-22 that is not present in the 22-23 budget. This is not a reduction. We do have our programs that you've approved through both PG&E, as well as the ARPA programs. So what you're just seeing here is a slight shift in emphasis with fee-based recreation and aquatics, as well as community centers and regional parks and permits. What you're largely seeing is the increase in the minimum wage that affects our total temporary program within recreation. Within the neighborhood services section, with the largest increase, what you see is a combined violence prevention partnership program, as well as the neighborhood services section within recreation. The neighborhood services section itself has both measure-O and general fund components while the violence prevention partnership is entirely within the measure-O fund. These changes overall constitute a flat budget with significant increases, again, in our minimum wages. The choice grant programs are fully funded this year at the 35%, which are now over $800,000, as well as the evaluation services and the choice mini-grant programs that accompany them. Are there any questions? Look into council. Any questions? Council Member Schwedhelm. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Jason, you had mentioned the change for kids fund. Could you explain that a little bit more? I heard Burbank housing go from 32K to 176. So how do we, where does that money come from and where does it go? Historically, we have partnered with Burbank housing so that we could locate our services within their actual housing sites. This provides the greatest benefit for the children who are affected in those sites as well as an excellent partnership. Recently, in the last couple of years, Burbank housing has been able to take advantage of their own finances to partner with us and provide the operating costs for those neighborhood sites. This may not include city-wide overhead, but what it does is allow the stability of those sites to continue, even though we may have changing budget situations here in the city. What Jeff and his team has done is taken that out and set it up as a separate program within the Change for Kids program. This will also allow for future neighborhood services sites to be brought into that program and again, to have a full funding component for it. This is a ongoing partnership. We have a memorandum of operations with the Burbank housing. And what we're looking at is as services come back online and as recreation is again fully open and services are fully back out, it gives the division chance to possibly expand into separate sites with Burbank housing. And Jeff, if you have anything to add. No, I think that covers it unless there's any follow-up questions on it. No, thank you for that clarification. Thank you. If you could advance the slide. Let's go to council member Fleming while we do that. Thank you. My question is around, what would it take to expand the hours to have the aquatics facilities both open at 6 a.m. And is there any demand for that? I'll leave that to Jeff to answer. Again, in terms of the demand off the follow-up with the aquatic staff and get more information in terms of that, obviously it would take the financial aspect of paying the staff to be there during those times. And right now, that's probably not enough because it also takes the ability to fill those positions even if there's funding for it, which is a huge challenge currently. So I know that the overview, I know that the family operation is open more than Ridgeway and that Ridgeway kind of fluctuates based off of those additional needs and has a lot of the school groups which are after school hours and some of those things. So I am not aware of that need at this time but can certainly follow-up if I find out that there would be a need to have that open. But I don't believe we're turning anyone away for morning laps when we're in those types of things to my knowledge. Well, yeah, I understand that there's, people would like to go but you're not open to turn them away. So I think that if we want people to be able to recreate in their own neighborhoods, we need to, as long as there's demand, take a look at increasing those hours. I know personnel is a perpetually difficult thing these days. The other thing with the Ridgeway pool is that whenever I go there, I experience this thing which is kind of distressing, which is that they're only open for these 90-minute blocks in the afternoon. So you see all these families come in, they swim for a while and then they get kicked out and they all line up again to pay for another 90 minutes. And I'm just wondering is the money that we're collecting on that worth the trouble that we're causing in dissuading people from coming to use our services? I'd have to look into it a little bit more. I'm assuming you're talking about the summertime rec swim. My guess would be that a lot of has to do with the number of field trip groups and camps and different things that are coming. And so our ability to serve the demand that's out there and having a rotation of groups and, you know, because we have capacity limits and those types of things that we do hit with, especially at that pool with rec swim during the summer because it is popular for youth programs to go and use it. So my guess is most of that is set up in terms of managing the high volume of groups that are coming, more so than the families. Obviously it could be an inconvenience for the families who choose to do both groups. And so there's certainly some, I'll take a note down that we can look at and see if there's any. It'd be interesting on the weekend where I imagine there is not so much of the field trips and so forth, but it just, it's kind of from an observational standpoint. It's not really a great look to see everyone get kicked out and have to pay again. Right. Yeah, the weekend operation would certainly be different. Yeah, talking to staff, is that only set up that way because that's how we operate during the week and then do we look at different operations for the two? Yeah, and, you know, you see that all over town, not just in this department where, you know, like the light at the intersection of Ridgeway and Mendocino is set up for the school schedule and then on the weekend, you know, you're stuck there forever as well. So it would be really helpful to try to differentiate between times of day use and weekend use across many departments. Thank you. Are there any more questions? I'm seeing them from council. Thank you. So to continue, within the general fund for the additional needs, we've requested one limited term recreation specialist within our neighborhood services group and this service for the general fund as well as the measure of fund focused on the most impacting kids in our community as well as one limited term community outreach specialist in community services. So both of these are being funded because the divisions are experiencing very high workloads as we come out of COVID within the Change for Kids Fund. Because of those impacts from COVID, we have a fund balance that allows this position to be added with no impact to the general fund and within community engagement, this is funded out of the PG&E one-time money. So both divisions overall have just short of a million dollars in additional operating money to be able to withstand services and what these two positions will do. Between now and the roughly end of the current measure is for both sections to be able, excuse me, both divisions to be able to continue to withstand those services and make them available for kids and make them sounds available within the neighborhoods and interacting with our residents. At the end of the two years, we'll have an opportunity to reevaluate and possibly justify the ongoing continuation of these positions. But for now, we're just looking at that two-year threshold until the end of the measure program and until we're fully recovered from the community from the pandemic. And so now I'll turn it over to Jeff Tibbets to go over some of the accomplishments within the Recreation Division. Thank you, Jason and good morning, Mayor and members of the council. I don't think it's too much of a surprise that the overarching theme of accomplishments for recreation this past year are gonna be tied to COVID and tied to the recovery and resumption of programs. And what I'd like to do is kind of share some stats for both sides of that story. So one, obviously the team of staff doing an incredible job of through the years, the two years of COVID modifying programs, coming up with different ways to offer programs and change registration and protocols and all those things to meet requirements. And then in this last year, as things have loosened up, transitioning back to offering programs in more traditional format. So in 2020, we were down to offering 189 barcodes. Barcodes essentially is a program session. So each session has a barcode that's how people register for activities. So 2020 with everything the shutdown, we were down to 189 of those barcodes for the spring summer session. This year, spring summer, we are back up to 1300 barcodes, which puts us about a little over 80% of where we were in 2019. So while a lot have projected that the recovery would be a three to five year, we're really on pace to hit that over the next year and get back to full offerings. Some of those areas where we're not quite back up to are more so the things that are outside of our control. So if you look at day camps, for example, our internal day camps, Wattam, Uchi, Doyle, Venture Camp are all back up and running at full capacity this summer. Whereas contract instructors and some of those things where contractor instructors have moved away, we need to recruit and find new contract instructors to offer programs and classes. Those types of things that are a little less under our control are the area where we're still working on recovering and bouncing back. Our aquatic centers, working with the high school teams, getting them back in the pools. Our aquatic centers have operated throughout the two years. The Neighborhood Services Sites of Urban Housing, we've talked about that with the Change for Kids funding, be able to expand those programs. And one of the things that that has allowed us to do is an expansion of some of those programs happened during COVID, because we weren't running other programs like Junior Warriors and some of those big measure L programs, we shifted that money and we expanded it after school programming because of this contract and another funding source, we're able to maintain some of that development and growth we did in other areas while we shift measure out back to bringing back some of those programs that we've lost. So that's really exciting that we're not, through COVID we learned and we gained and we brought in new things. And it's really exciting that we're able to continue some of that while also bringing back some of those programs that we lost during COVID. So, recreation facility rentals have picked up the senior programs that are back up and running. And we're seeing that those numbers start to really pick up that program area for understandable reasons has lagged behind a little bit some of the other traditional rent programs with just concerns of participants but we're starting to see that switch over and programs filling up and more activities. And again, really the area now at this point is more so contract instructors availability of people offering programs. So we're now shifting our focus back to that of how do we get more instructors? How do we get more programs to make up for some things that maybe we lost over the last couple of years? Next slide please. So mentioned aquatic centers but also just kind of wanted to point out the safe opening plan for aquatic centers and COVID safe lifeguard training. This was a huge component where COVID protocols did not allow us to offer traditional lifeguard training courses and without lifeguard training courses we don't have certified lifeguards we can't operate them on our pools. So the team there did really a great job not only developing for us here in Santa Rosa but leading the way as they led with the reopening of pools leading the way with the training of lifeguards for the whole county and the whole region how to do that and making some purchases like extra dummies and those types of things so that we could do more training water ones that we could do more training that wasn't person to person the way it had been in the past with close contact but utilizing those resources. So one of those behind the scene things that the public doesn't necessarily see but it's critical and us being able to provide the opportunities and the programming that the community loves. Redwood Empire Food Bank we've always worked with them and partnered with them but obviously through COVID programs came up and at a higher need. And again, not losing everything that we gained through COVID but building on those relationships and taking advantage of the progress that we made through COVID. So we've always partnered with them with youth programs and our summer programs through neighborhood services and having free lunch as part of a component of that. We've added senior nutrition partnerships. We are also doing permits for community distributions at Martin Luther King Park and at Bayer Park. So a lot of work has happened there that we look to continue in the future. And then I believe this has come up in the last two or three council meetings. So that's the Pico's professional baseball league and really excited to have something new coming to Santa Rosa and kicking off this summer of 2022 with opening day being Thursday, May 26. So obviously wrapping up the final details of that but excited to get that kick started this year. Next slide please. With that, I will pass off to Magali tell us to go over some accomplishments for community engagement. Thank you, Jeff. Good morning. Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Rodiz, members of council, Magali Bay is here. So first thing, we completed the choice grant cycle 10. We were able to extend it by six months which really allowed a lot of the agencies that we were working with to do additional support services for the community that they were seeing. So essentially the violence prevention partnership is closing out funding for our 10 local nonprofit programs who have assisted us with our most vulnerable youth and families during the pandemic fires with various services from parent education classes, mental health resources and workforce development for youth. We awarded cycle 11. We selected the cycle 11 grant. So soon the violence prevention partnership will be presenting the next cycle recommended recommendations for youth and family programs whom we'll be working in lockstep with in order to meet the incredible demand that the community is seeing for youth and family services at this time. We built the Mary Lou launched it, had a fantastic turnout. Our team is incredibly proud of the continued partnership and work with the Sonoma County Law and Order Council, SRPD as well as several city departments in transforming a vehicle into a true community engagement tool. The Office of Community Engagement poured their heart and soul into our first major in-person event on March 26th with over 500 youth and families in attendance to honor not just the culmination of the collaboration but to honor and celebrate cultural wealth and community. This program will continue to grow and expand to continue to connect city resources to youth and families. Sideshows. Our team went out into community held in-person and virtual listening sessions regarding sideshows. In less than a month, we collected over 600 surveys from the community regarding sideshows through our Let's Connect page. We hope to bring those findings to council as well as with the appropriate department soon. We created a resolution to declare racism as a public and human rights crisis in San Rosa. This came directly from our community empowerment plan listening sessions in the summer of 2020. The next steps for this will be housed in two of the SEED collaborative work equity work groups. And additionally not on here, but the DEIB Spaces Grant, which is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Spaces Grant will be launched relatively soon. Again, this came directly from the Community Empowerment Plan and Listening Sessions and the community requested spaces where we can collectively learn and participate in the celebration of cultural wealth from our rich and diverse community. Another item that is not on the list, but I wanna note, very important, the Hearn Community Hub Project. We'll be working with a consultant this summer to capture as much input as possible directly from community regarding the city's investment and collaboration with the library, fire department and what potentially could be a community multicultural center if that's what the community determines to be the foundation for the structure or base of that through that input process. So we have a Let's Connect page that we'll be launching today in English and in Spanish for more information. Those that are interested in participating and providing input, we have a space to sign up. So once that input process begins, you will be notified through the Let's Connect page. So meeting with our community is going to be crucial, especially meeting community members in spaces where they're already meeting, spaces that they already feel comfortable with, as well as a larger city-wide approach. And lastly, our youth from Autotas program will be assisting us with this outreach and specifically other city-wide initiatives. So with that, next slide, please. So I'm gonna start with some of the challenges for both recreation and community engagement and specifically with the renewal of measure O. We can mention that due to the uptake in youth violence and the increase in gang involvement and gang interest, our balance prevention partnership community outreach specialists have been in high demand across middle and high schools in Santa Rosa. We've created programs and referred an unprecedented amount of youth and families to various resources and direct service providers. We are gaining momentum and we've created clear cohesion with our community agencies serving our most vulnerable families. However, given the current structure and funding, we are limited in terms of our capacity and footprint in schools where the need is the greatest, which leads us to our ultimate challenge down the road with violence prevention partnership. As Jason Parish or ASO mentioned earlier, that would result in a loss of 80% of our department and capacity of measure O funds are not available in the future and that would significantly reduce our department, the office of community engagement to staff members. So I will send it over back to Jeff. Yeah, so to continue with the challenge of measure O, certainly that'll have an impact on the services that are provided through the neighborhood services section and recreation. So we've talked about some of the change for kids and some of the sustainability that we're building with some other funding sources, but that certainly doesn't cover the impact of a potential loss of measure O. So I think one of our most expensive programs to operate is our summer recreation sensation camp program. We're currently, we fund four sites serving 400 up to 480 kids a summer. That program would be incredibly challenging to operate. There is not another funding source for that program and the cost of it would be incredibly difficult to operate without measure O. Probably the goal would be, can we still operate a site during the summer, maybe two sites during the summer? So obviously you're talking a dramatic loss of summer childcare and recreational programming for youth. So moving on to some of our other challenges, the reevaluation of the recreation fee structure and rates, certainly where we've experienced the cost of living and those things going up here and the inflation that's currently taking place and that directly relates to cost of employees, which is another one down there. And so looking at that where we've been flat within most of our recreation fees for over five years now. And so trying to find that balance and obviously again, some of that comes direction from council of what is that cost recovery goal and expectation within recreation programs. So finding that balance and finding that fee structure and those rates that allow us to be financially stable as well as continue to serve and provide opportunities for the public. Re-engaging public and post COVID services. So earlier I talked about trying to tell both sides of the story and then I only told the staff side of the story. So bringing back those programs, obviously that's only so good if the public actually wants to participate. So I don't know that re-engaging public in post COVID services is necessarily a challenge in the way that it sounds because of those 1300 barcodes we currently have, we have 25,000 individual registrations. So we have engaged the public in those programming. So I look at that more as a, how to expand how we engage, not just re-engaging but how do we expand how we engage? How do we put a lens of diversity, equity, inclusion and as we look at recruiting new contract instructors to bring new programming, how are we recruiting those contract instructors? What type of programs are we offering? So it's more of a new look at engaging the public as opposed to just re-engaging what we were doing before COVID. And as I mentioned, continuing to take what we've learned through COVID and expand on what we're doing. Again, the seasonal temporary employee hiring actions from this council a few years, three, four years ago to be very aggressive in our area with the minimum wage hike put us in an advantageous position for a couple of years. And with what's currently going on, the difficulty of hiring, the fact is that that's kind of we've been caught up to and in some areas maybe even more starting to get passed in terms of what temporary and minimum wage and entry level positions are being paid in the city. And right now everybody is struggling with hiring. We haven't seen the full impact of that that's certainly something we'll be looking at over this next year is are we being competitive within our own business operation with other cities with other recreational facilities within the city to hire the staffing that we need to offer these programs. So that's gonna be a big thing for us to evaluate and continue to work on our hiring practices and making sure that we have qualified staff and the number of staff that we need. Expansion of after school and summer programming. So we know this is continually a need. We know that we have some unique opportunities through Mejero, through Change for Kids, our partnership to do that. So not just again, getting back to where we were before COVID but how do we continue to expand? How do we continue to serve the needs of our community? And then the shutdown of family aquatics during water feature construction. So that's a very exciting challenge. It's a challenge that we've wanted to take on for decades now and so we're excited but we are working on finalizing the timeframe for that and hoping for a fall shutdown of the Finlay Aquatics Center this year to start the construction. It'll replace a large portion of the deck of the pool to meet some ADA standards and then do some just needed maintenance of the pool deck as well as creating a water feature that will certainly make Finlay even more of a Finlay Aquatics Center more of a draw for the community. Give us more ability to do Earth Day parties and those types of activities and serve younger children. So that is a very exciting challenge but how do we already having a small amount of aquatic facilities within? How do we balance the opening of the JC pool that they've just kind of finished construction on and how do we collaborate with them? What do we move to Ridgeway? What can we accommodate? Working with the different groups, the Neptune swimming and the high school teams and the water polo and master swim and all those different groups of, how do we handle a long term, nine months to one year shutdown for this project and continue to serve the public the best way we can for that year. Next slide, please. All right, council. Do we have any questions? Start with the vice mayor. More of a comment if I may, mayor. Not taking one eye on away from the efforts from the community engagement team but I would definitely advocate for the challenges to also represent side shows. And again, not taking anything away from the efforts that have been put forth thus far. I've received a great amount of compliments in regards to the listening sessions and I'm very optimistic to hear about the listening sessions for the hub but nonetheless, single the mile prove that our current strategies are not working. So I would hope that we keep the continued focus on what I consider to be one of the largest public safety issues that I know we're facing as San Rosa and really the nation. So I hope that that continues at the forefront. Thank you. And I can just, sorry. Can I just comment to that really quick? Thank you. I have been in contact with the organizers of the annual single the mile are large celebration that happens in the Roseland community. And we do, we do have plans to collaborate even further for 2023. So I just wanted to make that note. Thank you for that. And even taking that one step further seeing that we haven't had a rose parade or single the mile event. Hopefully we can even plan something for the end of this year. That's something that I know that I'm working on on a personal level. And I would love to speak with the community in regards to that as well. But again, I do appreciate the amount of effort that's been put forth to really give voice to the community. It's greatly appreciated. And I know I receive a lot of feedback complimenting the efforts that have been put forth. So I have to applaud the teams. Mary Lou, what we saw here at city hall is a great representation of what's happening when it comes to the collaboration between the city and our community. Again, I have to applaud the efforts. Thank you. Council Member McDonald. Yes, thank you. I just wanted to make a couple of comments or actually ask if we do any outreach to our local high schools, the junior college or Sonoma State for internships for these temporary summer programs. Because that seems to me like an opportunity for us to work with those that are looking to go into some type of industry. It's a great way for them to connect to perhaps working for the city in the future as far as workforce development. But that might be an opportunity since those can be kind of difficult for us to fill a lot of times on those temporary positions. If we've done any outreach or letting them know what positions we might have available. And if it is a paid internship, sometimes those can even be more attractive to some of our youth in the community. So that was one of my questions. And I know that you're looking at the afterschool and summer programs. And I know I've mentioned it before that the governor's approving or has proposed a significant increase to afterschool and summertime programs. And if we've done any kind of communications with our schools on maybe allowing them to use our facilities if they have staff to run the programs, if that's another area that we maybe need some support with. Thank you. And I'm gonna answer part of that question. With we do collaborate with Sonoma State regarding, we have two VISTAs that we could not do all of the work that we do without them. They are incredible. We're super grateful for all their hard work. I mean, they are in the trenches with us. And so in addition, we are going to be offering paid internships. Thank you so much to the council for approving funding for those paid internships. We are in the process of developing that program. So hopefully by this summer, that opportunity will be available to high school and college students who are interested in any of the various departments that the city represents. The process of council, there's so much wonderful learning that can take place here. But Jeff, I don't know if you wanna jump in on any of those other pieces. Yeah. So yeah, more to that same topic within recreation. Certainly there's challenges that we're experiencing right now. That's not the historical norm. The temp staff model works incredibly well within recreation, not just here in Santa Rosa, but across the nation. That's really the model. And all those things that you listed are exactly who we do our staff recruiting through with the temporary positions. And the other side of that is, when we're talking about struggling, getting staff, we're carrying about 300 temporary employees for the season, the summer season. So it's not a struggle to find five or 10 people. It's, when things are a challenge, it's because of the, part of that is because the team is so large. And so while internships are great within the recreation, all of our staff resources and everything are already towards kind of managing that scheme of temporary employees. So it's certainly another model that we can evaluate and may have to make adjustments as we move on. Obviously, like I said, that this isn't a historical problem. This is a current situation that we are certainly looking at all options as we move forward. But we're also hopeful that we'll see some bounce back in return to how we've been able to operate the same way that we have historically, but definitely something to keep in mind and consider. And then there was another piece at the end, I forget what the question, oh, with the after-school programs. So yeah, there certainly is a lot of opportunity and, excuse me, funding sources that are presenting their way through the schools to provide more programming. The reality is in terms of facilities, we certainly could make that an availability. The schools are in a much better situation than the city is in terms of facilities and program space. So that relationship is usually the opposite. Where could we use school space to offer programs? But yeah, we regularly communicate with the school district through different channels, part of the violence prevention partnership, ongoing meetings is changing and the needs in the community change. So certainly open to those conversations, but I have not heard that request from the school district. We could certainly have that conversation if they were looking for that in terms of space, but for most of the time for the schools, it's so much more convenient for them to offer programming at their own site. Through some of the ARPA funds, we are looking at how to operate a program at the Steel Line Community Center, and we are talking with Santa Rosa City Schools. Certainly there's the school right next door where we would just pick up the kids and walk them over. But would they bust kids from some of their other wait lists on after school programs to that Steel Line Community Center? So there is some of that happening, but overall they're usually the ones that have the facilities and we're the ones asking for access to space. Thank you. Council Member Rogers? I one wanted to applaud you for all your efforts, the recreation and community engagement departments. You guys are doing such a wonderful job through COVID, I mean classes have been canceled and you guys conduct the class on Zoom for like three year olds and also declaring racism as a public and human rights. Crisis in Santa Rosa and bringing that before the council I think was wonderful and it really shows where we're trying to go as a community. And I think that that is wonderful being a woman of color and sitting here on council. But one thing I wanted to also point out is that in looking at summer programs for my 11 year old today, he turns 11 today, happy birthday Jalen, is that he could not sign up, well I could not sign him up for one of the programs because we were not low income. And so to me that reminds me of separate, right? But separate is not always equal. So I think that maybe if we have slots that are available and I'm sure we have a reason why we have that, but to me that is it's separated by income. So separate but equal is what I'm getting in my head. So if we wanna look at that or examine that of why we have only low income, low income individuals that are low income youth being able to attend a certain program or it's only slotted for those children and then other youth that can pay full fee, have to go somewhere else. And I merely wanted him to go there due to location. It was convenient based on where we were physically located in the city. So that would be probably my only feedback about the summer programs. But I think that you guys are doing a really good job and I applaud everything that you're doing and thank you so much. Thank you. We'll go to council member Fleming. Can I comment real quick? I'm sorry. Yeah, go for it. I just wanted to, I know we've had a brief conversation on this in the past as well. And I appreciate you bringing it up again. You know, there is a measure of programming. And so some of how we've had those requirements set up in the past or accountability to measure O and the Citizens Oversight Committee. But we completely agree with you and we've had conversations about it's not a perfect system and how do we move forward in addressing that and are currently having conversations about how within our capacity, how can we create, we have a membership for measure O and right now it is strictly based off some of those income requirements. So how do we expand how we're bringing kids into that membership? Because there's a lot of ways to serve violence prevention and it's not just an economic factor that comes into play with that. So certainly something that we're having conversation with and we do have to balance it with that accountability to measure O, but there's other ways to balance that and we're looking into that and certainly above and to more conversations. We don't have all the answers of how to manage that or administratively to process that. So definitely something that we're having conversations about and trying to figure out the best way to meet the requirements of the ordinance and meet the needs of the community. All right, Council Member. Thank you and thank you to you and your team. I wanna amplify what Council Member Rogers said about and thank you for your efforts to increase diversity amongst the measure O programs. There has to be a way that we can separate out the slots that we fund for low income children. If our goal is truly violence prevention then clustering low income and vulnerable students together is gonna be detrimental to the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. So I think it's imperative and frankly, part of our accountability to not have concentrations of poverty and cohorts amongst students. But that was not why I originally raised my hand but after she brought up that point, I thought I would make sure that you heard from at least two Council Members that that's absolutely has the change and I know it's complex, but I believe in you guys. So you guys did more during the pandemic than I think anybody could have imagined and kept so many children who are at risk occupied and away from some of the stressors that we all went through. So I wanna extend a sincere thank you. A few slides back, we were talking about access to summer recreation programs, the traditional Wattamuchi ones. And one of the things that I heard and I personally experienced as well, it's no fun when you're struggling with someone to have everyone yelling at you and you're like, I'm sitting here at midnight too, trying to get enrolled in, get my student enrolled in summer camp and then everyone's piling on yelling at you, why are we up at midnight? So I'm wondering if and what kinds of plans you guys have so that next year we're not all up at midnight hoping to get our kids into summer camps. And for the rest of the Council, just so you know, the enrollment starts at midnight. So just curious to know. Yeah, so we did have some conversation about that leading into this one. And again, definitely, we talked about do we push it off and have it at eight o'clock but then the concern is what about parents who are already at work at eight o'clock and then they can't register. I mean, we're looking at what is that best solution? It certainly is a change in how we set it up but we've talked about maybe there's two different sessions two different times that slots open and half the slots open at one time half the slots open at another time. So there are some conversations taking place of that and within the limitations of our registration software and everything we're looking at what can be done. Ultimately, the reality is with a program like Camp Wautom that has a, I think over 60 years now, history, we're starting to have the third generation of family members sign up for Wautom. So it's always going to be an impacted program. There's always going to be people on the wait list. There's going to be people who are left out but we've definitely heard the same thing that you have heard in terms of the challenges with that. So we are looking at our registration software and looking for what are ways that we can handle not just, I mean, there's some other programs as well. Wautom is certainly the kind of the marquee program but some of those other programs that do go into a wait list very early on. I think that this is just my perspective and from the perspective of the parents that I've heard I think we all expect that these programs will get sold out quickly and that will all be wait listed. But I think that sleeplessness on top of it all is just an undesirable outcome. So maybe noon or any other time besides the middle of the night would be appreciated. Thank you. All right, thank you so much to the team. It looks like we're out of questions here. So we'll move on to actually, council let's take a five minute break since we've been at this for about two hours. And then when we come back we'll move on to our next department. You got to go ahead and bring us back. Thank you everybody for having a brief break. Madam city clerk, if you could please call the roll. Thank you mayor, council member Schwedhelm. Here. Council member Sawyer. Here. Council member Rogers. Present. Council member McDonald. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Vice mayor Alvarez. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. All right, let's move on to housing and community services. Thank you and we'll introduce the next department housing and community services. We have Megan Bassenger, the department director and Kate Goldstein here to go over their budget. Thank you. Thank you, Veronica. Good morning mayor Rogers and members of council. I am pleased to present our proposed fiscal year 2223 budgets. Next slide please. So this slide is an overview of the five primary areas of funding to the department of housing and community services. As you can see, we have a very small contribution from the general fund and this is comprised of the Secure Families Fund Collaborative and also a grant that the city provides to legal aid of Sonoma County. The change will be later described in some of our position adjustments. Next we have the Mobile Home Right Stabilization Fund. This is a fee that is collected per mobile home space that is subject to rent control. Currently there are about 1600 spaces citywide that are subject to this fee and I'll be giving into the mobile home or control ordinance later in the presentation. The third area is the administrative and community services, the general admin fund for the department. And so this covers city overhead, IT costs and insurance for the department as well as general administrative expenses. The next two areas are the primary focus of the department of housing and community services. Our rental assistance programs which you can see have a really significant increase in the upcoming fiscal year. This is the Housing Choice Boucher Program and also incorporates the Emergency Housing Boucher Program which was a new addition in summer of 2021. So the increase here is to accommodate for the emergency housing vouchers being brought to the budget and then also there's an adjustment for increases in the administrative fees that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development provides us for the administration of the program. And then finally we have the housing trust which is the city's affordable housing lending arm. And so you can see we have a fairly worthy increase in the upcoming fiscal year. And this is primarily due to two issues. One, the real property transfer tax which Veronica touched on yesterday and the adjustment that's being made with the homeless services. So that will be funded with ARPA funds in the next fiscal year. So that allows more funding to be put towards affordable housing. And then in this past year, we've had a fair number of loan payoffs and residual receipts which we put into lending again. So when loans either make pay downs or pay off, we put those right back into our lending pool and put those out to additional affordable housing units. Next slide please. So again, the program area is kind of mimic what we looked up on the last slide, the mobile home break control ordinance. The amount that we collect per space we use to administer the ordinance and we'll also be using these funds to do an ordinance update. And that is going to be kicked off in the coming month or so. And so we'll be having more information pushed out to council once we have an executed agreement with our consultant who will be preparing that update. As I noted, the housing trust has an increase in its lending. And you can see that this amount doesn't match what we saw in the previous slide because some of that is included in projects below. So the city also received a contribution from the state and that's known as the Permanent Local Housing Allocation Fund. And these are monies that'll be used for additional affordable housing units throughout the city. Our admin and community services, again, it's administration for the department touches on IT liability insurance and other department wide expenses. The code enforcement, which has come in and out of various departments and is now with PED as Claire noted in her presentation. So this fund has a carryover name, but again, it is the Secure Families Fund and Legal Aid contribution that we provide. We'll move on to the next slide. So some of the general fund budget highlights. And again, this is less than 1% of the department's overall budget. We eliminated a vacant deputy director and this was a position that had been vacant for several years and was created when code enforcement was part of housing and community services. So the deputy director oversaw code enforcement, the housing choice voucher program and NRP, which is also good over into planning and economic development. And then as a result of that combination, we were able to adjust some of our staffing and added in the upcoming fiscal year, one technician to help support the homeless services team. And as you may remember from yesterday, this is a rather small team. We have a manager. We recently added a program specialist. So we are excited to have an additional staff member to help support the efforts of that group. Next slide please. So for the housing authority, which includes the housing choice voucher program and the housing trust, we will be adding three FTEs in the upcoming fiscal year. And these are non-general fund positions and they will be funded through the additional funds available through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And that's a technician to support rental housing inspections. The council thankfully added that in February during the mid-year budget. And that person has started, they started last week and they're actively learning their role in inspecting units for the housing choice voucher program. We also will be adding a program specialist in rental housing to help with the supervision of the program, coordinate with landlords and just improve the administration of the overall program. And then finally, an additional technician in the housing trust to assist with compliance. As Claire noted in her presentation, we have a significant number of affordable housing units under construction and in various stages of pre-development. So we need an additional staff member who will help with the verification for those residents. We do annual monitoring of the contracts of those properties. So it's a significant increase in workload and we are looking forward to adding one more staff person. And as I noted previously, we're able to achieve these additional positions due to the increase in the administrative allowance from the US Department of Housing Urban Development and then also through funding that's available through our compliance fees that we charge for affordable housing programs and then also adjustments in real property transfer tax. Next slide please. So some of the accomplishments that we will have by the end of the fiscal year is we continue to administer the emergency housing voucher program. This is 131 additional vouchers that were provided to the city of Santa Rosa accompanied by two and a half million dollars in funding. These are vouchers that are targeted specifically to homeless individuals. And we have a staff person who's assigned to that and is actively working with residents that are referred to us through the Sonoma County Continuum of Care. There's a structured referral process that we are adhering to. So that is underway. By the end of the fiscal year, staff will have completed inspection of over 1600 housing choice voucher units. As a result of COVID-19, HUD provided waivers on the inspections. So we are getting all those inspections conducted and bringing those units into compliance. So this is a significant lift by staff. And again, we are very grateful to have an additional staff person who we are training and getting out there into the community. As I'm sure many of you recall, the city received over 38 million in disaster recovery funds as a result of the 2017 wildfires. These are the CDBGDR funds, and they were targeted directly to low-income housing rental units. And so the Housing Authority was able to identify five new rental projects to put these funds into, three of which are currently under construction and that would be the rebuilding of the former journeys in Mobile Home Park, the Karatoss Homes, which is the rental component of Karatoss Village, and then also the Linda Tuna's Apartments in Rinking Valley. So we are very excited to have those units under construction, which is 184 of the 377 units that were assisted with CDBGDR. We are actively performing compliance monitoring on over 4,000 units that are subject to regulatory requirements throughout the city. We've committed 132 project-based vouchers to affordable housing units. And so these are housing choice vouchers that are assigned to a property. There's a 20-year contract, and staff has to do a fair amount of work to identify potential waiting lists for these units, inspect the units once they're connected, and then work with those clients to get them into those housing units. And then finally, we developed and implemented with IT, and Brian mentioned this in his presentation, an electronic waiting list. The waiting list was opened this year for two months, and we received over 7,000 applications electronically. I'd say the majority of the interested people did not have any issues accessing it electronically. We provided assistance to those who did not have access to the internet or needed some help navigating through the system. So that was a great success. We no longer had paper applications coming in in boxes and having staff sort through that. So that definitely has been an efficiency and a great coordination with the IT department. Next slide, please. Finally, the challenges for housing and community services in that kind of year. Like many departments, we are looking to hire and train additional staff to provide our four programs and services. We are actively adjusting to the ever evolving and expanding programs that are available through the federal government as well as the state government. One of those is the one-time funding known as Home Mark. This will be an additional tranche of affordable housing funding that will be specific to homeless individuals. So we are navigating through changing regulations and programs and looking at how to implement these in the community along with continuing to lease up the emergency housing voucher units and then launch our down payment assistance program. And this is the $2 million program that council approved in February through the PG&E settlement funds. So we look forward to that being implemented in the coming months. And then finally, as I touched on at the beginning of the presentation, we will be conducting an update to the mobile home rec control ordinance. This is an area that the community has expressed interest in having the city evaluate the ordinance and look at the cost increases that are being provided to mobile home residents. So we'll be kicking that off in the coming months as well. That concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions and the cable plan is available as well. Thank you so much, Megan. Council member McDonald. Yes, you mentioned the mobile home rental control project that's coming forward. Can you tell me, I'm sorry, I did not hear when you said that's coming forward to council for review. So the contract will not be coming to council because it's under the limit, but once the ordinance is drafted and we have a material for the council to review, it will be presented likely in two hearings, the first through a public hearing to review and receive comments on the ordinance. And then a second, if you approve that, a second ordinance adoption reading. And I anticipate that happening in the next several months or so. So an ordinance wouldn't be presented until at least fall of 2022. Council member Rogers. Request, although the ordinance will not be presented to us if we can be updated on the status of the ordinance, that would be great because we are getting a lot of feedback from community members that are affected within the mobile home. So that is just a request. And then also, what is the balance currently in the mobile home rent stabilization? The fund balance is approximately $800,000. And that is several years of the fee that we noted in the first two slides being collected for the spaces that are subject to the rent control ordinance. Okay, perfect, thank you. So through the mayor, council member McDonald and council member Rogers, the city attorney and I have discussed the ordinance and we have flagged this as a priority. So we're gonna get it to council as soon as possible. Any other questions from council? Okay, thank you so much, Megan. Thank you to you and your team. Let's move on to the fire department. Welcome, chief. Good morning, Veronica. You can do your thing. Okay, thank you. Yes, our next department is the fire department and we have our fire chief, Scott Westrop here. Thank you so much. Great, thank you. Good morning, Mayor Rogers, members of council. Scott Westrop fire chief for the city of Santa Rosa fire department. I'll be presenting to you the slides on the fire department proposed budget for fiscal year 22, 23. Next slide, please. So looking at the fire department by funds, there's three funds that we look at. It's the general fund, obviously, which is the majority of our funding opportunities, measure O and then the capital improvement fund. Looking at the general fund, we see about a 9% increase into the general fund allocation to the fire department. This is based on largely a $2.5 million increase in salaries and benefits due to MOU changes last year and this year. And also a mid-year adjustment to our budget of $1.5 million towards non-contract overtime. We'll talk a little bit more about what that was for later on and obviously council has seen that before, but I'll cover it in the upcoming slides. And lastly, there was a increase of $250,000 in leases for the two new type one fire engines that we purchased in December of 2021. The major changes to the measure O fund, excuse me, are essentially they're on pace with the general fund. It's a $125,000 increase to salaries and benefits due to MOU changes and a $20,000 increase in service and supply and overhead costs. In the capital improvement fund, we saw a marginal increase in the funding opportunity out of the CFF, which assisted many city manager, and that we'll talk about later on in the presentation today. But essentially the CIP fund goes towards the temporary fire station five, the relocation of fire station eight and the construction of fire station nine in the Southeast. So while it shows a 32.7% increase, the funds relatively small. So that's why there's such a big increase for the small amount, I'm slightly pleased. So looking at the fire department by program, really the numbers pair over well. So we'll just get into a little bit more detail in each one of these slides. So again, in the general fund, the 9% increase due to the salaries and benefit changes, the non-contract overtime and the leases. But what we're also seeing, which we're very excited about in this year's budget is the addition or restoration of two FTE firefighter paramedics. So in the last fiscal year budget, we lost five positions based on salary savings for the entire organization, the entire city. So it's the restoration of two of those positions. And I'll talk about why that's so important here upcoming in some additional slides. Changes in measure O, excuse me. Again, an on par rise in the general measure O compared to the general fund of 3.8%. Again, salaries and benefits due to MOU costs and the $20,000 increase to service and supply and overhead. In general administration, we see an 11.6% increase to the general fund. This is largely due to salaries and benefits in MOU costs, as well as an increase in $290,000 in the general fund admin plan and $55,000 in the IT admin plan. In fire prevention, we see a small increase that's due to the salaries and benefits increase in MOU costs. And then again, in capital improvement, it's an 11.5% and also our O&M projects. So where we have money that we save up for large capital projects or replacement programs, we see a marginal increase in there as well. Next slide please. So in the general fund highlights, we saw a mid-year adjustment and I'll carry over to this year of 1.5 going down to 1.4 million dollars in overtime costs that are non-contract overtime. So just to bring everybody back up to speed, non-contract overtime is essentially accumulated by positions being vacant within the organization due to vacation, sick leave, jury leave, injury, training, whatever the case may be. We have a minimum daily staffing of 39 and we're not like other parts of the organization where if somebody's sick or on vacation, their office can be vacant. We have to put 39 people on duty every day. And so the non-contract overtime fills those positions. What we did was we did a five-year analysis of our non-contract overtime and determined that we were under-budgeted by about 1.5 million dollars based on a five-year average. And so this was an adjustment to bring this back up to true and essentially to keep us from having to move money around at the end of the year to finish with a balanced budget. Contract overtime just as a point of comparison is for strike team deployments. So it's part of the California Master Mutual Aid Program. So they're separated because on the contract overtime, we actually bring in, we get reimbursed and an additional 14% in admin fees. Again, we saw the $250,000 increase for the two type one engines. This will be the last fire engines that we have to buy with its own funding source. Now they'll be replaced out of the Capital Fleet Replacement Program. So it's sort of exciting that it's this last time that we had to come to council and figure out how we were gonna fund, purchase of fire apparatus. We have the addition of six full-time employees, well, FT, but limited term firefighters in response. We're currently in the process. And as council knows, we currently just reclassified those positions and created a new job class to single role paramedics for in response. So the recruitment process is underway for that right now. And then the one FTE fire captain use the supervisor for the in response program. But all these positions will be vouchered directly to in response and not be coming out of the fire department's budget. Again, we added the two FTE firefighters this year. Essentially what that does is you heard me talk before about our minimum daily staffing of 39. So essentially what this does is it brings us up to a minimum daily staffing of 39, but we have 40 bodies now to be able to plug into those positions. So if somebody calls in sick on one engine, we don't have to hire overtime for it. We move that extra body up into that position. So it brings that overtime line down. Eventually we'd like to get to two over per shift, but right now this puts us at one over per shift. So it's very exciting for us. We're really happy with it. It also increases our ability to upstaff during red flag emergencies or during major events to where we can actually put another engine company on service with the three over that we have right now. And then another one of the highlights is that we were able to do a budget neutral realignment and reclassification of a lot of our admin bureau positions. So we stayed within position control on the count of bodies that we had. And we tried to stay within budget, but there was a delta created between the new positions that we reclassed to and the positions we formally had in the bureau. And with that delta, we were able to make that up by vouchering time away from the vegetation management program and the fire prevention bureau to make up the difference between those job classifications. So it's budget neutral, but we're essentially have the right bodies or the right job classifications out in the fire admin bureau now. We're previously, we had historically filled positions, but with the way the world has changed and the way the fire department business model has changed, we had to change some of those job classifications. So we're excited we're able to get that accomplished as well. Next slide please. So some of our accomplishments to look at over the last year is as council knows, we implemented our vegetation management program. And one thing I'm proud of the fire prevention bureau for accomplishing with this is we've also received $5.3 million in grant funding. So essentially we've doubled the council's commitment and investment to vegetation management and grant funding. We implemented our recruitment and diversity strategic plan. We just recently gave an update to the public safety subcommittee on some of the exciting programs and events that have been going on there. And we're already starting to see the fruits of our labor come out in the recruitment and diversity strategic plan. So we're very excited about that and we'll continue to move forward with the seed and the rest of the city on those programs. Last year we purchased the two type one engines we spoke about and we purchased the two type three fire engines out of the PG&E on one time funding strategy for Rui 2.0. The second type three engine is in Sacramento. It should be here in Santa Rosa anytime. So we'll have that in service before the fire season starts. As you all know, we purchased the property for station five and for the new station eight. This is a collaborative process throughout the city. We're not taking responsibility for that, but we're excited that we have actually purchased the property and we're in the process to start building station five and we purchased the property for station eight. And we're working with the city as Director Tay has talked about on building the Roseland hub. I just talked about reorganizing the admin bureau. And then as council knows also we were awarded a $1 million federal earmark to build a hot POC. So essentially it'll be retrofitting a current building that the city owns to house our EOC on a full-time basis. So it'll be stood up full-time. There won't be any set up time. It'll be big enough, be state of the art to accomplish our goals when we activate the EOC. And finally we hired to maintain constant staffing in the suppression division. Essentially this is we hired and promoted people to maintain our 39 for 39 riding positions for bodies. But again, adding those two additional firefighters will bring us to where we're one over per shift. So hopefully we'll see some decrease in our overtime allotment and wear and tear on our personnel. Next slide, please. So challenges for the fire department. Just like everybody else, whether it's the public sector or private sector, we're seeing a difficult time in recruiting technical job classifications. So for the fire department that really falls in the fire prevention bureau with building plans, examiners, fire inspectors and assistant fire marshals. The fire prevention bureau has been working hard with human resources to keep those recruitments going. And we're seeing some good efforts to being done there and some good results coming out. So we just had a meeting yesterday that essentially we were looking for the office space and the vehicles to make sure that as we hire these people coming out of backgrounds that we have all the space for that. So things are moving along well. There it is. It's really slow things down and making sure that we're on par with everything going on here in the fire department. Controlling non-contract overtime costs. So like I talked about before, the 39 for 39, we can't have an open seat on a fire engine. So COVID has really impacted us. When we have an employee who is off on COVID, we have to fill that position. So it's been really hard to budget around that, but essentially we're working really hard to maintain all of our control measures to keep our employees safe and healthy. But it has been an unintended consequence that our overtime goes up due to COVID. The second piece of that is injury. As we all know, the wear and tear in our employees across the city, but within the fire department in particular with the year long fire season and the increase in call volume has really weighed heavily on the injury and also on the behavioral health of our employees. And so, and that not only goes for suppression and operations, we have to look at the increased workload and fire prevention and in the admin bureau as well. So really our business has changed a lot with recovery resiliency, with COVID and with the development that's going on within the city. And so we're employing a lot of different strategies and employing every opportunity that we can to make sure that our employees are taking care of both physically and mentally. Privacy retrofits and remodels of fire stations. So this is based on a lot of deferred maintenance that's gone on throughout the city. Everybody knows it exists and we're working with TPW and the city manager's office to employ some strategies to get to a point where we're retrofitting or remodeling our fire stations for diversification of the workforce and making sure that our employees are feeling safe and welcome and a sense of belonging within the fire stations. And then just like everything else in the world whether it's ordering for an Amazon or ordering a fire engine, we're faced with supply chain challenges. Day to day, we have issues with that with PPE and the stuff that we need to run our business on a day to day basis. Some of our communications equipment that we've been ordering either through the WUE 2.0 strategy or through Measure O. Those are slowed down because it's supply chain challenges. So we're working through those and we continue to apply pressure to make sure we have those critical pieces. The two type six engines that we are trying to order as part of the WUE 2.0 strategy, they're the smaller wildland fire engines. Essentially, we've been told by the major manufacturers that they're not producing commercial chassis until the fourth quarter of this year, which is what this engine goes on to focusing on electric vehicles. So we won't even be able to order those fire engines until the fourth quarter of this calendar year. So across the board, we have supply chain issues. It's nothing different, but we continue to apply the pressure and continue to get stuff done in light in spite of that. So with that, that's the end of the presentation and I'm available for any questions you may have. Thank you so much, Chief. Looking to my counsel to see if there are any questions on the fire department. Council Member McDonald. Thank you, Chief, for your presentation. I saw that you noted $1.5 million in overtime, but you had suggested that by hiring the two new positions that might mitigate some of those costs, would it actually serve us to add additional full-time positions to reduce that projection of 1.5? I'm assuming most of the overtime is when we actually have an emergency or a fire and that prediction is there, but I'm just wondering, you're suggesting that we're fully stopped, but that just seems like a pretty high amount and if we would be better served to actually hire in some more full-time firemen. And then I did have a question around remodeling of the fire departments for privacy. I'm really happy to see that we have more women and diversity in our fire departments and that that's part of the recruitment strategy, but when you actually go into the fire departments for anyone, there's not any privacy and some of the equipment of where they sleep is quite old. So I would love to see what's going to be done and what the progress will be around that. I went in to one fire department and I think the bedding was older than me. So type six, is that the smaller engine that was going to be going into Oakmont? And they're not building that right now because I know that they actually have a height problem of getting in a larger piece of equipment at that specific station and where are we seeing some of those holdbacks on that? Sorry, that was a lot of questions. Let me know if you need to state anything again. I think I got it. So on the non-contract overtime piece, we have done a staffing study, we presented it in 2019 and it should, we needed to fill the current vacancies that we had, which at the time was six vacancies. And so that was two over per shift and hired an additional 14 personnel to eliminate the overtime problem. So it's a huge lift, it's a big economic driver. And so we're working steadily towards it while it will slow the problem, it will not stop the problem by hiring these two additional FTEs. So we'll continue to work with the city manager and the CFO on ways to accomplish that, but we do have the study to back it up. And as we hopefully add additional stations and personnel, obviously the problem will rise on scale. And so we need to find a good way to adjust to that. So we look at the delta between an FTE and overtime, we see about a $55,000 savings in hiring somebody full time. So the number will be small in the savings, there will be some savings, but it will not accomplish a $1.5 million problem. And so, and like I said, you brought up the strike team over time or the contract overtime when we're in an emergency and it really depends on what the emergency is. If it's a state incident or a federal incident, we get the reimbursement plus the admin fees. But if we're upstaffing for a red flag warning, those are reimbursed either through the state or through the county funding. So there are some reimbursement there. So the good news is, is during those large-scale emergencies, particularly revolving around fires, floods and earthquakes, we have some reimbursement costs. So they're pretty much on par as far as they go. We just, we essentially make money on the strike team side. On the remodel, the bedding is not as old as you. We replace the mattresses fairly frequently, but the infrastructure is old. We haven't built a fire station since 2009. That was the last time we built a fire station. So we have a lot of fire stations that are built in the 70s and 80s. And so we're working on a plan with TPW and with the city manager and with finance on how we look at deferred maintenance and different opportunities to build new fire stations or retrofit our current fire stations. But as we know, the commercial construction, particularly in California and Sonoma County is extremely expensive. And so it's managing big ticket items and making sure that we are moving forward into the future and planning for the future and making sure that there is a sense of welcoming and belonging for everybody that comes into a fire station. They are a public facility, they're a public asset. The difference is, is that we live there 24-7, 365. So we are working holistically with everybody and throughout the city on that. And we look forward to solving that solution here in the near future. And the type six engine is the smaller of the fire engines. It's built on a two-ton chassis essentially of a sort of commercial truck that you see driving down the road. Engine 22, if you recall, is our current type six engine. That would be an ideal fit for Oakmont based on the fact that it is small enough to fit into that small station. And it's the streets and the narrow streets and the access that we run into in the Oakmont community and that adjacent area where that type of fire engine would be ideal out there. So we're, we have the order ready to go. It's just a matter of getting the chassis to put it on. So our fleet management within the department working with fleet services in TPW continues to apply pressure and try to find creative solutions to get those built sooner than later. But essentially we've been told by the major manufacturers we're not building any of those chassis and there aren't any to be had right now. So we're turning over every rock we can to make sure we find a creative solution to that. I cover everything there. You did, thank you. Great, thank you. Council Member Rogers. Really quickly, I just wanted to thank you for the presentation and also for acknowledging the behavioral health and physical health and wellness of our staff as a priority. I myself, I feel like that is definitely something that we need to hold at the forefront and of a high priority. And I also wanted to know, are we leveraging any community assets or any community programs that we have where people may be able to come in, especially on the behavioral health front to assist and support our staff because now is definitely a trying time. And I know that there are community programs that might be something that we can do is leverage some of, with some of our partners just to support them. And if there is anything that we can do, I think that we probably should because we can give them fire, I mean fireproof jackets and we can give them bulletproof vests but mental health is something that we can't see. We can see when the fire comes to get us, we can see when the bullet penetrates our bodies but mental health is definitely something that we can't always see and detect until it's too late. So we need to make sure that we know the warning signs and how to support and protect people from that. So thank you very much. And that just goes to show the type of leader that you are. So thank you. I'm happy that you're in the position that you're in. Thank you. I appreciate that. My philosophy has been since day one and I've shared this with city manager Smith and in my entire command staff that essentially will employ anything that we can because we're just looking for, if it impacts one person it's worth the investment. So that's my take on it. So we have a lot of different strategies, we have a lot of different programs but we're just looking for if it's that one person that didn't like this or that or the other thing but they like this program great. And as far as leveraging resources throughout the community, we're very involved in obviously our community partners in behavioral health. We believe we are a leader in behavioral health. And so we are working through community partners on that in a lot of different strategies. One thing I'll say is the May 21st wildfire ready event that we're holding, we held it last year and working with off security engagement. One thing is that it's a holistic approach to healing throughout the community. The one thing that is common across any geographic or socioeconomic boundary is the fires and the impact of the fire. So how can we build and bond through the community? So on May 21st, we'll have some healthcare and behavioral health support out there for the community. We're looking at next year, working with the Santa Rosa Fire Foundation on bringing in a public facing behavioral health network and program. So we're working a lot of those things to make sure we're incorporating the community because our community has a lot of battle scars. And we certainly see it this time of year as things dry out and get warm. And as we get into the fire season, so every place that we can make that chain of survival stronger, we will do that. So thank you for that. Thank you, Chief. Council Member Svettel. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for your presentation. I had a question regarding your admin restructuring because in the staff report, it talked about your losing and administrative services officer and creating a deputy fire chief. And I know typically in public safety, you have, you wanna have a lot of the functions, you don't need to have all the training that let's say a firefighter would need. Can you talk about the roles and responsibilities, how those are changing? And if you believe this is gonna be a sustainable new organization chart without an ASO with a department of your size? Absolutely, thank you for that. So like I said earlier, really the business model of the fire department has changed. There's a lot more development, there's a lot more recovery and resiliency work. And so our admin team has been working really hard and a lot of times they're working out of class on working on the different projects. And so we had a lot of vacancies in that bureau. So we looked at the opportunity to look at the department now and into the future on what we really needed out in the admin bureau to run the business of the fire department essentially. So we worked not only with the admin team that's on the floor right now, we have three people that still are on the floor that have been here, one's been here longer than I have and the other one's been here a couple of years. So we used their expertise, the expertise of our command staff and all the bureaus and looked at how we could reorganize that department or that part of the department to be more effective not only now but like you said, into the future, particularly with the amount of development that we have going on. So with the ASO position, we saw that there was, ASO really has to be good at finance and has to be good at human resources. And so one of the parts of the reorganization was bringing in a specialist and analyst that will focus on finance and an analyst that will focus on human resources. And so we've sort of parted that out and we put the overhead structure in with the second deputy chief. So essentially the second deputy chief will oversee prevention, emergency management and the admin bureau and bring in the analysts to build out the expertise in those two particular fields. And then we're gonna bolster down the road. We're gonna phase in some other positions into the admin bureau. This is sort of phase one of the approach. So I really do think it is sustainable and I really think it's where we need to be because of the way the business has changed and the way that we need to focus on future development and future business and really look at different revenue streams, things like that. So I really wanted those expertise positions in there that we can work directly with. Does that answer your question, sir? Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. One other question. I didn't see anything in the report about it. Can you give us an update on the COPE program or regularly hear from community members about their opinion about that program? Could you update us on that? Yeah, absolutely. So the COPE program is still alive and well. The emergency management team and fire prevention team go out on a regular basis to educate communities on how to become a community organized, prepared for emergencies. So the COPE program is alive and well, essentially what it is, it's in layman terms, it's catch and release. So we will train those members who want to be community leaders and then go out and develop their own program. One of the parts of the WUE 2.0 plan or the Wildland Response and Resiliency Strategic Plan was looking at COPE and do we need to invest in a more robust COPE or CERT program. So part of that plan was to essentially, we're going to have to do a feasibility study and figure out what that means because as I've said to council previously, we just didn't have the bandwidth back in the day to really sustain the COPE program where we were running it. And so it turned into this community driven approach. But if we want to invest more in a COPE program, we're going to do a feasibility study on what that looks like and come up with a really good strategic plan on building a sustainable and long-term lasting COPE program. Great, thank you for that update. Council Member Fleming. Thank you. I think most of my questions have been asked and answered, but the first one is, is the COPE program the prior equivalent of the BIP program or is it tangible different in terms of the amount of offset in hours that it provides to the department? So between, I don't know a lot about the Pleast Farm BIP program, but the COPE program, they would not be uniformed members of the organization. They're not in fire engines that are marked as out of service, anything like that. They're not out running calls or providing assistance on calls for service. So essentially the COPE program is, in your community you would have a COPE team and you would be organized to prepare for an emergency whether it be an earthquake or a fire. And so it's building up your community. We did have some volunteers in our office previously that helped organize that. They got a little out of their lane in some regards. So that was some of the challenges that we had, but I'd say they're relatively different in their approach and how they are managed and how they're organized on a daily basis. Well, I'm sure it's a lot of work to administer a volunteer program. It does seem like in the police side of things that they do have a pretty strong program for getting some clerical work done and offsetting some labor needs. And maybe in future years we can look at that, but I get that you've got plenty on your plate and wanna congratulate you on getting two more FTEs back. I know that that's not the five that is necessary, but it is a really good start. I had a question about the room models. Essentially it's to make the space usable for women. Will this mean that we'll no longer be employing workplace exemptions? No, not at all. We're just, we're trying to build future fire stations, remodel our current fire stations to where everybody has a place and they're welcoming and belonging. So there will be no exemptions. It's just gonna be everybody's welcome there. It's their place to live and to work. So there won't be any restrictions at all if that answers your question. I think it does answer my question. I think the way that you answered it doesn't highlight how great it is, what you're doing. I think that this is a big deal. It's been a long, longstanding problem that it hasn't, the spaces haven't been accommodating to women and that that's gonna change is really exciting. Do you have a timeline on when we will be retiring our workplace exemptions and making all of our fire stations fully accessible to women? Wouldn't say I have an ETA. It's gonna be based on the deferred maintenance plan that we develop as a city and how fast we can get the work done. So, we have 10 fire stations that all need different varying levels of work. Some are good to go right now and some on office and there's varying levels in there. So as we prepare for this budget, we were talking in depth with the city manager, assistant city manager and TPW about what this plan looks like and I know we'll be looking at that very soon. It's certainly a priority of mine and certainly a priority of the city manager. So it's something we're gonna be jumping on we're gonna be figuring out the plan to get it done and then the funding strategy to accomplish it. Very cool. Look forward to hearing updates on the progress of that. And then the last question I have is around the cost savings associated with reductions in overtime. You mentioned that there was a delta of about $55,000 and I'm wondering if that accounts as well for the pension liability costs? That's a fully encumbered number. So when we did the math on what the difference was between a FTE and overtime position, it was a fully encumbered number, all the costs that you could possibly imagine. We came up with the $55,000 delta. Okay, that's really helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, chief. Any additional questions? All right, thank you so much. We'll move on to our police department. And I apologize, Veronica. I know I'm stealing your thunder. I know this is interrupting the flow of the meeting a little bit, but yeah, since I'm here to introduce, I will introduce the police department. We have John Cregan, our police captain, and he has Pam Lawrence, their ASO, to help introduce this budget. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor Rogers and Vice Mayor Alvarez and City Council. John Cregan, I just recently stepped into the role as the interim chief of police. And I'm gonna be joined today by our administrative services officer, Pam Lawrence. And she's gonna start off with our first two slides which kind of dive deep into the numbers and I'll finish out with our accomplishments and challenges for the fiscal year ahead. Do we have Pam on here? Sorry about that, there was a delay. Good morning, Pam Lawrence ASO for the police department. If I could have the next slide, please. Great, thank you. This shows our budget by funds. And as you can see, we have several different funds that make up our entire budget. The general fund increased by $3.8 million. The majority of this is in salaries and benefits for the most of our 259 employees. And includes the addition of the three new police officer positions. The remaining staff are funded by Measure O which increased by 207,000. This increases to purchase and install cameras in all of our patrol vehicles. Federal asset forfeiture remained at $40,000. This is used to purchase equipment to investigate and deter crimes usually in relation to drugs. Supplemental law enforcement is funding from the state of California for frontline police services. The budget increased by $220,000 due to the renewal of our body word camera contract, interview room contract and taser contract. State asset forfeiture remained at 150,000. This is used in a similar fashion as the federal asset forfeiture funding. It's also used for buy funds for undercover operations. And then the CIP fund reduced by 275,000. This was used last year for the PSB boiler line replacement. Next slide, please. This breaks down our budget by programs within the police department. We were held flat as the other departments were except for the increase in salaries and benefits. General fund administration is where vehicle maintenance replacement and fuel costs are budgeted as well as the lease for the radio towers. Vehicle maintenance increased. Vehicle replacement fund also increased to add in our new slot van and due to the increased replacement cost of all of our vehicles. The fund was reduced by about $1.1 million due to removing in response to the ARPA funds. Technical services includes the 911 dispatch center, our records bureau, property and evidence and crime analysis and IT. It also includes our public safety consortium fees and software maintenance for the radios. The support bureau is the training and wellness division which supports the entire department's training needs and the outside contract with our wellness coordinator. It also includes our VIPs program and community outreach team. Our measure O, which is a critical part of our overall budget and funds, 16 positions, as well as our lease for our downtown substation that's in the transit mall. Field services is made up of eight patrol teams, the K-9 team, downtown enforcement team, our drone team, honor guard, hostage negotiations, SWAT traffic and the new special enforcement team. Then we have our investigative services which includes the four investigative units, domestic violence and sexual assaults, property crimes, narcotics investigations and violent crimes. Also included in this budget is the hiring and recruiting team which is critical to the continuous hiring that is required. CIP and ONM projects, this includes our crime mitigation funds that we received from the great casino. This funds the iPhones that each field staff is provided with police auditor contract and other department priority projects. Next slide, please. Major changes in our general fund budget include the 1.7 million in CalPERS unfitted liability payments and then the decrease of 1.1 million from moving in response expenses to the ARPA funding that I mentioned earlier and an increase of 180,000 in equipment repair and services for police vehicles. We also added three police officer positions which Chief Regan will discuss with you further. Okay, I'll take over from here. So we'll talk about those three positions and we're excited to be able to look forward to potentially having those in our next year's budget and those resources are gonna be dedicated toward violence reduction. And unfortunately we've seen in 2021 and now right into 2022 a dramatic increase in some of the violent crime throughout the city of Santa Rosa for the calendar year of 2021 we saw 471 shootings reported to the police department and we saw six homicides occur in the city of Santa Rosa in 2021 and we're off to a robust start for here in 2022 with just having our fifth homicide of the year last week for 2022. And so we really are coming up with an innovative strategy of reducing some of the violence and working with our key community partners and certainly with our community engagement and violence prevention partnership toward reducing some of the violence here in our community. Some of the accomplishments we're able to accomplish for this last fiscal year are number one and Council knows is near and dear to my heart is the launch of our in response mental health support team and we're able to launch after a year and a half of work and launch the team on January 11th of this year. And we're excited to say in the first three months of the team we've gone to over 487 calls in the first three months of the team and we're working toward right now seven days a week from 12 noon till 10 p.m. We're working with the fire department or other key team members on our in response team to launch a second team in July of this year. And then we have covered from seven a.m. till 10 p.m. so 15 hours a day and really expect those call volume to go up during that time. So we're excited about that. We'll actually be holding a community meeting this Monday, May 16th at 4 p.m. that's gonna be available via Zoom to update our community on the calls for service and hear from some of our key partners in that program and to seek feedback from our community how we can make improvements to that team. Another big accomplishment for the police departments this year is the creation of our special enforcement team. And we presented that to council last year's budget hearing and we talked about some of the improvements we needed to make of being more visible in the community and being able to work with some of our key neighborhood and business groups to address some of the crime problems they were experiencing. So we launched, we started with two officers and a sergeant and in January of this year, we're able to add the fourth, the third and fourth officers to that team. So we have four officers and one sergeant that are working on specifically a violent crime reduction. And just this team, even though it took them until the end of this year to be fully staffed, we're able to seize 20 firearms. Five of those are the ghost guns which are the un-serialized guns that were unfortunately are plaguing our community. They made a total of 56 arrests. And we know going into this next year, having the training and expertise and being fully staffed they're going to do even greater impact to our community for this next fiscal year. Another thing, coming out of COVID and we're excited with so many other city departments to be able to start re-engaging with our community. So we're able to, after a two-year hiatus, to be able to launch another community police experience. And so actually just this last Wednesday we graduated that first class of the year and that was an eight-week program where 15 community members were able to come in and learn about the different aspects of the police department and to be able to provide input back to us about how we can continue to make improvements. Chief Navarro had launched the chief's community ambassador team. We've continued to use that with 15 different members from across our community of providing input on policies and recommendations as we've moved forward as an organization. And the Public Safety Subcommittee has been a valuable opportunity for us to present key topics to our community, to receive feedback from our council and another opportunity for our community to let us know about what expectations they have of their police department and their community. Another key priority that we've been working with, so Coral Shields, our DEI officer who's been a tremendous influence on the police department and providing us some critical advice going forward and we're working on a comprehensive implicit bias and some cultural diversity training. So we launched the cultural diversity training where we're working with our staff and our supervisors of having different community groups come in and talk to us about different unique cultures in our community here. And we had a procedural justice and implicit bias course that all officers went through a four hour all staff members went through a four hour procedural justice training this last fiscal year and we're creating a new implicit bias course that's gonna be launched in October of this year all staff of the police department will go to because it's such an important topic for us to understand some of the biases that exist in organizations and what we can do to reduce those biases make sure that they're not being exhibited here by our staff here at the police department. 20 this fiscal year was also a big year for training. There's so much of this training. So we sent over 24,000 hours of training to our police staff members. And a lot of that is mandated by posts the police officer standards and training and other training or things that we chose to elect to do ourselves like the procedural justice and this upcoming implicit bias training but it was a busy year for our training department and we expect this fiscal year to be even a higher number of training. If we can go to the next slide please. So some of the challenges. So obviously the big one and you're seeing this is a recurring theme among many of the organizations talking today is recruitment and retention of qualified staff. This continues to be a struggle for us. We have right now that we're working to we actually just entered into agreement with Epic Recruitment, which is a recruitment firm specifically dedicated toward public safety. And we're really hoping to use that and about better messaging with our community and hearing some of the feedback. And so we have Epic Recruitment is coming in and working on some videos, some still photography that's gonna be going out in some of our social media and other recruitment efforts. So we're hoping really to be able to use that. And we're examining several other ideas that we wanna be to be more innovative with our recruitment and then really focused on morale and officer wellness and staff wellness to keep the retained employees to continue to be part of our organization. Some of the other challenges we talked about is the increase in violent crimes and property crimes. We saw last year a dramatic increase with the ghost guns and we our officers seized over 175 arms off the streets of Santa Rosa and 44 of those were these un-serialized ghost guns. We also saw a dramatic increase with property crime to like one example is the Cadillac Inverter theft that we saw over 387 reports to the police department of Cadillac Inverter theft in the city of Santa Rosa. We're working with our property crime scheme toward community education on that and then really working toward getting some of those providers which are taking the metals that are in the Cadillac Inverters to be able to reduce those crimes for occurring in our community. We're also really focused on funding and implementation of technology because we know we're never gonna have all the staff we need. We have to stay within the overall budget of our city. So what we're trying to do is be smarter with the resources we have and use some of the technology. So we're working with Scott Alonzo who's been a key partner in helping us and some of our internal staff of seeking federal funding that we can get to be able to improve some of the technology we have to better understand the crime that's occurring in our community and be able to increase our response time to those issues. And that's not just for crime. That's for evacuation for our wildfires or the sideshow enforcement and so many other issues that we have occurring that are community priorities. The traffic safety has been another thing. So far we've seen already, we had our fifth fatal collision of the year already for 2022 just several weeks ago, I believe two weeks ago and we've spoken in depth about the increase of the sideshow activities and we're working with community engagement to hear some of the community concerns but we're frankly working on a more proactive response to the sideshow activity in our city and we're not gonna be able to tolerate some of this illegal and dangerous behavior in our city. So we've really put a lot of time over the last months building a comprehensive Sonoma County protocol toward responding toward sideshow activities and Santa Rosa PD is taking the lead on that for our county and we're seeing some of the improvements over the last few weeks but I know we still have some progress to continue to show over the coming months of this year. Another really disturbing challenge for us is seeing the increase in our response time to priority one calls. So priority one calls are those calls like most urgent calls that need an immediate response by a police officer. Our goal is to be able to see our response to priority one calls six minutes or under and actually unfortunately we saw in this last in 2021, our response to priority one calls creep up over seven minutes for one of the first times in my memory to now 703, seven minutes and three seconds that we have. And when you call 911 waiting seven minutes and three seconds for a police officer to be able to at your front door to be able to assist with that emergency is a long time and we're taking steps to be able to reduce some of that and I really believe those three officers that we're adding to our budget not only are gonna assist with some of the violence reduction but are gonna help me with this very important goal of getting back aligned with the under six minutes to those priority one calls. Our next slide please. So sorry, now we'll just finish up with any questions that we have from the mayor and from council. Thank you so much. Let's see if there's questions from council members. Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. First and foremost, I'm very happy to see you in your new role. Congratulations. Secondly, I remember one of the first conversations that you and I had once I became elected was the possibility of a remote site in Roseland. And it's something that I hope that we can continue forward at least in conversation when it comes to community policing. I was hoping that you can elaborate a little bit about technology, the technology that's now coming forth that might be available to the centers of police department. The technology that I'm very interested in is and we're gonna continue to get community feedback and what the expectations of our community are. But some are automatic license plate readers and that's something that will certainly help with sideshow enforcement and with crime. And for us, one of the community feedbacks is this on the retention of that data. So we're looking at some of the best practices which was only retained that data for 30 days. And another key community concern is the sharing of that data not sharing it obviously with federal agencies and immigration agencies. And that's something that we'd be committed to be a building to our policies to make sure that the retention and the sharing of that data. So automatic license plate reader is a key one. Better surveillance equipment throughout the city that could give us a better situational awareness about when crime is occurring, when sideshows are occurring. And also one key part that I've managed our response with the wildfire evacuations for the last several fires is understanding the traffic flows and where are the bottlenecks in our community? We see historically bottlenecks on coming out of Oakmont and Skyhawk and Reakin Valley area and Bennett Valley and Highway 12. So those cameras will give us a better understanding for being able to safely and efficiently evacuate our city for disasters, especially wildfires. There's also shot spotter programs that understand about reporting when shots are occurring. And an example where that will come in is one of our sideshows in the last four weeks. We had two individuals who were shot at a sideshow. Neither one of those individuals reported being shot to the police department instead transported themselves directly to local ERs. And we're not planning on reporting that victimization to the police department, but shot spotter programs allows us to know instantly when those shots are fired. It increases the ability of an officer to respond in a timely manner to that scene. And it also increases our ability to be able to seize the firearms which were used in those illegal shootings and be able to get those guns off the street so we don't see future victimization of other community members. So those are some of the key things but we're continuing to look at some of the technology. I recently met with another police organization that has a real-time like crime information center where they're able to use that data and they're able to use it. And that's something that we can integrate with our city's emergency operations center. And it has a lot broader focus than just crime enforcement. It's something that we can really help some of the other organizations throughout our city to more effectively serve our community. On the Rosen substation, that's one of my key priorities in stepping into the role of chief is to be able to look at our available funding and that's some of the things that we're looking through Mejaro. We're looking at grant opportunities and we're looking at a lot of the other funding options to be able to build a public facing substation, hopefully on Sebastopol Road but right in the heart of our Rosen community and the work to have bilingual and bicultural staff there to be able to meet the needs of our community. And that's certainly something that's a near and dear to my heart to see us be able to launch that in the next 12 months if we're able to find the appropriate funding from some of the alternative sources that are out there. Well, having no chief with the efforts that are being done with in response, I could tell you that you're on the right path. And with that being said, I do appreciate the efforts and I look forward to working with you. And thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Council Member Rogers. I was just also going to ask about the technology and to let you know that I was very happy that we're looking at alternatives to just hiring more, looking at alternative ways to address problems that were happening within our community than to just say let's hire more people because obviously we're not going to be able to staff up to meet the needs of the community. We would look very militant if we did that at this point. Thank you. And that's important for us. And we had at one time the highest police department staffing was 190 sworn officers we've had in the city and that shrunk down to 178. But I'm very cognizant that we need to look at some of our alternatives. And some are going to be building back that staffing and I think these three key positions are going to get us there. But I think also of continue to look some of the other technology, looking at some of the civilian positions in the police department and certainly that will be examining this next fiscal year and the years to come. I would like to point out though, I while cleaning up one of the parks that was near one of the high schools, I know we don't have the SROs in the schools anymore, but I felt like there were more kids at the park than there were at the schools. And that was because although some of them did volunteer to help me clean the park to pick up the trash and some of them did come eat breakfast with me where I asked them, why aren't you in school? Well, I did and I was like, why aren't you in school? Like, what y'all doing? I think that is because they didn't have to be accountable and there was no one going around the neighborhood and saying like, why aren't you in the schools? Where are you guys doing or know them by name? To say, hey, what's up? What are you doing? Why aren't you in school Tommy? Why aren't you in first or second period? So to me, that would be a bright spot of having a resource within the schools, whether it's the SRO or whoever it is. I just see that that was missing just offhand. I think it was about at least 15, 15 kids that were at the park, which probably was not okay. So I didn't want to point that out. Yeah, that's an important point in and that was one of the responsibilities of our former school resource officer program, but that's one of the things that we're continuing to do it. And I just recently met with Hector Rico from Roseland Schools and Anna Trinnell from Santa Rosa Schools. And we're looking at like what the future is with that and what are the needs of the schools? What are the needs of our community? And then how does it meet with our overall city organization? And we're gonna be having some more community conversations about that. And there may be possibilities one day of coming back with some type of reimagined SRO program or maybe it'd be just youth engagement officers. So we're still gonna continue to have talks with that and see how we can fit it within the allocated resources of the police department. Council Member McDonald. Yes, I'd just like to commend you on your work on the implicit bias as well as the procedural justice trainings that you're doing with staff. I think that's such a critical component to ensuring that everyone really has a deeper understanding of those two specific areas and how we work with our community. So I just wanna thank you for that extra training. I know that a lot of it's mandated that we have requirements of the state, but I think that really says a lot about the police department and their desire to address the concerns of the community. And so thank you so much. Please take that back to them. I know that you said that you're hiring three additional, I'm just curious with the response time if there's going to be any type of reevaluation, perhaps at mid-year budget to see if that did decrease response time if by adding one or two more full-time police officers if that would be helpful. So I know it sounds like a very quick response, but when you're in distress, six minutes feels like a very long time. So I really thank you for making sure that you're addressing that, but I would like to us to not just say, we can do things through technology, but making sure that we have actual people out there to address those responses. I think it's such a critical thing and I wanna make sure that the police department is supported in those efforts as well. I know that you mentioned exit routes and that has been a continuous concern from district three because we are a fire zone through Oakmont and Skyhawk area, but in 2020, the department did a phenomenal job on getting everyone out, not just the fire department, but the police department as well, as stressful as it was being in that with a pug dog climbing all over me and freaking out, I have to just really commend the police department and then also making sure that all of our homes were safe and protected while we were evacuated. That did not go unnoticed by me and my neighbors, so I just wanna thank the police department for that, but I do feel like there's an opportunity to do some additional outreach so that folks do understand where all the potential exit routes are. It's something in Oakmont that's of a high concern, making sure that those emergency exit routes are available to our residents in Oakmont so that they can get out safely and how we're using the data on the RAWS system as well as how police works with that to make sure that they know that they are able to use those. It seems like there's some distrust that we would not be able to use as emergency exit routes, and so I really wanna reassure our community in that area what we will be doing. Highway 12 is a major issue because it bottlenecks, and so looking to see what we can maybe do to provide information for those residents over there, it does impact the rest of the city when we cannot get out, so that was my comments and just thank you, and most of the time we have an officer here in chambers with us, and I wanna do a quick thanks to them too for their protection while we're in these meetings and say thank you to them for that. Thank you, we appreciate your support, and I agree with you so much on the WALIFIRE preparedness and knowing your routes, and the city of Santa Rosa has a dedicated page on the website about knowing your route, and so I encourage community members to look up their address and know like, and think outside the box, if not just going down Sonoma Highway, taking farmers to Highway 12, but there are many other exit routes today out of our city, we'll start planning now for what we know will be a fire season coming up ahead, and then also coming to the event that Chief Westrop had mentioned, that we'll all be out of Courthouse Square on Saturday, May 21st for the WALIFIRE preparation day, and then Chief Westrop and I will be out there in response teams that can be out there as well, to be able to talk about some of the resources, not only for evacuations, but making sure they're alert and warning systems, but also some of the mental health resources that are gonna be available to our community, so I encourage everyone to check out that webpage that we have on the city's site, and also be out there for the WALIFIRE preparation at the end of the 21st. All right, thank you so much Chief, and I'm glad you touched on the SRO program a little bit. I know you and I have talked about, and now is probably not the appropriate time to get too far into it, but what I'd love to see is, as we seek additional funding sources to be able to fully staff in response, that we also re-engage our schools, and perhaps rethink the SRO program through the lens of in response, to have mental health support for our schools and for struggling youth as well. That might be a nice tie-in to rebuild that trust and to work with the school board, but perhaps we can discuss that as we move forward throughout our budget. I see no other questions from council members, so I don't wanna be accused of ruining the flow of the meeting, so Veronica, could you please introduce Transportation and Public Works? Of course, and you're not ruining the flow. I feel I'm ruining the flow, sorry for the awkwardness. Yeah, our next section is Transportation and Public Works, and we have Gabe Osborne here, our interim director to present this section. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Veronica. Good afternoon, mayor and members of the council. It is my pleasure today to present the budget for fiscal year 2223 for the Transportation and Public Works Department. Obviously, our conversations today are going to have a heavy focus on the proposed general fund expenditures, but we also wanted to use this as an opportunity to also discuss the two enterprise funds that exist within the department. So joining me today is Jen Santos, our deputy director of parks, and Rachel Ede, our deputy director of transit, and they will be involved in the specific discussions associated with the enterprise funds that are involved in the operations of the Bennett Valley Golf Course, as well as transit operations. I would also like to point out that the director position to the department is fairly new. It was recently added to the budget. As we move forward with the budgetary process this year, on a parallel track, the department will be moving forward with filling that position and providing multiple opportunities for acting assignments. So our assistant city manager, Jason Nutt, is heavily involved in the continuity through that process, and he is also available today to answer any questions you may have and lend his expertise and institutional knowledge to the conversation. Next slide, please. So as we've seen in the previous presentations, the first slide focuses on expenditures by fund, and as we can see with transportation and public works, there are quite a few funds that go into our general operations. The largest dollar amount fund is the general fund, and what we've seen this year is an anticipated increase to the tune of 9.5%. The general fund plays a heavy role in some of the significant operations. Facilities maintenance, the department manages the existing city facilities, our traffic engineering divisions, much of our field services and parks maintenance rely heavily on the general fund. So the increases that we've seen in that area are very consistent to what you've seen in previous presentations. Salary and benefit increases are playing a significant role there. Approximately $800,000 increase is due to salary and benefits. Since we maintain facilities, we also see some uncontrollable costs just in the maintenance of those facilities. And one of the bigger ones this year is associated with the service for gas and electric. And that's specifically PG&E. We have seen generally a 20% increase in those service charges for all the facilities across the city that's equating to roughly an increase in cost of around 220,000, excuse me, 720,000. And so that's a pretty significant impact there. In addition to that, our crews play a heavy role in construction activities. They're maintaining infrastructure. There's costs to that maintaining the infrastructure that goes into supplies for those construction activities. We've seen due to inflation, the cost of those supplies increase. We typically budget that year to year based on construction cost indexes. And as that currently stands, we're assuming 124,000 increases to services to supplies for construction activities. So that's a big number there as well. There's quite a few vehicles that are used in the delivery of those operations. So we have garage services, also increases in fuel costs. That's really the vast majority of that 9.5%. Moving forward to the next fund, Measure M Parks. That actually is only the staffing charges associated with Measure M. Measure M is programmed in a variety of different ways. Many of that ends up in our capital projects program. We have a section of slides further on in the presentation this afternoon that deals with capital projects specifically. This really goes into the reimbursement of a parks planner position. And the increase was associated with a portion of the parks planner position going to 100% of the parks planner position. So that is the 22% increase that you're seeing. Special assessment districts, we have a variety of different areas where property owners pay special taxes for the city to maintain certain landscape areas. Those are in the future going to be handled by professional services. We are seeing contractual costs for those services go up. That's basically landscape maintenance. So that's assuming a small jump in those costs. That revenue is brought in through that tax district. Utilities administration fund is the amount of money that we get from the water department to manage capital projects for the water department. That one actually is showing a decrease. There were certain increases there, but we trued up some of the costs associated with vehicle maintenance to track with actuals and that resulted in a reduction of that line. The next few funds are our municipal transit fund, parrot transit fund, and those associated with the golf course. I'll leave these here for reference. As I mentioned, there's going to be more robust discussion at the back end of our section on those enterprise funds. So I'll leave that up to Jim and Rachel to dive into the details associated with that. Our stormwater enterprise fund really goes into the maintenance of the storm drain system. What is involved in that is obviously staff and vehicles. So what we see there once again is we start to see the salary and benefit increases. We start to see general increases in fuel and the operation of those vehicles as well as the garage service fees on those vehicles. The next two funds are our equipment repair fund and our equipment replacement fund. And those are really our fleet services. And I know there's been quite a bit of discussion with other departments about some of those increases from fleet for the service of vehicles that they own and maintain. That first line item is the repair fund. Generally what we do when we pass on increase in services is generally pass on the overhead associated with that. So for example, the salary and benefits increase across the staffing there and that's passed on to the other departments through their budget and then to the general fund. And then our team actually bills out of that as they perform the maintenance on the vehicles. So we had a minor increase there. As we can see in the equipment replacement fund there's a significant increase. And just a very quick reminder on the equipment replacement fund any of the departments that own equipment that's maintained by fleet and these are for equipment that is in the fund. And I think that's an important point. Some of the public safety vehicles are in some are not but each department for every fiscal year pays a proportionate share of the replacement value of that vehicle. And then that builds up the fund and there's a very mathematical equation that determines when that vehicle is replaced. That could be based on age. It could be based on usage. And year to year the revenue that we are the expenditures excuse me that we program out of that fund are really based on the number of vehicles that are scheduled to be replaced in that fiscal year. So as we see a fairly significant jump of 8 million in that category that is mainly based on that demand. There's a few different reasons as to why that has so high other than the demand. We did have a bit of a backlog in orders. Obviously there are supply chain issues and those are playing themselves out in the purchase of vehicles. But that is the anticipated amount that we are going to spend for vehicle replacement. Bolstering that up, especially when the dollar amount is there gives our team a little more flexibility purely from a purchase order standpoint and gives them a little more of an ability to meet the demands of other departments for that vehicle replacement. The last one is fairly small. That goes into our Railroad Square Maintenance Fund. Yes, and that's basically coming to us for the maintenance of certain components in Railroad Square. That increase is fairly minor. That's due to electricity costs for lighting in the park. The last line item is our Capital Improvement Fund. And you can see there's a jump here. That's usually due to an influx of grant funding. Specifically, in this case, it's mainly associated with the 101 pedestrian and bike crossing and some of the funds that we've been able to allocate to that. Once again, the Capital Improvement Fund is a separate conversation in our overall program that's happening towards the end of today. So we'll touch on that briefly, but we'll try to direct any very detailed conversations about the Capital Project program to that slide deck. Next slide, please. So the next slide gets into some of our expenditures by program and what you see here is some of the smaller amounts of increases. Those are typically due to salary and benefit increases. So we really do see that in our general administration. Most of that is salary and benefits to the tune of 29,000. There's also some small IT increases in that. Our zero waste operations is a very small but mighty team. So that has actually a salary and benefit increase. It has a higher percentage due to the fact that the number of staff there is fairly low. The next fund is our Transit Fund. And once again, I will allow Rachel E. to dive into the details. Some themes that you'll see in that fund are very similar to what we had talked about before, salary and benefits, vehicle costs, gasoline, but Rachel will provide more detail in the next section of slides. The real estate services division was discussed yesterday in the beginning of the presentation. Real estate services has historically lived in the water department. That has recently been moved to the Transportation and Public Works Department and the associated budget with those positions. So that's a new addition to the department. Capital projects engineering, which is really a staffing cost in capital projects engineering, small increases there, salary and benefits, facilities is where we start seeing more significant increases and that is the team that maintains city facilities. There is obviously salary and benefits in that, but that's where we start seeing more of the utility service increase. In that case, particularly there's 454,000 in increases in utilities. That's mainly due to the gas and electric services to the buildings that can be associated with water services to the buildings as well. And we're also seeing general increases in contract costs there. The facilities teams leverages professional services quite a bit for specific trades. For example, our janitorial services are contracted out. Pest management, plumbing, HVAC, heating, cooling systems, a lot of that special expertise is contracted out. And with those contracts, we're seeing anywhere from two to 7% increases. So we're assuming in that particular case that a good chunk of that increase is associated with additional contract costs to maintain a level of service that we currently have. Our materials engineering division, slight increases there as well. That's due to garage fees and once again, salary and benefits. Regional parks goes into the management of our park system. With that one, once again, we're seeing salary and benefits, but we're also seeing other parks' maintenance features coming in where utility services once again can drive that up because we have water fees coming into the equation. We also have some vehicle charges that are driving that up as well because that team heavily utilizes vehicles for their day to day operations. Traffic is our traffic engineering team. Once again, salary and benefits are contributing to that. There's also a slight increase in professional services there of $20,000 and that is to do our annual traffic counts. That has been pushed a bit due to COVID and wanting to make sure that the traffic counts are done accurately during COVID. We had interesting vehicle patterns that were occurring. So we intentionally delayed that to be able to have a more accurate study. So that is hitting this fiscal year. The Bennett Valley Golf Course, once again, we have a separate slide to discuss that. So I will leave that one to Jen. Our field services, you can see a significant increase in there and most of that increase is due to our replacement fund because that is where it lives. So we have about 8.5 million just in the replacement of vehicles that is driving that up. And then also we have other budgets associated with, excuse me, other increases associated with salary and benefits. There's a significant amount of staff that lives in there. That's around 700,000 increase. And then we have garage services and some of those other typical increases that are playing out in that category. And then lastly, we have our CIP budget. Once again, that's another section of the presentation this afternoon. Next slide, please. So briefly just an overview on some of our general fund changes. As I mentioned, we added the real estate services section from the water team to transportation and public works that included four FTEs in the associated budget. So that was an ad. At the mid-year process, we added the director of transportation and public works position. That position was added to the budget. The assistant city manager position was relocated to the city manager's office budget. We also converted a few vacant positions. We have a skilled maintenance worker to a senior maintenance worker. And then we have a few positions in our capital projects engineering team. And the intention behind that was to create logical promotion steps everywhere we can, mainly for retention and to encourage growth. It also balanced out some of the staffing resources in our capital projects team. That was actually a net reduction due to the ads and the deletes. Next slide, please. So once again, the biggest impact really, one of the larger impacts was associated with PG&E. That is an uncontrollable expense. It was fairly significant. When we look at PG&E, obviously we're talking about facilities and the service, but we're also talking about powering public street lights and traffic signals. So it hits in a few different areas. As we move forward, obviously the conversations about photovoltaic and the benefits of that are some ways to offset that. That is a conversation that we're going to evolve further this year and see what we can do to potentially eliminate the vast swings in that amount because those increases of 20% are a little hard to account for. Also we've seen roughly the 100,000 increase in city equipment and repair and garage services. Like I said, that is a service that has passed on from fleet really to more alleviate their very specific impact on the general fund. It comes around and around about way through the other departments, but they charge out to the fund. And once again, that fund attempts to basically grab their overhead. The one piece that is scattered a little bit in smaller sections, but I did want to point it out is we have 16K and approved additional needs to restore training and conferences. That's in various budgets and to restore what those budget line items look like in previous years and to get staff to have the ability to go to more training opportunities and conferences. Next slide, please. So the Transportation Public Works Department has had quite a few accomplishments over the years. This really just touches on a few. Our transit services section experienced some fairly significant impacts due to the pandemic and it's been quite the lift to get back up to where they are now, which is quite the achievement, which is approximately 80% of the pre-pandemic service level. On the capital project side, we have awarded notable long-term construction contracts. Many of those are some of the last fire recovery projects. So we're actively moving forward with the reconstruction of the landscaping and restoration of parks in the Fountain Grove area. We are currently programming the community engagement portion of re-envisioning the Hopper Lane corridor. So those are moving forward. We've also awarded the Fountain Grove widening project, which is really significant for that section of town. That is just really a bit of a bottleneck through that corridor and it will free that up. And then we also move forward with the LTP disinfection improvement project. And that is actually the second largest capital project in the Water Department's history. So that was a fairly significant lift. On the active transportation side, we've been able to acquire additional funding for the bicycle and pet overcrossing of one-on-one. That very much was a team exercise to secure that. There's 12 million of regional active transportation program funding, but also an additional 3.4 million on state transportation improvement program. So that's really critical to moving that project forward. Next slide, please. One back. A few more accomplishments on our street side. Our debris removal team continues to really produce positive results. Over the year, 4,274 cubic yards of debris from the public right of way. Just to put that in perspective, a normal garbage dumpster you would see in a commercial or residential area is approximately five to eight cubic yards. So that would be a total of almost 530 garbage dumpsters. So it's a significant amount of work that they put into that process. And the team's done a stellar job with that. Our fleet maintenance has installed 620 new telematics devices throughout cities fleet. This is a really critical component to informing the maintenance and replacement of those vehicles. It basically gives real-time stats on the status of that vehicle, the usage patterns. And as we look into this coming year about transitioning the fleet to more electrified vehicles, this is going to provide really good information for how we do that. Because it's going to determine range. It's going to determine usage patterns. It's going to help us figure out if we need to wait for certain vehicles for that technology to evolve or if that vehicle is suitable based on the current usage patterns to bring it into the mix now. So it's very critical to the operations of the fleet section. Parks maintenance and recreation collaborated on the Revitalize of Park Month Volunteer Program. Really proud of the group for doing that. You know, many people have been involved in that. It's quite the event these days and it's a really good way to bring our parks team into the mix with the community to help solve one of these problems and to gauge and to better understand so they can really kind of work together with the community to address some of the issues that the community may be having about those parks. So really proud about how the teams came together for that one. And I think more great things to come for that program in the future. And then of course, from the capital project side, especially from recreation and activation, we were able to develop a new playground for children, age five to 12, installed at the Colben Creek neighborhood park. Next slide, please. So of course we have challenges, very similar to other departments. We have experienced staffing shortages, impacting ability to restore core services. Similar to what other departments have mentioned, these have had a tendency to play out with very technical positions, mechanics and fleet maintenance, capital projects, engineering. And I will let Rachel go into this a little further, but we had experience with that on the transit side as well. In many of those situations, they are recovering. We're looking at really really evaluating what some of those position type looks like and we're also looking at where we can leverage professional services as contingency plan to keep those operations going. Another challenge is developing appropriate funding strategies and staffing levels for the maintenance of the storm drain system. The storm drain system is maintained very differently than the public sewer and water system. It lives outside of that enterprise fund. And as our department takes on additional responsibilities and roles, and I think the debris removal task force is a prime example, it starts to spread us a little thin and we start losing sight on some of the main components that we need to focus on. So developing the appropriate strategies for the proper maintenance of the storm drain system is something that we'll be working on closely with our stormwater and creek section to be able to figure out the appropriate plan for that moving forward. Next slide please. So we also need to address the challenges with reed removal and the landscape maintenance of medians, facilities and roadside landscaping. Weed removal is done for a variety of different purposes. It can be for a very specific fire safety purpose, which is commonly referred to as weed abatement. It can be done for a vegetation management process that's done for roadway safety where we're clearing vision triangles so people can see around corners. And it's also done for beautification. And as we look at our areas of the street, how do we bolster up that process to increase the amount of weed removal that's done for the basic fire safety purposes, but also get more into vegetation management and to look at better ways to manage from a beautification standpoint. So understanding how we utilize our resources and how we don't pull resources from parks and other areas that are equally as important is one of the challenges we're gonna be facing moving forward. Providing the appropriate funding and staff to support the acquisition of new parkland and advance of development. The PED team has done a fabulous job of putting more units out in the community. And as we see that occur, we're seeing more residential uses. And we look at then our deployment of neighborhood parks and those other amenities that people want, it can be a bit of a challenge in keeping up with that demand in certain areas. So that's a focus that our parks department is looking at just to be able to make sure that we're deploying in a fashion that really meets the increasing need that's occurring through the new units that are being developed through PED. And then of course we have managing rising costs and aging infrastructure associated with city facilities. That's fairly common. The best example I can give is in facilities when we look at HVAC systems repeating cooling systems, technology often evolves to our older technology is no longer supported. So it becomes very hard to acquire the parts and materials that are needed to maintain that facility. So understanding how that comes into the budget and how whether those are one time or ongoing needs, how that factors in and how we look at ways to properly replace our infrastructure moving forward. Next slide please. So this takes us to the enterprise fund and what I would like to do is pause because we really do have three distinctly different conversations with the different funds. So it's, if it's okay with you, mayor, if we would like to pause at this point to provide an opportunity to ask any questions about anything was discussed in the previous slides, general fund-wise before we dive into the enterprise funds. Hopefully that provides an efficient way to move through this. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see if there are any questions for transportation, public works, general fund, council member Schwedhelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. If I could just get clarification and Jason, you may be able to answer this. I think you were instrumental in creating this, the debris removal team. Because my understanding debris removal is more for fire cleanup. And what's the name of the team now? Because I know I've had some constituents ask me, how do I get a hold of them? Because it's a great resource. I've heard nothing about positive things, but the name, this is showing debris removal team. But again, I thought that was fire cleanup. What's the team that you were instrumental in creating? Thank you, council member Schwedhelm. It is still debris removal team. The intent was the primary focus was on homeless debris and dealing with residential and commercial dumping as well as working with our harmful services program. So when we coined the debris removal team, it was that type of debris, not necessarily fire-related debris. Okay, and for constituents to actually access us, I know we have the in, or almost the in-response app, the My Santa Rosa app. If someone isn't using that app, how would they find the information about how to contact that team? Yeah, Gabe, and you might be able to correct me on this. I believe it is srcity.org forward slash clean city. And that's how they would find the debris removal team. Great, thank you so much for that. Council member McDonald. Just a couple of questions. I know you stated in the field services, there was an increase to the budget, about a 43% increase, and didn't we move the fire department replacement equipment into TPW? I'm just wanting to make sure that that was part of the increase, or is this solely the fleet of Santa Rosa city vehicles other than that? I'm just want clarification on that is my first question. And then also we've had a recent presentation of the need to increase funding to replace roads. And so I'm wondering if you could tell me how much of this budget is attributed to the increase in roads, because if we continue to not do some of that infrastructure, it's going to cost us a whole lot more in the future. So I'd like to know those two things. Thanks. Absolutely, thank you for the questions. As far as the roads and the improvements to the roads, there's really two components to that. So when we look at this budget, it's really focusing on general maintenance activities day to day. And the easiest way I can explain it is assume pothole repair. And then the team handles smaller projects that are improvement projects for various roadway issues, but the vast majority of roadway reconstructions and slurry seal projects is actually programmed in a different way through our capital projects programming. So as we get into that next set of slides and Jason will be presenting that, hopefully that will provide a little more clarity as to how that funding through the capital project programming is distributed to the various needs that exist in that program. So that will provide a little more detail. And Jason, I might ask for your input on this one too. As far as the secondary question with the replacement fund, the increase in the replacement fund is not the results of additional vehicles coming into the mix. That's the results of the existing vehicles in the mix and the replacement of those existing vehicles. So it's really the calculation. And that, like I said before, the significant dollar amount, which it's higher than it normally is, some of that is due to the backlog of ordering supply chain issues, but no additional vehicles. And police and fire do have certain vehicle types that are in that program, but some of the larger vehicles that are not on there. So Jason or Veronica, I think you might be able to provide a little more insight on that question. Yeah, certainly I can jump in here. So within field services, there's the equipment repair fund and the equipment replacement fund. And replacement is where we are seeing that large increase. And just to answer Council Member McDonald's question, in this budget line item, no, you are not seeing that increase of the fire equipment that will not be happening with this annual budget. We're going to see that starting in the ongoing years. The reason we see an increase is because we are appropriating fund balance within that fund. This does not represent additional funds coming from other departments this year to fund this. There are simply a lot of vehicles that are up for replacement, that are existing vehicles that need to be replaced. So we are appropriating the funds and the replacement funds to buy those vehicles. And are any of those vehicles, electric vehicles, is that why we see an increase as well? I'm curious if that's something that we're targeting. Currently as it stands now with the electric vehicles, what we're looking at, we are looking at a purchase of electric vehicles. And we've seen technology and availability actually evolve to the point in which electric vehicles can provide a significant portion of the fleet. And what I mean by that is pickup trucks, right? That's a pretty significant portion of the fleet. And we are currently looking at the purchase of 20 electric vehicles that are in that range. As technology evolves, we'll see more competition in that arena and we'll see obviously an evolution of the battery technology. What actually happens in that particular case because that is an important point is the replacement cost for a vehicle is basically worked out year to year. So each department is putting a proportionate share in the fund and there's a variety of different reasons as to why that proportionate share can increase or decrease. So for example, if we are replacing a gas powered vehicle with electric vehicle and we assume that that's going to be $10,000 more just to throw out an easy number is we will start capturing that prior to the full funding of that vehicle and then the rate will increase. So the department will start to incorporate that. And like I said, that can be done for a variety of different reasons too. Sometimes vehicles or equipment do not last as long as we assume because the use is heavier. So it has to be replaced on a quicker cycle which means the department has to make that up. So when you get out to three years or two years prior to that replacement sometimes we start seeing those increases. So as part of this first purchase of electric vehicles what we're looking at and we will be developing in this coming fiscal year a more strategic plan that we will hopefully bring in front of council we will bring in front of council at some point to where we can discuss all the fine points of electrification in the fleet and how we'll roll this out. So there'll be another opportunity to have this discussion but as this becomes a reality we will start working with those departments and that rate may increase to be able to account for that electric vehicle. And hopefully that answers your question. Council Member McDonald, if I could just add just to talk a little bit more about fund balance as Gabe mentioned, each department pays specifically into each vehicle that they own to a fund balance that is part of the replacement program. And so as Veronica mentioned we are shifting funds from the fund balance to the operations we're just taking money out of an account that's an accumulation account for each vehicle in an effort to replace that without having to come to council and request extra or excess funds to make up the difference. And so that's the purpose of the fund balance within the replacement fund. So hopefully that clarifies that a bit. So Jason, the question around the press democratic article always a fun headline to see that half of your cities are going to fail. Can we talk about the road funding at this point or do you wanna hold off and talk about it in regards to some of our capital improvement projects? Mayor, I'm happy to talk about it either. We can certainly focus in on what the capital improvement program is doing and utilize that discussion at the end when we discuss capital improvement program or we can talk about the road funding here as far as what it's doing within the department and how the department is actively trying to keep up with our roadway condition. Yeah, I'm hoping, can you talk a little bit about use of new technology and the way that that's impacting the department's ability to deliver service throughout Santa Rosa? Certainly, as we did a study session two weeks ago, we talked about our current payment condition and gave us an opportunity to update council and the public not only on where our current condition is but some of the things that we're doing. Technology is one of those and as you heard Gabe talk about our budget in public works, one of those line items is the material engineering team. It is a dedicated group of folks with an entire lab specifically dedicated to testing materials relating to roads, sidewalks, curb and gutter, all of those hard surfaces that we're utilizing to ensure that the material that's being placed, one meets the city standard specifications. We don't wanna have a contractor, whether it's a public or private contractor, build a public facility, roadway, sidewalk, curb and gutter to a standard that is below what we believe has the highest level and use for the ongoing need of the community. We do have standards and thresholds and that's their predominant work. Now when it comes to advanced technologies, they have additional equipment that helps them do testing on different mixes in an effort to try to help our contractors and encourage them to try different things. So one of the concepts we've done recently was looked at a product called Roller Compacted Concrete. It was a new technology that's easier and cheaper that provides that same benefit of concrete which is that 40 to 50 year extended life over the 20 to 30 years you might get on asphalt. So those are products that that team is actively working on. They're utilizing their lab, they're utilizing knowledge base from around Northern California and there are a number of institute oriented experts that we work closely with to make sure that all of those pavement materials are set up in a way where we're extending to the greatest ability of the life of the product that we're putting down for the benefit of our community. And that's all knowing that we do have limited resources and as we explained, we currently are not financing a program that would allow us to sustain our existing pavement condition. And all of those technology and training and study components that we're putting into our research is what's helping us bridge that gap as close as we can utilizing advanced technology and materials. Great, thank you. Any other questions from council members? All right, thank you so much Gabe. We'll take a half hour lunch break. Let's come back at 1.30 and we'll finish up the rest of our budget presentation. Oh, I apologize Gabe, if you wanted to go through the enterprise funds first, then we'll take our lunch break. Yes, if we could and we'll try to make it as quick as possible. So at this point, if we can go back to the presentation and at this point, I would like to introduce Jen Santos, our deputy director of parks and Jen will provide an overview of the current situation with the golf course enterprise fund. Thanks, thank you, Gabe. And good afternoon, council members, mayor and vice mayor. I, again, one of the things you'll notice on this slide is there are no numbers and we're here to talk about budget. So I'll talk about why that is. Back in February, council authorized us to go out to bid to find a new operator to take on the next few years of operating our golf course since our current golf course operators agreement expires on July 1st slash June 30th, July 1st. And we have done that process and we've received five wonderful firms that submitted a proposal to operate the golf course. And we had our review committee review those proposals that came in and they made a recommendation of the top three to be interviewed. And from that interview process, the review committee recommended the highest ranked firm for staff to try to negotiate an agreement with that firm. And that's where we're at right now. We are still in the negotiation process to finalize an agreement with that highest ranked firm so that we can come back to you with some of the final details of the budget. While we're in negotiations, it's very difficult to finalize a budget until we have the details of that agreement worked out. If you recall from a couple of slides ago, there is a member for the golf course, $583,000. Essentially that's our status quo budget for debt service and our basic O&M for electricity, water services and minor repairs. So we've placed that out there just as a reminder that's our core budget. But we will be looking to come back to you all on June 7th with a much more comprehensive look at the recommended firm, the agreement that we've been able to negotiate as a recommendation for the budget at that point. So this is gonna be a fundamental change to how we operate going forward. We don't have the ability to go through all the numbers at this point. So we wanted to at least give you an idea where we were at in that process and that we do plan to come back to you at June 7th to have a much more comprehensive review again of that agreement and our budget recommendation at that time. So hopefully that's a bit of an overview. Sorry, we don't have the detailed numbers today but those are pending. And before I move on and turn it over to transit I'll pause to see if there's any questions about the golf course enterprise. Questions? Council Member Rogers. So I know utilities have gone up. That payment should have stayed the same and minor repairs means minor. Why such a large increase of 44,000? If I'm reading correctly for the golf course line item, a 30% increase. Is that what I read? Right. We do have significant increases in electricity and water services for the entire enterprise especially recognizing that the restaurant is gonna be coming back online starting July 1st. So we'll see those increases there. And we also are recognizing some of the minor restaurant issues such as the walk-in freezer and things like that. Though we know we're under process for fixing right now. So that alone was a ask of $20,000 just for that alone. So it's just for minor things to be able to get this golf course at the restaurant available to take on new customers starting July 1st with a new agreement. So they are minor, but when you add them up to the utility it does reach about $40,000 in additional funds. That's okay. I thought I had asked previously about the restaurant and what the repairs were that needed to be needed to happen in the restaurant during one of the meetings. And I was told that it wasn't a big deal but $20,000 to me seems to be a big deal and a pretty big repair, but... Council Member Rogers, if I could just step in. Now our initial estimate on some of the repair that needed to be done was about 200,000 for the restaurant building itself. We've been systematically working on components of that over the course of the closure so that we've been able to bring some of those down until we understood exactly what type of operator was gonna come in and use that space. It was unclear what additional need was gonna be. We didn't know if that operator was gonna come in and wanna make changes. We didn't know if they were gonna come and help self fund because of the type of operation. And so it's at this point now we know that given the type of management company and what they're going to do in leasing the space or utilizing their own chef to reopen the restaurant, there are aspects of it at this point that we've been asked to look at and make repairs to. And so realistically, $20,000 is not a substantial increase in costs relating to the type of repairs that are required there. I think the team has done an extremely good job of being cost sensitive in how they implement repairs and looking at how we can make this functional and operational for this new restaurant tour who's gonna show up. And that would be the total of the repairs? Because minor, $20,000. That is at this point in time based on the budget that is the number that we're looking at. We will be presenting potentially changes in that as we look on June 7th when we're able to outline the proposed operator and their needs to begin operation. That is currently under negotiation between the city and the selected management company. And that's why Jen has a slide that doesn't have numbers specifically on it because there's components that are likely gonna change and adjust. So I'd like to reserve that discussion in more detail for June 7th. Just addressing the line item. Understood. Council Member Sawyer? Thank you, Mayor. And Mr. Nutt, if you could correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's important to keep in mind that this is an enterprise fund. The monies that are used for repairs, operation and maintenance come from that enterprise fund and not only does it not affect the general fund but those funds cannot be used in any other part of the city being that it is an enterprise fund. So it is like our water department, wholly separated from the rest of the funds of the city and they cannot be commingled. Thank you. Rachel, are you kicking off the next part? Sure, if we can go to the next slide, please. All right, good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the council. I'm pleased to be here to discuss the fiscal 23 proposed budget for the transit enterprise. As you see on this slide, we are proposing an O&M budget of $15.2 million. That reflects $13.7 million for Santa Rosa city bus fixed street operations and around 1.5 million for Santa Rosa paratransit operations. This figure brings our budget back up to about the fiscal 1920 levels. So I wouldn't call it a post COVID budget. It's definitely a COVID recovery budget moving us closer to full restoration of the services that have been reduced during the pandemic. Revenues are sufficient to cover our expenditures this year. We are not proposing any use of our reserve funds. And in fact, we are able this year to stay on track with making our annual allocation of transportation development act revenues to our capital reserve, which is where we build funds for our major capital activities such as bus replacement and electrification of the fleet. I do want to note that the stability of the O&M budget as well as the capital reserve are due in large part to the allocations we've received in transit emergency relief from the CARES Act, Chris and the American Rescue Plan Act. They have done a lot of good to replace revenues that have been impacted by the pandemic and enabled us to retain a stable financial plan as we navigate and recover from the pandemic. So we do have $1.7 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds in this O&M budget. That leaves us with 2.9 million remaining that we can apply to fiscal 24 and fiscal 25 to help replace ongoing reductions in fare revenue as our ridership recovers from the pandemic. And as I'll discuss a little bit on the next slide, we will be coming back to council with a more in-depth discussion about our plan to transition off that emergency relief funding to get back to reliance on our regular funding sources. Next slide, please. So as shown in this slide, we have some increases in a few areas. And I should note not on the slide, but we do have about a $670,000 increase in staffing cost salaries, benefits, as well as an increase in overtime costs, which relates to our current staffing shortage. We are seeing overtime increasing as we work to cover service while we continue our efforts to step up in our bus operator ranks. We are proposing a $328,000 increase in fuel, which brings our total fuel budget to $878,000 in fiscal 23. This is a conservative estimate recognizing the current high fuel costs, the volatility of the fuel market. And it also plans for further restoration of transit services. We're gonna have more miles operated out there on the road in the coming year, more fuel consumed. One thing we're really excited about is this is the first year that we're including electricity as a fuel source in our budget as we plan to roll out our first four battery electric buses in the second quarter of the fiscal year. So that's a fun change that we have in our fuel budget starting to see that shift from diesel over to electricity. We are a major customer of the city's fleet services. So the $90,000 increase relates to the rate increase in the garage, as well as, again, our anticipated restoration of services as we have more vehicles out in service, more miles operated, more preventative maintenance and repairs are needed. So we've budged it accordingly. Like many other parts of the organization, we have increased conferences and training budget. We have some fantastic new field supervisors in our operations section who need some training to be the best at their jobs and some elements of that training are mandatory. So we're requesting funds for that training. And as we have in past years, we're also requesting $30,000 in general funds for a continuation of the Free Rides for Veterans program that was initiated in fiscal year 2018. I also wanna conclude just by noting that we will be doing a much deeper dive into the Transit Division finances and financial projections over the next few months. We're gonna be kicking off our short range transit plan update with a council study session on June 7th. And part of that SRTP update will be a 10 year financial plan, a 10 year capital plan, and then a correspondence between our finances and what we're gonna do or what we hope to do on the service side as we look at different revenue recovery scenarios from the pandemic. And we'll obviously be getting a lot of public feedback around that service plan as well over the next few months we go through that process. So there will be much more to come to council on the financial outlook for transit over the next few months. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions council may have prior to handing it back to Gabe. Any questions? Council Member McDonald? I just have one question I had seen in the past that we had offered rides to youth at a free rate and that we had seen an increase of ridership from them. Is that budgeted in any way or have we done outreach potentially to schools that may need support with transportation to schools? That would be one of my questions around that. I didn't see it in the budget just in a past budget, I think. Right, that's a great question. So that a program is still running. We initiated it on July 1st. So it's nearing its first year. We have funded it through a grant through December 2022. So right now we just literally yesterday sent a survey out to the schools and are starting to distribute it through youth organizations and will be on social media to get some feedback on the program from youth and their families. We have seen tremendous ridership improvement. Our system-wide ridership on city buses at about 60% of the pre-pandemic level, but youth ridership is at 125%. And as we've gotten feedback on the program, we're really hearing about the impact it's making not only on the finances of families, but also that we're starting to see evidence that we are having some mode shift in the school commute as well as for other trips that youth are taking around town, which is great news on the climate front. So we have a really strong interest in bringing an item back to council to discuss ways to further continue that program and potentially even try to make it permanent because it has been very successful. So that is an item we'll be coming back to council to further discuss after we evaluate, receive the survey results and complete the program evaluation in the next few months. It is not shown in this budget because it lives separately in a grant because it's being reimbursed through that grant source for the time being. That answers the question. Yes, thank you. And just to further comment around truancy, one of the biggest reasons that we see kids, tardy or missing school is because they may not have transportation. So it's such a critical need to ensure that it's an equity issue actually in our community. So making sure that we're partnering with schools to offer this service to families at a freer or far reduced rate would be of interest to me to see the outcomes of those surveys. Thank you so much. For sure. And if I may, I'll just comment that one question we are asking on the survey is how this program has affected school attendance and whether there has been a shift in attendance from students based on this free access to transportation. So we'll be happy to provide more information on that when we're done with the evaluation. Thank you so much. Council Member Rogers. Just to point out the youth ridership, I've been able to tell families that their kids can go to any school that they want within our city because we do have this program. So they don't, transportation doesn't have to be a hindrance because they wanna like go, they live in Southwest Santa Rosa but they would like to attend Santa Rosa High School like the ArtQuest program. I'm like, but you can get on the bus. The bus is free. So that is a program that we have. So I'm really happy that we do offer that program for our youth. I did wanna ask about the veteran program and if our veterans are taking advantage of that program and what are the numbers? Sure. Yeah, I just double checked the numbers yesterday and the ridership is definitely recovered on that program. Right now we are carrying 1900 veterans on that program each month and it's growing, it's starting to trend upward as we see ridership begin to recover. That's definitely not quite where we were pre-pandemic but it's, I would say it's increasing faster than the ridership at large. I think because of that free for access and because it tends to be a group of people who may have more limited means and need to take advantage of that free fare program. So we'll continue to provide information on how that program is trending as we check in with council. Any other questions, council members? Council member Fleming. Thanks. Just wanted to mention as far as the youth free fare that I continually get notices through the school districts and that they are doing a good job of getting the word out and just wanna congratulate you on your partnership with them and hope that the communication keeps coming and that we can continue to see the ridership changes amongst our young people which hopefully will result in fewer car dependent folks as these people transition into adulthood. Thank you. All right, thank you to the team. I really appreciate the presentation here on Transportation Public Works. We will take our lunch recess and we'll come back at 1.45. Thank you, everybody. I'll bring us back from our break. Madam City Clerk, can you please call the roll? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member McDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council, Vice Mayor Alvarez. Mayor Rogers. Here. Council Member Fleming, have you joined us? Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Fleming and Vice Mayor Alvarez. All right, I'm going to turn it over to Victoria. Or excuse me, Veronica. Victoria will be with us in a moment. All right, thank you, everyone. We have our final department for you here today, Santa Rosa Water and Department Director Jennifer Burke is here to present and thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Mayor Rogers and members of council. As Veronica mentioned, my name is Jennifer Burke and I'm the director of Santa Rosa Water and I'm here to cover the Santa Rosa Water budget. I do want to thank the Water Department managers for their hard work in putting this budget together and would also like to specifically thank the Board of Public Utilities for all of their work reviewing our proposed budget. We met with the BPU Budget Subcommittee twice. We reviewed the budget with the full board in study session and then the board reviewed and recommended the proposed budget that is in front of you today. Next slide, please. This slide provides a high level summary of our adopted fiscal year 2021-22 budget by fund compared to our proposed fiscal year 2022-23 budget. Just by way of a little bit of background, we have a water enterprise fund for the water system, a wastewater enterprise fund for the sewer collection system and most increases in both of these funds are due to salary and benefit increases. The sub-regional enterprise fund is paid for by Santa Rosa as well as our four regional partners, the cities of Katati, Runert Park, Sevastopol and South Park County Sanitation District. Increases in this fund are due to salaries and benefits, increasing chemical and utility costs, as well as increases in ONM projects that are due to critical projects that need to be completed at the treatment plant. The utilities administrative fund is paid for by the enterprise funds. You'll notice a big change in this fund which is due in large part to the move of water billing from the finance department to the water department, which I believe you heard of in great detail yesterday during the study session. The general fund, stormwater funds, other funds and capital improvement fund are all for our stormwater increase program. The increase in the capital improvement fund is for storm drain improvement projects that we will be working on this next fiscal year. You'll also notice that last fiscal year we appropriated the first 30 million of our bond sale for the replacement of our ultraviolet disinfection program or project, sorry, at the Laguna treatment plant. The rest of the bond proceeds were appropriated by this body at your April 26th meeting. So you'll notice there is no bond funding proposed to be appropriated in next fiscal year budget. Next slide please. Here is a summary by program. Again, the large change in administration is mostly due to the move of water billing from the finance department to the water department. For the water ONM program, there are increases in salary and benefits, in particular the annual wellness benefit, as well as the addition of one new USO position and a new vehicle for that USO position. And that's a utility system operator, pardon me for using the acronym there. On the wastewater ONM, again increases due to salary and benefits, as well as the addition of one new utility system operator or USO position. The reduction in the wastewater resource distribution was due to the reorganization of the geysers. These positions basically were moved into the wastewater resource recovery program. So you'll see an increase there. In addition, we're proposing to add two new positions in that fund and there are increases in ONM projects, again, due to critical projects that we need to get completed at the treatment plant. Purchase of water is up by 6% due to this normal water increase. And again, you'll notice the big reduction in CIP and ONM projects due to the bond funding being appropriated last year and earlier this year. Next slide please. The water department has very little general fund. It is only there to support the stormwater increase team. We have a couple changes. One senior administrative assistant position is being moved from the water fund to the stormwater fund. And overall there is a reduction in total general fund budget due to the reduction in the amount needed that we have been, pardon me, we have been budgeting for the potential trash regulation that has just not come to fruition yet. And so we went back and looked at how much we've been budgeting for that and how much we've actually been expending. And so we reduced that down based on our expenditure history. And so we reduced our budget from that perspective. In addition, our staff charges out to various CIP projects for the environmental work they do to support the capital projects. And so both that increase in staff time charge to CIP projects as well as the reduction in budget is why you see an overall decrease in the general fund of stormwater increase. Next slide please. In terms of accomplishments, Santa Rosa Waters had a very productive year. Some of the highlights are implementation of a robust multifaceted drought response and outreach program resulting in savings greater than 20% last summer when compared to 2020. We also completed our long range planning documents, the urban water management plan and water shortage contingency plan. Both documents were recently deemed complete by the state of California Department of Water Resources with no required changes, which is great news. Very exciting. We completed the lower Colgan Creek restoration phase two restoring approximately 2,000 linear feet of the stream realigning the creek channel enhancing stream habitat, removing invasive plants and installing native vegetation throughout the creek corridor. It also enhanced flood protection for that area. We secured over 350,000 for water and over 650,000 for wastewater bills from the state to assist our customers with overdue bills due to COVID. And we also negotiated with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to make changes to the water quality training framework, which is the mechanism in Santa Rosa's regulatory permit that allows us to comply with our no net load requirements for phosphorus. We negotiated changes that allow for longterm projects on publicly protected lands that results in environmental uplift that those credits would not expire. And this is a huge benefit. It provides regulatory certainty for Santa Rosa and our partners. And previously, credits would on average expire after three years. So this was a really big change and really important that provides regulatory certainty for our ratepayers. Next slide, please. We also face the number of challenges coming up this year. We are in the third year of a multi-year drought and we need to continue to help our customers reduce water use and work on overcoming drought fatigue, which can sometimes set in. We need to also carefully manage our budget, balance our reduced revenues from the reduction in water sales due to drought and balance that with increasing costs. We also know and have mentioned previously that we are under investing in our infrastructure. We are under investing about half and we are seeing some critical failures at the infrastructure at the treatment plant that are requiring urgent and emergency repair. So we're really looking to be as proactive as we can with investing in our infrastructure. We also continue to see increased regulatory requirements. We are currently negotiating our next stormwater national pollutant discharge elimination system or NPDES permit and expecting that there will be additional regulatory requirements that we will have to comply with. We are seeing additional drought regulations from the state that are gonna cause us to have to comply with additional restrictions. We are seeing also increased water quality regulations in particular related to lead and copper. So these are all regulatory challenges that we are following closely and we'll have to implement over the next fiscal year likely. And then last, as we've heard from a number of other departments, staff retention is incredibly challenging for the water department. As an example from 2015 to 2020, we saw on average 16 employees leave each year either due to retirement or resignation. Last year we jumped up to 22 employees leaving and so far to date this year 17 employees have left. So what are we doing to try to address this? We are working on creative solutions with our human resources department to attract more interest in water careers. But in addition, we're really trying to look at how our staff feels valued. Assistant city manager Nat and I started an effort with Santa Rosa water and transportation public works departments using a program outlined by the book, The Advantage to really try and focus on organizational health in the two departments. We adopted a thematic goal that staff are valued and supported and identified six defining objectives to implement our goal. We developed a cross departmental team made of approximately 40 folks from all levels of the two departments to work on the top three objectives which are providing training and mentoring opportunities, explore options for wellness and communicate and appreciate across both departments. We are very proud of that work. We've developed some policies related to communication. We're working on appreciation ideas and implementing wellness ideas. Staff have been very engaged and appreciative and we are hopeful to continue to build on this work to make our departments a place where employees are excited to join and encouraged to stay because they feel highly valued and supported. Next slide, please. The next three slides will show a summary of the water, wastewater and regional enterprise funds comparing revenue to expenses. For water, our reserves are fully funded and we have a very healthy undesignated fund balance due to reducing our fiscal year 2020-21 budget and revenue projections in anticipation of COVID impacts. Those COVID impacts never materialized and we actually saw an increase in total water sales. You also may recall as part of the Tubbs Fire, the water department funded, cash funded, all of our damaged facilities and so we are now starting to get reimbursement from FEMA. And so therefore we have a very healthy undesignated fund balance in the water and enterprise fund and we are purposely spending down that fund balance. Next slide, please. Similarly for wastewater, all our reserves are fully funded and we also have a very healthy undesignated fund balance due to FEMA reimbursement of our sewer system facilities that were damaged. And you may recall that we were initially looking to provide a big portion of cash to put towards our UV disinfection project, but due to the very good bond rates that we received, we decided to fully fund that project with bonds. So that left a little bit more in our undesignated fund balance and we are also purposely spending this down in the wastewater system to deal with critical projects we need. Last, next slide, please. Last subregional is funded by Santa Rosa as well as our four partners and we are budgeting to meet anticipated revenues. And that is the end of my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. I also have my deputy director of administration, Kimberly Zamino available. If there's any specific questions I can't answer. Great, thank you so much, Director Burke. Council, do we have any questions? Council Member Spudhelm. Thank you Mayor Rogers. Thank you for that presentation, Jennifer. First, I wanna congratulate you on your recent appointee your selection as the attack chair, very well deserved and thank you for your willingness to take on that role and I also really appreciate over the years the support I've received from you and your team whether it be on the WACC or the GSA. A couple of questions I have is, I know at our next meeting, which is I think in two weeks, council be giving me direction regarding the GSA study and fee study, how do that, because right now that fee's gonna, it's gonna change. How does that factor into what you just showed us here since we don't know what that GSA fee is gonna be and since Santa Rosa water does use groundwater resources? So we plan for the high end of that range and that's factored into our budget that's in the Water Enterprise Fund. I believe it's out of water administration, but we plan for that based on historical groundwater pumpage as well as the high end of the fee. So that's included in the budget. And for the water customers, how if at all would they be seeing those fees? So that is incorporated into our budget and we are budgeting to keep within the adopted rate structure that we have already in place. And so our customers are not gonna see a change to their water rates above and beyond the adopted four year schedule that we already have in place. Great. And then my last question is, I know yesterday we heard about the 115 trust in that water will be providing some funds. Where would that show up in what you've showed us here today or is it somewhere else that someone would be able to track that? So we are taking, as I mentioned, we have a very healthy, undesignated fund balance. And so we are taking money from that fund balance to put from the water and the wastewater system to put into the 115 trust. Great. Thank you very much. Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Jennifer, it rained yesterday and it rained beautifully, didn't it? I have a question in regards to the Potter Valley issue that I know we're facing. Does that have the potential to affect us in any form, whether it be the budget or our water resources? Thank you, Vice Mayor. That's a great question. We are following the Potter Valley work very closely. It's important not only to Santa Rosa, but to our region, to all those that receive water from the Russian River. Yes, there is potential long-term that we could see impacts to our rates. It would potentially impact Sonoma waters rates, which would then impact Santa Rosas. So we are working very closely, coordinating and keeping up to date on all the work that's happening with Potter Valley project. Currently, the project is now in what's called the start of a surrender process and getting annual licenses. And so there will be annual licenses issued to PG&E and we will be, again, just watching that very closely because we know that it has potential to have impacts for us in the future. Thank you. See any other questions for the director? Thank you so much. I'm gonna turn it back over to Veronica. Thank you. That concludes our department review section for the fiscal year budget 2223. And our final section here for you is the citywide capital improvement program for the next fiscal year. And we have our ACM Jason Nutt, as well as a representative from the water department to present this to you. Thank you. Thank you, Veronica. Thank you, Mayor Corsi, Vice Mayor Alvarez and council members. It's my pleasure to come and, sorry, Vice Mayor Alvarez. Wow, was that a flashback? Sorry. None of us are that cool, Jason. It's a good thing no one's here watching, right? So anyway, it's my pleasure to present to you the citywide capital improvement program budget. I'll be joined by Lori Urbanek from Santa Rosa Water, who will be giving you more detailed information about the specific components of the capital improvement program for Santa Rosa Water. If we can move to the next slide, please. You know, the headliner of our capital improvement program is that of all of the assets that the city owns maintains and is responsible for, we have about $5 billion worth of combined asset responsibility and liability. And as you can see from the slide, it's always nice to do this part because I get to show you some photos and pictures. It's a little different from the rest of the presentation. But you can see in here that we do own an enormous amount of assets, whether it's the 627 miles of water mains or the 109 parks or the 512 miles of roadways. It is a lot of components that we're responsible for. And the teams do a phenomenal job of attempting to keep those up from year to year. But there are capital investment requirements needed to reinvest, improve and replace over the course of time. Next slide, please. So aside from the maintenance aspects, you know, the question is, where do new projects come from? And we get asked this question quite frequently when we're out in the public is how do you come up with and what constitutes the range of projects that you're looking at when you develop the CIP? And so this is a list, it's not comprehensive. There are many, many areas that we gain feedback. One of the first is when we receive community feedback and comments, either email, phone or when we're out in the public and gathering information. Then we're also looking at all of the documents that departments from around the city are developing that really outline what the future city asset structure should look like as we move forward, whether it's master plans or area plans, those each outline investment strategies and capital investment needs. We're also starting to see more and more investment looking into the climate action plan and feedback coming from the community advisory board. Climate action plan is one that we've had in place but we're starting to see more and more evaluation on. We're starting to see components that are capital investment strategies toward accomplishing our climate action goals and you will likely in the near future begin to start to accumulate requests and project lists that help us achieve some of that. Community advisory board, as I mentioned, is on here and the question is, well, why is a community advisory board, what is it they're doing? It is in the community advisory board's charter that every year we spend time with them to talk about priorities associated with our capital improvement program. Priorities mean how are we evaluating projects? It's looking at the categories, not just the categories but the method with which we score those categories to ensure that the highest priority projects are getting the attention that they're due. One of the key pieces that we heard in this year when we went back to the community advisory board was really starting to layer in equity as a metric in the evaluation of our project lists when we're going forward and doing our capital improvement program and we are gonna be investing in a process over the next 12 months of layering that into our evaluation strategy and so we appreciated the community advisory board's feedback and the time they took to think about the work that the team already does and the effort that your staff puts into making this a solid list that's fiscally constrained but we also wanna make sure that we're meeting the needs of the community into the future. Next slide. So what we're proposing this year is just about a 68 and a half million dollar capital improvement program. Slightly less than what you saw last year predominantly because of the ultraviolet system replacement out of the treatment plant. And you can look on the pie chart and see that about 55% of the investment that's for this year is related to the Santa Rosa Water Department and Deputy Director Banek will be going through that here shortly. But you'll also notice that the general fund department components meaning transportation and public works and departments that we service and assist whether it's fire police, park and recreation, garage. All of those are incorporated into this, the general fund side of this pie, which is about 45%. Next slide. A couple of funds that we wanna just highlight. One is the general fund ask. We have an enormous number of fund sources that come in and help make up that 68 and a half million dollar budget. From the general funds perspective, we're requesting $5.3 million and that $5.3 million is made up of the four projects that you see in front of you. That is an annual $1.2 million allotment specifically for the benefit of ADA improvements. As you recall, the city has adopted a transition plan that is focused on the improvement of all public facilities both here at City Hall plus the other 100 buildings that we own and then the 109 parks in an effort to bring those up into compliance with federal ADA standards. And every year we have a list. There is a internal staff team that evaluates that program and develops a list. We vet that list and get that approved to make up the $1.2 million and those funds will be invested for this upcoming fiscal year. The next slide item is a pre-design planning item. Many years ago, back in 2009, the city changed how we did capital investment and how we charge out to our capital investments. In doing so, our capital improvement team is fully reimbursable, including all of our general government overhead. That became a burden to some of our departments who are looking for small support to do internal projects, mostly tenant improvement type projects in each of the buildings and the additional increase in cost made it so it was very difficult to deliver some of those projects and gain the support. And so about five years ago, we began to input this $50,000 cost in here so that our capital improvement team can support those internal general fund asks without having to charge some of that additional cost to those projects, especially on the planning front. And it's been a successful program so far. As you heard throughout the course of yesterday and today, we were very pleased to receive a $3.4 million STIP grant from MTC and thanks to council member Fleming for her effort in making sure that this did come our way. This helped cap the funding strategy for the bike and pedover crossing. Those funds came into the general fund as a revenue source and we're programming it here so that we can begin to finalize that project and get it hopefully on the street in the next 12 months. The last is the Roseland Pavement Maintenance Program. As you recall, we annexed a portion of the Roseland community that had not been originally annexed into the city. As part of that negotiated agreement, the county for a 10-year period is transferring $662,000 a year to the city for the benefit of pavement maintenance in that portion of the community that had not received a lot of maintenance from them prior to the transition. In doing so, we have been investing these over the last four years and making substantial improvement in that community. We appropriate the full $662,000 every year. We fluctuate the actual expenditures on that, which means, for example, for this particular year for fiscal year 22-23, a portion of this will go to the construction of ramps, pedestrian ramps in the community and some gap infills in preparation for the following year, which will be a fairly significant Cape Seal effort. And you heard a couple of weeks ago about what a Cape Seal was. It is much more of a structural component to roadway repair, but it does require that we upgrade all of the pedestrian facilities for ADA compliance. So we are going to utilize the first portion of this money coming in this budget season to get those ramps implemented. The second component will be combined with next year's allocation to implement that pavement effort. And we'll continue to keep you updated as we're looking to spend those funds moving forward. Next slide, please. From the city manager's office, we've been, the capital projects team is working with homeless services in effort to continue to renovate and improve services at Sam Jones Hall. We will be utilizing $340,000 from the homeless services fund to continue that investment strategy in an effort to make sure that not only is Sam Jones Hall prepared and ready for full opening now that we're starting to see the lifting of COVID services, but also how we're going to see changes in the Sam Jones Hall annex property and what it's gonna look like for future services as potential navigation center and others. So that's where this $340,000 is coming from and I know the team is working on the specifics of that expenditure plan as we speak. Next slide. The capital facilities fees program is made up of impact fees that we receive from developers doing business within the city limits. A certain portion of the fees are delegated specifically to various pots of capital investment. In this particular case, we're talking about the component and the percentage of those fees that come in to improve our fire facilities. Every year, what we do is program those, we appropriate those as part of the budget in an equitable way among the available projects that are listed in the measure O program or I'm sorry, that are listed in the CFF program. And so what you're seeing is an equitable split of the $503,000 that were assigned from this fee program to new fire station in South Santa Rosa. That is typically known as fire station number nine over located at France Kafka. There have been conversations that that may locate elsewhere once we complete fire. If fire station eight is able to accomplish the future task that the chief has explained to you in prior meetings, it will accomplish. We are putting 168,000 toward fire station eight, which is going to be located on the new property we've purchased out on Hearn Avenue and the vicinity of Dutton. And then 168,000 going to temporary station number five. Why that? And I know just so I can hold off a question later. The reason being is one, we do have a decommissioning component of that piece of property once we're ready to move into the new fire station that we hope to begin building in the next 12 months. And with that decommissioning, we know there will be some funds required to put that property in such a state that we're able to surplus it and move it into other hands or to utilize it for other city services as we're looking at it. If at some point we find that we don't necessarily need that specifically fire fire station five, there are other projects such as the reconstruction and rehabilitation of fire station 11 off of Lewis Road where the funds would be transferred to and it's a simple administrative shift in order to make those work. All of those are eligible costs. We show these because these are the three most important as identified by the fire department. Next slide please. From the finance department, we have a number of garage and lot repairs that we're working on. I'll start at the bottom actually go with lot 10 reconstruction. These are funds that should get us to a point where we can now bid that particular project to get lot 10 resurfaced and put back into a condition that's functional and usable. That project was put on hold as we contemplated some potential real estate actions at that particular location. We've since determined that the cost benefit of implementing the pavement improvements is worth our time and it would be a great service for our downtown community and the visitors that are coming there. The three garage projects are to look at things like weatherproofing. Yes sir. Can you do me a favor Jason and just when you talk about the lots of the garages, give us the cross streets. I believe lot 10 is the fourth, excuse me, fifth and D. But thank you. My apologies. Yes, transportation guy talking code. So garage is three, which is located at the intersection of third and D. I'm sorry, actually, I'll probably need Alan's help at some point to define exactly where garage three is. Garage one, I believe is at the intersection. I think we all know where garage five is. We all know where garage five is. I believe garage one is located at B and first. But Alan will confirm since I see him popping in right now. Yeah, so garage three is upon fifth street, which is always confusing because you would think that that would be garage five, but now garage three is upon fifth street. And then garage one, I believe is over off of seven. Thank you, Alan, for the assist on that. I appreciate. So these particular garages, the repairs are predominantly weatherproofing. There's some minor improvements along the way. There are cracking of some of the structural members. Some of the non-structural members that we can do repairs on in an effort to ensure that those facilities stay in reasonable condition moving forward. Just an example of one of the key components on garage five, we'll be doing some rehabilitation of the stairwells. The slip proof material has since worn off over the course of time. We want to ensure public safety, so we're putting that material back on those steps so that folks don't slip and fall during any adverse weather or if they're not wearing shoes that are conducive to walking on concrete. All right, next slide, please. Next is to talk about our park impact fees. Our park impact fees are set up in such a way that there are four zones throughout the city and we have traditionally used Highway 101 North South and Highway 12 East West to differentiate between the four different zones. You can see the revenue stream that has come in over the last year for each of those four zones, ranging from about $470,000 over in the Southeast to just under 1.9 million in the Southwest. Those funds then as a part of this program, next slide, please, just simply get appropriated to each of those zones. As they come into the general fund for revenue, we want to make sure that those get captured specifically in each of those project accounts. From those, we designate specific improvements for parks in those areas. And we've got a number of things coming forward that are pretty exciting. So for example, in the Southwest, we have some work on the South Davis Street Park that'll be coming forward in the next year. It's a great location. It'll be some really exciting work for that. We also have Measure M. Actually, before I go to Measure M, let me just talk about park development fees a little bit further. Back in 2018 as part of the up downtown and the housing action plan, the city council authorized the retention of a certain number of funds that were collected from downtown development to remain in the downtown. From one perspective, that all exists within zone three. So we're not shifting funds between various zones in an effort to do that. And so even though we don't specifically have a zone defined and designated for downtown, we are working with planning and economic development to assure that funds that come in from those downtown defined developments are captured and will remain and be utilized in the downtown at this point in time. And therefore, we're doing work on Fremont Park right now to try to rehabilitate and put that park into a usable function moving forward. And we're excited about that effort. I know there's community meetings that'll be coming up on that. So moving to Measure M. Measure M is the Parks for All measure that was approved by voters back in, I believe, 2019. No, yeah, 2019. And we have just recently in November received council approval on an expenditure plan where funds that come in, 50% of those funds go towards capital investment, 40% go toward maintenance and 10% go toward new recreation programming. All of those are eligible activities underneath the requirements of the sales tax measure. And we've begun to utilize those funds in our capital improvement program. And so there are projects currently this year that are in our list that are utilizing Measure M funds. We are currently waiting for the results of our, we've done a comprehensive evaluation of the state of each of the parks. And we're looking at the condition assessment of all the facilities within all 109 parks. That is just getting wrapped up now. We expect to have some feedback and results by July. And we would expect that that will start to feed the specific expenditures and project lists that are defined, that'll be utilizing the Measure M funds. Next slide, and I will hand it over to Deputy Director Urbanic. Thank you. I appreciate the introduction. I'm Lori Urbanic, Deputy Director of Engineering Resources for Santa Rosa Water. And it's certainly my pleasure to present the Santa Rosa proposed CIP budget to all of you today. It's a $36 million budget for year one. Santa Rosa Water does do a five year planning horizon. And so this is just approval for year one, which is the new money that's being funded to certain projects. As Director Burke mentioned, we have three separate distinct funds, water, wastewater, and the regional fund. And the regional fund is shared by our partners. As I started to work on this presentation and took a look at everything in kind of a different light, I noticed that the main focus of all of our highest priority projects are centered around hazard mitigation. We're focusing a lot of funding on fire, floods, drought, and earthquake mitigation projects for to maintain our level of service for our community and our environment. Next slide, please. So I'll just highlight a few of the projects. You can see from this pie chart here, it describes the amount of money that's going into each of the various types of projects that we have. You'll notice that the reservoirs, which are our storage, water storage tanks, is receiving $5.5 million this year one. And those are for seismic and water quality upgrades for two of our reservoirs, R9, which is off of Summerfield Road, and R16, which is on the eastern side of Fountain Grove Parkway. When it comes to drought, you'll notice that we have $1.6 million allocated this year for additional resources for groundwater. We're anticipating a new emergency groundwater well at the Valley Gulf course, and then of course a rehabilitation of an existing well on Lee Avenue. On the earthquake kind of side of things also that we are replacing a couple of water mains down Sonoma Avenue and Montgomery Drive, where they cross the Rogers Creek fault. So I'm trying to harden that east-west connection for our water distribution system. You'll notice here that there's a, just to avoid any questions, there's a small portion of $1.4 million that's shown here for public assistance. And that is due to the tub's fire. There was damage done, obviously, as everyone knows to a number of water facilities and sewer lift stations. So this is just some residual, a lot of fencing, permit or fencing needed to be replaced. So that's where that funding is going. Next slide, please. And the wastewater budget. So you'll notice that it's $13 million this year for year one. And a significant portion of that money, $10 million is going towards the rehabilitation of sewer chunks. I'll add that we do sewer, we do our master planning condition assessments. We try to get them done every five to seven years. The most recent condition assessment that we have on our trunks showed us that we have a level grade five defects in the Lano trunk as it enters the Santa Rosa Regional Treatment Facility. In sort of layman's terms, this gradation for a condition assessment on concrete pipes goes from level one to five being the worst condition. And there are several sections on this large diameter concrete pipe, a reinforced concrete pipe that has lost a significant amount of concrete and has not just exposed reinforcement, but it has degraded where the reinforcement doesn't exist in certain locations. And we're very concerned about that, which is why we're putting so much money into the first phase of this trunk rehabilitation in year one. There is a structural deficit now in that pipe and so we're very anxious to get that done. There are some, the sewer and water, the sewer mains that you see here being proposed, those are typical residential sewer and water projects that go on in the city. This one is insured forest and then we have a small amount of master plan studies analysis. Next slide, please. And now on to the regional policy, I'd keep budget. You can see here that it's $9 million and that's cash funded each year with our regional partners. This year you'll notice that there's pretty even split between master planning studies and plant infrastructure. One of the highest priorities out at the treatment plant, there are many. I must remind everybody that our treatment facility is over 50 years old and we're starting to sort of notice and be told by the plant on these multiple failures that we've had over the last several months occurring out at the plant. One of the highest priority projects that we have on the books starting this year and for $3.6 million is plant infrastructure replacement for the electrical system, the electrical network system out there. This, the current estimate that we have recently puts the entire project at $20 million in today's dollars but we anticipate that the cost will likely go up and it's planned out for the next five years to complete that work. The master planning number that you see here is kind of a unique project. It's for the sub regional mitigation bank development and this project will create a mitigation bank on sub regional property for endangered species. We have a number of significant projects that will be occurring out at the treatment plant over the next several years, UV being one of them. The flood wall is coming up. Some of you probably remember that and so we'll need mitigation credits to offset the impacts at the treatment plant during these construction projects. That completes my slide presentation for today and if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them. All right, council. Do we have any questions for Lori? Kick it back over to the assistant city manager. All right, if we can go to the last slide please. Okay, second to the last slide. That's the one. So Lori provided you with a fairly detailed discussion about the Santa Rosa water capital improvement program for both water sewer and the sub regional. When we want to look at the other side of the coin and get into more detail about where transportation and public works, fire, parking, parks and recreation come into play. This particular table shows you a little bit more detail on the $32 million that are non-water enterprise and how those are broken out into the specific type of projects that are coming forward. That 32 million is made up of money coming from gas tax from SB one, which is Senate bill one. That's a gas tax extension. Comes from our community facilities fees. It comes from measure M transportation as well as measure M parks for all. It also includes a utility impact fee, which is a fee that transportation and public works of Santa Rosa water have agreed on for the benefit of having utility in the ground. And that is specifically associated with improving pavement surfaces where water sewer projects are involved. And so there's a number of different funding sources that occur and every time we get a grant we have additional sources that come into play. And so with that, there are just a few projects I'd just like to highlight to kind of give you some examples of where we're at. But when we get to June, you'll actually get a booklet or a component of your budget book that describes in detail all of the projects that are receiving funding for this particular fiscal year. This information is also available on the website because there are 51 projects that are receiving funds for this particular year. We don't walk through each single one of them as a course of our budget presentation, but we just give you kind of a highlight of where we're at. So as examples, you heard earlier today Finlay Aquatic Center is getting the remaining funding it needs in order to be able to move forward and have that project go out to bid this year. We're putting additional funding into the Herne Avenue interchange in an effort to close the gap as well as some grant resources that we're actively working on to try to bring that project to fruition. We've talked about the bike pedover crossing, receiving money. We do have our annual slurry seal program which is where we go and we do pavement preventative maintenance. We are setting aside some funds this year in an effort to do additional sidewalk gap in fill programs and projects. We're gonna be working on Sonoma Avenue pavement rehabilitation this year which is gonna be a big one and we're excited to see that working forward. And then there are a handful of stormwater improvements whether we're starting to evaluate what's gonna happen on McMinn Avenue and doing some initial design so that we can get that critical project moving forward or we're dealing with the Pauling Creek restoration and how that's gonna work. So just a couple of very quick examples of where some of that funding is going and some of the exciting things that are happening. I will tell you as we started this, one of the things that we asked of the capital projects team several years ago was to try to eliminate projects that have been on the books forever. And we've been systematically working on that. Our focus is Herne Avenue. Herne Avenue is over 20 years in the making trying to get this project to the finish line. That is a key focus for us. There are three or four per key roadway widening projects and resurfacing projects that are gonna be near the top of their list because it's very difficult to talk about adding new projects and scoring those from a priority perspective when you've already made promises that we haven't yet fully delivered on. And so you'll hear some of the things that come up over the course of the next few years that may scratch your head and some of it's because we've gotta clear the books. We either have to make the decision to cut that project looser to get it finished. And so those are things that are coming forward and we'll be discussing that as we start to describe in more detail what that future project prioritization plan's gonna look like. Lastly, I just wanna conclude and say the capital projects team is working there. They are working really hard to get these things squared away. And there's been challenges that continue to walk in front of them. We're currently 50% vacancy in our engineering team and we've been experiencing substantial vacancy over the last several years. And it's been very difficult because it's had a direct impact on our ability to deliver some projects. We are in the process of finalizing a staff report that'll come to council that'll approve incorporating two consulting firms that will act as staff augmentation in an effort to bridge that gap and potentially not just bridge the gap but help us provide some of the additional resource needs that we have or that we need in order to make this happen. Similar to what planning and academic development has had, our goal is to have a baseline staff that's augmented by consultants moving forward so that in the ebb and flow of the construction activity, we're able to capture and gain ground on what's going on in our capital improvement program. So we're excited about what we're gonna be producing coming forward. We're really thrilled about this capital improvement program budget. And Lori and I are happy to answer any questions that you might have. All right, I've got a couple of questions for you, director. Excuse me, Mr. Assistant City Manager. First, I wanna say I am pleasantly surprised and pleased to see 35.6% of the capital budget going to pike and pedestrian projects. That's obviously been a big priority for the community and was one of the refocuses for Measure M when we went back for reauthorization. So I do like seeing those numbers trend up, hoping to make our streets safer for folks to get around, not just in a vehicle. So thank you for that. There was, you mentioned the sidewalk gapping project and I wanna give you a chance to sort of tout your team and what you're doing different in terms of sidewalks that's showing some positive benefits for the community. So we've done a couple of things. One, we actually have an internal construction crew that works with our facilities team. They've not only been building pathways in our public parks and spaces, but they've recently been assisting our capital and projects team and delivered and built a sidewalk along Gernville Road. It's been a great program to get that built and built with the expertise of the staff that we have within the department. The team's also been working through our highway safety programs to really evaluate some of our most dangerous corridors and I think you'll start to see those come forward in a couple of grant applications through the Highway Safety Improvement Program and predominantly gonna be Stony Point Road, Dutton Avenue and Fourth and Montgomery. Those particular corridors were identified as the high areas of concern and ones that we wanted to focus our efforts on from the safety perspective. And so we're very excited about those efforts. Some of the gap infills that we're gonna be looking at in Roseland relate to some of the pavement work that we're gonna do, we're gonna try to combine. We know that there's a number of gaps in the sidewalks and the walkways out there. In some cases, those are gonna be the side on pavement work that we've done previously. And in some cases, we're gonna be utilizing concrete to fill in some of those gaps. We think that's gonna be a huge benefit to that community as well. In addition, we're looking at expanding on a program that the county initiated to repave Corby Avenue. That'll include a bridge over Colgan Creek down near the Colgan interchange. And that'll give us an opportunity to eliminate a gap infill at that location as well. Great, thank you. And I do hear from specific neighborhoods all the time concerns that there's just the poor road quality and also don't have sidewalks. And I do know a couple of folks have asked about creating special districts where in which the neighbors could pay extra taxes into a fund to try to improve their own particular neighborhoods, have we examined any of those types of programs? We have looked at that historically. We're not currently evaluating those at this point in time, but it's something that we can consider moving forward. In some of the rural communities, they do roadway districts that allow the municipality to work in combination with property owners to, in essence, maintain a public street with private dollars. We're not at that point yet, but that is an area that we're willing to consider, especially if there are portions of the community that unanimously come forward and explain that they'd like to see us work with them to make their community better. I'll suggest that to some of the neighbors who frequently ask me about that. It really does seem to be the confluence of poor road quality and no sidewalk for them to be able to travel on, particularly in older communities where folks might not be as stable walking around. Can you remind us how much is the gap still in terms of the Hearn Avenue project? Yeah, we're still estimating about a $9 million shortfall for that project, and we are focusing our efforts on a federal grant, the raise grant. That particular program was enhanced substantially by the Biden administration as a part of the Infrastructure and Improvement Act. I think given the fact that our project has been highly rated and highly ranked for the last several years that we have as good a shot as any at this point in time. We're hopeful, but I'm not gonna throw all my eggs in that basket. We're gonna continue to search for other resources, and we're working collaboratively with the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, evaluating some of the state opportunities that exist out there to bring that project to be fully funded. It is ready to go. We just need to get to that end point of filling the piggy bank. Great, thank you. Other questions from council? Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. So Jason, the PCI and something that we've been talking about, will we always talk about? It's been many years. It always comes up every year. It's getting worse, as we know. It gets worse every year, and we're spending, according to Mr. Sprinkle, about a third of what we should be spending on our roadways to bring them up to speed, so to speak. What do you see as a long-term plan to try to get a handle on this very unsexy, but necessary expenditure? It always gets pushed off to the side for obvious reasons. As we hear more complaints about that, probably that almost anything else, other than a couple of obvious issues that are always number one on people's lists. This one is right up there. How do you see the future of dealing with this very necessary, at least currently necessary, obligation that we keep pushing off? Yeah, thank you, Council Member. That's a difficult question to answer. The bottom line is it's an increase in revenue. We need increased funds to be able to put toward a capital investment plan to improve pavement around the city. What you heard from Mr. Sprinkle and Mr. Cosell during the study session was that in order to keep our current pavement condition index stable, we need an additional $4 million a year of investment just to be there. That actually doesn't bring all of our streets up into good condition. We would likely need an additional $5 to $7 million above that in order to make that next jump. And so those are some of the challenges that we're seeing. There are the best technique we can use within the current revenue stream that we have is exactly what you heard from a materials engineering team. They're looking at trying to utilize better materials in place that have longer life and longer lasting materials so that we can use that as the technology to bridge some of that financial gap. The model that we use to evaluate pavement degradation utilizes a 20 year life for asphalt. And what you heard from Mr. Cosell was that we are regularly seeing 30 to 35 years of life off that same pavement cross section because of the work that they're doing to ensure that the quality of the pavement material is higher than the standard. That they're looking at whether it's fibers or they're looking at thickness or they're looking at better base or they're looking at a number of different tools that exist out there in an effort to expand the life of that. That's the most cost effective resource that we have without finding an additional revenue source. And with that the hope is is we're able to stabilize our current PCI by being smarter on how we put our surfacing on the ground. I know people don't typically like slurry seal. It looks like you're just painting over the street but I can tell you it's a very cost effective and valuable way of preserving that asset. And it only gets more expensive when you start to neglect that. So the tough part of the answer is for us to bridge into that next realm of starting to increase our pavement quality around the city, we do need to find an additional revenue source whether that's looking at additional tax or whether it's looking at increased revenue coming from state and federal obligations which we will start to see a little bit coming especially as part of the infrastructure bill or whether it's looking at something akin to a bond to be able to make some of those investments. Those will be concepts that we'll be looking at over the course of the next couple of years to see if there is an option there. If not, I can only guarantee that our team's gonna do everything they can within the resources that they have to try to bridge that gap with just the intelligent way that they're managing the system. Just to expand on that a little bit, I know that one of the considerations before we do a major road, probably a replacement is whether or not we are going to be doing some under grounding in a particular neighborhood. And that under grounding may not be scheduled for five or 10 years. So as not to cut into a nicely re-engineered roadway, we hold off on that project until the under grounding work has been done, whether it be sewer or water, whatever it might be. With these new technologies, will that, might that philosophy be able to be compromised somewhat given some of the new materials that are being used so that when we cut into a newly created roadway, that we no longer have to be as concerned about waiting until that under grounding is done to do that major road work? I'd like to say no, we really wanna make sure that all of the substantial underground work is complete before we resurface the roadways. Doesn't matter what the technology is, what the tool is, the minute you put a trench through it, you are never gonna get back to that original stabilized roadway, that brand new roadway. As much as we know there are remedies that you can put in place to mitigate how fast that trench will fail or where water will get in, there's always gonna be a weak point and the weak point is always along that cut plane. And so some of the concern you heard about the use of concrete, that's one of the issues. It's not that we can't find a way of making that patch work, it's that that created a spot where water can get into the subsurface and it's the subsurface that creates potholes. It's the subsurface that when that settles and differentially moves, that's where you start to see failure on the surface. And so we try to limit as much of the cutting as possible in an effort to preserve the stability of that roadway surface for as long as we can. We've got a great program going with our own utility. I will say we struggle a little bit with some of our private partners that are out there that are doing an awful lot of work in our streets right now. They're not always seeing all of their projects and there's always one that comes in at the wrong time. But we do our best to try to limit that and we coordinate with planning and economic development to make sure that those encroachment permits we try to make those occur before. No silver bullets. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Council members, by the way. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Jason, for that answer to that question because I know it's a complex issue, but I really appreciate the way you explain this. I have some questions regarding the Park Division proposed CIP budget at slide 151. So, and I know I'm gonna be asking this question. So part of the reason I wanna hear your answers so I know how to explain it to community members who will have some of the same questions. So when we see the total parks projects of $6.9 million, total parks projects of $6.9 million, is that the balance or that's in those funds or is that, do we have $6.9 million worth of projects ready to go? No, this is, in essence, what we're doing here is we are appropriating funds. These monies are being banked. There are likely projects sitting on the other side. So in that list of 51 projects, some of the money that's getting banked is going directly into an expenditure plan for a particular project, but this effort that we do as part of the Capital Improvement Program is specifically to move it from General Fund Revenue, which is where it comes in, into each of these four park improvement fee zones so that they can then be sent to projects for expenditure and implementation. Great, thank you. And I know since my time on council, I know there have been some borrowing from one zones to another. Where would a member of the community be able to see that it's been paid back where those balances when we have shuffled around some of those funds for projects, which is I think a great use, but who is tracking that? Where would someone be able to see that it has eventually been paid back? So the good news is our finance department is tracking that. Right now, I'm only aware of one remaining outstanding loan between zones and that is a loan from the Southwest zone, zone two to the golf course. And it's possible that someone from finance or Jen, if they're still on, they can correct me if I've got that wrong, but I believe that's the only outstanding loan at this point in time. And those would get rectified whenever the golf course has adequate reserves or funds to be able to pay that back. And again, where would, again, for transparency, where would someone from the community who wants to track that be able to find that information that you just shared off the top of your head? Right now, I don't believe that's available to the public, but we can certainly provide that upon a phone call. Great, thank you. That'd be very helpful. And then, so I see with the four different zones, and again, that's based on development in those zones, correct, and then measure M is city-wide, correct? Correct. And you talked about the allocation priorities that we've made. So you have the zones being geographically representative, but now measure M is city as a whole. So how do you balance those challenges where 2.4 million anywhere in the city in the zone projects, how do you equitably balance that throughout the city? And that's part of our project prioritization effort is looking at how we're implementing projects around the city. Right now, we do not set things up by council district. And even when we think about measure M, we're not even distributing funds based on the park impact fee zones. In this particular case, it's our effort to make sure that the projects that we're bringing forward are representative of the city as a whole. When we look at some of our larger facilities, whether it's Finlay Community Center or Ridgeway, we don't have those in each of the districts. And so we don't necessarily want to try to divide and conquer the funds in an effort to equitably distribute that way. But we do our best to make sure that the facilities that receive the funds are either geographically distributed or put in such a way that it's to the best city-wide use possible. And so we are going to be expending those funds in a way that the fits the projects that are moving forward that need some additional funding to get across the finish line. And staff will be intentional in the way that those funds are distributed. And that brings back to my memory. I know you made a comment about a community park versus a neighborhood park. And we theoretically, we have two large ones in the city, Youth Community Park and Howard Park, correct? Howard Park is our specialty park. It's the largest with the most facilities. Youth Community Park is a community park similar to a place to play. Northwest Community Park, Rankin Valley Community Park, those are all parks that are in the 20-acre range that have a little less services than Howard. Howard is kind of our one big specialty park. And is the future planning, and this may be more of a general plan question, that's one on the east side of town, is there a future for one on the west side of town? At this point in time, we don't have plans for another specialty park of that magnitude. There are certainly gonna be amenities at each of the community parks that will provide offsetting benefit to what we see at Howard. Howard is unique from a geographical standpoint. You know, it's Jason to Annadel, it's Jason to Spring Lake, it has a lake on the property. That's where we've invested in the train and the carousel and the pony rides. And it just, it has unique features that other community parks don't have access to. And so those other community parks, as we come forward with the master plan developments, each have their own unique component, place to play is a place to play. That's where we have our ball fields. When we get to Rosen Creek Community Park, it is gonna be more nature oriented. That's the primary focus. When we think about youth community park, it's a park that actually doesn't have a comprehensive master plan at this point. There's gonna be an active section and there's gonna be a passive section. What that looks like until we have enough funding available to really dive into it, we're not exactly sure. I know that's one that Jen is very excited to get into when she has the chance. So hopefully that answers your question is, is Howard will be unique. There will not likely be something like that distributed. Similar to Finley Community Center and Aquatic Center, it is unique. We will not likely be able to replicate that throughout the city in its form. There will likely be efforts to try to build components around town that aren't currently there today that provide access that we only currently get at Finley but that we might find is beneficial in other parts of town whether it's pools, gymnasiums, additional ball fields. So we will be looking at that and measure M as a tool that we can use to make those types of investments and develop those plans. I really appreciate that. And my last question and comment, did I hear you say that when the final budget comes back in third week in June, there'll be more specificity as to how many of these park dollars will be actually, what projects will be funded during the next fiscal year? Yes, you'll get a component of your budget book that will specifically outline all 50 projects that are receiving funds. From the park standpoint, I think it's seven projects that are receiving funds. They're fairly significant projects. That doesn't mean that all of money that's currently set aside in each of these accounts is being utilized. And you'll see more projects coming in the next two years as well that'll start to pull those as well as the increase from either impact fees or measure M. Great, thank you so much. Council Member McDonald? Yes, I know I've asked this, but I'm still not really clear on it. In the past budget, we've had about $11 million set aside for roads and street repairs. Can you tell me, because I'm looking at this and it says street capacity and street rehabilitation. And I'm only seeing about $8 million or $8 million five. So did we decrease like our infrastructure around roads or am I not reading this correctly? So the comment from staff was we average about 11 million a year. That means in some years we'll have more, some years we'll have less. We also mix and blend project types. And so some of the bicycle improvements that you'll see there actually have roadway resurfacing components to it. And so that it's, I want to say it's not as clearly defined on that pie chart slide, but we do average about $11 million a year just to give you an idea right now between the gas tax SB1 and the UIF, meaning the utility impact fee, that is just about $13 million that it's all going toward pavement or roadway oriented components, whether it's a traffic signal, a street light, pavement improvement, sidewalk improvement, those are all components that we would be able to utilize those funds for. Okay, thank you. Council Member Rogers. Yes, question. I'm calling loan amount from zone two to the golf course, which is an enterprise. We'll be happy to provide that. I don't have it off the top of my head. I'm not sure if Allen or Veronica are on that can provide that information for you directly. It will come up as a function of our conversation on June, because it specifically relates to the debt that the golf course is currently holding. It's not just the bond debt service that we have to pay, but there is the outstanding loan between zones. And we'll get into more detail on that at that time, but I don't know, Allen or Veronica, if you have that detail that you can provide at this point. Oh no, this question shall not wait till June. Thank you. Yeah, and I'm sorry. I cannot bring that up to you at the moment. We're happy to follow up with you via email or in some other manner after this meeting, if you'd like it, but I don't think I can call it up at the moment unless Allen has it. Yeah, I don't know. I was gonna actually say the same thing is that this is something we'll need to follow up with the Council Member on it. And we'll be happy to share with all the Council Members as part of that response. In addition, I wanted to ask about a place to play in football fields. So I know we focus really heavily on soccer, on soccer fields. Will any of those fields be dual purpose and be able to be used for youth sports for football? Because we don't have. And I think I asked this question before, but it keeps being asked to me and I forgot the answer. So I'm not aware that the master plan currently designates specific field use for football. The two new fields that we are working on finalizing design right now will be multi-purpose between soccer and baseball. And those will be the large unimproved area at the front of the park. The other fields that need to be built at that park are also baseball or softball. My understanding is we don't have a specifically designated football program for any of our fields. Soccer and baseball are the two predominant field types that we put out in our parks. And that generally comes from the community feedback when we go and do the master plan process. That doesn't mean we're not interested or willing to make adjustments if we felt that there was a community need to specifically incorporate publicly owned football fields. We have gone to a component and worked with some outside investors. The city has kind of a joint venture with a rugby community and there is a rugby field that is operated and maintained and constructed by a private entity, but I believe it is on city property. And so there are different ways for us to accommodate some of these if we thought there was interest from a particular group or a large group of people. Yeah, we have football youth teams within our city. They just rent from our high schools because we don't have a city field but we do have youth football organizations within our city. We just don't have a field. Happy to discuss that with the parks planning team. Any other questions from council? All right, thank you so much to the team. Thank you. Let's go ahead and go to public comment now on today and yesterday's budget hearings. If you'd like to leave comment, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. Let's go to our prerecorded voice mails. My name is Carla Wike and I'm calling to comment on agenda item number three. I would like very much for us to prioritize funding of a fully connected, safe and low stress bicycle infrastructure. I'm a mom of three who love to avoid driving when possible but it's very difficult to navigate this city by bike with young children. And I would like to see us take budget funds to make biking safer and easier in our city. Thank you so much, goodbye. Hi, my name is Alexa Forrester and I'm calling today with a comment about agenda item number three, the budget study session. I want to speak particularly to the question of transportation budgeting in Santa Rosa. Currently our transportation system is dangerous, inequitable, inefficient and irresponsible from a climate perspective. In my comments today I want to focus on the safety issue. Recently at least three children in my part of town have been hit by cars. One was walking to school, the other two were on bikes. The most recent involved a close friend of my 14 year old son. All of these kids survived but with significant injuries that interrupted their schooling, their social lives and their extracurricular activities. Quite honestly I was a bit appalled that these collisions have mostly been ignored by our media and no public statement has been made by my own city council member as if kids getting hit by cars is just a regular part of life in Santa Rosa. When our community shrugs its shoulders in response to such events, parents, rightly concerned about their children's safety start driving their kids everywhere assuming they are privileged enough to do so, that is. This additional car traffic further contributes to the danger, inequity, inefficiency and climate irresponsibility of our transportation system. There's a better way. Rebust investments in protected bike infrastructure, pedestrian crossing and traffic calming to protect those already traveling by foot, bus and bike as well as aggressive investments to get more folks out of their cars will help reduce traffic injuries and make the streets safe for our kids. As it relates to today's study session I really want to applaud the work of city staff in finding the funding for the bicycle and pedestrian bridge over 101. This is a much needed safe crossing for anybody traveling on bikes, including our kids. But I'd like to remind the council that if there's no safe way for cyclists to get to and from this bridge it will largely go unused which will undermine the investment. Right now the roads feeding the planned bike bridge are treacherous for cyclists. So as we begin to spend money for that project I hope city staff will be doing everything in their power to re-envision the streetscapes in and around the bridge helping to integrate it into other safe bicycle infrastructure we've already built. I'm grateful for the steps city staff has been already been making but we need to move faster and I would appreciate the council sending a loud and clear message to prioritize safety on the road for non motorized users and our most vulnerable users in the coming year and beyond. Thank you. Hi, my name is Avery Figueroa and I'm a Santa Rosa resident and commenting on item number three. I wanted to encourage the city to prioritize in the transportation budget funding for fully connected safe low stress bicycle infrastructure. I'm a mother of two young kids and enjoy using my bike as a form of transportation to get around the city, to run errands and also to bike my kids to school and would like to be able to feel safer when riding with my kids around the city as it stands right now. There's progress being made and I know that the city has secured 15.4 million in state and regional grants to fund construction of the highway 101 bicycle and pedestrian overpass, the transportation and public works capital improvement budget for the 22-23 fiscal year includes 5.6 million and 5.9 million for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. And I see and appreciate the many improvements that are being made around town, including the buffered bike lanes on Hoenn Avenue, Summerfield Road and Seventh Street, the new green painted transition zones near intersections and improved crossings. And I want to encourage the city to continue to work to expand and accelerate these efforts to dramatically improve safety and convenience for bicycles and pedestrians to realize the vision of a complete connected low stress bike network that can provide a real alternative to motorized transport. Because as it stands right now there's places in the city that don't feel safe to ride and we can't completely get around especially if you're riding with young kids with a feeling of safety around the city. And even though it's amazing that there's the 101 bicycle and pedestrian overpass that's gonna happen, if there's no way for bikes to safely get to and from the new bike bridge, most cyclists won't use it and it will end up being a wasted expenditure. So I'm really encouraging the city to prioritize safe connected low stress bike networks in Santa Rosa as soon as possible. Thank you very much for your consideration. Hi, my name is Erica McCush. I'm calling about agenda item number three. I live in Santa Rosa and ride my bike as a primary mode of getting my children to school mostly along the Joe Adoda trail. I would like to see the city prioritizes transportation funding for fully connected safe low stress bicycle infrastructure. I appreciate that the city has secured 15.4 million in state and regional grants to fund construction of the highway 101 bicycle and pedestrian overpass. Anything that can be done to expedite the bicycle and pedestrian safety of the Sony point at highway 12 overpass would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time. Mayor, that was the last voicemail public comment on this item. Thank you. I'll bring it back to the council then and see if we have any wrap up comments from council members. Mr. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. For myself, I know that the challenges are many when it comes to transportation being from district one. Historically, well, we thought that there wasn't much investment into our area, but I do want to thank Jason and the crew for changing that. I do appreciate that. And not only to yourself, but also as a testament of the good things that are happening in my neighborhood is the work that being done by centers of water, specifically an event that's happening on May 19th with the ribbon cutting of the lower Colgan Creek. So I invite my community to come join us 10 to two, 2920 Dunn Avenue and join us in seeing another project out of so many that I know are happening. And I know there's many more that are coming forth. And I mean, I'm optimistic. I love to see what's happening in my neighborhood and I know there's changes in the greater San Rosa. So I do appreciate all the efforts being done. Any other comments from council members? Go for it. I just want to thank the council for allowing me to ask so many questions as this is part of my first budget development and really to thank the staff for their outstanding presentation in each of the budget areas to the council. It was really well done. And so I really appreciate you entertaining and giving me a tutorial in each of the areas. And then I also want to encourage the community. A lot of times we do not get feedback from the community until June. And now is the time to actually reach out to council while we're in budget development and getting information to our staff. And so I appreciate the four calls that were made and comments around transportation and bicycle safety, but that's what it's going to take for us to understand what the community wants to see. So I would really encourage them right now to actually reach out to us and let us know your priorities as well. Thank you so much. Council member. So I also would like to thank my fellow council members. Thank the staff for their presentations, but also thank the staff that we're not here to present that are out there doing the hard work while we're sitting here. Your hard work is not a noticed assistant city manager. I would like to thank you. And I like to, I like seeing you sitting out there. So, and I would like to thank the city manager. We have you here for a reason, your direction. I just like to, I admire your direction. I know it's a hard direction to reign us in as far as the budget is concerned, has to be very hard. We always like to our eyes are bigger than our bellies and a lot of instances because we have really big hearts and we know that there's a lot of things that we wanna do in the community, but we don't always have the pocket books to do it. So thank you very much for doing the very hard work of having us stay focused and trying to have us stay to the basics because that's what we need to do. So we can do more later. So thank you very much for that. And also echoing what councilwoman McDonald said about the community coming to us and letting us know now is the time to do that, to really let us know what your wants and concerns are so that we can advocate appropriately for you because that is what we are here for. Thank you. Thank you council member. And I wanna echo those sentiments as well. I know doing the budget in the city of Santa Rosa the last few years has been like trying to get blood out of a stone. And we continue to do so year after year because we have dedicated staff because we know that there's a shared vision for where the community needs to go. This was the introduction of the budget. And I know the city manager was very excited to get this budget presented so that we can discuss it. We can go out and talk to the community about what's the impact going to be if we approve it? What will they see in their neighborhood? And so this gives us an opportunity as a launching point for the next couple of weeks to have those discussions as we move forward. So thank you to the team. Thank you to everybody who presented and who watched the meeting today. With that, we will go ahead and adjourn. Thank you for participating.