 It's made a big difference. And he thinks he's doing it. Good morning. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently in the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available. And members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon and zoom on the toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Interpreter, would you please restate this in Spanish? Bienvenidos. Para los que recién se unen a la reunión, interpretación en vivo, al español está disponible. Y los miembros o personales cual les desean escuchar en español pueden unirse al canal. Para unirse, hagan click en el icono de interpretación que aparece en la barra de funciones de zoom. Ahora aparece como un globo terráqueo. Una vez se unan al canal de español, también se recomienda que apague el audio primario para que solo escuche la interpretación al español. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to our May 10th, 2023 Santa Rosa City Council Meeting. It is now 9.02. And we will be resuming our meeting from yesterday, May 9th, 2023. Welcome, Madam City Manager, Madam City Attorney and fellow Councilmembers. Seeing a quorum, Madam City Clerk, may you please call the roll. Thank you. Councilmember Stapp. Here. Councilmember Rogers. Here. Councilmember Okrepke. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Here. Councilmember Alvarez. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record reflect all councilmembers are present with the exception of councilmember Alvarez. We will resume our study session from yesterday, 12.1. Ms. Veronica, can you go ahead and take it away for us? Thank you. Good morning, Mayor and City Councilmembers. I'm Veronica Connor, the budget manager here to pick us up on day two of our budget study session. And while I get this up, I did wanna take a moment to introduce our budget team that I work very closely with. They're up behind me near the top of the auditorium. Patricia Mason, Mike Frugoli and Jose Morales. We all work together very closely. They're each designed several departments and duties throughout the budget process and we would not be here today without them. So thank you very much to the fabulous budget team that I work with. And today we're going to start with the fire department and we'll take it through the remainder of the departments listed as well as our capital improvement program, when we'll be happy to answer any questions from council. So with that, I'll hand it off to fire. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor Rogers and members of council. Scott Westrop, fire chief at the city of Santa Rosa. With me today is Sarah Roberts. Sarah is our admin analyst who oversees our finances. So she's the lucky chosen one that gets to deal with all of us, try not to spend too much money. We're gonna present to you the fire department's proposed fiscal year 23-24 budget. Sarah's gonna handle the front end with all the numbers and the budget in earnest and then I will handle the back end with the rest of the presentation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Sarah. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor Rogers, vice mayor McDonald's and council members. This slide shows the fire department expenditures by fund. So the fire department is funded by three different funds, the general fund, the public safety special tax formerly known as measure O and the capital improvement fund, which is funded by CFF funds. In the general fund expenditures, there was a increase and it was attributed to 1.5 million in salaries and benefits, as well as a 1.6 million increase in the startup of the capital fleet replacement program, which was approved last budget year. For the public safety special tax, the department has an increase of approximately $158,000 due to merit increases, colas and benefits. This funds 10.25 FTEs within the fire department, nine of which are, sorry, 10 of which are line staff, as well as 0.25 of the EMS division chief. There was also a $668,000 increase to the CFF funds available for CIP projects. The fire department has currently funding temporary fire station five, the fire training center improvements, and also we continue to set aside funds, my apologies, for a new fire station in district nine, which is in Southeast Santa Rosa. The next slide is just a different view of pretty much the same thing, but it's just by program instead. Again, there's the 1.5 million increase in salaries and benefits for fire operations, as well as the $1.6 million increase for capital fleet replacement program. There was an increase to the general administration cost plan of 222,000. This covers things like the internal services that the budget team offers us, the city attorney's office and the city clerk's office, as well as HR. And I'm happy to report that in our fire prevention bureau, we are now fully staffed, but we still were able to have a $51,000 decrease. This is mostly attributed to cost share salary reimbursements with our code enforcement section. We also worked to stabilize some station budgets. Some stations were funded and some were not for services and supplies. And so we evened that out based on previous year's spending. And that is it, I'm sorry. And if there's any questions from the council, I'm happy to answer. Council Member O'Crepkey. Yeah, what accounts for the quarter of a million dollar increase in Redcom? So Redcom fees are basically based off call volume and we've met with the Redcom team and we can figure out exactly what our increase, not exactly, but roughly what our increases are gonna be on a year-to-year basis, but essentially has to do with our increase in call volume. So we pay per call, so to speak. There's three different math factors that go into it. Thank goodness for Sarah, because I couldn't figure it out, but she was able to figure it out. So we can now budget in earnest moving forward what our increases are gonna be, but essentially it has to do with our call volume going up, and so our dispatch fees go up associatively with that. I would like to take the opportunity to remind council and staff that we will be asking questions when you are done with your presentation. I will ask council if they have any questions just so that you can get through your presentation and then answer the questions. Thank you. The general fund changes that we had were the increase of the one and a half million for salaries and benefits. As I said before, the Redcom dispatch contract increased by 250,000 we're also looking at ways to control our costs with technology. We do pay a small portion of Redcom for our MDCs that are on our apparatus. And so we're looking at ways to bring that in-house so that we can control those funds better now that technology has advanced more. And then we do have the one and a half million dollar increase in the vehicle replacement fund so that we can replace our apparatus. We currently have approximately eight apparatus on order. Nine apparatus on order, I apologize. All right, thank you. And just real quick on the previous slide, the only thing I'd like to add is out of the additional needs, one thing that we added was a $28,000 increase this year and an ongoing $21,000 increase to add two new technology programs. One is a new report writing system called Image Trend. It will really change the way that we extrapolate and pull data so it's very useful and helpful to us. Our current program is going away so it's a much better program. And also we'll be switching to a new scheduling program called Vector Scheduling. And so really that's internal customer service that we're looking at there. It's built by firefighters, for firefighters. So really looking to improve the way we do our scheduling because it is very complex. For our accomplishments, out of our last fiscal year, we were able to purchase fire engines, type one fire engines, with funding from the Equipment Replacement Program. So there's four type one engines on order specifically out of the Capital Fleet Replacement Program. We obtained enhanced communication equipment. We purchased a dual band mobile radios, the mobile radios or the radios that go inside the vehicles and we were able to purchase that with the public safety sales tax or former measure O funds. And we also were able to purchase all new portable radios which are the radios that each individual carries on an incident through the Wildland Resiliency and Response Strategic Plan funding at a PG&E. We identified funding sources for the Fire Station eight construction in Roseland. We're still continue to work on alternative sources of funding but essentially we have enough money to build the station if we needed to. We're just trying to figure out ways not to use a lot of our reserve funds to do that. So we continue to work on that but we do have essentially what we need to build that station but we're looking at different ways to fund it. We funded and filled operational vacancies to achieve constant staffing in all three bureaus. So in operations we're at constant staffing plus one meaning that we have 39 riding positions on a day-to-day basis and we have 40 positions filled and staffed in order to fill those. That's to reduce our overtime. So if somebody calls in sick, we don't fill it with overtime, we can fill it with that one over position. In administration we completed a reorg last year which part Sarah was a part of. And with that reorganization we are at full staffing in our admin bureau and have a very high functioning team that runs the business of the fire department on a day-to-day basis. And in fire prevention as Sarah mentioned fire prevention is at full staffing. This is the first time this has happened since the 2007 recession. So we're really seeing a lot of great work being done out of fire prevention especially it has their mission has shifted a little bit with plan review and with vegetation management and all the things that go along with the tubs. We developed a new five-year strategic plan that works in progress on that. It'll be a first view at our strategic plan since the tubs fire. So we're really interested to see what comes out of that but we will be working off a new strategic plan here very shortly. And importantly we eliminated the plan review backlog that we built up during COVID. It really had to do with solar and ESS. But in the COVID phase we actually saw an increase in plans that we needed to review based on people being at home and having projects that they wanted to get done. If you recall we were at about a 12 to 20 week turnaround time and now we have that down to about 14 days and we'll continue that in the future. Next slide please. Challenges for us, recruiting technical job classifications, as you know all too well, this is a city wide statewide issue. What we saw in Veronica mentioned it yesterday is we were unable to hire a building plans examiner and we converted that position to a community outreach specialist. It's just having a hard time recruiting those technical engineering positions. Same goes in fire prevention. We're fortunate to be a destination department for a lot of fire inspectors so we still are able to fill those positions but we just don't see the recruitment numbers that we typically have in that division. As usual we're always controlling, trying to control our non-contract overtime costs. So if you recall non-contract overtime is not strike team overtime. It's sick leave, industrially, vacation, things like that and it's really tied to the next piece which is behavioral and physical health and wellness of the employees. We continue to add resources, we continue to explore resources and my take on it has been or philosophy has been if we can add a program or a project that impacts one employee it is worth the investment. So we continue to add both physical and behavioral health resources. I'm proud to report that we actually are embarking on getting a behavioral health canine on staff and we have two members who are currently in training for that and we'll be receiving a behavioral health therapy canine that will be one of four that we plan on having on staff in the next couple of years. We continue to work on privacy retrofits and remodels of fire stations. This is all part of the city infrastructure programs. We're looking at alternative resources and I've been working with Assistant City Manager Nutt on some different ways thinking outside the box on how we can get those retrofits done. And then of course supply chain issues are delaying purchasing equipment and apparatus. Fleet and the shop is having a hard time getting parts right now to repair fire engines but really the bigger problem is as Sarah mentioned we have nine fire engines on order. Typically we see a about a year turnaround time to go from ordering a fire engine to putting in service and right now it's anywhere between 600 and 900 days to get a fire engine. It's a statewide issue. There's just not the resources out there and believe it or not the biggest issue right now is getting light bars. There's fleets of fire engines parked in a lot somewhere in Wisconsin that need light bars. So we continue to work through that so it'll be great for our organization once we are able to get those new fire engines and our aging fleets replaced. So through all these challenges I just want to assure council in fiscal year 23-24 we'll be continuing to work on our response times and by that I mean both externally to the operations and the suppression division with improving our response times to city council goals. Our admin team is working on efficiencies on how we can respond to the community quicker. Prevention is doing the same particularly around plan review. And then our internal communications where we're really working on the response time and how we communicate with our internal staff. We'll continue to work on fire station construction and land acquisition for new fire stations that we have planned. We'll continue to make advancements on our recruitment and diversity strategic plan and we will be diving in pretty deep on phase two vegetation management project. So that's what we have coming up in this next year from a strategic high level view. And with that now I'll turn it over to council for any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you. Looking at council, are there any questions? Council member Rogers. Thank you mayor. First of all, I wanna thank you chief for two specific focuses that you've had that I know have been of concern and interest from the council. The first is the emphasis on well-being, mental and physical well-being for the employees. The other is the backlog on plan check. Understanding that that helps drive some of our other priorities. So I wanted to thank you for that. I did wanna ask you with the county's move, hopefully, fingers crossed, I'm not sure if it's final or not yet, towards a public service model for EMS. Will that have any impact on our operations? And if so, how are we accounting for it in this year's budget? Great question, thank you. So the grant ambulance contract has yet to be determined. Essentially there's an intent to award the bid to a public entity at this point. It's been through an appeal process. It's in the middle of an appeal process and we won't really know the results of that until we just found out yesterday that it'll be going to the board of supervisors on June 6th for a vote. So it'll be heard and we'll know more definitive answers on June 6th. At that point, whoever the winning bidder is will have to negotiate their contract for grant ambulance service. And then in turn they'll have to negotiate a frowl's contract or a first response ALS contract with us. And so we're preparing for that. We've been working with the city attorney's office and our team and the labor group is working on what our frowl's contract would look like. So it's not accounted for yet in this year's budget just because we don't know what the results are gonna be, but we are planning for it and we will have to pivot based on that but we are looking at a different contract. We're looking at a better contract for us. Our contract's very old and outdated. So we're working really hard to make sure that we have a very steadfast and good contract for the community and for the fire department. Great. Thank you so much. Any additional questions from council? Vice Mayor McDonald? You. Thank you, Chief, for the presentation and for all of your work. And I appreciate that you're continuing to work on response time. However, my experience has been it was quite rapid for the fire department to get to a 911 call that I recently made. So I appreciate the work that you're continuing to put in. I did hear you say that you were fully staffed and I wanna make sure that I heard you accurately. Is that in all the departments or is you're still down a couple? I know that there's a formula when we did the fire 101 of how many you wanna have at each station. Are we fully staffed for that type of formula of the two in and two out? I think that, am I doing it right? Is it two in? That's great. You're doing great. So yeah, we're fully staffed from a position control perspective. So we have the staffing that we need currently for our station. So we're at 3-0 staffing or three person engine company staffing for the truck companies for the staffing that we have right now. So we have the positions. There's always gonna be a little bit of delay and reflex when we have somebody retire or leave or whatever the case may be. So when I say that we're a constant staffing it means that we have the positions within the position control list. We currently have a few vacancies that have been attributed to people leaving on industrial leave or retirement or whatever the case may be. But we have an academy plan. So there's just that reflex time we can only hire once the positions are actually vacated. We don't typically over hire unless we get special permission to do so. So we're short a few bodies right now but we have an academy plan for us. So it's just always this cycle of, hey, we have the positions. People are retiring. Okay, let's plan an academy. We put people in the process through the background check and then we get them into our internal academy and get them on the street. So our plan right now is to have those vacancies filled before the start of fire season. So it's all part of the chess game of making sure that we're covered. Okay, thank you. And I think when you have a focus on behavioral, mental and physical health that having the full staff specifically at fire department is so critical. So I just wanna make sure that even though you're at a balance right now that there's nothing more that council maybe needs to do to support all of our firefighters. Absolutely, I appreciate that. Council Member Flaming. Thank you, Mayor. I have a question that tags on to Council Member Krepke's earlier question around Red Crom and to the quarter million dollar increase. And this is more just educational for me. I'm not trying to make a point here or anything like that. So when somebody calls 911 in the city of Santa Rosa they're not calling or they're calling a contractor or they're calling an internal employee who answers the phone and says 911 what's your emergency? Good question. So when somebody calls 911 within the city limits it's first gonna go to Santa Rosa PD Dispatch. So that's who answers the phone first and then based on what the call type is they will either transfer it to Red Crom or if it's a law enforcement call they'll keep it within law enforcement or there's a sharing of information through the computer aided dispatching system where both calls can be run at the same time. Okay, so Red Crom is a third party contractor then. Correct. And they bill us based on call volume and that's why, so that's how you can attribute, you said there's three numerical factor inputs that cause that maybe nobody else cares but I'd be interested to know what some of those factors are and how roughly how much a call costs. Yeah, I don't remember exactly how much a call costs off the top of my head but we can certainly follow up with some more information with that but we typically see a two to 3% increase in our call volume on an annual basis. And I thought it would be as easy as doing the math of add two to 3% to the cost but as we found out in trying to do some long term strategic finance planning is that it's not that easy and it's pretty complicated math to get there. So I forget exactly, I don't know if you remember what it is. I apologize, I don't recall off the top of my head how it's factored but I can look back and get back to you with the information. It's not urgent, I was just curious to know because I had assumed that it was internal but now I'm understanding that there is a contractor. Okay, thank you. And just to kind of close the loop on it, it used to be internal going back to, I don't remember when we moved over, it was like 2002, 2003 within Santa Rosa PD so it was all in one dispatch center but as Santa Rosa PD's grown and the call volume's grown and as the fire department's grown and the call volume's grown, we had to go into this JPA in order to separate dispatch services and it's much faster and it's much more efficient because every fire department except for runner park and Cloverdale are dispatched out of Red Comp throughout the county and the ambulances are so everybody's on one channel and so there's not a delay in moving through a bunch of different dispatch centers and having more than one operator working on the channel at the time so there's a lot of efficiencies built in there and the question always is would it be better or cheaper for us to have our own and it would be a massive, massive cost to build the infrastructure and the cost and hire the employees to have our own dispatch center so while it is expensive it is the most financially prudent decision at this point to remain with the JPA. Okay, that's really interesting and helpful information. Thank you. Any additional questions from council? I did have a question, it was concerning staffing so my question is you say that you're fully staffed. I know with PD there's a lag time for people to actually get out and patrol on their own. Is there a lag time although you may be fully staffed of someone that can work 100% on an engine or? It's a great question, thank you. So when we hire somebody you know there's a lag time and just getting them through, once they get through the interview process they go into a background process and we've actually shortened that from a couple months down to about six weeks so it's much quicker to get them on board and then they go through an internal academy so anybody coming in whether they're a lateral or coming out of the fire academy has been taught sort of the global way to do things and we teach them the Santa Rosa way. And our academies typically run four to six weeks. We really base it on what their experience level is and so if we have a full lateral academy and it's a small academy we might shorten that time up if it's entry level and they don't have a lot of experience we might extend it to six weeks so we're kind of flex and bend based on the needs of the organization and the needs of the new employees but there is a short training time that we put them through where they're at the tower 100% of the time. Do you have any employees that are currently within the four to six week training process? No, everybody's on the street right now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Seeing no additional questions from council thank you for your presentation. Good morning, Mayor Rogers. John Krieg in the center is the chief of police and with me today is Pam Lawrence and Pam is our administrative services officer for the department and manages the complexity of our budget. So we're gonna start off presenting our proposed 23-24 fiscal year budget. I'm gonna have start with ASO Lawrence is gonna start with our first two slides. Great, good morning everybody. Thanks for being here. I'll start off with our overview of our department by fund. Thank you. So our overall ask for this next fiscal year is $79 million. The majority of this is in general fund. As you can see our general fund except the majority of our budget as I said and there's an increase of about 4.4% in this line. That's due mostly to our COLA's for our employees our nearly 260 employees. Also includes a small increase in our overtime budget, large vehicle towing contract as well as an increase of about 849,000 in uncontrollable costs. Those are like city overhead, vehicle replacement, IT replacement costs, those sorts of things. The next line item is our public safety special tax or measure H. That increase greatly by about 74%. This is due to a $2.6 million anticipated purchase of a Roseland substation and an added sergeant position. Chief will go into those in more detail later. Next line item is our federal asset forfeiture which increased slightly by $10,000. This fund is used for software that's used to extract data from cell phones. So there's an increase in that contract which is due to the increase. Supplemental law enforcement funds. This is funding from the state of California for frontline police services. This funds our axon camera contract which is our body worn cameras, in car cameras and interview room cameras as well as evidence.com. And then we have our state asset forfeiture which remained flat at 150,000 and these funds are used to replace equipment for our SWAT team and clean up the drug paraphernalia that might be in vehicles, those sorts of items. This slide breaks it down by program and the first line is general administration. This increased by a million dollars due in part to moving one senior admin assistant position into admin or into general admin from field services. We also have an increase in colas for the staff that are budgeted in this line item. And then this is where that $849,000 increase in uncontrollable costs is technical services. This includes our 911 dispatch center, police records, property and evidence, crime analysis and IT. This also includes our consortium fees for the Sonoma County Public Safety Consortium which increased by about 75,000 this next year. The support bureau is training and wellness division which supports the entire department. It also includes our volunteers and police services program and community outreach. We have public safety special special tax which I talked about earlier. This funds 17 positions with this new position added. It also includes our downtown enforcement team office in the transit mall and the new Roseland substation. Then we have our field services. This makes up is made up of eight patrol teams. Also includes our canine team, downtown enforcement team, drone team, honor guard, HNT, SWAT, traffic and special enforcement team. This increased by about $1.6 million and that was due to a few things. We moved three officers that are assigned to the special enforcement team that had been incorrectly budgeted in investigative units. And we also increased overtime slightly by about $100,000 to become more in line with what's needed and what's actually spent. And then this is the $50,000 increase for large vehicle tows. Our investigative services includes the four investigative units, domestic violence and sexual assaults, property crimes, narcotics investigations and violence crimes. It's also included in here is the recruiting and hiring team. This budget increased by about 200,000 for overtime to get it more in line with what's actually spent. And then it was offset by moving those three staff members. Our last line is the CIP and ONM projects. This is our crime mitigation funds, which are the funds that we receive from Great Casino. These funds are used for iPhone replacement. Each staff member that's in the field receives an iPhone to use as a tool in their jobs. We also pay for the police auditor out of this budget and some other department priority projects. Great, and then next we'll move to our next slide and we'll talk a little bit more detail about some of these general fund changes. So the first that ASO Lawrence really explained is that we're seeing the big increase or just some of the cost of living increases with salary and benefits. And what we saw also carried through with our healthcare and then our proposed budget of having the additional 300,000 in overtime to start making our overtime budget actually realistic to deal with the needs of emergencies that are daily across the city of Santa Rosa. We're seeing as a common theme, I'm sure you're hearing from other departments about the increase in equipment repair and garage services for our fleet. So we're seeing the 260 or sorry, 238,000. And then also for the consortium. So the Sonoma County Public Safety Consortium is a GAPA of all the police agencies with the exception of Sebastopol and Cloverdale, which are part of it in our county and it's paying for the mobile data computers in our cars, our county wide records management system, our computer aided dispatching system and so many other software programs that are used consistently throughout the county. So we're all on the same platform. And at the long run, it's a very much of a cost savings so we're able to make these purchases for county wide and it reduces the cost for our mobile data computers and the technology. We saw $76,000 actually increase. We're budgeting 75 for this. That's going to be in the annual cost of our consortium fees. The $50,000 increase in large vehicle tows that's been one of the things that we've really been focused on as an agency about some of the dangerous RVs that are creating hazardous conditions here in our city and we've been increasing towing those across the city but that comes at a cost with that. And also we really been in examining the department about some of the needs in our property and evidence room but understanding some of the fiscal restraints of the city so without adding an additional position what we're proposing is actually to reclassify positions for police technician which works in our records department is actually going to be classified and the correct title is actually the property and evidence technician that's going to be reclassified to for that working full time. We book thousands of pieces of evidence and property into our evidence room in a year and it's really important to me as chief is that we have that continuity of dedicated people to that team. So for the preservation of criminal cases and to make sure that we're booking there they handle hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and high volumes of narcotics and weapons to make sure we have dedicated staff and keep that room running in top shape. We go to our next slide please. So this is the fun part kind of talking about some of the accomplishments we've made over the last fiscal year. One of the big things that we're excited about is some of the things we've done toward side shows and we saw that side shows are becoming an every weekend experience here in the city of Santa Rosa and it was really like terrorizing some of our neighborhoods, our downtown area. We made it a focus to be able to have more increase enforcement and really it's been a multifaceted approach that we've worked with the Bionic Convention Partnership towards some of the education in our community. We worked toward having with our mutual aid resources across the county to be able to move in very quickly when these are going on. And then ultimately we worked with our city council to be able to pass the first in Sonoma County of a side show dedicated ordinance prohibiting drivers, passengers, spectators and promoter organizers of these events. And now it's been months since we've had a side show and we're really excited about that and we want to continue that progress. Another thing that we've really been focused on and set one of our priorities is the recruitment. And last year we started this fiscal year with 21 sworn police officer vacancies which was crippling to our agency and we're excited as of next week with another hire we're doing next week we'll have two sworn officer positions and one sergeant position open. And we already have people in the academy able to fill those positions. So we've made significant progress but both with our sworn and civilian staff last year we hired 35 new employees with our organization and it's really gonna have an impact. Now one thing to be the reality of it is as of next week we're gonna have 25 officers in the training program between the police academies there's two police academies in progress and then our field training program. So it takes up to a year before they go through the academy they go through our internal 22 week training program. Sometimes that's extended. So we're excited with the progress but it's still a ways out before we're actually having them solo officers out on their own but the momentum is certainly rolling in the right direction for that. With that comes we have a lot of new staff but it's so important for us to properly train our staff. So we have a dedicated training team and so excited with their work of almost 23,000 hours of training for Santa Rosa staff last year with 253 different courses. And we're really working to be a regional training hub that we're setting training here in Santa Rosa. Not only is it drive down our costs that we're not sending people away for traveling and for other expenditures but we're making it a value for other agencies here in Sonoma County and really making Santa Rosa, the city of Santa Rosa and our police department continue to be kind of leading the way. We also developed our own internal implicit bias course and we worked with key community stakeholders to be able to create that. We worked with our independent police auditor who came down and was a part of that training with us and had every single one of our sworn officers attended that training to really look at what we're doing as we examine our RIPAA data, we examine our contacts in the community to make sure that we're having that lens of the unconscious or implicit bias. Another thing that said is one of my key priorities step in the role of chief is the wellness and so we're seeing the trauma impacted upon our staff and really wanna put a focus on that. We had a contracted employee through a work care who was 26 hours a week and we're able to extend that in January this year to a full-time position to really start working with our staff to provide them both the mental, emotional and physical health needs that they have. Another thing is our restorative justice program. So in January of this year, we are the launched a new program really focused on our juvenile offenders, but it's the data is so clear that when you can prevent juveniles from ever getting introduced to the criminal justice system, it greatly enhances their ability to stay out of the criminal justice program in the future. It's something that's important to me. So we launched a program where officers have discretion for low level offenses. So this isn't violent crimes, but for low level offenses that they can divert them from ever going into it. We entered into a contract with a local nonprofit called .RJ for restorative justice and they go through a 12 week program that has like listening sessions and they actually meet with the victim and talk about the impacts of their crime. And if they're successful, then there's no criminal charges that are ever introduced. And so we're really looking forward to rolling out that program and even more in the coming months what we launched it in January. Next slide, please. So another thing for us, we're always talking about, we certainly sent an uptick in some of the violence across Santa Rosa over the last couple of years. So really been working with our crime analyst team to focus on data. And we have what I call our data led proactive policing initiative where every month we've created a report for each one of our nine beats that we have in the city. And we're putting like, what are some of the hotspots and we're trying to be smarter about allocating our resources. Instead of the saying, generally drive around and make a difference. What we're saying is no, these are some specific areas. These are some times this is where you can address some of your community's earned. And we've really been able to kind of pinpoint more of the issues. And I'm already seeing some exciting steps toward reducing some of the violence in our community. We've seen an incredible amount of guns seized and over the last year in our office receives 236 illegal guns off the streets of Santa Rosa, and 74 of those were personally manufactured firearms known as a ghost gun that they seized off. So one new tool that we added as the first we've ever had in our department's history is we have a canine that specifically trained on the detection of firearms. So we're seeing firearms that are hidden in hidden compartments in vehicles. We frequently see firearms that are discarded on foot pursuits or on vehicle pursuits and thrown in bushes and they're left on sidewalks or roadways. And now this dog is able to have that special training to go find these discarded firearms, get them off the streets of Santa Rosa and make sure that some innocent child or someone doesn't stumble upon this loaded gun that's been discarded on a trail. Also going with the firearm removal from our streets, we partnered with the Binocenture Partnership and we launched our first gun buyback program that the department's done since the 1990s. It was very successful. I was out there that day and we had a line of a mile and a half of cars lined up to turn in their guns. We were able to get all private donations. So $76,000 in private donations. The city didn't spend a dime on the money that was paid to take back these firearms and we're able to get 423 firearms that included assault rifles and ghost guns that were part of that. So that was a pro initiative. And again, I mentioned about for the $50,000 increase in the RVs, we're seeing the impacts and the impacts are some of the environmental damage to the area. We're seeing impacts with crime associated with these complex of RVs on the streets of Santa Rosa and we're seeing fire dam are danger with not only RVs catching on fire but also time propane tanks and other set around. So we really put a focus on that and we've been able to tow many of these RVs. But again, we're working with their, if they're occupied and we're working with the residents to be able to get them into services. And we've actually seen by us having a more proactive approach to some of the RV toes that we're seeing people who are now seeking the services and getting into our city's safe parking program, looking at some of the available resources that we have through Catholic Charities and the Sam Jones. So we're excited about the movement we've had in this area and we've heard resounding feedback from our community about filling safer in their neighborhoods when we're seeing sometimes RVs parked directly in front of people's homes here in Santa Rosa. Next slide please. Now some of the challenges as much as we've been excited about the movement we've made with our recruitment, that's quite honestly it's a roller coaster ride with staffing and that we're at a high right now where we're filling this, but we know that it's not always gonna stay that way. So it's gonna be continued of showing that the support that we're getting from our city leaders certainly from the management inside the police department and we're gonna be continuing to work toward that and looking what we can do future to be able to bring back other things to incentivize staff both officers and civilians to come to the city of Santa Rosa and most importantly to stay with the city of Santa Rosa. Another challenge that we had is some of the violent crime that we've seen across the city of Santa Rosa this isn't just specific to Santa Rosa we've seen this across California in increase but a sad reality is that we set the record in 2022 for the most homicides ever in the history of Santa Rosa. And when I looked really have been diving deep into the data of that, it's multifaceted that we saw four of them were directly related to gang violence, we saw three of them were related to domestic violence. We saw unfortunately two young infants who overdosed on fentanyl due to the criminal negligence of their parents. So these are all different trends that we saw on these and these are things that we're proactively working really excited with the incredible work of our violent crime team which solved out of these 10 of these homicides were solved out of 12, which is much higher than national trends you see for solving homicides and we're gonna continue to put the focus on our cases to make sure that we're able to bring justice to the victims of these cases. I talked about already the increase in the firearms and the sideshow this talks about a challenge we saw a huge intake and uptick in the early 2022 but I'm excited as we've evolved through the rest of this year really been a fork toward eliminating the sideshows in our community, but we'll continue to have a focus on that cause we know that's not going away. It's something that we continue gonna have to focus on. Next slide please. So we also saw some of the fatal collisions across our city and we saw eight fatal collisions in 2022. So that's something that we're really working on that we've been working to as the staffing returns and these officers get out of training we wanna start backfilling our traffic positions which really have been at a historic low for both our accident investigator cars and our motorcycle officers. So we're working to rebuild those units. Another challenge that we've talked before with council is our slow uptick year after year and our response to priority one calls and priority one calls are the 911 I need someone there immediately and we have four of a priority one through four depending upon the urgency of the call and we're seeing that now that our goal that we've said over 10 years ago is to be under six minutes to a priority one call. We haven't been in many years and this year it's over seven minutes where it's seven minutes and seven seconds for a priority one call. And the reality is seven minutes and seven seconds is a long time when you're called 911 and you're waiting depending upon the severity of that emergency. Another challenge is we talked about these 12 homicides and the hundreds of shootings that we had in the city of Santa Rosa last year but every single one of those a Santa Rosa police officer a Santa Rosa firefighter was responding to and they're dealing with the trauma that's impacted from each one of those calls and we have filled evidence text processing those bloody crime scenes and that takes a toll on any human being so we really put a focus on the mental health and wellness and we're excited with some of the progress we've had such tremendous support from our city manager on the wellness programs in our city so we're excited what we can continue to do but the reality of it's a challenge of public safety and it's something that as a city we have to come together it's really clear to me that if we have the focus on wellness that officers are providing a better level of service in our community they use less force so it's a win not only for our organization for the officers, for our community but ultimately the entire city of Santa Rosa so it's something that I'm really looking for that we have more of an upstream approach toward that investment and I think if we put the money and the resources there that we're gonna have less problems down the road and have better employees that are able to help serve better in our community and stay longer with our organization. Next slide, please. So sorry, I'll turn it over to the council for any questions. Council, are there any questions? Council Member Staff. Thank you, Chief Krugin. I've had the opportunity or I've been in a position to observe the police force in action in recent weeks both with doing an RV street sweep and then handling a disturbance at a local auto dealership and I was impressed on both occasions with the diligence and professionalism of the staff so to echo Council Member McDonald's remarks about the fire department it's impressive to watch our officers in action and then as a just a thought for the future I noticed that both you and Chief Westrop mentioned two new canine staff members of the city and speaking as a council member if there were photos or even short videos including future presentations of our canine staff members that would be that might be helpful. I say that mostly tongue in cheek but I'm excited about the new dogs. Thank you. Absolutely, thanks for your reporting. Yes, we have four canines that we've have at the Santa Rosa Police Department so we're happy to share some canine pics and videos. Council Member O'Crapki. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for that great presentation. School resource officers have been a hot topic lately and this is from a strictly budgetary standpoint because I can feel the city attorney reaching for her microphone, not from policy but from a budgetary standpoint if school resources officers if capitalized, underlined, italicized in bold if they were to return to the levels in this budgetary cycle that they were in let's say 2019 what kind of impact would that have on expenditures to the general fund as well as FTEs? So it's certainly something that's been a hot topic and been on my mind as Chief and really been focused on some of the things that we can do in school safety. So with the SRO program we had five officers dedicated to that program when we lost that program in 2020 three of those positions were cut those were funded by Measure O so three are no longer positions that we have the two existing positions were moved to patrol because we had catastrophic staffing levels in patrol and so they were there now that we're bringing back staffing we could look at those two but for the five we'd have to look at adding three full-time positions to the budget to be able to handle that. So you would see a cost of approximately $660,000 to add those three officers that's with benefits and all the packages with that. So that's what we'd have to look at and we're working closely with our school board and our school superintendent to look at where we go with that. And so to get to five we would be taking two FTEs from another position we have to backfill those and at the same time with a level of violence we've seen at schools do you anticipate seeing more than five being needed or would five be sufficient? Well, that's a good question. So one thing that we're also having the five was only for Santa Rosa City Schools. So one thing that we've been looking for of having equity across our communities looking at the Roseland School District as well. So in reality six would be and then with that it only had an SRO at the schools for four days a week because they work 10 hour shifts. So to do it effectively you'd have like a floater SRO who's filling in on those other days. So to do the program properly you'd have between seven or eight officers to be able to work within all of the high schools across the city of Santa Rosa and have someone there each day of those schools. And so it would have an impact and that's a good question about moving the two because as we already saw those two were dedicated patrol but we're seeing patrol volumes go up and up and up and we're seeing now we already talked about the response times to party one calls is at seven minutes and seven. So taking two more from patrol is gonna have an impact there. Chief can you expand on the cost of an officer fully funded? So fully funded right now and of course we have other cost of living adjustments is 218,000 and that's salaries and then it gets blown up quite a bit with all the benefits right there with the pensions and healthcare and everything else. So 218 is right now the cost of a police officer. So in doing horrible math on the spot for seven to eight suggestion you would say roughly one and a half million to properly fund it in your opinion. Correct and there is like a ripple effect too because now right now you have currently patrol officers who are leaving their patrol beats to go handle the schools. Quite frankly, we've been going to schools every single day right now for multiple times and so there would be a ripple effect at least if we have dedicated officers in the school patrol officers are able to respond to the emergencies across the city of Santa Rosa and that would be a step toward getting us back to our priority one calls under six minutes. So that's another important thing and what's important for me is to have properly trained staff to be able to handle the calls on school campuses and we lead with our restorative justice model in the school campuses. And I think that's another huge win of having those properly trained staff who are selected not only by the school administrators and certainly I would have a big role in that. Council Member Rogers. Thank you. Chief, with the large vehicle towing the increase is that because of additional towing or is that because of additional costs? Primarily because additional costs. Now the cost per towing are exorbitant. So right now it's approximately, it goes by the length of the vehicle but the average is $2,500 for the not only the tow but there really costs as the disposal. So they have to be able to, many times there's a lot of hazardous material in these vehicles and they have to go through a dismantling process. So there's, we've sent out multiple RFPs for those. Right now there's only one vendor in Sonoma County who's willing to do that because it takes large vehicles and a lot of commitment. So primarily it's been the increase in towing those. And so we had to believe last year, 68,000 in there, we surpassed that. And so now it's gonna go up to approximately 115,000 a year that are in that large vehicle tow account. And I know we were having issues with where to tow them to that the one vendor that you're talking about that they had their lot filled. Have we resolved that issue? We did resolve that issue and that was the city of Santa Rosa coming together. And so we have a city lot that we're temporarily putting these vehicles on. And so we're still using that lot but that helps us to be able to, we have, we hold them for a minimum of 30 days by the law up to 90 days, depending upon the value of the vehicle. So that way people have a chance if they wanna be able to get that vehicle back if there's some owner who has the ability and the right to do that. So right now we temporarily store them on a city lot and eventually they go through the dismantling process. And I assume we probably have to pay for security at that lot and other resources. We're not paying for security. We have this, the city of Santa Rosa police officers handle that right now. And to my knowledge, we haven't had many calls out there or any like break-ins or anything like that because it's in a secure spot with other city facilities. Right. And then with the increase in calls for in response, are we budgeting for additional time for folks to be on the street this next year as the community starts to better understand that resources available? So in response has been one of our exciting accomplishments too. And so we're seeing right now, we're at the 15 hour model a day. So seven days a week, two teams for 15 hours of coverage. We're hoping by early fall to add a third team and then we'll be out later in the evening. And that's one of the things. So for the first year in response went to almost 2,900 calls. My goal is to have a full 24 seven response model and ultimately from the very beginning I've said, hoping to divert up to 5,000 calls a year from the police department though in the end of the day, be going to a better trained resource to the problem. So that will be something that helps us drive down our priority one calls but it's gonna take some time to be able to get there. And at the end of the day, the reality is in response can't go to calls of violence, a subject armed with a firearm or knife or whatever their suicide weapon could be. But for 100% it's helping the police department and has been overwhelmingly supported by our community and our internal staff. And a couple of years ago, the public past measure O the county wide measure O for mental health is any, are any of those dollars flowing down towards the city helping to fund in response or other programs? Last year they gave, I presented to the board of supervisors and they gave us $87,000. What their county's big investment is, is the licensed mental health clinicians are actually county employees and they're in each one of our teams. So they're doing an in kind service to us. We are this year, we're right now finalizing the numbers for the next county's measure O. And I think that we'll see an increase in the financial contribution but they're continuing to put the licensed mental health clinicians for free. Excellent, thank you so much. Absolutely. Chief, before we go into the next council member, I did have a question. Previous lot was 168. We went from 168 to how many? Which one are you talking about? We're talking about the towing. It went from 68 to, and then so now it'll be just over, I guess it would probably be 118, correct? Thank you. It's 65. Oh yeah, sorry, 65. So I guess we went from 65 added in the 50,000, so we'll be at 115. Thank you. I have that all wrong. Council member Fleming. Thank you. It sounds like you guys are doing a lot of great work and I'm excited to hear all these updates. I'm just curious to know if the new compact with the Federated Indians of Great Rantaria and the state will impact your funding streams as you were talking about, I think around that CIP and O&M. So the crime and immigration money that we get from the Great Casino, they give the $300,000 a year. I haven't heard of any talk of them increasing that. We'll certainly welcome that if they. There is a new compact signed between the state and the tribe. Will that impact your funding streams? I know it's impacting other jurisdictions in Sonoma County. Not that I'm aware of, but it'll be something that we'll have to do some research on to look on. Okay, and then another question about the RVs. It's fantastic that you're able to process them. I know it sounds like a tremendous amount of work. Can you talk a little bit about how you're working? I know when I am working in diverting folks who are trying to find safe parking, and not necessarily for RVs, but other folks living out of their cars and so forth, that there are some faith-based organizations that have parking spaces. Is your team aware in working with those organizations that have space for people to legally park on their lots? Not all of those lots are in Santa Rosa, but they're close by. We are working with some of, there's a Methodist Church, I know that we've worked with before. So what we're doing is we utilize our city's contract with the host team through Catholic Charities for the Homeless Outreach Services team. So before we're towing them, we have host operators come out, meet with them, talk about some of the city resources, but that's certainly some of the resources they talk about is private resources throughout the city. And our goal is to, the last ditches for us is to tow an RV that someone's living in. So we take every step possible to give them resources, point them in the right direction, get them on their waiting list for the city's safe parking program, and to be able to do that. But at the end of the day, when we have some of the criminal concerns, the fire concerns and the environmental concerns, we take action. Of course, thank you. And then the last one is, I just was wondering if it might be helpful around the restorative justice program, which sounds like a really exciting opportunity to keep young people out of our system and both for their sakes and for the police department, if it might be helpful to track demographic data or if that's something that you're already doing to make sure that that program is applied equitably along different groups of our young people. Yeah, that's a great idea. And that's something that we can certainly track. And right now it's just kind of getting off the ground and rolling, but we're hoping to really see quite a few youth. And I've been having conversations with our public defender and our district attorney about how we can extend that program to young adults going all the way up to 25. And again, we'd be the first in Sonoma County to launch a program like that. So we're looking at a program in San Diego County where they do to like the transitional youth, as it's called, up to 25. And I think there's clear evidence that for these low level offenses, that there's benefits of diverting them from the criminal justice system. And so that's one of the things that we're looking at. That comes though with cooperation from our DA's office and others. So it's a multifaceted approach. Well, thanks for everything you're doing. Thank you. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Chief. Thanks for the presentation. So I have a few different questions. You said that we'll be down to officers and one sergeant and you've budgeted to fill that position. But with response times, I guess my question goes to, when we at Annexton Roseland, did we add more officers to the staff? We did. We actually added nine positions to the police department for Roseland. And I was part of that as a lieutenant at the time. So six officers and three civilian staff. Now in the subsequent years, we did cut six positions from the police budget like that. So since then, we've slowly built back up. So now we're back at the 181. And we've seen police staffing go up and down. In 2006, we're at our highest with 190 officers and 91 sworn. And now today, here we're at 181 sworn and 79 civilian positions. And that was prior to us actually annexing in another area. So we would say that we would be still down about nine officers based on pre-recession numbers, right? Correct. And so some of the things that I'm looking about is like, how do we better allocate our resources? And then really focused on how do we use technology to assist us? Thank you. And then you mentioned the downtown transit mall. How many officers do we have in that specific area dedicated throughout the day and evening? So we've had our, due to staffing concerns, our downtown enforcement team has been understaffed for almost two years. And with some of the progress we have now in July, they're gonna be back to fully staffed at six. So it's six officers and one Sergeant in July, they'll be back to that full staffing. And hopefully that'll start having an impact. And the reality is the downtown enforcement team though, goes throughout the city of Santa Rosa addressing and they really become like our experts and some of our homeless response and working with Catholic charities and working to get people into resources but ultimately taking enforcement action when needed. I think some of my concerns really go around our response time. If you're at seven minutes, seven seconds, I think it's because you have a staffing issue because if you have more officers, clearly our response time would be quicker if you have people that are, you know, not able to be on duty for the 24 hours. And how many people are on duty at any given time during your actual eight hour shifts or 10 hour shifts, whatever you. It staggers, we have minimum staffing levels. So like we have four teams a day. So there's like a morning team and an early swing, a late swing and a graveyard team. So it all staggers, but we have minimum staffing levels of ranging from as low as eight, sometimes in the middle of the night to going up to 16 in the afternoon. But then they can be supplemented by other like the traffic teams and other things that those are only talking about patrol teams. But the reality is we have nine beats the last year we had just over 108,000 calls for service. So they get spread out and it does impact the response times without a doubt. You can have a goal to actually continuously try to lower the response time, but without us actually considering adding more officers to the budget, we're probably not gonna be able to get there just because of the increase in calls and what we're seeing if I'm correct in actually trying to figure out how to budget to meet the goals of the city as well as the goals of the department. So I think that that's something that we need to have brought back to us is if we're down some staff members still and I know it's great that we have them in the queue and I'm glad that you've budgeted for full staff, but I think that that's important for us to consider and then to know how many responses we're doing to the schools on a day-to-day basis. As Council Member O'Crapke said, this is a hot topic and so we wanna make sure that we're supporting the schools however we can. But that said, I do think it needs to be more of a shared responsibility. I realize that the city has taken that on in the past. I know other jurisdictions specifically Cloverdale, which is where I was a school board trustee. It was a shared responsibility between the school district and the city. So as we have those communications to the school district, if they do want support from the city, I hope that that's part of the consideration as we bring back how to do that best. So I would be interested in having a little bit more data on those two things, how much we're taking away as far as response to the schools and how much more staff you would need to reduce response times. Yeah, absolutely. And I know I just know from my memory, like when we had the homicide on March 1st, pulled the data and it had been 945 calls to Santa Rosa City Schools in the 12 month proceeding of that. And then I just recently looked in the data and we saw a significant increase in school calls following the homicide. And actually for the month of March, we had 164 calls just in the month of March and we were trending for, I got the data just before the end of the month in April and we were trending toward a 150 for the month of April. So a significant increase. And we're seeing the school call and they hadn't been calling for knives on school campuses before and things like that. So we're seeing some changes in policies for them following the education code and calling for knives on school campuses. We also see that it's an uptick in some of the kids getting involved in physical altercations and other things. And so we're willing to address that but it is taking a toll on our patrol resources and it's something certainly that I'm open to having conversations with our city leaders and our school leaders to see what the right solution is for that. Thank you. Thanks again for all that you do to protect our community. I appreciate it, you and your team. Thank you. Are there any other questions from council members? All right, I will dive into my questions. I'm kind of piggybacking off of vice mayor briefly. I just wanted to point out to the community, not only are we looking at getting at the staffing levels that we were previously at, but also our city is growing and we're constantly building. And so it's not just us working to get at a previous staffing level. We're diligently gonna work to look at how we can and I know that you have along with city manager looking at how we can utilize other services and other technology and things like that to help us to support the officers, right? And everything that they do. So it may not just be staffing, but how do we look at other ways to support the officers so that they can reduce response time to calls. And the behavioral health for our officers is really important to me, not just reducing response calls, but knowing that they are the ones that are responding to their response calls. So we need to make sure that they are sound. They're not working a ton of overtime and they're not because you're stressed when that happens if you don't have time to recuperate. So just finding a balance for the two. But now I'll go into my questions. If there are 35 new officers and correct my numbers chief because I'm trying to go with you, but 35 new officers, 25 are in training. How does that affect patrols and how does that affect the demands of overtime for officers that can go out solo? It will assist us with the overtime for sure because right now our biggest and ASO Lawrence prepares a monthly report for me and our biggest is just the staffing vacancies that we're feeling. So that's our largest cause. So I think that we'll see reduction in our overtime. We'll see what's happened is most of these specialty teams haven't been fully staffed. So our narcotic team, our property cream, domestic violence, sexual assault, violent crime, we actually eliminated our entire gang team in 2019 due to the staffing issues. And there's a cause and effect with each one of those. And we've seen it up taken our gang violence across Santa Rosa. So as we bring these officers out of training we'll start filling these teams, our motorcycle team for our traffic officers used to be nine officers, now we have four. So those are some of the things that we're gonna start filling some of those specialty teams again. But then we'll also start working toward getting our patrol resources back up the full staffing. And I think it's gonna have an impact on reduction in overtime. And it'll be a step in the right direction toward our reduction in the priority one response times. Thank you. I would like to say I have seen an increase in patrolling in district seven. Great. So I am very happy with that. And I'm sure that the residents of district seven are also happy. I am concerned with, or I have a question about tickets. So do all officers write tickets? And I asked because I've said at an intersection and sitting there for less than five minutes I would see like one person making an illegal turn one person going through or two people going through a light that's red. So is there an increase in tickets or a decrease in tickets for moving violations? Because to me it's a safety issue especially when we're trying to get people out of their cars and onto bikes and pedestrians for people to walk. So. Excuse me. I do wanna remind council to stay focused on the budget and not on general police policies and practices. But to the extent that it's a budgetary issue feel free to answer. Yeah, from the budgetary side is we rely a lot on these specialty teams which is impacted by the budget that we've seen some reduction enough. We have the dedicated motorcycle officers which are assigned as traffic enforcement and collision investigation. And then we have four like accident investigators slash DUI cars that work like nights that go out and take like DUI crashes and things like that. We've seen a reduction in that. I am encouraging. We saw a significant decrease during COVID obviously of traffic stops and citations plummeted during that time. Now it's been picking back up and every single officer is encouraged to make traffic stops. We're really open of obviously not having a quota on citations or mandates. But what I've given the direction is get out there and make traffic stops when you see violations. And they have full discretion about we can we launched a warning citation program so you can still memorialize it and make it a learning experience but it goes nowhere. And it's just like a learning opportunity. But officers are encouraged to be proactively out there in the community but that comes with staffing. So right now when staffing is lower calls are taken longer than they're just going call to call to call and don't have the time to be doing like necessarily sitting at a stop sign in our working radar on the street. So as we get the staffing back up then I think you'll see more that unallocated time we have call it and in that unallocated time they can take proactive measures with traffic enforcement and then really working toward bringing back those traffic teams to full strength. Chief, I believe you had a couple of people who rotated out of the motorcycle staffing crew. Are they still down? Yeah, so right now we're at the four office the four dedicated to them but we're working toward bringing one back. So with the staffing we have another one going at the July patrol rotation we're adding one more motorcycle officer. So that's helping. So like the end of the day I would just say like helps on the way. Like we're seeing like light into the tunnel with filling some of these specialty teams and then having some of the focus out there not only with community engagement well with traffic and with each one of our specialty teams getting back team and then with the measure opposition we talked about my goal is we're bringing back that gang crimes team and so that's near and dear to my heart I was part of the gang crimes team as an officer and so in January we're going to relaunch our team of staffing allows the measure opposition the sergeant position will lead that team and I'm going to take existing resources and put four detectives in that new gang crimes team in January of 2024 if staffing allows and that's what I've been really clear that's the goal but if the staffing is not there then the patrol responses the priority. I think that that was it. I just want to say that the eight fatal collisions I'm wondering if there are maybe not fatal but an increase in collisions because we don't have the officers to do a lot of the traffic stops. So I'm just trying to see what the correlations are between the numbers that you gave us and how that is impacted by our staffing or other resources that maybe we could use within the community and I know that you're working on that so. Yeah and the data is very clear I was a motorcycle officer many years ago as well that with increased traffic enforcement drives down collisions undeniably like that and it's this human nature that if you see a police car parked at the stop sign by your house you're a little bit more careful with it when you're going through that so that's one of our goals is increasing this team and I will see I think that you will see reduction in some of those and eight fatal collisions doesn't really capture the damage across our community it doesn't count the dozens of near fatal and crippling injuries that people were involved in like that so there's still like literally hundreds of collisions that across the city of Santa Rosa and some of them quite significant that don't end up in fatals. Are there any additional questions from council? Seeing none, thank you both for the presentation. All right, good morning Mayor Rogers Vice Mayor McDonald members of the city council. I'm Claire Hartman I'm the director of planning and economic development and with me today is Kate Goldfein she's our administrative services officer. So Kate's gonna handle the math and I'll do the narrative so Kate's gonna kick us off. Good morning council. The 2324 PED budget is 19.3 million that spread over four different funds. In the general fund we're seeing just a small increase of 1.6% that's the result of several key positions being added and salary and benefits increases for existing staff. In the art fund, we're looking at about $236,000 a very small reduction and that is because funds are carrying over from prior years and not quite as much budget as needed this fiscal year. In the Santa Rosa Tourism BIA fund we're looking great. It's flat compared to the prior year. Revenue has rebounded from its low in 2021 due to the pandemic and is looking strong. The EPA Brownfields grant that's Environmental Protection Agency. So we're utilizing this year the entire fund balance the entire grant balance that the city has to restart that program and Claire will go into that more in a moment. And then finally our Administrative Hearing Fund is flat year over year that funds the Code Enforcement Administrative Hearing Process. This slide shows year over year changes by program area and starting at the top administration increased 1.2 million 30% due to the consolidation of administrative staff into that division. So 11 staff members moved from the different programs into that division. Functions were consolidated and this is to provide better and more efficient service. Also a 1.0 senior administrative assistant position was upgraded to an admin analyst and professional services were reduced department wide to cover the cost of that increase. So in general, the smaller changes throughout the programs are due to admin staff moving out offset by salary and benefits increases for the staff remaining in the programs. So I'm gonna touch on the larger changes up here and then I'm available to answer any questions. So starting with planning development review reduction of over 26%. That includes four administrative staff that were moved out of that division to admin. It also includes the elimination of a limited term senior planner that was grant funded. The department went a different way with that grant. Advanced planning also decreased about 26%. The staffing is the same. However, a senior planner will be charging out to the Brownfields grant program. So staffing is the same. There's just an additional charge out. In 2223, there was only one charge out. That was a senior planner who was charging to the Kaiser Healthy Cities grant. Now we just have a second charge out. In economic development, an overall increase of 164,000, 22%. That is the addition of the $100,000 of the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber contract for this year. It also includes the 105,000 of community promotions budget that was moved out of the city manager's office. And that's offset by an admin secretary moving out of that division into general admin. The NRP neighborhood revitalization decrease is just the movement of a senior admin assistant into general admin. And then finally in CIP and O&M projects, the major increase is that Brownfields grant that is budgeted in an operation and maintenance project key. That's offset by slightly lower funding to our general plan update key due to slightly less fee revenue. And now I can turn it back over to Claire to discuss the programs. Great, so that was the fiscal summary. I'm gonna talk about a little bit of our organizational changes. So we are adding an additional code enforcement officer. What we did last year is we welcomed the one-time funding that was provided to our code enforcement team and what we were able to pilot is what we could do with that additional capacity. And we were able to not just work on our backlog that we had due to some vacancies but really make progress on code compliance, not just notification, but really following through with penalties when compliance wasn't achieved. Also, we were able finally to make progress on our short-term rental enforcement and that's gonna be an ongoing responsibility. Second change is organizationally is for the last couple of budget years, we have asked for admin analysts or a admin champion if you will for our public records, our contracts or grants and the records management that our department supports. We have that responsibility distributed throughout our department. We really needed a central clearing house, an analyst that can handle that. So with budget neutral, we got creative and we are making use of a vacant SAA, senior admin assistant. And also allocating some of our ongoing professional services money towards this position and that is across our divisions. But it will have such a tremendous impact in terms of the way we can manage contracts, data, MPRAs. In addition, this technology application specialist, you actually heard about it yesterday, Director Tickner in his IT presentation talked about it because this is a position that's actually housed in IT but it's dedicated to planning and economic development. I just have to say this position is a game changer for the department. What we need to do is modernize how we deliver service and we can develop the strategy but really it's all about implementation and follow-through. And so we are anxious to have this position on board. We know that it will modernize how we not just take in plans but process them, how we provide information and data to our public and our applicants and is really where our department's headed in the future. And then lastly, you don't typically see us eliminating a senior planner position because they are catch all and can do many, many things. However, this was a position, this limited term position was created in position control in anticipation of our House Santa Rosa project. So just as a reminder of what that is the grant funded by the state to develop a map-based incentive tools for applicants and members of the public to really click on their parcel or a parcel they're interested in and really see all the layers of incentives that we provide and sort of ready information like setbacks and whatnot for how to produce housing anywhere from second units all the way up to apartments. What we found while we were developing the implementation of that project is that we have the brain trust in terms of the strategy in-house and what we needed is the tech support to build the tool and so we've reshifted this so we don't need the position we've reallocated the money to tech support. Next slide. And just a couple more items here. So Kate talked about the one-time fund contract for Santa Rosa Metro. What this money is, this is one time, I think we had one-time funds last year. We're looking at this on a year-to-year basis. It's still a pilot partnership if you will but we work with Santa Rosa Metro to manage and program our courthouse square. So many of you, I've actually seen many of you at many of the events there. So what we do with these funds is we leverage the Metro to staff and set up those events, program those events, promote them, notify adjacent businesses that they're happening and if they didn't do it then we would have to assign city staff to hold up those events, it is a city facility but this is a much cheaper efficient way to do it and it's been very successful so far so we're gonna do it for another year. The next item is not in addition of funds, it's transfer of funds as Kate noted. So this is community promotions, this is facilitating grant funding for community events throughout the city. The staff in PED have promoted the opportunities, facilitate the review process and granted the awards and we do this in concert with the city manager's office so we're just simply transferring the funds organizationally but the process will remain. And then lastly, a big piece of organizational change in planning and economic development has been with our admin team. So for many years, our admin team was distributed throughout the department so multiple supervisors, very specialized functions each and every one and sort of working in isolation. We seized the opportunity last year to functionally shift and organize and centralize the admin team so that they could cross train, professionally develop and really be more nimble when things came up, we weren't sure if are we standing up more boards, are we focusing on PRAs? So really having that sort of unit work together as a team and so this year we are officially making it in our org chart by shifting those positions into under general administration. Next slide. All right, now accomplishments and I know, I thank you for your patience at council goal setting, I went through each and every one of our accomplishments. Today I just highlight them but there are so many from this department. One of our greatest achievements this last year and we'll continue on this year is housing production. When you really do see results when it's an all hands on deck and again it's never just our department, we facilitate housing permit review and inspections but we rely on our partner departments and when you're aligned you can get it done. So we really moved into the sticks and bricks phase of housing action plan. We've adopted many of the initiatives, they are attracting investment and we have assigned our staff and prioritized this work so we are actually seeing quite a bit of construction. We issued building permits for 1400 housing units in last year and 377 are affordable by contract through our housing authority. We granted 1200 housing units and land use approvals and what that means is it's really starting to pent up. I think I was quoted as it's a banner year last year. What I'm gonna tell you this year is epic. We're really gonna see a lot of construction and it's not just downtown, it's city-wide. We do have a lot of construction downtown which we're proud of but it is definitely throughout the city. So we have 2,300 units in plan review or pending permit issuance and that's what I'm talking about. That's what's gonna mature this season and you'll start seeing that that continued construction is gonna happen and continue on. Now if you wanna follow this work you can click on our new website, srcity.org slash dashboards. We have real-time dashboards. You can look at housing. You can look at affordable housing. There's maps. And then we also have these quarterly reports that we're starting to publish. One is pending development. That's also map-based so you can find what's happening in my neighborhood by clicking on the map. And then what's different about the quarterly reports versus the real-time is that it summarizes total so you wanna see what it all kinda adds up to in your neighborhood that's there as well. And a quarterly economic development report as well. Next slide. So we have finally entered the final year of our general plan process. These are long-term processes. They take at least three years. That's what we're taking and but we have, when you have such a long-term process it's good to celebrate the milestones as you get there. I'll talk about it in a moment, keeping up the momentum on these larger scale policy documents is key. So we completed the preferred alternative process. We have not only adopted the city's housing element but it's certified and we have applied for pro-housing designation. And I don't have a conclusion to that yet but I'm very confident that we're gonna do well. We're working with the state on finalizing our points for that and so that will be forthcoming very, very soon. And then we have started the draft plan and policy document process. So this is kind of the meat of the document, developing the policies, it's comprehensive, it's all elements in particular. It's going to include a complete update of our climate action plan, not just integrated throughout the general plan but also climate element to our general plan. And so that's the point that we're at now and there's still work to do but very proud of the team and it's interdepartmental all across the city assistance to make something like that happen. We adopted the gas station ban ordinance last year and we are the largest city in the United States to do that and that speaks volumes for our commitment toward climate goals. There's been a number of activities again to sustain the momentum that we have for downtown development. Our department assisted in the downtown city asset surplus process. We're still supporting that but we've made it to the point of our first offer and are now reviewing those offers. We extended the downtown fee incentives, we heard loud and clear that we needed more time on that so we did that last year. We've launched the EIFD conversation and we hope to form the EIFD for downtown by the end of this year. And then we've steadily supported transportation and public works and housing and community services on supporting IIG grants which is infill infrastructure grants and those are partnerships with our downtown development projects and public infrastructure that we would like to see. And then lastly just upstream economic investments really maximizing the use of this ARPA funds and investing millions of dollars into our community and raising opportunities for those that would otherwise not have that unless we had ARPA. So talking about challenges, balancing all the initiatives that we work on, our long-term projects and our core services is always a challenge. So one of the ways that we've addressed these challenges and you've heard me talk about before is grants contracts and we also particularly look for grants that support staffing. So it's not enough just to get money to do the study but we need help with managing the study, engaging the public on the studies and then implementing. And so we are strategic when we go out for leveraging funds but that is how we accomplish the breadth of work that we do. Another challenge that we have is a lot of our initiatives do take time especially if you're going to properly engage the public and so then the challenge becomes in completing that work and staying on task and staying on timeline. So like I said, we need to recognize that these aren't one and done that we need to sustain it till the end and then we can take on more work. Let's see, we do balance these things with day-to-day demands. So daily we get emails, phone calls, record requests and we need to be available for them. So the challenge with that is while we're working on these initiatives is constantly trying to look at process improvements to streamline to get people help quicker. And so that's a challenge that we rise to each and every day. We also are looking at a better balance of the cost of our service and the cost of how we deliver service, the opportunities to improve how we deliver service with our processing fees. So the last processing fee update was in 2014. So we're in the thick of a new fee update. Right now we have the cost of services study complete and we will be going out to the community at the end of this month. We'll start with public workshops to talk about our initial findings and what we're finding, how much does it cost to deliver the service in the way that the community is demanding. And then like I talked about before, just modernization of how we deliver development services. We are in the beginning stages of a strategic business plan and the pillars of this plan are going to address customer service, they're going to address processing, culture, technology and access to information and records. So those were the existing continuing efforts. And one of our challenges is it's never, it's always emerging, we're a dynamic, we're trying to be nimble. And so just reflecting on some of the newer emerging efforts, some of which have sprung from the council, some which spring from the community and some spring from state compliance needs and we're trying to make sure things that we know our resources get outdated and it's time to update them. So I'm sorry for this typo here, I didn't mean to set an alarm bell for South Santa Rosa specific plan. That's an item that we will do if we get enough funding for it. We have applied for a $1.2 million grant. We haven't heard yet if we have that. Again, that's the grant we will need to have staffing associated with that grant. So one of the things we'll do is we'll find out if we get the grant, we'll find out if that's enough to do the work and then we'll revisit it if it's not. But the typo there is that it's from 2023 to 2026, not 2028, it's a two year plan to do it once you get it started. So sorry for the alarm bell there. And then as I said, things that you may not know about but that we know we need to do an update, it's important is update our streets, standards and our storm water standards. And so it's long overdue. We're gonna be engaging staff. It's again, it's not just planning and economic development. We'll work with water and TPW on that. Resilient city development measures ordinance. This is ordinances that we created in concert with the response to the Tubbs fire. They're still in place, but they do sunset at the end of this year. So we are already engaging on what elements we wanna keep. So as you know, Reduce Review Authority is quite popular with our applicants. We're looking at how that might look in the future in terms of codifying that as an opportunity. Let's see, emerged from the community is the issue of vacant properties and nuisance properties. And so we are developing ordinance for that. And then the other items here are things that we'll consider as we get funding and our staff capacity. So they're on our radar. And if we can do it this year, we will, but we do need, they need capacity and or funding resources to move forward. Otherwise we will do them, we'll look to do them in the next fiscal year. The exception of those italicized items is the graffiti abatement program. I'm happy to say that we will be getting, we did find some one-time funds through some settlement funds through the county. So we will be able to stand up a pilot program. I think we'll be allocated about 300,000 for the graffiti abatement. And this will be an inner departmental effort as well. We have a good city team that's already engaged trying to make a difference on graffiti. So that concludes our challenges and I'm here to answer any questions that you have. Are there any questions from the council, council member Rogers? First of all, thank you, Claire. We had what I thought was one of the best economic development subcommittee meetings that we've ever had yesterday, talking through a comprehensive economic development plan for the city, the different elements that we'd like to see. I know my colleagues and I, we were very clear that there's kind of two ways that we can approach this. We can either expand our economic base here in Santa Rosa or we can keep asking the community for tax incentives to fund our budget. And obviously looking at it this year, I think we all kind of agree that let's try to expand our economic base. Do you have the resources that you need in the proposed budget to be able to deliver on that plan this year? I think we do. First of all, we, as we discussed, the higher level economic development policies will come through, already funded, and will come through the general plan update, right? So the big vision for the city over the next 30 years is gonna come through that process. So that's funded and we're engaged in that. What we talked about yesterday and what's on our work plan this year is the, is a strategic plan. So that's more of a three to five year horizon. And that's really targeting specific objectives to move forward with. And I do think that we have the ability to manage that project without additional resources. Okay, great. Because I know we talked about a whole bunch of different components, including working directly with emerging industries on what their issues were and trying to find, even if they were direct investments up front, long-term returns on it. So I do appreciate that. I think it'll pay dividends for us long-term. Council Member O'Crufty. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for that presentation. Excuse me. A couple of questions. First, a minor thing for me that has, I think, wide-reaching ramifications is, I know in my experience, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I think when I say that the most eyes the community ever gives a project is after it's gone through every single thing in the city and gets approved and a shovel goes in the ground. And that's when you start getting questions of, hey, what's happening at Main & A? What it's already done. And I know that you have the dashboard that was phenomenal, I love it. And I don't know if this is a pet or a zero question, but is there, or if there's even a budgetary line item for it, but is there a way that we could try to get that, use some sort of funding or try to get that out to the public so that they can know beforehand, like, hey, there's a vacant lot on whatever corner. What's going on there? They know to go there and so that they can get ahead of the process or at least try to get them ahead of the process before it's, hey, what's going in at that corner? And then, you know, I think aside from potholes, that's probably what most of us up here get as far as emails. Is there a way that we could try to help with that? Yeah, no, that's a great observation, because yes, that is when we hear from a lot of folks that, you know, how did this happen? There's only up in terms of how we can improve our notification and our announcements. And so we've just gone and started. That dashboard webpage is a placeholder, is a place to start, and we are working with Ciro more often to get the word out through various means. And I think Ciro is even modernizing how they get the word out and what platforms and stuff. So it's an evolving process. And I think that access to information in a timely manner is one of our STRAT plan principles. And so, yeah, I think we will be working on it. Right now, we're just testing things. Thank you. You spoke of the South Santa Rosa specific plan and that we have applied for funding through that, but it also takes staffing. If there is a private entity that would want to help subsidize that funding to help further that along, is that a possibility? Yeah, I think if it turns out that we need additional funds or additional staffing to support that project, we will revisit all the different options. And one option is, it's a 1900 acre plan. I think 500 acres are in the city, the rest are in the county. One of our first stops would be to ask the county to see if they're interested in partnering to expand or support the boundaries. But there's a lot of options and yeah, certainly I know there are community interests to help support and, well, for example, Kaiser supported our general plan update. So it's not unheard of that we get partnerships in the private community to support community work. Thank you. And then my last question is, what percentage of the Brownfield grant can go towards personnel? The percentage, I don't know, but we do have our, we do have a spend down plan for the Brownfields grant. It will be facilitating the cleanup of our public sites. As you know, we're suppressing quite a number of city sites and many of them don't have phase ones in place. Some of them do, but need phase two work and some of them need work. And part of that will be program management of getting those phase ones ordered and whatnot. So we do have allocated some staffing funds and do have staff available to manage those funds. 40%. Council Member Alvarez. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Working off that question, you just asked Council Member Nkrepke, when it comes to actually, first of all, should apply to you for the EPA Brownfield grant that was applied for and achieved. With that said, are there, what does this look like for you in the future with the projects? And you just touched on the phase one and phase two projects. And the reason I asked the question is, what resources do you see being needed the next year to five years? And so it gives us an idea of what the project looks like moving forward. Specific to the Brownfields? Specific to the Brownfields, yes. Well, I can certainly follow up with our specific plan for the spend down. So you can see the components of it and the phasing of it. But no, it will spend down completely and what the results will be is three part. So one of them will be that we will have cleared city surplus sites to offer. So there's no ambiguity about what we're offering. Two, we will be able to do a market feasibility analysis on selected areas. We haven't identified those areas yet, but we can spend some money on figuring out if there's obstacles to some of our Brownfield areas. And then third, infrastructure deficiency analysis on the same areas. So sometimes it's not just cleaning up sites. Sometimes the cloud, if you will, in an area of town is the unknown of market or the unknown of infrastructure deficiencies which you can get quite costly if you haven't peaked to see what those look like. And so that's something that we can spend the money on that will help those areas. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple of questions. I just wanna make sure if you're doing 21 out of the 58 work plan items that you have enough staff to be able to accomplish that. I think it's a pretty high percentage of the total work plan for the city. So I know we talked about it a bit during goal setting and so congratulations for all the work that you're doing, but I do have concerns with so much that's put on pad that you don't maybe have enough staff to accomplish everything. Yeah, we sort of take on a how and when. We acknowledge there's interest in doing initiatives or doing processing work. And so we figure out how and when we can offer it. So sometimes we do have to say we can't do it this year but we'll plan to do it next year. Or if something comes up in terms of helping with capacity and or funding. We are fully staffed with an exception in building. We've had struggle with filling a plan reviewer. But even those cases we get creative. We figure out, well maybe we should underfill it and then onboard and train over time if instead of having something vacant, build our own again. But yeah, we leverage grants, getting grants that pay for staffing. We are always looking for that. So not just work but help to do the work. And then you just have one bullet under your challenges on page two, support for expedited processing of major housing proposals. And I think that what gives me concern is what do you mean by expediting it? As community members see that they might be fearful that we'd be pushing something through before it be actually properly vetted through a process. Yeah, I appreciate that question because I saw that and I realized that it was maybe a poor choice because it could be alarming to citizens about moving too fast on some of these large proposals. What I mean to say here is that when we do get a large proposal like these properties that are well known, big proposals, 500 units or whatnot, it's a lot to take on to process. It's very time consuming obviously with the engagement that goes involved with these processes. And so how we address those is one, they can just go into the queue, which means they're one of 30, 50 projects that each of our planners have, which means it could take five or seven years. Well, we don't appreciate that sort of response. And so what we'll do is we'll work with applicants to help offset the cost of processing and we'll work with applicants to supplement our staffing budget with professional services funds so that we can hire additional processing so that they can go in a reasonable timeframe because one of the things you don't want also is a total burnout on the community side when these things go on and on, they run out of steam and we want people to be engaged all the way through. Thank you so much. Council Member Rogers. Thanks. I also realized we haven't really talked much about the EIFD and I know that we got that across the finish line here at the dais, but that doesn't mean that there isn't additional work, particularly as the PFA starts to do their thing with numbers. Do we need to be budgeting at all for either some consultation services or some staff time for that ongoing through the next year? Well, we're actually good with the current scope of our EIFD and yeah, we've kicked it off, but I'd say there's still a lot of work to do before now in the end of the year. We did have $80,000 budgeted to help us with the studies and the infrastructure finance plan that's required as part of that process and the engagement. So we're good with the scope, which is the downtown EIFD. If we were to add additional EIFD areas, we would be in need of some additional funding. I think as we go through this, if we find some additional cost savings, I'd be supportive of bringing back some additional funds for consultation services, whether it's for the EIFD or the comprehensive Strat Plan or even the South Santa Rosa annexation, because I do recognize that there's a lot that does fall on staff shoulders and rather than letting things get bogged down if other priorities pop up. If we had a fund that we could draw from for some of those outside work, I'd be more than supportive of that. Council Member Fleming. Thank you and great work all around. I just wanted to pull out one small thing since we have a couple of new council members and we just keep moving forward our tourism BIA. And it's something of a particular interest to me in that this number $500,000 remains flat. I'm just wondering if we do any analysis about if the BIA is effective in returning the value to the city of Santa Rosa. I know a couple of years ago in economic development, we had talked about analyzing this and determining if it made sense to us since we pay into it, but not all jurisdictions in the county pay into it. And then when we pull, in particular, when I look at our newsletters, I don't find that Santa Rosa is frequently featured as a destination in the BIA, the tourism newsletter, and just wondering if we are still having talks about if this could be more effectively done in-house and if we're getting the value for a half million dollars. Yeah, I think it's an ongoing discussion and I think we should watch that in the future to see if there's anything we can do to at least feel like we get more for our contribution to that. I think that's gonna be a work in progress. I'm just wondering if you felt that for $500,000, we could have at least two FTE working on that internally. Do you feel like there's been any consideration about if that would be a more prudent expenditure? Council Member Fleming, I would like to draw a little bit more attention to that question. So if you wouldn't, if you would allow, can I have the microphone for Raeisa to come and answer that for you, please? Thank you. Because we've been in discussion about this as well. Okay. Good afternoon for the record, Raeisa Delarosa, Economic Development. So just to be clear, I believe your question is referring specifically to the county tourism business improvement area to which we, the city lodging establishments contribute 2% of their gross revenue. And we have not adequately studied that. We've worked or have had discussions with Sonoma County Tourism to show the return on investment. And it's been a long simmering question, but it would require working through the lodging establishments to reassess what we would wanna do with those funds. I believe in the past, there's been interest from the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber, which also houses our local Santa Rosa Tourism Business Improvement Area to review that as well. And so I think if we wanted to, there would be a partner in that as well. Okay, that's really helpful. And largely I just bring it up because it's been a long simmering question that doesn't seem to get a lot of traction. But I think that our council may be interested in looking, especially since the two most successful tourism, destination, jurisdictions in the county do not pay into this. And I'm wanting us to be joining and being successful in tourism and differentiating ourselves. So thank you so much for the information. Very helpful. Are there any additional questions from council member Alvarez? Yes, could you elaborate on what is an overlay district specific to Rosalind, please? Well, that's a great question. So this is a line item here that emerged out of the council goal setting session. So one of the first things we would do if we were to tap into this effort would be to ask that question. But the way I was presented through council goal setting was some mechanism, whether it's an overlay or design guidelines or something, but some way to protect and preserve the unique cultural identity that Rosalind Commercial District has and the scope of what that would include, like that mechanism, that would be developed through lots of discussion and figuring out how to do that to solve that interest. And I imagine this pertains to not only the economic factor that is Rosalind, but also the development or future development that's coming into the area as well, I imagine. It's an area of great change, as you know. And sometimes areas of change that are unregulated, if you will, or unlimited. Sometimes you'll attract a design of development or a type of commercial enterprise that can change the character. So if there was a lot of chains or big box that went in there, that might change the character of the neighborhood. So if it's of interest of the community and the council, then there are tools to shape that or at least make sure that there's some protections. And I know this is a discussion that Councilman Krepke and I have had in regards to the historical homes that are found in Rosalind and then that in contrast to the new development. So something that does interest me at the least. Thank you. Any additional questions from council? Seeing none, I just had one question. And that question was, I see the partnership with Santa Rosa Metro Chamber, which I think is great, but I wanted to know, are there any, and this may be a right to question, are there any additional partnerships with other chambers that we have that work within the city of Santa Rosa? We do work with other chambers. So the other chambers in Hispanic, it's the Sonoma County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Black Chamber of Commerce, we meet with them. They have fewer resources and staffing, so we're looking for partnership opportunities in terms of programs that they may run that we could support. We're still in discussions with those chambers as they build their capacity. Do we provide any, are we just in discussion talks, verbal, or do we provide any resources? We don't provide ongoing resources in the same way. So again, the $100,000 for the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber is really for direct services to related to the courthouse square and events and downtown activation. The discussions that we're having with, in particular, I think the last person I spoke to was the North Bay Black Chamber of Commerce and they're looking at programs around economic development through their chamber. Again, they have sort of limited staffing resources, so the question is still out in terms of what substantive support can we give them in any way? Other than that, we are not members of the chamber, but we can certainly look at that and support them through membership. Does that answer your question? I don't follow, no. Meaning that, so they're programmatic, so similar to say the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber that's a programmatic element or it's actually a professional service that we're asking the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber to perform. We do not have some similar opportunity at this time with the other chambers of commerce in the county. In particular, I'm speaking about the Black Chamber and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. We do not yet have opportunities for equivalent or for professional services in that way. Instead, we're looking at programmatic support through those chambers if they have a program that aligns with something that would benefit Santa Rosa. Okay, and is the $100,000 the only monies that is given to the Metro chambers that they only transfer? So the $100,000 is the only transfer specific to the service of activating Courthouse Square and providing event-related services. The Santa Rosa Metro Chamber is a fiscal agent for other organizations, specifically the Sonoma County, I'm sorry, the Small Business Development Center, SBDC of Sonoma County. They house the SBDC, which is a state and federally funded program. And so sometimes if we wanna work with the SBDC, we either have to work through their fiscal agent, the chamber, or through another organization that can then funnel the SBDC, their funds. Similarly, they are the fiscal agent or the contracted administrator for the downtown action organization. So sometimes funds for the DAO could go through the chamber or an invoice to the chamber. They are all separate accounts though. So it may look like we're giving the chamber some funds. We are only working through them as a fiscal agent. So long story short, sorry, we're not giving them anything other than the 100,000 to facilitate what goes on at the square. And if it looks like we're giving them money, that's just because we're the funnel for them to get the money from. Right, that is correct. At this time, the $100,000 is the only funds that are going to the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber for the square. Everything else is acting as a fiscal agent. Okay, perfect. Are there any additional questions from council? Seeing none, thank you all very much and thank you for the presentation. We will now take a short break. I'm sorry, a short stretch break. So we'll come back at, let's go ahead and do 11-10. Thank you so much. We will now resume our meeting. Madam city deputy clerk, may you please take the roll? Councilmember Stapp? Here. Councilmember Rogers? Here. Councilmember Ocrepke? Here. Councilmember Fleming? Here. Councilmember Alvarez? Present. Vice Mayor McDonald? Here. Mayor Rogers? Present. Let the record reflect all councilmembers are present. We will now continue with our department presentations. Right, thank you very much and good morning mayor, vice mayor and councilmembers. I'm Jason Nutt, I'm the assistant city manager and also acting as recreation and parks director. So for the moment we're going to work, this next presentation we're gonna go through the parks and recreation department. You will hear interchangeability between parks and recreation and recreation and parks. It is the same organization, same wonderful phenomenal group of folks and it's just a term of art. So we wanna make sure that if we switch back and forth, just want you to know we're talking about the same great people. So if I could get the presentation on the screen, right? But I'm gonna stop for just a second and advance to the right slides. My apologies. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here today to present their recreation and parks budget for fiscal year 23-24. This particular slide is a tad confusing and the reason it's confusing is because of what you heard from the finance department early in the presentation yesterday which is we are doing a reorganization and that reorganization has taken about 31 staff members out of the transportation and public works department and put them into the recreation or recreation and parks department. So that's where you see the significant swings. You see a lot of the additional budget line items that didn't exist in prior years because those did exist in the transportation and public works department budget. And so you'll see a similar slide when we get to that other department. So let's just go ahead and move to the program funds. Lots going on. As we said, we have 31 particular individuals that are moving from public works. That includes five individuals from our park planning division and 26 individuals from our park maintenance team. Those are now going to be part of this new department. We also have staff that are shifting between the through the community engagement program that's going to be moving over to community or communications and intergovernmental relations. Again, you heard about that yesterday afternoon. And so all of that is comprised and demonstrated in the current total change in the general administration as well as many of these other components. Most of the increases that you'll see in these line items relate to just the average annual MOU increases, increase for services, increase of benefits. But there are a couple that we want to point out for you. The neighborhood services program does have two additional programs that we're serving, which is fantastic. We're continually working with Burbank Housing to try to increase service opportunities. And so that is for our after school enrichment program. And we do find that we're just continually having great success with those programs that we've moved forward and we're continuing to look for partnership opportunities on how to expand those offerings. On the aquatics front, we have increases relating to the increased cost of pool supplies, particularly chemicals, and the regional parks and permits cost increases are predominantly due to the addition of the Pony Express and some additional funds needed for the operation of the train. Now unfortunately, council approved the agreement with the Pony Express. We are having some challenges bringing the Pony Express online and it's very possible that that service won't be available this year. And so those funds will be worked inappropriately to other regional park services that'll be going forward. And I'm sure we'll provide more information about that in the future. The Bennett Valley Golf Course shifts not only because we're looking at the reorganization from Public Works to Recreation and Parks, but also we're changing the method with which we're operating and managing that golf course. And so this really relates to our agreement with Touchstone for the ongoing maintenance and management of that site and facility. And then of course the CIP and O&M projects, these are all funds that are shifting between the departments and makeup. What we'll talk about at the end of the day in our CIP presentation. As we just discussed, here the majority of the changes we are looking to also add a new recreation and parks director. And that's because you don't want me in acting forever. We wanna make sure we get someone that's gonna be really looking toward making this a phenomenal place because parks make life better. And so we wanna make sure that that is a key piece for us and we are set up and ready to go with a recruitment should counsel approve the budget with that position continued in place. We are gonna be offsetting some of the cost ongoing of that particular director position. We have a senior administrative assistant position who we have not been utilizing for a long time as part of our reorganization and we structure that's been occurring. And so because of the work that we've done internally we believe we can shift that financial resource and that FTE to the director position so that we have a net neutral FTE and less overall new cost to the organization. We are gonna be funding a 1.0 assistant parks planner as we're looking at reconstructing and recreating our department into something that's modern, that's looking for and forward thinking utilizing measure M funds that's measure M parks for all not transportation and roads tax but utilizing those funds so that we can continue to push forward and think ahead on projects getting them in place and in the ground is gonna be critical. For those of you who recall about four years ago we had one park planner in this organization she's sitting to my left. Now with this addition that will be two park planners and an actual deputy director that can focus in on the big picture on how to get things moving forward. So Jen has done a phenomenal job up to date but giving her that assistance and this additional will be a huge asset to our community. And then of course as I mentioned we're moving the two FTE out of the department which is recreation and community engagement soon to be called recreation and parks or parks and recreation depending upon which of us you talked to and those FTEs we've moving to the CRO team. It's been a great year. We've had a ton of accomplishments a lot of which we've represented through our council goal setting components and updates. The biggest is we've successfully found a way of recovering all of our revenue and registrations back to pre COVID times. We're talking in the slide of being able to exceed 85%. I think what was reported to me most recently was the last registration. We were in the 92 to 95% of pre pandemic registrations which is very impressive considering there's still a lot of gearing up that has been going on including shifting and adjusting of programs within our own operations because there are different vendors that are working with us to provide services and so having to make those shifts and adjustments in the recreation team has just done an outstanding job. As you can see, we welcomed over a half a million participants this last year. That's a huge total. We are definitely open for business and our teams are super excited to welcome folks back into our recreation facilities and programs. We made some adjustments and changes in how we do permitting. That has resulted in a lot less complaints. Used to be that we had field permits and park permits all being done by different individual divisions. We've now consolidated that to reduce overlap and confusion because we were finding that two different managers issuing permits were sometimes putting two different entities at that same spot. And so this is an opportunity for us to clean some of that up. It also helps reduce the instances where we have overpopulation of a site. We had a couple of instances in prior years where, for example, Northwest Community Park had not only a softball series going on but a tournament under soccer and adult league rugby or soccer happening all on the same day. And it was a little chaotic for all of us to handle. So consolidating that, as you see on the screen, has been a huge, huge win for us and we've received substantial positive feedback from our community partners. We've also been able to, on the heels of the pandemic, start to resume some of our really key flagship programs like City Sluggers, the City Booters, and the National Academy of Athletics. We've got 850 participants that are coming in. We're also looking at our Junior Giants Program and our Junior Warriors. Those are things that are actively working and we're excited to see those get back up into full swing as well. We're actively working and completed most of our program agreements with school districts in order to serve these programs. As you may be aware, we don't own and operate all of our own facilities. We do a lot of our programming based on partnerships with other agencies and organizations. So we're working with each of the school districts to try to provide sites for those services to occur, which takes some ongoing negotiations work and we need to continue to offer and sign and approve permits along the way. Our Neighborhood Services Youth Membership is up and that's a really exciting component as well and something we should really be celebrating as part of our Measure O program. We're just seeing more and more interest and more and more activity, which is a great way as we'll talk about in the future of how we can do upstream investment in our youth and young people. On the Parks Planning Front, the GEN's team has been extremely active in going out and recruiting and looking at where we can find funds to invest in our community and you'll just see some of the key examples that we've got on the screen. You've heard some of the other departments because most of these are done in partnership, whether it's the Kiwana Springs Park program that we received, the $2.9 million, Martin Luther King Park is part of the IIG grant that Director Bassenger spoke of yesterday. Laura Colkin Creek Park and Restoration is part of a program working with Director Burke's team and the Santa Rosa Water Department. These are all being done in coordination with other departments for the benefit of our community and trying to do a lot of multifaceted investment at these spots. From a capital program, this is us trying to reinvest in existing sites, not necessarily just growing new. There's been a substantial amount of effort going at how we can replace and repair existing playground equipment. Colkin Creek was one of the most recent projects that was completed and we did a great ribbon cutting this last year. It was a lot of fun, great community involvement. And we're looking here in the very near future to be able to do contract awards for the construction of the Kiwana Springs Community Garden and rehabilitation and reconstruction of a more vibrant kids' play area at the Finlay Aquatic Center. It's gonna be a really fantastic project and looking forward to bringing that contract award to council here this summer. Other projects that they've worked on are the Deterk-Round Barn and Bear Neighborhood Park. Picnic areas, these are things that, these are locations that get high, heavy use. And so putting our attention into those areas so that they can continue to be used, continue to function for our community members is just an important piece. In a moment, Deputy Director Santos is gonna talk to you about the Bennett Valley Golf Course, but that was a key accomplishment for us as shifting to a different operations methodology and securing a company like Touchstone to come in and really get that program up and running. And then we've, over the last year, been working on a parks condition assessment. There are two phases of that. One's gonna show up here in our accomplishments. One's gonna show up here in our challenges. Phase one is we've gone through all of our parks and open space and landscape areas through town and we've had a condition assessment done. For those of you who've been here since 2017, we did similar program on our facilities which help drive investment moving forward. It helped identify areas that we felt were some of the highest priority for us to take dollars when they come our way and put into first. This parks condition assessment is that way. Phase one provided us basic information about the condition of the parks, condition of the primary components. Phase two, as you'll hear me talk about, is really focused in on the cost and cycle of replacement and what that means for us financially. On the maintenance side, the maintenance team has been really hard at work. They've been out really pushing to try to make an investment and a critical image change in our community. They do maintain nearly 1,100 acres of parks and roadway landscaping. For the 26 employees that are part of that team, that comes out to about 42 acres per employee. It's a pretty heavy lift. That's generally about a third higher than the national average as far as number of employees per acre, or number of acres per employee. But to support that, that team is really focused in on expanding volunteer efforts in our community. And with the city manager's emphasis on trying to create volunteerism and community involvement, the parks maintenance team has really grabbed the bull by the horns and implemented a researched park a month program. And I know most of you, if not all of you, have participated in that program. The team has done an outstanding job. The team has gone out and created a trailer that is outfitted specifically for the volunteer efforts. It's branded in a way to help individuals in the community see what it is we're doing and why we're doing it. And it's intended to encourage community effort and volunteerism so that we can continue to enhance the aesthetics and quality of life around our parks in our community. They've done 28 volunteer events since we kicked that program off. And they've now expanded into another program which is an adopted green space. Adopted green space is really looking for individual neighborhood or corporate volunteers that wanna come out and help us address more of the detailed landscape component of our community and trying to make that more aesthetically pleasing. And we'll be continuing to work with our communications and intergovernmental relations team to try to push that message out so that we can start to see those volunteering efforts come to fruition. On the challenges front, the biggest challenge we have as we see it as resource, our ability to be able to maintain our landscapes, to maintain our acreage with the 26 staff members is very challenging. As you may recall in 2019, we adjusted and changed our landscape contractor. The landscape contract was the balancing act from the 2008 recession where we substantially eliminated employees to the benefit of contract service which worked in for quite some time. In 2019, we reevaluated and rebid that project and at that point in time, council awarded only the mowing component of that contract. So we are bent on bringing back to you a new proposal that includes landscape maintenance. That is our primary focus this summer and Deputy Director Santos and her team will be leading that effort to try to bring you a contract ready to award that will help us restore the aesthetic of our community when it comes to our landscape maintenance. In the meantime, we are shifting staffing efforts in an effort to try to at least control and manage the vegetation that's out there. And so that is the effort that's currently going on but that is a key challenge for us leading into this next year. Infrastructure is just continuing to increase in cost. As we go out to bid on new capital investments, as we look to purchase materials and maintenance contracts, we are finding cost of services and cost of materials is going up. And that is an area that's going to pose some challenges for us as we look to invest. Like I said, we're going to be bringing to you a contract award. We have an estimate. We're hoping that estimate is spot on and we've been working with our contract community to try to figure out how closest we can be to the estimate. But we have been seeing fairly consistent, very consistently bid proposals that are coming in above the engineer's estimate. And so our attempt is to continue to try to manage that in the best way we can. And we'll talk in more detail about that when we get through the Capital Improvement Program. And then of course, grant funding is a fantastic element. But granters, granting agencies are getting more and more strict on the way reporting is done. They are not streamlining their efforts. It's becoming more detailed on how we need to report. It is getting more difficult as far as the application process goes because they're asking for more detailed information. And then the ongoing management of those grants is critical. Now, Director Alton described for you earlier yesterday program that we're trying to create that helps us manage our grant programs better moving forward. And we're hopeful that will help a team like the Parks Department who is actively searching for and receiving grants had a fairly good clip to keep those under control and managed and processed in an appropriate way. So we've got great things that are coming in but it's managing those adjustments and changes moving forward or something that we're really keeping an eye on as we move into this next year. Now, I'm going to shift to allow Deputy Director Santos to walk you through the Bennett Valley Golf Course budget. Thank you and good morning. Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald and Councilmembers as Assistant City Manager Nut mentioned, I'm Jen Santos, your Parks Deputy Director and I'll be walking you through our Enterprise Fund in the Parks and Recreation Department. And so we're just looking at our budget proposed for next year. We're looking at a revenue generation of around $443,553. That's made up of revenue from the golf course as well as around $67,000 from a cell tower that maintains a site at the Bennett Valley Golf Course. And then we're looking at transfers in of around $229,000. This was originally anticipated as part of our discussions last year as we brought on Touchstone that we would have some need of transferring funds in as we go forward. So that takes us to 672,623. Our O&M expenditures represent about $208,000 of just general O&M. And then around $63,246 of our Park Development Impact Fund repayment requirement for a loan that was borrowed in 2004 from the Park Development Impact fees. And then the transfers out represents our bond debt service transferring out and next year, it's always around $400,000 when you add the 67 or 63, I'm sorry, from the Park Development, it's around $450,000 every year is our debt service on this. That's taking us to a use of reserves, which is zero, which is great. And a lot of that is doing credit to our finance team with advanced planning, with Touchstone and having that advanced meeting with council last year to have that discussion. Slide. And so looking at this year, one of our key highlights this year is, of course, the agreement that Assistant City Manager mentioned. It's a different type of agreement than the one we've had in the past. This one is a system where the city earns and receives all of the revenues. And we also pay all the expenditures and we pay a fee to Touchstone. Whereas in previous agreements, it was shared revenue and shared O&M expenditures, which leads to a lot of gray areas on how to move forward. So this is a really fantastic, easy to manage agreement and we are thrilled to be working with Touchstone. It's a very professional organization. We also are in the process of buying two hybrid greens mowers. We're really excited to have these. The equipment you might remember from last year is very aged at the golf course. So we are looking at slowly integrating new equipment. We have a lot of back order with equipment, as you may hear through the capital and other budget presentations, materials and supplies are difficult for those, but we are moving forward with it and we're looking forward to those greens mowers this year. We opened our restaurant and event center on October 1st of last year. To much fanfare was very, very well received. We changed the name of the event center to the iron and vine and is exceeding expectations as we thought it would. So it's doing very well. And if you haven't been, it's a great place to check it out. Our rounds of golf from this time last year compared to this year are around the same. They're shallowing just a bit with our latest financial updates. But if you look back in time at a time when we had the fires and we had flooding, it's a very similar type of golf rounds where we're lower in golf rounds just a tiny bit. The restaurant and event center have far exceeded expectations. So it's a good budget. They've done very well this year. We are looking at the irrigation water storage system coming back to this council in June of this year. To talk about that, we've started the design process that you may recall the irrigation system is over 50 years old. And this design is the step one in getting us to a brand new irrigation system in the next few years. We needed a water storage system first to bring in a new irrigation system. And then last but not least, we've increased golf fees in January of this year to make up for a five-year lack of increasing golf fees altogether. We also reduced the amount of golf type of fees from 180 to about 30, which is a significant change from one organization, one management operator to the next. And so that is, I would say overall though, just want to say the golf course is doing really well. Again, shallowing and a little bit of the golf because we had Epic Reigns this year for months, but overall balancing that out with their other performance of the driving range and that event and restaurant center. And I'll turn it back over to Assistant City Manager. Thank you, Deputy Director Santos. And with that, that concludes Recreation and Parks Department budget and we're happy to answer questions. Council Member Fleming. Thank you guys. I'm so excited to hear how many people are back using our services. I hope there's lots of pent up demand that is going to be continuing to reach out across the city. So it's really exciting. I do have a question about the aesthetic improvements. As we've heard, it's not all doom and gloom, but it certainly is in a rosy picture across the city in terms of revenues. And I'm just wondering where the money is going to be coming from for these aesthetic improvements. Yes, thank you, Council Member Fleming. So we have secured one-time funds to add the landscape maintenance component of a contract back in. This current budget actually continues and perpetuates the funds that have been necessary to sustain the mowing portion of the operation. And so we have one-time funds that, as you heard from Director Hartman for the Graffiti Program, we've also received funds to do the landscape maintenance component through that same resource. Our intent is to work with the Finance Department in next year's budget to incorporate the ongoing ask and need from Council. At that point, we will know exactly what the annual contribution for the contract will be and we'll be able to make the necessary adjustments moving forward. But it is our intent to bring that contract service back, which we feel strongly will make a substantial impact in the aesthetics of our community. And the one-time funds, are they general fund? They're coming from the landfill settlement contingency program and they'll be distributed into the city's general fund and then pushed through a separate Council action later this fiscal year for Council's consideration. Okay, thank you. Council Member O'Crapke. Oh, thank you very much Madam Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. Also a great job on the forecasting of the realignment. I know we always say put people before parks, but thanks to NBC and Amy Poehler and Chris Pratt, Parks and Rec is in the American lexicon and we can't help that. So even if we wanted to call it, you know, Rec and Parks, people aren't going to call it that no matter how hard we try. But to my question, Northwest Community Park has a interesting ownership and responsibility situation and I know there has been very, very preliminary informal talks about making it more logical, I guess would be the proper term. Is that in the work plan and if so, is that going to require any sort of budgetary requirements? Thank you Council Member O'Crapke. The Northwest Community Park is an interesting quilt of ownership responsibilities between the city and the school district. We actually have had now two conversations with both the school itself, as well as the district representatives on how we might proceed. One proceeding in the short term by creating an agreement between the two agencies is to basically code of conduct for city participants and permittees. And so far the feedback has been positive that our adjustments that I explained earlier about managing the permits better has really made a positive impact on some of the conditions that we saw over the last couple of years with that particular site. Moving forward, it is our intent to work with the district to try to clean up the ownership out there if we can, if we can come to a resolution and agreement. What that'll do is give us more of the long-term reliance on those facilities, how we can utilize them and what our relationship with the district is. As far as the last question, which is really the kicker is, is there gonna be a budgetary expense to it? And right now I actually can't offer anything. There is gonna likely be some level of negotiation in this. And I don't know exactly where that will land, but more than likely in that negotiation, we will try to make it one of labor and service as opposed to financial. But it'll be really a function of what ultimately we have to accomplish with the district to make the lines and use of that facility cleaner. Thank you. And then unfortunately, the Parks Foundation ceased operations in the middle of this last budgetary term in December. While not a part of our organization, it's a separate organization, but it has an affiliation financially, do you foresee any negative effects other than the obvious to that and what we can do as a city financially? Yeah, thank you again for that. Losing the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation this last year was a good hit to our organization. We really do wanna see the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation come back into operation. We do have one nonprofit entity that's expressed interest in taking on the leadership role with that and we're actively negotiating there. But my hope is that other organizations across the city will express interest in wanting to be a part of it. It is not just a single directive operation. We do need lots of partnership to make that function. Historically, the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation was singular in focus. Their focus was predominantly aimed at the train at Howard Park and some of the amusement style improvements out there as immediately following the Tubbs Fire as we were looking to recover from that, the Parks Foundation became invested in the restoration of Coffee Park in particular and we had started a conversation about wanting them to take on a bigger, broader role city-wide moving forward. Unfortunately, a number of the participants who were involved in the Parks Foundation chose to no longer proceed and therefore we actually worked with the last remaining operation and entity to close out the accounts in December. So we did retain the name and it's our intent to proceed in the future with a new Parks Foundation that has a broad city-wide focus to help us fund a lot of the improvements and that we're talking about today. So in summation, if we were to live in a county that has more nonprofits per capita than any other place in the nation and there were some people that were parks and open space minded, there's an opportunity to help re-establish this organization to help fund our parks and recreation purposes. Is that correct? That is correct. Thank you, Council Member Statte. Thank you, Mayor. So much excitement coming out of Parks and Rec on every front with the internal reorg to make it a more focused group. That's fantastic. The plans that are underway, I'm particularly partial to the Family Aquatic Center and also the work at the Benebelli Golf Course in Galvin Park, but I'm hearing a lot about MLK as well. So a lot of great buzz out there. The question that I had, well actually before I get to my question, thanks again for shining a spotlight on the grants management issue. That's something that we've heard across departments and it's interesting to note what a pain point that is for the organization. So thanks for bringing that to light. My question is one that you're already expecting and that you'll be getting many times over the next months because of the spotlight that's being shown on the Southeast Greenway. Obviously there's a lot of excitement about the city's impending or the city taking, not imminently taking control of that piece of land. In the budget this year, is there gonna be, do we have the budget? Do we have the resources to start taking the next steps in terms of the planning for that piece of land over the next 12 months or so? So I'll do the initial answer and if Deputy Director Santos has some additional components or a rebuttal to my statement, she's welcome to chime in. So the Southeast Greenway is active. It's an active project on our list. We are working today with the Sonoma County Ag and Open Space District to try to identify, prepare and draft the conservation easement that will be placed over the top of the property should and when the city acquires the property. And so that is a critical component for us. Immediately following will be the implementation and community discussion around a master plan of that property. The master planning process is not a small or this will be a large sizable program and it will take quite some time to complete. But it's critical for us to go through that effort to try to understand what services programs and facilities are intended to be located there. And we wanna hear from the community at large as to what their expectations and interests. And then that'll help us once finalized that'll help us develop an infrastructure investment strategy on moving forward. So to answer your question more simply, yes. We have that on our program. It is something that we don't need additional funds at the moment. However, if we get into more of the environmental aspect, we may be returning to council with a request to appropriate some park funds to proceed with consultant services for environmental or master plan support. Excellent. Thank you. That's a member Alvarez. Thank you Madam Mayor. First and foremost, thank you for making district one looks so beautiful. We have $12.5 million coming into Kiwanis MLK Park. We'll be done with the Colgan Park with the restoration Colgan Creek. And we've actually sat here and spoke about Davis Park and the upgrades to that park as well. So before anything, thank you very much for the efforts to make that happen. Considering that we've had a very wet start to the year and we're moving into the drier months, how prepared are we for weed abatement or addressing the tall grass in our city? Are we staffed? Do we have, are we prepared? So the fire department has an active program utilizing our supervised adult crew with the county and they are actively working through our wildland urban interface priority areas alongside our parks maintenance teams. Those are the primary direction, that's the primary area that we need to focus in on today. The grass is still growing. There's still green out there. So cutting today will result in additional cuts through the course of the summer and fall. But it's growing and it's growing at a much more rapid pace and much taller than we've seen over the last several years because we're now out of the drought. So in order for us to manage the vegetation as well as prepare ourselves for the upcoming fire season, that is the key focus. From the standpoint of the rest of the community, more of the vegetation management side and less the weed abatement side, we are having to shift staff around both from parks maintenance, street maintenance and actually facilities maintenance to try to address the rapid and uncontrolled growth at the moment that's occurring everywhere around town. We are aware and again, once we come and cut it, it's likely to grow again. We'll likely be out there in a couple of months. The focus that we have, which is usually part of our landscape maintenance contract is redirecting staff off of other activities. And so we are slowing down some services in order to respond to the current vegetation management issues. But we do have a plan that over the next four to six weeks we should be able to gain control of a majority, if not all of the city landscape areas and have them cut down at least for this first round. So we are making adjustments in an effort to try to address the current and emerging issue, which is the vegetation growth. Well, when you state a contract for assisting us in making that happen, do you mean with the county or is there another entity that we are entering in a contract with? Yeah, Council Member, it's the landscape contract that we don't currently have relating to landscape maintenance. And so as we look to award that contract this summer fall, that contractor will take on the direct responsibility for managing the vegetation component, not necessarily the Wildland Urban Interface areas, but really focused in on our medians side on landscapes, our parks and our facilities. And so once we award that contract, they will take on that responsibility and we can restore all of our crew services back to their original programs. And please help me understand why we as a city would not do this in-house. I fell to see the reason for that, if you could explain that. So historically, I'll just start there, historically through the recession, it was a shift. At that point in time, contract service were substantially cheaper than in-house staff. And we saw that by the elimination of nearly 30 FTE for a single contract. That's been shifting and ebbing over the course of time and we've been actively evaluating the difference and cost variance between in-house staff, bringing them in and their long-term permanent costs versus a contract services cost. Right now, we still find that contract services have a value in the operation, mostly for that long-term investment need in having full-time FTEs. And therefore, that's our approach moving forward, is to continue to look at having that in-house, that contract service provide us the ability to be able to address issues in the vegetation and landscape maintenance front. So we've been looking, we've been working with finance and right now we believe that contract services is still the cost-effective way for us to proceed. Would I be correct in making the assumption that the driving force is at seasonal compared to a year-round need? We have seasonal issues that pop up, but it is a year-round issue. In the wintertime when the growing season is shorter, that's when we focus in on other safety-oriented issues or capital modifications to a park site because now we're moving maintenance staff into more of the capital side. And so seasonal has an impact but maintenance activities operate to be flexible through the seasons, right? You've got summertime activities, you've got wintertime activities and that's how you keep your FTEs fully staffed, fully operational and invested through the course of the year. So even though there are seasonal activities that may be greater in some years like this year is with vegetation management on a normal year given the resources that we need, which would be the additional contract service, that is what will help us keep a sustainable program and be able to bring our parks back into good condition and sustain that way. Thank you. One of the questions that I get asked a lot is for example, Southwest Park or Southwest Community Park. Amongst many other parks in the city of San Jose, and I'm sure you probably get the question as well, as well as my colleagues, is are there any additional resources that we could use to renovate, introduce new parks such as developmental fees? Do those exist, are those within our reach? So Southwest Community Park is one of those that's located in a park development impact fee zone and actually it's an extremely active zone. We're collecting more, we've collected more this year than we have in prior years, which is an exciting thing which allows us then to turn around and invest it into those needs. The other tool that we have is the Measure M program, the Parks for All piece, and Southwest Community Park has been identified as a recipient of both funds over the course of the next several years with interest in looking at how we can rebuild the pergola that's out there, how we can invest in changing and improving the fields, potentially even shifting one of the soccer fields to an all weather turf field. So there are products and projects that are currently in place utilizing exactly those financial resources. We will always be looking to supplement those with outside grant funds or other financial pots of money because as I said, costs are continuing to escalate and we're trying to keep up. Jokingly I say, you might have to slow down, you're making me look way too good for my district. Later on, I won't know what to present up in all the parks, look beautiful, including the Rosalind Creek Park, which I know is coming up here pretty soon as well. Thank you for your efforts. Absolutely. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Mayor. So Jason, what happened with the scuba divers? The scuba divers were unfortunately not able to acquire an ABC permit for that location given the facilities that were available to them and with the sale of alcoholic beverages that is part of the way they balance their budget and without that availability, they chose to take a year off while we work on a permanent solution collaboratively. So if there's an intention then in a year to bring this back, do we have any dollars in this budget to actually address the issues at Doyle Community Park that led to them taking a year off? We don't at this point in time, partly because we're not exactly sure yet what ABC is gonna require for permanent or semi-permanent installation that would allow for them to provide vending out of. Negotiations with ABC over the last several months looked at a number of different options and they weren't pleased with those. So until we understand a little bit more what the need is, we may be able to accommodate it within our current budget but if there's more of a permanent building that has to be built, then no, it would be outside of our current budget but if it's something more akin to a tough shed or they actually proposed at one point the purchase and utilization of a container, ABC wasn't happy with that, at least not in the timeframe that they were given to review the request. So it's not a clear answer for you, it's partly gonna be dependent upon what ABC requires of the scuba divers and the city. All right, my request would be that when we know more that we bring it back if we need to allocate some resources or find some resources just because the feedback that I got from the community is that they really liked it and thought that it was interesting and it was something different to do in the community. I'd love to support that. Unfortunately, Council Member, it really came as a surprise to all of us, including I think the scuba diver program. I think this was a last minute shift. I wanna say they made the public announcement two days after announcing to the city. Okay, thank you. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to touch on you have an after school program that you spoke about. Can you maybe tell us a little bit more about that and how that's funded or where those activities take place? So Vice Mayor, I'm gonna do my best, but I may on this one have to phone a friend with Deputy Director Tibbets being online if there's a way for him to be promoted, please. Our after school programs in this particular instance are neighborhood services programs that are measure-of-funded and we utilize an MOU or an agreement with Burbank Housing at their locations and their sites to service community members that reside in their properties. And we've been shifting, we've had to make some shifts, especially through the pandemic because some sites didn't have enough participation. We had to see some participants be driven in to a particular site. Coming out of the pandemic, however, we not only feel like we've seen those, that participation resume, but we also have had interest from Burbank Housing and expanding to two other sites. So Deputy Director Tibbets, if you are available, if you can add additional information. That really did answer my question. I think I appreciate it, Director Tibbets. I just wanted to find out where those funds actually came from and where the sites were being utilized more than anything. And then, but if you'd like to expand on anything else, go ahead, since you're corroded now. I think Jason covered it well. And yeah, I think the one thing I would just highlight on is that this is a model that is really what started neighborhood services even before we had Measure-O, Apple Valley where we have a trailer out there was as a program that's been in existence for over 20 years doing this type of programming. And so that partnership just over the years has looked different over the different years. But it's really a unique way to provide after-school programming. There is a lot of money that goes through our schools, through ACES funds and different things to provide after-school programming. Unfortunately, there's still kids who slip through the cracks. And this is a unique way for us to go into the communities where we know that kids need that support after school and catch those kids who slip through the cracks. So it's not the traditional model of being at a school and serving 120 kids at one school. But it's a really important need in the community to make sure that we're providing the service to as many of the youth as we can. The reason this is so important to me, I think, is because we can also have a direct correlation between what we're investing in, you know, law enforcement and after-school quality programs. So I just wanna make sure that we, I do feel like this is a good investment specifically for youth, you know, in sixth to eighth grade. If we can capture them specifically, I think would be really beneficial to the community. And vice mayor, you bring a great point. And I think that's gonna be one of the benefits and perks of seeing us reformulate the Recreation and Parks Department where violence prevention and neighborhood services are now going back under one roof and able to work together. The programs at neighborhood services really are that upstream investment. And that is they need to be able to coordinate hand-in-hand with our violence prevention partners and the programming that that team is doing. So I think your point is very well taken and this new reorganization, I think, will help us make that happen more succinctly moving forward. I appreciate the efforts. And then I just have a couple more questions. I saw that on the Touchstone contract that we are transferring in, I believe you said $208,000 from General Fund. Is that consistent with what we do in enterprise funds? We take money from our General Fund to backfill? So I'm gonna let Deputy Director Santos answer. Thank you. And historically we take money from the reserves in order to backfill, but when we had this conversation last year when we were bringing on Touchstone, we recognized a budget deficit going into the first year. So we transferred funds from the, had the ability to transfer funds at that time and make those accommodations at that time. So it's not entirely unheard of. We have in 2013 and 14 transferred general funds over to the Bennett Valley Golf Course in order to prop up the enterprise fund. And Vice Mayor, on the more general front, the golf course has been the predominant recipient of general fund transfers to help it balance its budget. The other enterprises have generally not seen that transfer, but that would be the source should it be needed if they had to prop up their operation. The curve that we've seen from a budgetary perspective shows that that general fund transfer is only needed this year, potentially next year before we see that operation begin to be fully self-suffunding. Thank you for that. And then I just have one more question. I noticed that you talked about the irrigation needs out at Bennett Valley Golf Course and that it's in a design phase right now. Do we have money budgeted to address those needs in this current budget so that we can start work on it immediately? So again, I'll start. I'll let Deputy Director Santos chime in. The current program and design is being done through our contract with Touchstone. And so they are the primary implementer of that program. Deputy Director Santos will be bringing a separate item to program funds directly for the ongoing construction of that site. And that should be coming here within the next two to three meetings. So it's not in the new CIP budget? It is not specifically programmed in this budget. It will come as a separate item. Okay, would it be helpful, I guess, if we actually are budgeting in this current budget for the needs that are at Bennett Valley Golf Course for irrigation? Director Alton, good afternoon and thank you for your question. I think considering the, as we came to the final amount of what the dollars would be, it made sense that we, since we were gonna be pulling from reserves in order to pay for that work out of the general fund, that we would take it at a separate item as opposed to putting it as part of our ongoing budget here. We were gonna take money from reserves, which is different from what we're doing to solve our deficit. So that was the main reason why we would take it separately. So more of a one-time? Absolutely, it's a one-time thing. Okay, thank you for that clarification. Council Member Fleming. Thank you. One thing that got triggered by something Council Member Alvarez asked about was around budget management and weed abatement and the contract that's coming forward for beautification. Would that contract then eliminate the need for what you mentioned we're using supervised adult crews? It wouldn't reduce the need, it would reduce the stress on our need. Right now we have the supervised adult crews fully engaged and we are asking for any additional teams that they have available to send our way because of the demand. The demand really is the area that our contractor would be doing. We're hoping to try to bring in that service to try to supplement some of those needs. So it wouldn't eliminate it completely, it would reduce the stress and they would then focus on the larger property areas in the wild and urban interface. Okay, well I really struggle with the ethics of using supervised adult crews as I've expressed before and without ladders to careers and I suspect that I may not be alone in that. So my request would be that while it might be potentially really expensive that at least the council have the option of what it would cost to pay people who are not incarcerated and underpaid to do this service or a proposal for a program which would indeed give these folks an opportunity to a career or an explanation of what opportunities are being provided in them when we hear the full budget. Thanks a bunch. Thank you. Any additional questions from council? All right, seeing none, I will dive into mine and I only have a couple. So I did want to ask a question about when we make improvements to parks, even neighborhood parks, are there places to park bikes because we're encouraging people to ride bikes? I just wanted to know, are there places to park them? Yes, no, and yes, right? So yes, there are some parks that have adequate and incorporated bike parking. No, not every park currently has those facilities. And yes, it's our intent as we look to modernize, update and upgrade parks and build new that they will all incorporate bike parking. So when we, the current parks that we have that are have money slated, we're going to make sure that we have parking for not only vehicles, but for bikes. Yes, as we're looking at doing renovations in specific parks, that is one of the facilities we're looking to add into those parks. Okay, and because when I look at Jason, I think of everything, parks, recreation, roads. Hearn is having some improvements. Is there money in, or is it plan to make a four-way crosswalk that goes from Southwest into the park? Is that... Mayor, are you speaking of the Hearn Community Hub project? I'm talking about Southwest Community Park and then I'm speaking of the street Hearn. So when we look at, we're going to make improvements on the streets. Are we looking also at the accessibility of the parks when we make those improvements? And would that come from parks? Or would we have to connect, and you would be the connecting factor, would we have to connect with? And yes, the intersection of Hearn and Burbank is actively on our radar. We are working to install a full traffic signal at that location for the benefit of pedestrian movement and bike movement, but also traffic flow. It is, the other part of your question is one that it's sort of in the, it depends, right? So for example, Roseland Creek Community Park, there's a crosswalk that connects the park and the school. That is a function of the park design, and it's incorporated with the environmental. And so it's the park's program that will be funding that with support from the gas tax funds on the other end. Other locations where it's a street improvement, for example, at Juilliard Park. Juilliard Park improvements are being funded specifically by transportation-oriented financial elements. And so it depends upon the specific location as to which fund is paying for the improvement, but both the recreation and parks department and the transportation and public works department are always looking at how to improve access in and out of those high use areas, especially for bicycles and pedestrians. Perfect. And then I had a question about the fee-based programs. You may have already said this, but what percentage of those programs are youth-based? All right, I'm gonna have to phone a friend again. So if we could promote Jason Parrish, I believe he's also online. It's funny, it's like that show when you get a lifeline. I'm not seeing Jason on the line. If not, Deputy Director Tibbets, do you have an answer to the mayor's question? Yeah, I wouldn't know the exact breakdown of that percentage programs. The key areas that we have obviously are aquatics that serve all ages and then youth programming, adult programming and senior programming, but the exact. Would you be looking for that percentage in terms of offerings or in terms of participation? I'll tell you why I'm looking for the percentage, so maybe that will help. I'm looking for the percentage because previously we had had a discussion and I spoke about separate but equal programming. And I want to know if that is being addressed and how it's being addressed, looking that the fee-based recreation has increased or we're getting closer to where we were pre-pandemic. So that's a concern of mine. Mayor, thank you. And so I'm gonna take the first stab and again, Deputy Director Tibbets can chime in to correct. We did hear your request and the Deputy Director and his team have been actively working on trying to create a way to merge the programs and provide more universal offerings. And so this winter was our first time doing that and it was extremely successful and Deputy Director Tibbets, I might get this wrong, it was the fairytale dance, which was the first time that we had measure O and non-supported or general population together with both programs functioning. So we're working on making that happen. And how long was the fairytale dance? I was assuming it was a day and night. So yeah, we kind of started previous conversations, we talked about it's really a plan for each different program and the different components of that program. So that's a special event where we did the fairytale ball and we had a sweetheart dance there, something exactly what's called, but essentially two very similar family events. So we merged those together, merging the staffing and resources together with that event as kind of our first pilot program. We're looking at doing a larger community event through our Spring Fest, which has been funded through measure O and measure H. And we're looking at making that a much larger community event through the entire department. And then right now one of the programs we just brought back is flag football. And as far as an ongoing program, that's the first one that we're looking right now is because it's not tied to our agreements with the school districts and those types of things, but it's really just kind of a program that we can run outside in our parks and find our own space to run the programming. So we're looking at how to grow that program and expand that program and merge the resources from that program as well. So those are a few of the areas that we're looking right now to continue to kind of expand that process. Thank you. And I see Mr. Parrish on the line. Did you have anything you wanted to add? Actually, Mayor, I was hoping you might repeat the question briefly. I was just wondering, because I had made a comment prior to about kind of separate but equal when we have programming. And I know that there were some obstacles at integrating programming when you have fee-based and non-fee-based. But I wanted to know that we're still working towards it. And if not, do we need like money to work towards it? Or like, what can we do so we don't have, I probably a lack of better term separate but equal because that's essentially what it is. You pay, you have one program and you don't pay and you are in a different program. That is a system integration issue. Or I shouldn't say it's an issue. It's something we're actually all doing right now with the neighborhood services programming, integrating with some of the other existing classes within our enterprise software. And I know there's going, Jeff has been working with his team to actually develop that even more in the coming year. And so now that we're out of COVID and we're resuming what might be considered traditional recreation program that should be taking place. And Mayor Rogers, if I could just add one more thing. I think historical context of this is important. Having been involved when measure O first passed, I think a lot of what got developed was under a microscope of concern for supplanting the general fund and I am, I hope you can trust when I say that I'm very excited that this is the conversation that we're having. It's a conversation of, I agree 100% it's the direction that we need to go with these programming. It's just finding the right way to work back from 20 years of we have to keep everything separated to show that we're not supplanting anything from the general fund and that really being the microscope to I am much happier running programming looking at how do we serve youth, the best we can get everyone together and do these programming. So I think it's a sign that we're in a much better place with this measure, especially as it passes again as measure H and we have another 20 years. But that's a little historical context as to some of the complication of unwinding some of that. Okay, and initially, and I'll say it again, the reason why this was an issue for me is because I had to drive across town to take my son for a summer program because I live in Southwest, Santa Rosa and I did not financially, I was disqualified from him participating in a program that was right around the corner from my house. So this is what actually brought my attention to it, but the problem is still the same. We should not have separated programming. Absolutely agree and one more thing to highlight again, there's not gonna be a one answer to everything. It's the steps that we're taking, but one of the slides of our accomplishments mentioned the increase in membership based off of adding the residency. And so in the particular example that you gave, that is something that has now been avoided. And again, it doesn't solve every aspect of that problem, but again, it's the continued steps that we take to look at it from all different angles and make sure that we correct that over time. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions regarding that. So with that being said, I'm assuming you don't need any money for that, that you guys are working on that and trying to find a way to work around some of the rules for the grant funded or other programming that we have. Any questions from council before council member Alvarez? Could you describe, thank you. Could you describe the Rosen lighting district please? I'm sorry, the Rosalind. The Rosen lighting district. General fund proposed CIP projects and it's on page 61. So the Rosalind lighting district was, it's a function of the annexation process. There is a standalone assessment that was placed for a particular area of Rosalind. That was managed and operated by the county. With the annexation, the city did take over those street lights and that district. It has taken some time to get all of the data and information together and transferred from the county to the city. And so that's why you're starting to see that today as opposed to five years ago when we initially took on Rosalind as a part of the community. So it is specific to those lights that are assigned to that assessment district. And I believe this was through the LAFCO agreement. Correct. I don't have to report that we have a council member who sits on that board. Thank you sir. So thank you, thank you, thank you for everything that you do. Like parks definitely is a place that everyone can go to regardless of their income, income level and recreations is something that we want everyone to have the ability to experience. So thank your department and thank you for the presentation. Thank you, mayor. And I'll just say it's a phenomenal team and they are very excited to all be back together again. The challenge for you though is you don't get to lose me, I get to stay up here. Our next department is gonna be Transportation and Public Works. Again, I am Jason Nut, the assistant city manager and acting transportation and public works director. With me is deputy director Rachel Ead. I will cover the general aspect of the department and Rachel will help discuss the city bus budget. Again, as I mentioned with the recreation and parks side of the house, the numbers on here seemingly are all over the board and it specifically relates to the transfer of budgetary items from transportation and public works to recreation and parks. That is the 31 employees, the Benetville Golf Course, the Capital Improvement Program and all the associated budget line items. And so it's very difficult, like with some of the other departments to go line by line and explain to you what's happening. If we go to the next slide, which is looking at programs, in general what we have operating is a flat operation. We have increases because of MOU changes, increases in costs relating to fleet replacement, increases in costs relating to electricity and gas. Those were actually significant increases in costs this year for both. And we're starting to see increased cost in resource and services. One of the additions up here relates to the 60, almost 67% increase in the zero waste operations. We are adding funding into this year's budget specifically to begin addressing SB 1383 while implementation date was two years ago, there's been a lag in enforcement. It is now time for CalRecycle to start stepping up their enforcement activities. And in response to that, we need to make sure that we are prepping our organization, our community to respond. And so our zero waste coordinator is going to be incorporating some additional activities that are showing up in this budget. As I mentioned, really the major change here and the general fund is this shift of staff and operations from relating to park maintenance and park planning. So we'll just go straight into accomplishments. We have a number of different divisions that are doing a ton of great things and trying to pare down all of the activities and all of the accomplishments was difficult, but I did my best to give you a summary. The local road safety plans is really our opportunity to begin taking those high incident corridors for bike and pet incidents and really study them to a level of detail that we believe we can actually implement improvements in a way that starts to have direct impact in reducing the severity and number of collisions with bicyclists and pedestrians. There are three primary corridors that we looked at this year with the fourth corridor having been studied the year prior. That fourth corridor was Stony Point Road. The three that we studied this last year were four streets, Montgomery Drive and North Dutton. Those particular programs are really critical. We held a number of public meetings and we now have a program to implement to the benefit of roadway safety. We are using that term, which is a local road safety plan to actively go after grant funding. That is now a tool and a requirement for certain grants such as the Highway Safety Improvement Program. And having these in place will actually give us additional points and qualify us for certain grants where we wouldn't otherwise. So huge effort and I applaud the staff for getting that. I will also say is if you've been around this community as much as we don't like to be the bleeding edge of things in some ways we are in others. And you heard from other departments, places that we've gone and taken the lead nationally. Historically from a traffic perspective, we were the first to implement pedestrian activated flashing beacons, especially the in-ground ones. So we were ground zero for that. Now we are working with SMART and the California Public Utility Commission to implement a rectangular rapid flashing beacon protocol for multi-use path crossings at railroad crossings. It's a lot of words there. But the idea being is not every intersection of a railroad crossing mandates requires a traffic signal. One, people just won't obey that because they won't wait for the indicator for them to cross. But two, it just doesn't make sense if the volume of the road or the safety indicators on that road are low enough to allow bicyclists and pedestrians to cross that roadway with that enhanced safety beacon. And so Sebastopol Road is our primary location. We're having a great success with that. The Public Utility Commission is very pleased with the level of work that's going on there. And this not only means a substantial win for the city of Santa Rosa as we look to incorporate these safety elements that are at a reasonable cost, but for SMART in general, as they look to expand this throughout their corridor at many of these uncontrolled crossings. So that was a huge win for us. As council approved back in December of 22, we are now fully funded moving forward with the Herne Avenue Improvement Phase Three. That's the interchange project. Great project. I'm finally seeing it come to fruition. And I've only been here for 13 years. So folks who've been here longer have a lot more excitement about seeing this come and move forward. We expect to hear about the LPP competitive grant in early June. And that is the last piece for us to get this out on the street to bid as council's action. We do have the alternative that doesn't slow the project down. We just hope the grant is successful. So more things to come there and our partnership with SCTA is working beautifully. We did go through and develop and implement the first battery electric buses in the city. We've got four out on the street. We have five more that we're actively working on bringing into our community. Rachel will be happy to tell you all that good news when she gives the transit update. We started the project for the outreach for the Herm community hub project. That's a new fire station eight. That's the Southwest area library branch. And it's a new multicultural community center. So that particular project is now getting too full swing. You've awarded two key contracts for us in the earlier part of this year. So preliminary design is on its way. And we now have a permanent project manager who will be leading this effort as we move into our community meetings this summer. Realistically, just want to give you a high level thought of what's going on. In 2022, we invested $49 million into public infrastructure projects. 26 million of that was in the non-enterprise side and 23 million in the enterprise side. It's pretty hefty considering our staffing challenges that we're having and we'll discuss that more when I get to that slide. On the real estate front, I got to say that team has really been pushing it into high gear. They went through and completed the acquisition of the three properties for the Herm community hub. That is now complete and final. And the project can now move forward without any hesitation. Not on this, but they also were able to complete the acquisition of the Bell property. Bell property is the part of and the key piece of the Laura Colgan Creek phase three. And that is super exciting, especially with the grant funds coming in. They were instrumental in setting up the Surplus Lands Act sale of properties in the downtown. We have great proposals that we're currently reviewing right now and we're very excited to see how that could reinvest in our downtown community and get those properties activated. And we're looking at finalizing the map for Fire Station Five. Fire Station Five, thank you for awarding that contract. We're excited to see that start to break ground. And we'll have an announcement on the groundbreaking ceremony coming public here very soon. And so great opportunity, but they also helped us get all of the legal boundary issues and the easements that cross that property organized so that we can start construction. For street maintenance, the data that you see here actually is a little bit old because this is data that was provided for you prior to goal setting. So as of February, we had done almost 4,200 cubic yards of roadside and encampment debris in 22, almost 9,400 graffiti tags in the 5,100 potholes. Now, just in April, that team has removed 542 tags. 204 potholes were filled and they removed 213 cubic yards of material. In every case, they've exceeded the target response times when those responses come into our department with graffiti being within 23 hours, potholes within 56 hours and roadside debris within 42 hours. Our target is 72. The team is really working hard to make those primary aspects of our service for this community. Moving into fleet maintenance, the Telematics program was huge. And thank you to council for giving us the funding and the authorization to proceed with that. All vehicles have had Telematics incorporated that's giving us specific and real data on the travel patterns of our staff, our equipment and it's really helping us to organize our replacement program making it more efficient and effective moving forward. So really appreciate that. And obviously that team was really a critical component in helping fire move their assets into the replacement fund. On the solid waste front, we've been working actively with Recology to make that service agreement sustain into the future. We've been making amendments along the way and really setting up so that they can assist us with the SB1383 implementation. We did get a grant from CalRecycle to help us with that SB133 implementation and we are working with them with our zero waste team as the lead to implement the Clean Santa Rosa initiative where we're going out into communities and cleaning up roadside debris and really trying to make our neighborhoods and community areas look better all the way around. From a city bus, we did talk about the battery electric buses, they secured funds to bring in six additional buses as well as the second phase of infrastructure charging. We can currently charge, or we will very soon be able to charge 10 buses. We're hoping to expand that to 20 with an additional 10 chargers through this grant program. And they're working really hard with our partners through a number of different initiatives. In particular through our TIES study, this is the Transit Integration and Efficiency Study that the city kicked off. It was our initiative several years ago. All other agencies are starting to come on board and through the efforts that Deputy Director Ead has along with Executive Director Smith at SCTA, we're starting to see substantial changes with the most exciting coming is the Free Fair for Youth program. And I think Rachel may touch on that here shortly. So some of the very cool things that are happening within the department and we're super pleased with the efforts of our team. Now, what are some of the challenges? As I mentioned early on, electricity and natural gas are really going through the roof. Our contract services are also starting to increase substantially, whether it's the janitorial, the alarm, or the pest. Staffing has been our biggest issue. So you heard HR report that we have 124 vacancies in the city, 49 of those are in public works. I have approximately a 50% vacancy rate in our capital projects engineering team, 20% in street maintenance and 20% in our city bus. So we are experiencing high levels of turnover. Folks are either moving out into retirement, they're moving on to other careers that have a different pay and benefit package to them. Or they're finding other opportunities that have different salary and benefit options, such as fully remote work opportunities. So that's some of the struggles that we're having in the department. It is really starting to hand tie us in certain areas. I will say we are ebbing and flowing in every division to try to keep up, catch up, and continue to look forward in a positive way. And I'm really proud of the team for what they've been able to do with that. On the fleet front, our challenges, the availability of equipment just doesn't exist. We are now in our third year of trying to replace vehicles that were supposed to be replaced three years ago. The equipment just isn't out there. We're seeing 24 to 36 month build times on certain types of equipment. So once we get them ordered, there is a lag in the delivery. There's a big push to bring in electric equipment. Electric fleets aren't out right now. And we think part of our challenge with our gas and diesel equipment delivery challenges and ordering challenges are that manufacturers are trying to figure out how to shift their production from fossil fuel to electric or sustainable operations. And that is creating a huge lag on both fronts. And so while it may seem like both from the department perspective and from the community and council perspective that we are slow at integrating, I can tell you we are working extremely hard to try to bring equipment in. It's just the availability is not there at the moment. And as soon as we start to see those order windows open, we're gonna be all over it. I promise you. Some of our vacancies have arisen from, we've been without a director for a year. And we've been without a deputy director of engineering services for three and a half years. We've been filling in and substituting staff over the course of that time. I've been filling in from my role in that position. I will say, thankfully to our human resource department, I can announce that we at least have a conditional job offer for an employee for our deputy director of engineering services. Can't tell you how thrilled and elated our staff is. That is a huge hole to fill. And I will, I am very excited about the candidate and we'll give you an opportunity to meet that person when they come on board. And I think you'll be very pleased with the selection. We are still working with the city manager's office to determine and identify a staffing response for the climate action goal. And so that's something that the department will be working with both myself, the assistant city manager Dunstan and city manager Smith to try to understand how we can roll that and moving forward so that we can meet and achieve the goals that you've put on the table for the city this upcoming year. With that, I'd like to turn it over to deputy director Ede to go over the transit enterprise budget. Thanks, Jason. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor and members of council. I'm pleased to be here to present the proposed budget for the transit enterprise. And just to provide an overview, the transit enterprise fund funds both Santa Rosa City and Santa Rosa Paratransit, the ONM, as well as the capital program, as well as the other activities of the transit division. So in fiscal 2324, we are proposing a budget just under 16.6 million. That does represent a 9% increase over the current year to give it a little bit of a COVID recovery context. However, that is also a 9% increase over our fiscal 1920 budget. So really, that just demonstrates how we're starting to get back in our recovery to a point where we were right before the pandemic with that 9% increase. And I'll talk on the next slide about some of the factors driving that increase. The transfer in is a general fund transfer of $30,000 to support our free fair program for veterans. That's a transfer the council has made over the past several years to backfill the lost revenue for that program. And as you all know, the fair free programs that we have in place have shown the strongest ridership recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic. So we're grateful to continue to be able to offer that program. And the veterans community certainly is grateful to be able to take advantage of that free access to city bus. We are not proposing any use of reserves this year. We do have sufficient revenues to cover this proposed budget. I do wanna note however that we anticipate we will have some significant savings against this budget as we are still carrying 14 vacant bus operator positions. As you all know, that's really been hampering our ability to further restore service. So I don't anticipate even with our efforts and my anticipation that over the next few months we will make some inroads on that number of vacancies. I do anticipate we will have some savings in this coming year. So in terms of some of the highlights and the factors driving increase this year, one of the major ones is fuel and this is a very conservative estimate we've made for fuel this year. One because we're still hoping to restore service. We'd like to have about four more buses out on the road this year in service getting additional frequency back on the routes that are still operating at half their pre-pandemic frequency. So in addition to leaving the diesel budget flat anticipating that while we have brought four new battery electric buses into our fleet, we're gonna hopefully get four more of our older buses back on the road. We are incorporating electricity as a fuel source for the first time and because we only have a few months of experience with fueling our electric buses and it's a very complicated rate structure that has to do with the fueling as well as the charging and the timing of it. We don't have a really solid baseline at this point in time and we're also seeing PG&E's proposals for the significant rate increases as you know in the coming year. So this estimate or this proposal for our fuel budget is conservative taking to account all those factors as we understand this transition from an all diesel fleet to a mixed fleet of diesel and battery electric buses. Hopefully at mid-year we'll be able to come in with a downward adjustment but we wanna just make sure we cover our bases on fueling giving all of the uncertainty and volatility. We also have a 165,000 anticipated increase in our purchase transportation cost and that is for our MV transportation contract for Santa Rosa paratransit. Of that increase, the majority of it is associated with an increase in the contract cost itself and the majority of that increase is related to higher wages for the paratransit drivers per the CBA that MV has with its labor group. We also anticipate we'll have a little bit of additional service demand in the paratransit service in the coming year. We are seeing demand continue to recover not quite back to pre-pandemic levels yet but it is occurring. So we've incorporated that as well. We've added $63,000 in professional services to include some staff augmentation for delivery of capital projects. Good news is we've been very fortunate with getting a lot of competitive grants for everything from vehicles to facility improvements to passenger amenities over the past few years but we need to have some additional capacity to bring on as needed to work with our CPE team and TPW to assist with delivery of those projects so we can get them done and delivered within the grant required time frames. So that would be something we would just bring on in it as an added basis to augment our staff. And finally, we are also adding funding for private security at the transit mall. Actually, we have already put private security in place given some of the issues we've been having recently through the contingency line of the city's contract but we will be looking to come forward to council with an amendment to the city's contract to amend in funds for ongoing private security at the transit mall as we reset that environment to a more safe and secure space. And the last note I just wanna leave you with is that we are using the last of our ARPA funds, our emergency relief funds for transit in this year's budget. Next year when we come to you, we will be on our own post COVID emergency relief. Using those funds this year does allow us to bank some of our Transportation Development Act funds to ease that transition next year. But as we move forward and continue to restore service, we will be really keeping a close eye. Things are gonna get tighter, costs are rising in all categories as Director Nutt indicated. And so we will be, you know, keeping a close watch on those expenses and what our revenues look like as we look forward to the fiscal 24-25 budget. And with that, I'll turn it back to Director Nutt or Assistant City Manager Nutt. He's both. Thank you, Deputy Director Eid. And with that, Mayor and Council, that concludes the public works budget. We're happy to answer questions. Looking at Council Member Rogers. So first of all, I wanna point out for folks who don't know what in accomplishment it is that you're able to deliver a transit budget right now without dipping into the reserves. Every single SCTA meeting that we have, every single transit meeting we have, the only real conversation that's happening in everybody's mind is the fiscal cliff of transit falling off. And I think, you know, our brethren at the Golden Gate Bridge District, they're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a week because of the transit patterns and presenting us a balanced budget without having to use reserves. Really just wanted to call that out how incredible that is given the times that we're at. Assistant City Manager, I wanted to ask you, first and foremost, about first last mile options, give us an update on what's happening with BIRD, our operator, and what the future of first last mile within the context of this budget looks like over the next year. Yeah, thank you, Council Member Rogers. First last mile is definitely a target for us. And there are a number of initiatives that are currently underway, whether being housed by the city or other entities within Sonoma County. BIRD is our current contracted operator of scooters, which started out in a robust way and really looked solid. We had great ridership. We had an exciting robust launch and we started to see significant, what we thought was gonna be a significant boom for our first and last mile. Over the course of time, we did start to see ridership wane. Now the question is, and part of the conversations that I've had with Council Member Rogers is, is ridership waning because ridership is waning or because there's less and less equipment out on the street. What we did find is that our operator is having some struggles in particular in our area. They've had national trouble as well as local management issues. And we are still working with the corporation to rectify our local issues. We've been told that the local issue is unrelated to their national corporate issue. But we have not seen the type of recovery that we had hoped. We are going to be engaging with them more assertively over the course of the next few weeks. We are gonna be seeing a new transportation planner start in transportation and public works who will fill Nancy Adams' position who retired earlier this year. And that individual will help shepherd because that will be part of their goal and directive to shepherd that conversation with Bird to make sure that we start to understand what their intent is long-term. And if we feel that it's not compatible with our goal that we'll shift and move on. Other initiatives, I'll have to get back to you on some. There is a bike share program that is being rolled out between SCTA and TAM with Nancy's absence. I don't have an update today on that, but I can get back to you and share that information with you in the future. There have been conversations from SMART and the downtown business community about incorporating a first and last mile in the downtown. I think that conversation is still underway. And once that formulates into a plan that they're planning to implement, we'll come back and describe that for you in more detail. I'll just look to Deputy Director, she may have, is there anything else? No, I would say in terms of that downtown circulator concept, we're providing assistance in terms of, given our past experience with running a circulator, but I believe it is still in formulation and more to come on that. Great, thank you. We have a building conditions index similar to parks that you talked about that we've completed. How are we, I'm looking at this through public works, but we can talk about it elsewhere if you'd like to, but how are we addressing not just the deferred maintenance on our streets, but also the deferred maintenance for our buildings? That's a great question. Council Member Rogers and a very difficult one to answer. It's difficult because our investment strategy is far short of what the need is. Back in fiscal year 2018, 2019, we came forward to council with the results of the condition assessment and requested a $3 million annual investment to try to bring our facilities up into the good condition. And we were unable to continue that allotment even though council incorporated into that year budget, it got pulled back as we went into the pandemic. It was felt that the need for those resources would extend beyond facility investment. We have not come back to council with any further requests given the state of the current budget. There are programmatic and prioritized investment strategies that we've put forward, that we've been talking with the city manager's office about. And if there's opportunity moving forward for additional or programmatic funding that could go toward facilities, there is a plan in place and the city manager's office is open to that dialogue given other needs of our community and our city operation. So it's unfortunately right now we are utilizing our current facilities budget to sustain to the best of our ability, the operations that are existing with limited upgrades and limited improvements. But we're doing our best to keep our facilities operational and in the best possible condition we can for our staff, our community and the public. All right, that'd be encouraging if there was a further conversation about how we direct more of those resources. Again, just looking at it from a long term expected yield or return on investment, particularly with our streets, we've seen the degradation curve and we know how much more expensive it goes or it is once we let it go. And then do you wanna talk about bike lanes now or should I wait until capital improvement projects? Let's, your pleasure, we can do it now and I can respond later if it's more appropriate. So please feel free. Sure, we'll do it now so we can take two bites at the apple then. Obviously we have a very robust bicycle pedestrian master plan. We hear consistent public comment as we did yesterday at our council meeting about expanding on that and accelerating the adoption of that. Is there anything in the budget this year geared towards either the full implementation or even just picking a critical corridor like College Avenue and figuring out how to better protect the bike lanes that exist there to increase ridership? Yes, there is and given that question, I will expand on those particular areas when we go through the capital improvement program budget but we are through the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board and through our regional partners working very closely to try to incorporate more and enhanced bicycle and pedestrian facilities throughout town. You'll see things, well, we talked already about programs that were implemented through the local road safety plan, things that we've done community-based, community-oriented with substantial feedback to create a plan and a design for a particular corridor. Financially, it's a matter of getting those funded. Because of our current capital improvement program investment strategy, a majority of the funds that we use are either gas tax, measure M streets or grant funding. And so local road safety plan projects in particular, the reason we do that is so that we can qualify and be highly thought of for grant funding so that we can utilize those other forms to match. And so we are doing our best to incorporate where we can but we do look to grant funding for a lot of those enhancements. Now, when we look at a resurfacing project, we look at other pavement restoration, we are always looking at ways that we can improve the conditions and utilizing the current funding for that project to make a betterment. And we've been successful in most cases of making betterments along the way. I appreciate that. And I know you and I talk about this all the time that smooth roads are important for bikes too. And investments in better bike lanes help bring up the PCIA pavement condition index as well across the city. So I'd like to see those improvements. I also like to propose that there's a low hanging fruit program that we could adopt or implement out there. Very similar to what you talked about with parks about adopting a green space. Why not a program adopting a bike lane where folks can help working with the city to make improvements to make the bike lanes that exist safer. We've talked about this quite a bit. I loved when I was in Canada, the protected bike lanes that they had that they used flower pots to protect the bike lane which added to the aesthetic made it look like a welcoming community. And then also obviously protected the bikes. Why not start a program like that where people can adopt existing bike lanes, put in something like a planner box or something to help delineate it and take some ownership over the streets. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I appreciate those thoughts. Council Member Stapp. My question is really just an add-on to Council Member Rogers. First, thanks to the Traffic Department for how responsive they've been to some of the traffic issues. Across the city, but especially in District 2, it's been a rough year in District 2. You brought it up in your remarks where you talked about some of the areas of focus specifically on pedestrians, which again is an add-on to our bike traffic. There are obviously other corridors, in addition to the ones that you mentioned on the slides. Is this an increased area of emphasis for the Traffic Department and for TPW? Are we gonna be able to do more with some of the higher risk pedestrian crossings in the city? So the team has been working, I mean, our traffic team, as I mentioned, has kind of been out in front in many ways. Like I said, as the initiator of the in-ground pavement flashing beacons, we've done our best to try to be in front and we have a really talented team in traffic engineering. What they're looking to do at this point is to utilize a combination of new implementation in an existing facility to provide enhancements. For example, one of the projects we're gonna be bringing forward is the utilization of TDA funds to go out and incorporate rectangular rapid flashing beacons, pedestrian activated at a number of crossings through town. We currently have seven identified. We think we're gonna have funding to be able to implement nine. That's a positive influence and we're utilizing data that we collect and we are data organization engineers. We have a tendency to be very programmatic that way but we are data heavy in that sense to try to determine where the highest priorities are for those implementations. One of the other tools that they've already started to talk about is are there ways that we can utilize existing infrastructure and enhance it further? We went forward and implemented a hawk over in front of the junior college in Santa Rosa High School, which is a modified or hybrid traffic signal that allows pedestrians a safe stop oriented crossing but should that pedestrian move through in advance of the dedicated time, vehicles have the opportunity to proceed after stopping. And so it's an innovative approach. While we weren't the first, we were definitely looking at places that we could implement those. And so one of the thoughts is how do we take what were our historic innovative approach of those overhead flashing yellow lights and turning those into a hawk oriented type of program? And we believe that there are already equipment on the street that we can start to implement a program and other locations where some of that equipment exists, it's a much lower investment cost to convert those to that type of facility. So they are actively looking at how they can make some of those adjustments and changes to the benefit of our bicycle and pedestrian communities safety moving forward in the near term. Council Member O'Crapke. Thank you, Mayor. So first I just want to say real real quick, anecdotally, there was this football player in the 90s named Cordell Stewart, whose nickname was Slash because he played quarterback slash running back slash wide receiver. And I say that because this is your second of three presentations today. You're an assistant city manager slash interim deputy director of engineering slash interim slash interim slash interim. So that's been going on for over a year now. So I just want to say thank you, Jason, for right now for going above and beyond which I think you even expected to do. So thank you for all of that. My question that I wanted to ask was when I was on planning commission, one of the things that frustrated me the most is we had to play pretend. And this is a, this may be a planning slash public works question, but I think some of my council, fellow council members have had to do this too where a specific project comes forward. And oh yes, this will be approved because this street's going to be there. And the question, but the street's not there, but we have to pretend like it is. And there's streets that have been talked about since the 60s that were codified in the general plan 20 years ago that still don't exist. And my question after saying all that is, are there projects out there that have been on the books for years that we can work to get off the books in some way shape or form so that we can allocate time, energy, money and staff to other pursuits? Thanks council member. So this is what you and the city manager are doing when you're talking the same language right now, which is how do we really look at our project lists? Cause we do, we've got projects. I mean, whether it's North Point Parkway or Farmer's Lane Extension or the widening of West College or I mean, I can go on and on about projects that exist that have zero funding assigned to them. But yet because of our general plan, we continue to require certain things to occur. That's why for example, you drive down Dutton on the south part, south of Sebastopol. You've got some that are four lanes wide and some that are two lanes wide because the general plan has shifted over the course of time to try to respond to what we're visioning as the future travel and traffic patterns in our community. So yes, there are absolutely projects we have to reconsider. There are absolutely pain points in reconsidering those projects. In part of the response to your question is the response to council member Rogers question. There is a resource limitation financially for many of those projects. Great idea, look good on paper. Actually in order to make certain things work are required but will we ever be able to truly fund them? And so through this general planning process, we're having to ask some of those questions. Can we sustain without it? What if we don't do that? And so we're actively working on those questions right now. I don't have answers for you partly because the traffic engineer in me and the public works guy says I want them all because I think they're vital and critical to the long-term viability of our community from a circulation standpoint. I mean, we all hear about traffic woes in our community and in certain parts of town. Those certain parts of town are where this critical infrastructure isn't yet constructed. And the question is, will we, should we and how are we going to? And so those are the questions that we're gonna have to ask moving forward in the next year or two. Thank you, I appreciate that. I just wanna point out that this is not something that would be the fault of staff or anything like that. I mean, of mice and men, right? The best laid plans. But I think that it's important to understand that no matter what we're talking about, what a lot of policy comes down to and a lot of our ability to do is a city comes down to staffing and funding. And so if we can be more efficient in ways like you're talking about, we're addressing these projects to see if they're realistic or needed or both. I think it's important. Thank you. Vice Mayor McDonnell. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions for you. As far as the ridership on the last mile, I don't know if they're called the birds or whatever we're using. Do you think that statewide it's been a problem because it's been such a wet winter that maybe that's why ridership has gone off or is it simply just equipment and we're having problems with? You know, I wish we had enough consistency with our current operator to be able to answer that question. And so I'd like to believe that it's a weather issue and that that's the real reason why ridership has dropped off. I have us, I suspect that it's broader than that and more relating to the amount, number and deployment of the equipment. And that is a contractual issue that we're having to deal directly with the operator. Some cities and communities, this is a phenomenal first and last mile resource. And that's what we wanted to hop on the bandwagon. They haven't been successful in every community like some, but I believe we've got the right community and I think that really is one of the most, one of the most viable first last mile options that we're gonna have, especially in our downtown area. I think it's a great resource and we need to make efforts to shore up that contract and make sure that we can have that operation work effectively. I agree with you. And you know, specifically as we continue to develop the downtown area, I think it's gonna be even more important to have those types of options. And going along that line, and I know council member staff had asked a question around specifically crosswalks. And this is something that I think is high on our mind as we look at bike paths and walkability in the city. And I'm getting requests in my district for specific areas that have been a long time problem. Could you tell me how those are prioritized in a budget so that there's more of an equitable approach around the city in the district so that we can look at specifically areas where children maybe walk and ride to school. And so we're promoting that kind of walking school bus and those types of programs, safe routes to school. Just because I know that sometimes we focus on the high traffic areas, but there are other areas in the city that maybe impact 100 community members, but the safety of that. So that's still not clear. And maybe that goes back to the need for prioritizing by district and coordinating what's being done in our CIP budget. And that's something I think I'll probably touch on again. I know I've asked in the past, but specifically around crosswalks, how do we actually effectively make sure that these are being done in each of our districts as our community members request us to do? Yeah, thank you, Vice Mayor. You know that we are actively working to transition all of our operations to a districted format. One of those is we've had historical lists of locations where community members have requested street crossing improvements for safety or for accessibility or for convenience. And those lists have been prioritized over the course of time, some of which go higher depending upon, like I said, engineers. So we're linear in the statistical front of things. Ones that meets the statistics and conditions more robustly tend to be higher on the list than those that are at less. And so as we transition to those lists to districted format, we are creating that specific program within each of the seven districts. That's why this year's rectangular rapid flashing beacon program includes one for each district and not necessarily the highest priority seven in town. And so that's the direction that we are moving with all of our, I wanna say, capital investments relating to maintenance and response for safety. Those tend to not have larger capital planning processes. They are more relating specifically to community input and requests as well as safety concerns that arise. So that's how we've come up with the current program. And that's how those have made their way to the top of the list for this upcoming funding cycle. Thank you, that's helpful. Council member Fleming. A couple of things. One is just I wanted to split a couple other council members have said around bike and pedestrian safety, being a top concern and wanting to make sure that our bike lanes are as operational as possible. I love council member Roger's idea that he brought back from Canada around the planters. I can see that from a bureaucratic perspective that might just be lots of, I could see lots of reasons why there would be no, but I urge you to try to figure out a way to help us say yes. I think people would love to tend to those and take care of them. And our pavement conditions, both benefit bikers and cars alike. So I'd like to see a real emphasis on safe biking conditions and just know that you have my full support to implement that and to be bold and to try things. And if they don't work, that's okay. I just heard you say something that really concerned me, which was that instead of picking the seven most dangerous places to put a flasher, you're picking one in each district. It's really important to me that they go to the seven most dangerous places, even if my district doesn't get one, because the lives of Santa Rosans, you know, I'm here to represent district four, but the lives of all Santa Rosans, like I just couldn't sleep at night if we got one, just for political reasons, when someone else with a more dangerous intersection didn't get one. Thank you, council member for that feedback. I appreciate it. And I will say on the, you know, in response to the comment on council member Roger's point, some of the activities that we as a city have done in other departments, such as planning an economic development, looking at the Parklet program, that is giving us a new vision on how we can implement other technologies and techniques on roadways shoulders. But I certainly appreciate the feedback on the list for enhancements. Council member Rogers. Yeah, I appreciate it. And that's actually why I raised my hand as well, was to reiterate that point that I know that we're in districts now, and I know I'm the last of the dinosaurs that have been elected citywide, but I don't care when we talk about safety about keeping everything equitable for the sake of fitting it into the molds of all of us representing districts. I want a methodology behind it around safety, around when we're gonna get the best bang for our buck. I don't want us to break into sort of parochialism as it pertains to city infrastructure. I want us to look where the need is and make sure we're investing dollars that way. So I wanted to support that. Thank you. I do have to go back to Vice Mayor, but I wanted to piggyback off of that one to say that to me it is important that we look at districts because historically things have not been equitably distributed. And in a particular district, you may get some people that will speak up more about something being non-safe. And so they may be the loudest, but it doesn't mean that the safety concerns are not within another district, but we definitely go to those intersections and to those places to look because we hear them. So when we get the emails, we get the phone calls, we respond, we see, we hear and we try to respond. So I would like it if you stayed doing the districts, but maybe Mayor, we have one in your district that is due, but we know that it is not on the safety list, but this one really is, and this is a priority. As a council member, I think I should have the ability to say, I think you're right, Assistant City Manager Nut, we should go ahead and do that one, but can you make sure that this crosswalk gets on the list as soon as possible? So that would just be my two cents with that. And Mayor, thank you for that. And in response, I will say we're not losing track of safety concerns and specific locations. In fact, that's part of why the team is insistent on trying to add additional non-programmed locations so that we can begin to address those other high-profile sites around town. So they are cognizant of making sure that we're addressing the highest-profile issues we can while having geographic equity within the district. So I appreciate the feedback. Vice Mayor McDonald. Yes, I appreciate that, and I certainly wouldn't want to take away from a district that has safety concerns, but want to make sure that how we're capturing that information, because you said you're linear in thinking, is it based on accidents? Is there a way to report near misses? Because I'm not sure that that's how we actually, right now, capture the information in specific areas, either through our app. Is there a way to expand on how we're getting that data so that it actually isn't necessary for us to have a fatal incident for us to be able to be reactive, but in fact, understanding that this can be a problem every single day, several times during the day, and that because maybe somebody's paying attention, we haven't had that horrific incident occur, but I'm just curious how those statistics are actually captured through the city so that we are getting accurate data. I appreciate that. We take into consideration feedback from the community when we talk about near misses. Near misses are very difficult to calculate and to corroborate, and so, again, from, and when we try not to be bureaucratic to a T, we try to utilize that as a tool to help us gauge and prioritize. And so, we are routinely taking feedback, even if it's the assessment and statement of near misses, into the calculation as we start to move forward in. And you'll see every time we do a traffic and engineering study, because we have to do one for each of the enhancement locations, we do identify whether or not there's a known statistical report or whether it's based on community-oriented report or, quite frankly, report from other departments, such as fire and police. Thank you, that's helpful. Any additional questions? Council Member Alvarez? Well, with a discussion that just happened shortly, just a little bit ago, I do have to thank my fellow colleagues for recognizing the area of San Rosa that might need a little bit more help than others. So, to my fellow colleagues, thank you for recognizing that District One, specifically, has received a lot of help from not only staff, the departments, the focus, but my colleagues here as well. I believe that if we just go back a couple of pages in today's presentation, one of the words that you see most is Roseland and is District One, is Sebastopol Road, and I do agree that we should look at each district equitably, but I do feel that we as a city of San Rosa are recognizing what parts of our town needs a little bit of that push, and I have to again thank our council members for recognizing that as well, thank you. Any additional questions from council? Seeing none, I will ask the last questions. So, the EVIT, very interested in charging stations. The training, how we're gonna implement that, is that in the budget, are we doing it in-house, are we contracting out, and take it away, because I'm very interested in if we need to invest the money. So, our electrical staff, thank you, Mayor, for the question, our electrical staff is EVIT-trained. Those members that are new or are coming into that program will get trained, and so that process is underway. We have historically installed our own electric vehicle charging stations with our internal staff, depending on what the future holds for us that may shift purely from a resource and scale standpoint. So, we are in the process of putting together an electric vehicle master plan. What that plan will do is look at not only the city's current fleet and our desired need to have charging equipment, but also the city's public parking infrastructure and the need to provide charging equipment for private vehicles, and it will give us guidance on the numbers, the locations, and how we should be looking to not only install but connect to the grid or not. And so that particular initiative should be going out, soliciting for proposals this summer in the next month. A draft of the solicitation is already prepared and being circulated internally, and we would expect that we would have some results by the end of the year so that this next fiscal year's budget will look at how we can begin to roll out an implementation program. When we are doing our own installation, our staff will be fully and totally trained per state requirement. Training, are there different types of training? How does training work? Like, I know you said state requirement, but are there different types of training? There are private institutions that will, that you can buy training at. We've sent individuals to those programs for training and certification, and that's how we'll continue to do it for our staff. For private entities, contractors, or individuals looking to do that, there are a dozen or so companies that are providing that training, and we would encourage them to go and look them up to see if there's one locally that fits their needs. Okay. We are not providing training for the general public for EVIT. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. And seeing no additional comments or questions from my fellow council members, thank you very much for the presentation. You guys did awesome. And we will now recess for lunch. We will return at 1.45. Thank you. All right, and seeing that we have a quorum, Madam Deputy City Clerk, may you please call the roll. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Here. Council Member Ocrepke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers, present. Let the record reflect all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming. Thank you. I think we left off with Santa Rosa Water Department. So Director Burke, please take it away. Thank you Mayor Rogers and members of the council. I'm Jennifer Burke. I'm the Santa Rosa Water Director. And with me here today is Nick Harvey and he is our budget and financial analysis manager. Before we start, I just wanted to take a moment to recognize all of the effort that your board puts into our budget every year. So we met with the Board of Public Utilities starting in February, actually starting in January. We had a couple budget subcommittee meetings with them, thoroughly went through our budget. We brought our full budget in front of them in study session and then we also brought it to them for a recommendation. So the budget you see before you today in study session is actually recommended by the Board of Public Utilities as well as our Subregional Technical Advisory Committee. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Nick and he's gonna go through a few of our slides related to our funds and then I'll talk about accomplishments and the summaries for our enterprise. Nick. Thank you, Director Burke. So to start off today we're gonna do some variance analysis from a couple different looks in our department, one by the fund structure the funding mechanism and the other from a programmatic standpoint. To start off with, we're seeing the same challenges or increases that many departments around the city are including two and a half percent colas as of July 1, 2024. We're seeing increased electricity and chemical costs. We're seeing increased safety training and certification costs, things of that nature. And I'll speak to those more specifically when we get into the programmatic look because I feel that provides more context into our operations. Regarding the budget by fund here, the first thing I wanted to point out is as you all know, the general fund helps fund our stormwater enterprise. And so that 15.2% increase, that's general funds portion of the stormwater enterprise, mostly attributable to the two and a half percent colas and the addition of one position in our stormwater enterprise which we'll touch on later in the presentation. The other main takeaway I wanted to point out on this cap is the capital improvement funds citywide. I wanna avoid any impression that that is general fund money going towards capital improvement. What that is is our stormwater enterprise has a couple programmatic stormwater drainage improvement projects. And those because of the scope and nature of those projects have access to some special revenue funds. So those are actually coming from special revenue funds that are not in fact indicative of general fund transfers going into CIP. So I just wanted to clarify that. The last item I'll touch on is the water funds. You see we have a $3.2 million year over year change and two and a half million dollars of that is due to one line item in our budget that being the water purchase budget which I will get into in just a moment. Okay, so purchase of water, third from the bottom there 16.5% increase as you all know. Sonoma water put forth and recently formally approved the 10.56% increase to the wholesale water rate for the Santa Rosa aqueduct. That was fully adopted. And even though the increase was 10.5, 10.56% rather, we are seeing a 16.5% increase in that line item due to the expected bounce back of demand after the end of the drought emergency. When we look at wastewater resource distribution, wastewater resource recovery, that's really where the bulk of our electricity and chemical budget hits. As you might imagine with our sewer pumping operations and all the pumping and treatment operations at the treatment plant, our wastewater operation as a whole is the largest contributor of electricity and chemicals for our department. The treatment plant is specifically heavy on the use of things such as sodium hypochlorite, different chemicals used to treat the water. That's been subject to severe price spikes and supply chain disruptions. It's beginning of the COVID emergency. And so we're still continuing to see pretty high market prices on those items. In addition to a higher electricity rate, our treatment operation is also budgeting for a fairly significant increase in the quantity of electricity consumed. So stormwater increase, we see a 9.8% increase. Both council member Alvarez and assistant city manager Nutt spoke to what this is related to earlier. And what that is is that the debt service portion of the acquisition for the land for the lower Colgan Creek phase three project or the Bell property that city manager, assistant city manager Nutt spoke to earlier. So that accounts for $120,000 of that $233,000 increase or $254,000 increase rather. The remainder going to the 2.5% colas and the non-general fund contribution to the funding of that new position. And in terms of general fund changes, I spoke to this a bit earlier. There's one FTE quality control associates being added to the stormwater enterprise. And that 35% of that is being funded by the general fund with the remainder being charged with stormwater enterprise funds and being allocated through CIP efforts. And as I spoke to, colas and benefits are a large part of the increases we're seeing this year. And with that, I'll hand it back over to Jennifer Burke, our director of Santa Rosa Water. Thank you. So I wanted to take a moment and just talk about our accomplishments in addition to serving our customers 24 seven for water sewer wastewater treatment. There's a few things that I just wanted to highlight. First, we had a great response to the drought. A big thank you to the community and to the council for your leadership and supporting us through that effort. I did wanna note that I have some updated savings numbers. So we actually have numbers now through March of this year and still an 18% reduction by our community, but they saved 2.1 billion gallons of water through their efforts, which is amazing. We also worked really hard to get as much state funding as we could to assist our customers who were dealing with arrearages due to COVID. You may recall that during the COVID pandemic we were unable to shut water off, which is a tool that we do have that definitely can help people stay current on their bills because we were unable to do that. We offered various payment plans and other opportunities, but some customers saw very, very large arrearages. And so we worked very hard to get state funding to provide to our customers. And I believe we got over a million dollars of funding applied to all of our customer accounts, both on the water and sewer side. Also, we initiated the construction of our UV disinfection project. This is our new ultraviolet light disinfection system out at the treatment plant. Our current system is past its service life, and so we really need a new system that is going to allow us to continue to disinfect our wastewater and use significantly less energy in the future. As mentioned a couple of times before, we did begin Lower Colgan Creek phase three and we're very excited about that project. I did also want to note that not only is it gonna bring some additional flood capacity to the community and finish off that entire 1.3 miles of creek access. We did also get some grant funding. So we are excited that we're likely gonna get 4.36 million dollars from the state to assist with that project and 1.5 million dollars from open space to assist with the purchase of the property. We also expanded our program for monitoring viruses and wastewater. So we started off partnering with various entities to look at COVID and now we are able to provide samples and the analysis that's done looks for six different viruses in our wastewater, including COVID, influenza, RSV, Mpox, norovirus and HMPV. Please don't ask me to tell you what that one stands for. But they're all respiratory viruses. We share this data with local public health. It's all available on our website and it's a great program that also provides us with a little bit of funding as well. And then we also were able to produce 345 million gallons from our local groundwater resources. Our groundwater is significantly cheaper than purchasing from Sonoma Water. So that produced quite a bit of savings to our ratepayers. And then finally, a big effort that we're really excited about is we launched our Water Future Study, which we're looking at water supply alternatives analysis to try and potentially produce 30% of our demand from local sources. We are very highly reliant on Sonoma Water and we want to improve our ability to be reliable and resilient, especially during times of drought. Go to the next slide. In terms of challenges, I think on the flip side, we are doing the study, but we continue to be very concerned about ensuring that we have resiliency through times of drought. So everything that we can do to look at reducing demand where applicable and where we can look to have additional water supply sources that we control we are looking at. So that is the purpose of our Water Future Study. I know we've been in front of the council before and provided information on our infrastructure. We just recently did our new infrastructure report card and for our water system, we continue to maintain a pretty good grade. We have a B, which is consistent with what we had before, but we recognize that we are under investing year over year about $20 million in the water system. On the wastewater system, unfortunately, our grade did slip. We now have a C plus and we are under investing $29 million year over year in the wastewater system. For the regional system, we definitely have an older treatment plant. It's over 50 years old and there are a lot of things that need to be replaced. A lot of things that are reaching the end of their service life. And so the grade for our treatment plant is a D plus and we are under investing $16 million per year, year over year in the treatment plant. So that is gonna continue to be a challenge for us to make sure that we are investing and being able to get projects completed to improve our infrastructure. Again, as I mentioned, a 50 year old plant, urgent repairs continue to happen out at the treatment plant. We have a number of different ways that we're addressing that through on-call contracts and other things, but it definitely leads us to have to be more reactive than we would like to instead of proactive on a replacement because we are having to respond pretty quickly. We also are continuing to see lots of instability in terms of the market for chemicals and electricity. So having to be very reliant on those things, we just have to pay the price that comes. And so that is a challenge that we're doing our best to always get the best price and then continuing to work with Sonoma water and the increasing expenditures on the wholesale water side. So we are going to be launching a new rate study very soon. We'll be going out for an RFP this summer and we'll likely be bringing some higher rate increases to you in the future to deal with these challenges that we continue to deal with. And then last, staff recruitment and retention. I know you've heard about this in other departments and it's not unique to water, but we do continue to have right now a 32, 32 vacancies, which is about 11.8% year over year turnover. Last year, our turnover due to resignations, retirements, et cetera, we lost 25 staff, which was about nine little over 9% of our workforce. This year so far, just through this month, sadly, we are setting a new record and we have already lost 28 employees through this start of this year. So we're already at a 10% loss and turnover of our workforce. So we continue to work with HR and look at different opportunities and look at different recruiting strategies, but recruitment and retention, especially the retention part is incredibly difficult for the water department. Next slide, please. So we did wanna give you the summary of our funds. You'll notice for both the water and the wastewater enterprise funds, we are specifically spending down. We have, all of our reserves are fully funded on the water side after taking into account full funding of all of our reserves. We have 21 million of undesignated fund balance. And so we're specifically spending down one for some urgent and emergent projects and maintenance that we need to do. But two, this will allow us to absorb the wholesale rate increase from Sonoma Water this year. And we will likely be able to absorb next year, but we are gonna have to recoup that and build that into our rate structure in the future. So you are gonna see, as I mentioned, probably higher rate increases than we have done in the past. So again, we are spending about three and 3.4 million dollars spending down purposely on the water enterprise side for both of those purposes. If we go to the next slide on the wastewater side. Similar situation, we do have all of our reserves are fully funded and then we have $17 million of undesignated fund balance. Part of that is we received a demand fee payment for connection to our system that had been deferred for quite some time and they finally paid it. I believe it was almost a $5 million payment. And that only comes in as a reserve. It's a function of budget. So we are bringing that into our budget and spending that money on urgent repairs. And then also helping us absorb some of the variability in the chemicals and electricity costs. And then again, we are purposely spending down $3 million of that $17 million unfunded or undesignated fund balance to continue to work on our system. And then if we go to the next slide, the last slide, you'll see the, this is the sub regional enterprise fund. That surplus is not really a surplus. So this is the revenue we anticipate and then the our expenditures. But we have a requirement for an operating reserve for the sub regional system and because expenditures have gone up in the O&M, our O&M reserve had to go up as well. And so we need to collect more from our partners to fund that. So it's not really a surplus. That is what's needed for the regional fund. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. Looking to council for questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. Mayor and council members, Jason, not assistant city manager, acting director of transportation and public works and recreation and parks. And that means I get the hospice opportunity to provide the citywide capital improvement program. Now, I don't know if you didn't have questions for director Burke simply because they're so good at what they do. I answered all your questions up front or you're just so eager to see me back. We'll leave that question for now and we'll move on into the CIP. So there are a couple of things we do every year when we talk CIP. We wanna make sure that the public, more than anybody understands, when we talk about capital improvements, what is a value in our, or an asset in our organization? And so we provide the screen just to try to give you a snapshot of some of the assets that we have. And I will say that title is a little misleading. Actually, that total is almost nearly double that if you take everything the city owns into consideration as an asset beyond just roadway infrastructure. And so there is a big component to what we operate and maintain in this community and responsible for managing long-term. In total, we wanted to show how this year's general fund or non-water enterprise is working itself out by district just so that you can see some of the way that we're investing in our community. And we'll get into a little more detail about some of these along the way. But just to give you some highlights quick and early on, district one, obviously we're looking at the Herne Avenue interchange in district four, district five, we've got the Bicycle and Pedestrian over-crossing, we've got the Fulton Road widening, which is continuing in district six, and then we've got the Transportation Corridor and enhancements in district seven. There's just a ton of things that are going on. And I think we're working really hard to ensure that we get information out there. So if we look at where do projects come from, projects come from a number of different places predominantly through our goal-setting, our master plans, through community response, and through area plans and other organizational conversations that we're having with not only our internal and external partners, but the community. That's how all of this information gets derived, how it gets put into our system, how we start to look at things and determine whether or not it should be prioritized in our Capital Improvement Program. The total program, which is both non-enterprise and enterprise is about a $75 million total expenditure plan for this year. There's things that you'll see. We've got, as Director Burke just mentioned, we've got 13 and a half million for wastewater. We've got 10 million for the sub-regional. We've got about 14 and a half million for the water. And then about 8.6 million in park and recreation, which includes both the park development fees and Measure M. And then there's the large pot, which says transportation and public works special funds of 22 and a half million. What that encompasses is Measure M, the roadway and the regional sales tax Measure M, gas tax, SB1, community facilities fees, as well as our utility impact fees. All of those things get combined into that $22.7 million total. To walk you through the general fund component, general fund this year is a $2 million program, with 1.2 going towards our ADA improvements. You've got 60,000 going toward the Roseland Lighting District, 80,000 going towards the D Street Garage underground investigation, and then the 662,000 going towards Roseland Pavement. As you recall, the Roseland Pavement component is a pass-through as part of the 10-year allocation through the annexation document. But to give you some example of things that are going on, for our ADA improvements, we're looking at investing in the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens pathway repairs, Howard Park, accessible pedestrian entrances near the vehicle parking areas, Doyle Park accessibility improvements around the baseball field, and library improvements at all three of the branches. We are however gonna continue to plow forward or continue to complete work that was authorized last year that has yet to break ground. And some of that work you'll see is coming forward, for example, the Finley Pool Deck. That was last year's funding allocation that has yet to be spent because it's coming in this upcoming allocation or project award. We just completed the railroad depot restroom from last year, and we are working with granting agencies to undertake the Howard Park fishing pier this year. So that is our hope coming up. When we think about the Roseland Pavement maintenance, we've been working on projects year after year. This upcoming funding source, about 450,000 of this allocation will go towards a pavement program next fiscal year or next construction season. And that will be a Cape Seal on 16 segments in the Roseland annexation area. This year, the allocation from last year's being used to invest in doing all of the curb ramp construction and modifications that are required by federal law as we go and do roadway improvements. Monies that are banking are gonna be going towards a fiscal year 25, 26 major capital investment of grind and overlay for a number of streets in that community. So if you've been doing the math the last couple of years and you're wondering why there's a continued balance, it's because the project that we're gearing up toward is gonna be very expensive and we wanna get that all out at one time. As you heard from the fire department earlier today, the CFF program and the allocation for their particular programming went towards the fire training tower. Fire station nine, which is the South Santa Rosa Avenue fire station called the new fire station here, Coana Springs and then temporary fire station five as they described earlier is in an effort to transfer the facility and decommission the site, getting it ready for surplusing. One of the other funding sources we talked about was park development impact fees. As you may be aware, we separate and collect fees into from four districts. We made it very simple for folks to understand North, South, Highway 101, East, West, Highway 12. You'll see that creates a Northwest, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast district and those districts collect money based on completed projects or projects that are actually going and obtaining their occupancy. It's at that time those projects are responsible for starting to pay their park development impact fees. When those come in, staff works with finance to determine how best to allocate those into the capital improvement program. In some areas we keep it in a general account, for example, the Northwest play zone equipment. That's a generalized account that we will take and pay for specific projects off of. And so when we come and award a contract to someone, for example, that's gonna come and do the Dutch floor playground improvements, you're gonna be awarding from this specific account associated with the Northwest play zone equipment. So in the Northwest we're looking at, as I said, Dutch floor that takes two playgrounds, combines it to one, adds some picnic areas and improves pathways. In the Southwest area is really gonna be focused on Lower Colgan Creek Park. You heard that from the Water Department as far as initiatives that they have as well as recreational parks. In the Northeast area, that fund is gonna go towards the implementation of Fremont Park. That is the park that's in the process of working through the master plan and it needs additional funds to make that happen. And in the Southeast, it's really looking at Kiwana Springs. It says Southeast Community Park. That's just the title that they used in the budgetary process. But for those who know it, it's Kiwana Springs Community Park. And it's a very robust program that we look to invest. That'll build trail heads. It'll have playgrounds, restrooms. It'll even have a pump track at that location and a bunch of other amenities. So it's very exciting to see how we're gonna be investing those funds moving forward. From the Measure M, this is the regional sales tax Measure M, the parks for all side of things. And the million dollars that we received this last year is gonna be split in a couple of different ways. Council authorized an expenditure plan that takes 50% of that towards investment. Capital investment, 40% towards maintenance and 10% towards recreation programming. The component related to capital investment, we're creating a five year plan because of the size of the investment and looking at how we can invest that five year plan. So for example, in the Northwest, we're looking at new playgrounds and fields at Jacobs Park off of Ninth Street. We're looking at improving the Jennings Park fields, which is adjacent to Helen Lehman Elementary. We're looking at improving the playgrounds at Live Oak Park in the Northeast. Rankin Valley Park playground is gonna be rehabilitated as well as the ball field at Tanglewood Park in the Southwest Cook Middle School playground, South Davis Park basketball court and the Southwest Community Park field improvements. For the Southeast, things like Peter Spring's playground, Howard Park's Tenecus and yes, even Howard Park pickleball. I said the word pickleball. Pickleball is coming. Some would say pickleball is here and I agree. Moving into the Santa Rosa Water Proposed CIP budget, you got the high level overview from Director Burke just a minute ago. I'm gonna more or less show you much of the same slides. From the water side, we're looking at investing about $14.6 million. That includes projects like the Terralinda water main, Myers Drive water main and Carrie and Peter Spring's emergency well rehabilitation as well as the Leetwell rehabilitation. On the wastewater fronts, again, we're looking at the other side of the Terralinda, the Myers and the Salem Avenue. We're doing water and sewer for both. Those projects are separated in a way that's able to draw from both accounts. But the big projects for the wastewater side is the Los Alamos sewer trunk replacement. There's a large city-wide siphon rehabilitation program and the Robeless trunk lining. Those are gonna be big projects in the upcoming years. On the regional front, predominantly at the treatment plant concepts like improving phase two of the filter valves, the aeration basins and replacing one of the process boilers from the geyser standpoint, looking at some electrical enhancements for their pumping system. So when we look at those investments, those are just a handful or a snapshot of the projects that are coming forward with the funds that are being allocated this year. On the stormwater front, really the primary and the primary piece in the big sales pitch here is the Lower Colgan Creek improvements. It's gonna be an exciting process and I think Director Burke explained it very nicely. Looking on the non-enterprise side of the house, as you can see, we're really looking at street rehabilitation as the primary, the biggest functions there is money going towards the Herne Avenue interchange project as well as funds being set aside for the Highway 101 bike and pedestrian over-crossing. Those are the big aspects for the roadway side of things. Some questions that have been asked about what are we doing from a bicycle and pedestrian standpoint obviously within this budget are also the rectangular rapid flashing beacons that we've discussed over the course of the day. There are other improvements as we're looking at how we install the bike and pedestrian over-crossing enhancements to get to and from that facility are important so there's gonna be a rehabilitation and reconstruction of Armory Drive that will include a protected bike lane on that road as an example. And then other grant projects coming forward include the Herne Avenue multi-use path that will connect the edge of the interchange project to the smart multi-use path. So just to give you some examples of things that are going on that make up this $24.5 million of investment coming in the near future. And with that, I am here and available to answer questions. Looking to Council to see if there are any questions. Council Member Rogers. Thank you so much. And GSI really appreciate the presentation especially going back to our previous discussion before the break a little bit about breaking things out into districts. You had slide 58 if you could put it up because I think that there is this overwhelming feeling by a lot of folks that the city is not interested in investing in Southwest Santa Rosa and that has historically been the case but I did wanna point out that 45% of our capital improvement funding is going to Southwest Santa Rosa in this budget as well as if you go on to your parks one on slide 63, 42% of the park impact fees are going to support parks in that area as well. So get it historical under investment in the area and wanted to just point out that this council has taken it seriously in trying to make sure that we make up for historic inequities. Any other questions or comments? Seeing none, thank you very much. Thank you. Looks like we have concluded our presentations for the day. Are we going back over to Veronica? Okay, Veronica, take it away. Yes, thank you, Mayor Rogers. We have concluded our presentations and thank you to all the departments for their time presenting and their input into this department. So at this point, we want to come back to council. We hope that this presentation has given you all the information you need and you've had the opportunity to ask any questions and seek clarification. The numbers we've presented to you are proposed. This is a proposed budget. So unless there are any changes, we plan to come back in June for a budget adoption. So we'd like to take this opportunity to hear from council if there's any proposed changes, things to amend, change, add. And I will just add the reminder that at this time, the general fund budget is at a $2.5 million deficit. So additions would exacerbate that unless there were trade-offs, et cetera. Looking to count council member Rogers. Thank you so much. And I asked a couple of questions about a few of these yesterday. And so I hope you'll forgive me. But I did want to revisit specifically two different budget items. One is the deputy director for community engagement position. I've been a big supporter of that as a position since it was proposed in the open government task force. It feels to me now as we've rolled it into a department of five people that already has a director that perhaps we don't need a director and a deputy director for a department of five people. And so I would propose that if there's value, and I know it's listed in the slide as the deputy director position and a coordinator position that perhaps we can make do with just the coordinator position. Again, didn't feel like that position was directing anything. And the department is high performing already in their functions. So I'd propose that if we are looking for some budget savings, that position is currently empty. That instead of recruiting to fill that position, that would be a spot that we could cut longterm. Then the other pot of money that I mentioned and still would like to be convinced on is the 500,000 set aside for a labor contract negotiator given that we are hiring for that position. And in particular, I get a little bit uneasy when it comes to our labor negotiations allowing it to go to half a million dollars before council even becomes aware that the bill is being racked up that high is 200,000 enough to get the ball rolling and then allow the council to provide additional oversight that if staff needs more of a contract position than the 200,000, you can come back and actually discuss that with us. Thank you, Councilman Rogers for your question. We just received the bid proposals back. I don't have the actual dollar amount in front of me. Yes, director of HR is here while she's getting ready to address the question. My only hopes would be that all of our contracts expire at the same time. And we're coming up on those. So Dominique and I would like to start opening contracts up sooner than later, given the fact that the deputy director position is vacant. If approving this contract allows us to move forward with at least bringing council some information on how we wanna move forward with negotiating our MOUs. I think that would help. Dominique, I don't know if you have that information in front of you or you have it, but our goal is not to wait until the nth hour to begin negotiating. I would like to at least start by August or September. Yeah, and good afternoon, Mayor, members of the council. So yeah, we did recently just go out to RFP to kind of look at what that costing would look like. And so this is just an anticipation of what that contractor agreement would be. We're not saying we're gonna spend this $500,000 but we would like to earmark it and have it in your guys' minds that we are going into labor negotiations with the 18 negotiating units. That's a lot to open up. So this is more of a precursor to be prepared for that while we also will be looking and hiring for the labor negotiation position. And I've only had about like 30 days within human resources. So we're looking at the structure of the department itself and that position. So that might be something that I'll be coming back to council with and it might be splitting off from the deputy director title and maybe its own classification again. And I can appreciate that. And I think I'd be more comfortable if we had a smaller dollar figure like 200,000 and in the, cause I do want us to get moving on that and that should be enough for us to get started. But given that we have a position we're recruiting for that is supposed to do that work getting to 500,000 before the council is even aware that that's been spent on an outside contract for labor negotiations just makes me uneasy. So I'd much prefer 200,000 as I mentioned re-looking at the deputy director position for community engagement, especially with the coordinator role there. And that should be a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of savings that we can, as we talked about potentially add some money into the planning and economic development committee to support whether it's the EIFD or the comprehensive strap plan or the South Santa Rosa annexation. So that's where I see we can have more impact without expanding how much we're actually spending from our reserves. Yeah, thank you for that. I also want to remind you the chief assistant city attorney is making as well and that position also assisted in negotiations. And I believe we're going to pause that recruitment until we fill the city attorney's position. So in any help, we will be happy to bring back a smaller amount or we can add a smaller amount in the budget. And if we feel like we're lagging on either recruitments, maybe we can bring you back another proposal. Yeah, and if we've got more information by the time we come here for the full budget adoption then certainly we can retool that. But I'd like more regular check-ins than the 500,000 mark. Councilman Burrow-Krepke. Thank you. I think the main two points for me with the city attorney's office, we spoke yesterday about the individual that might be able to pursue civil penalties and stuff like that. You would imply that there could be a reshuffling within the organization that could help alleviate that or alleviate the need for an additional body. So I'd like to see some, just when it's presented some clarification on whether that is able to be done or not. Happy to provide that. Okay. And then the only other thing I had was the question I asked earlier today of Chief Krueger and the ASO whose name escapes me, I apologize. What's that? Pam, thank you. Is I think the policy question of SROs are gonna come back to us before the end of the budget cycle next year. And so I'd like to see an actual definitive cost of what that would look like instead of just, I mean, we did estimates real here on the fly very quickly, but I'd like to see that within the presentation, understand what the true cost per the Chief's expectation of supplying that service efficiently and effectively would be just so that we have that information should the policy question come to us at any point. Thank you. We can include that information in the budget questions that we send out to council. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. I think it goes along the lines of what council member O'Crepkey had said and I would be interested in staffing up some of our law enforcement for a lot of different reasons. Some of it has to do with the response time, making sure that there's enough staff to be able to lower those response times, as he said in those priority ones. I think that there's going to be a call for potential support in our school districts, but I'd like to look at maybe a shared cost in that model. As council member O'Crepkey said, I think it could come back before the end of budget cycle. And if we're not doing staffing with law enforcement, could there be a potential for another type of staffing in an outreach coordinator position that works with school districts, particularly around restorative justice and outreach to communities? But really those are the areas that I think we're still not quite hitting the mark is around law enforcement and then looking at our rates for overtime in both fire and police to see that if we staffed up, if we could reduce overtime rates. Council member Fleming. Thank you. So a couple of my requests would be one that we, I mentioned earlier today that we get an estimate of what it would cost for us to provide the services that the supervised adult crews are providing using unincorporated labor or what a program would be to help those individuals who are incarcerated and working for us at below market rate to have ladders to careers. Another is that yesterday we heard that our DEI person is typically in most organizations, it's a pretty high level person. It sounded like the way it's organized in our structure is fairly low level. I could see having an equal employment officer is pretty standard for an organization of this size. I could see that person being pretty low and buried in HR how we have the DEI person, but I'd like to see a proposal come forward for a higher level DEI person and maybe next year in the budget cycle, an EEO person in HR, although I wouldn't be opposed to seeing a costing out of it for this cycle. I get that we don't have the money for it, but I think it would be an informative exercise. And then one thing that I was a little disappointed, this, you guys put so much work into such a great job, so please don't take this as a criticism, but it would be nice to, recreation is the most impactful and positive way that our community interacts and leaves a positive sense on our community on a daily basis. It's not like a negative, nobody's having an emergency when they go to the swimming pool, one hopes. And so when we do hear the budget, I would like to have a staff member here from the recreation department because it is such an important, exciting part of what we do. And just to not have them at the table, I think really leaves some of the vibrancy out of the conversation. Thank you. To answer your question, our staff member is out on medical leave and was not able to attend today. That's really unfortunate. I'm sorry for them, but perhaps maybe someone else can come next time. Council member Stapp. I was really impressed by how comprehensive this presentation was. Thank you for all the work that went into it. Two things that impressed me is coming up again and again, where the grants management on the back end and then the interest in investing in technology and both of those areas can pay themselves back. And so I know that you've made, you've taken those into account with this year's budget, but I'm certainly supportive of investing in those two areas, not only because it's necessary, but also because they're both effectively revenue generating or at least cost cutting. So thanks for the emphasis and thanks for showing how those cut across multiple departments. Any additional questions or comments for? Okay. I think we are good. Thank you so much. Again, I would like to thank everyone that gave a presentation today. And yesterday, it was awesome. A lot of fun hanging out with you all. And thank you so much for your hard work. I know you sit here only for a few. Public comment. Did you want to call for public comment? When I'm done. Okay, thank you. Thank you all for the work that you put in to actually make the presentations because I know that that is a lot of work before you're even here to present. So thank you very much. And Madam Deputy City Clerk, may you please conduct public comment? We are now taking public comment on item 2.1. If you were in the council chamber and would like to comment, but have not provided a speaker card or your name, please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. We will be starting with Ken McNab, followed by Chris Gunther. We do have two podiums. So if you're up next, if you could head to the second podium and we'll get started. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, council members. Ken McNab came back advising representing property owners in the 2010 area. First, I'd just like to thank the council, the city manager and staff for your diligence in ensuring the responsible and productive expenditure of our public funds. As was just stated, this is important. If not one of the most important parts of your responsibilities are council members. And as a resident, I just want to say thank you and your work is appreciated. Putting my consultant hat back on, I'm here to speak on the South Santa Rosa specific plan. We want to encourage the council to provide the budget resources needed to initiate and carry out preparation of a specific plan for the South Santa Rosa area. As you know, this is an important planning effort. Not only will it help to ensure and secure a future supply of housing for the city, it's also will create an opportunity to improve some of the underserved and disadvantaged neighborhoods in the South Santa Rosa Avenue. Also just wanted to let council know that we recognize these specific plan efforts do take a commitment of staffing resources. And as we've said before, we are willing to assist in offsetting any costs for staffing that might be needed to help make the specific plan process go. Thank you. Next up will be Chris Gunther followed by Bob Geiser. Hello, thank you everyone. Chris Gunther, I live in the Montgomery Village area and I'm a co-lead for the grassroots campaign by Cable Santa Rosa. I'm obviously here to beat the drum a little more around the need for safe low stress bike infrastructure. To that end, of course, I very much want to thank both the staff and the city council for collaborating with us on this issue, especially over the last year while our campaign has existed. We've had some really productive conversations increasingly with staff and there's some great things happening. And I also really appreciate some of the questions and comments from the council today on this topic repeatedly actually. I just want to make a couple quick points. One is to emphasize again that this is not just about bikes. It's actually connected to a number of the issues that we've talked about at length yesterday and today. Things like safety, not just for bicyclists or for pedestrians, but for all road users including motorists. Traffic congestion, we talked a lot about. Housing, economic development, community development including creating a sense of place and vibrancy all around town. Last mile transportation came up a number of times and then of course reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the climate crisis. In light of all of that, I want to emphasize that it's important to think of this not just as a nice to have and something that we will do opportunistically when we can get to it. It needs to be a strategic investment and it needs to be an investment that is an alternative to continuing to invest in the transportation system that we have now along with investing in transit. Unfortunately one of the themes that has run through these discussions is that we don't have the resources as much resources as we would like to have and road infrastructure is incredibly expensive and I worry that when I see we continue to invest in street capacity that we are creating a burden that we are gonna have to continue to manage far into the future and we will continue to have this conversation for a long time to come. The alternative is to invest in actually reducing trips taken in motor vehicles. It doesn't mean we have to get rid of cars but if we can reduce trips in a meaningful way we can address traffic congestion, we can reduce emissions, we can improve the streetscape and the community life that exists in town and so I really want us to think of it in those terms and of course I want to remind the council that Bikeable and the city have been working together with CityThread on a plan to do just that, to accelerate investment in this bike network and all of the benefits that it could bring. Thanks so much. Next up will be Bob Geiser followed by Tom Robertson. Hi enough I guess. Good afternoon, a mayor and council members. I'm Bob Geiser, I'm co-chair of the Southeast Greenway Campaign Committee. This morning during the parks and recreation presentation or afterwards we had a question by a council member about the provisions in the budget related to the Southeast Greenway and they were ably responded to by staff. I wanted to address two things and basically express support of what my understanding is that's in the budget. The key thing is that the real estate division of public works I believe, in public works has been the leader for the last few years in the acquisition process which has proved to be long and far more complex and troublesome than we would ever like to think about. But things are going well with Caltrans and the state. We're moving ahead. We expect to be coming to the council in the coming year with some things. We're dependent totally on the real estate division for communications with Caltrans for starting to talk about the terms of the acquisition, the transfer of property. So we simply want the staffing to continue in the real estate division to provide that level that's needed to get through this process. The other thing that was brought up was parks and recreation in that context was what might be related to the Southeast Greenway planning and development. We totally support the budget proposals that I think I heard for a park planner and other staff and reorganization. It all sounds good. We will be, I can't say when this project will be in the queue for park planning, the master, the detailed master park plan, but we're going to work hard with the city to get funding, grant funding for that to help the city along and move things ahead. So we totally support what's in the budget for the parks and recreation department. Thank you. Next up will be Dwayne DeWitt, followed by Joshua Shipper. Oh, sorry. I'm Tom Robertson. You said I was going to speak to you. Yes, sorry. You're next. Thank you. And then followed by Dwayne DeWitt. Thank you. You're all very patient. It's a long session and a long day. And I'm the CEO of SCI office LLC, our company and its affiliate own an acre plus of ground right in the middle of your downtown. It runs north from 625 Fifth Street and it's two parcels. We've begun a 100 unit housing project and are hopeful of going very soon or working very hard on it. In any case, we also are going to begin this fall with the applications necessary to do what will be 130 to 150 units in the site now of the Sonoma County Department of Health Services building. And downtown Santa Rosa is essentially planning nirvana right now. So we're not worried about the planning. What we're worried about is security. We will probably, even if we wanted to renew the lease with the county, they are very upset about the security in garage three. Their employees' cars are broken into frequently. The DAO, the Downtown Action Organization, has a terrific program, which gives them escorts in the late afternoon or evening hours to get to the garage safely and leave. But during the day, their cars are frequently broken into. We desperately need two new police officers in the downtown. And I know that's under consideration, but I urge you to go forward with it. The downtown is going to generate millions and millions of dollars in new tax revenues. We need to begin to create a reputation for the downtown that it is a safe place. And especially for all the new residents in our projects, many of whom are going to park in those garages, they have to know that their cars are safe. And I can't tell someone that right now. They aren't safe. The other thing, which is completely obvious, is that the county should not leave the downtown. They've been there since 2000. They should leave spaces that are available in the downtown so they can have transit-oriented office space and fulfill the environmental goals, which the county itself has announced. But as things stand right now, they're going to leave. I had a catastrophic meeting with them a couple of weeks ago. So please consider two new police officers. Your planning department is terrific. Your staff is terrific. The quality of the presentations that you've heard today, which I've listened to, are first rate. All the pieces are there for a huge success in the downtown, a new era, but we need to make the downtown and the garages safe. Thank you very much. After Dwayne DeWitt, but we'll be Joshua Shipper. Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. I'm also a member of the Sonoma County Housing or Advocacy Group. And I want to thank you for the presentations today. The time is too short to comment on all of the topics that were under review the last two days. One of the most important things is that we're in a two and a half million dollar deficit. And basically penny-wise, I've seen the city get rid of many nice things in the past for as few dollars as a couple hundred thousand. We lost our television station. We lost our, excuse me, South Park Elementary School being torn down. All kinds of different things happen because you're penny pinching where you can. At the recent Board of Community Services meeting, it was mentioned that 30 of the picnic tables and benches at the new courthouse square would now have to be replaced. It was found that they were not the ones they wanted. So you look at this and you say, why does he have that up there? Well basically, penny-wise, you can get nice picnic tables and benches for just a few hundred dollars each. For 30 of them being replaced, you could go for that. One of the things that happens is frequently we hear at your meetings that you're going to offload some city properties. Those were not discussed in these budget hearings. In the past, Assistant City Manager and Nut pointed out that 1,400 city-owned properties were to be offloaded. Those are assets that we should be hearing about to understand how we can get revenues that will help us with these deficits. The time is too short to delve deeply into the matters at hand, but under housing, your own figures show that less than 18% of the housing permits that coming forward are for affordable housing. Essentially, we never meet the affordable component and always build for the upper end. Last but not least, these meetings are held at inconvenient times and they don't give a time certain for when the public can participate. Some people from the public came here earlier and waited hours to speak and then had to leave before this opportunity arose. In the past, there were settlements with outside groups to make sure that meetings would be held when the public could participate and there would be time certain opportunities for the public to put their comments in, even if their comments will not make any effect upon what you're doing. These decisions are already made. I'm glad you came down here and you gave us some insight into what you're already going to do. Bellevue is not Roseland. Roseland needs help, not the Southwest. Thank you for your time. Excuse me, thanks very much. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald, council members and staff. My name is Josh Shipper with Generation Housing. We really, really value the opportunity to engage and talk with the city on its projected spending and revenues and maybe unsurprisingly, as part of that process, we want to encourage the city to take action where we think it can impact both and that's on building more and more diverse housing. With each passing year that we add a moderate amount to our housing stock, we pass up opportunities to enhance the overall revenue streams from property sales, sales tax and the economic activity of home building. As you all know, there's no silver bullet at the local level to increase a city's economic base but adding residents and homes is as close as you can get. As I believe Urban Threes has illustrated to both the council and to our members, denser multi-family housing is an excellent use of our current limited space. The tax revenues are greater per square foot than single family home subdivisions and if located near community cores, they require a lot less investment than projects which contribute to sprawl. With limited space remaining, each missed chance to add affordable and moderate priced housing is a missed chance to maximize the value of the little land that we have left and it makes it harder to take corrective action later. We at Generation Housing think that we lose this income with each policy that makes it harder to build and this year, we strongly, strongly urge the council to take action to reduce the costs of building, especially on costs like impact fees that can discourage affordable and multi-family housing. We've seen the impact that fee reduction can play on the downtown and we ask that you consider two policies that we believe will positively grow the city's future revenue streams. One, we strongly encourage you to join Petaluma in waiving most of the impact fees on affordable housing so we can build this needed resource and we also ask that you consider applying the fee structure that has been successfully used to encourage ADU development to affordable by design multi-family housing. We do not think that building more housing at reduced fees is a sacrifice. We see it as an investment and for this reason, we strongly encourage the adoption of these two policies. As always, thank you very much for your service and we look forward to working with you on these budget priorities, thanks. If we have anyone else in the chamber who would like to speak, please make your way to a podium. Seeing none, I'm turning it over to our Zoom host for our callers on Zoom. Thank you, Rhonda. We're gonna start with Gregory, followed by Rigel. Gregory, I have enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald, members of the council and staff. Thank you very much for this presentation over the last two days. As you probably would have expected, listen to it all and try to absorb as much as I could. But I wanna ask you for a specific ask. It's hard within the budget process and the design of the budget for anyone to really get a sense of those one-time funds that you allocated last year. You know them as ARPA and PG&E funds. About $130 million between the two of them was allocated by you to specific projects within the city. In addition to that, the County of Sonoma allocated $91 million to its ARPA funding and $40 million of it to the area of Roseland. Those are projects and funds that total about $222 million between the county and you. And I would like to ask that you, sometime soon, I know the county's scheduling an update hearing on its 91 million in August. I'd like you to think about scheduling a meeting for your 130 million to give the community and yourselves a sense of what's happening to those funds, what's happening to those projects, how are they impacting the residents of Santa Rosa? I've done some study of the quarterly reports that the county has to issue to the Treasury Department. You have to do the same. And I can say that just looking at what's been done between last year and last week, we're a little behind on spending. There may be some monies that can't get spent by the deadline. And I think we ought to know that as early as possible so that you can reallocate them to other projects or expand projects that didn't get as much as they wanted and can do more. Essentially, I'm asking you to make of good effective use of those monies. They won't come again probably. And that's a huge amount of unrestricted monies that you have used to do the things that you think the citizens need and that usually doesn't get funded by other governmental sources. So I'm asking you to give us all a heads up. Let us collectively, you and the community figure out what new things can be funded within the timeframe and don't let any of that money be unspent or unutilized. Thank you very much. Thank you, Gregory. Next up we have Raigel, followed by Kelsey. Raigel, I have enabled your permissions. Go ahead and start whenever you're ready. Hello, thank you for having me today. I am a lifetime resident of Sonoma County. I'm currently in Bennett Valley and I'm a member of the NBOP Police Accountability Task Force. I first wanna say that while I'm appreciative that the police chief made efforts to eliminate one position in order to add another position paid for by the general fund, I'm still concerned about the SRPD's request for an additional 3 million out of the general fund when it's clear over the last day that those dollars are at a premium and that the council already has many tough decisions to make. Other departments do not have a dedicated tax revenue specifically for them. Those general fund dollars should be to backfill our high-performing and underfunded departments such as housing, community service, planning and economic, parks and rec, transportation and public works. Let's work on preventing the problems that require a police response rather than increasing policing. I'm also extremely disappointed in the council for both having spent more time on the police budget today than on the housing budget conversation last night and for congratulating the PD on its efficiency with which they confiscate and destroy the RVs that serves as homes for those who do not have a permanent home. It's obvious that your priorities lie in policing over housing when you ask more questions about how to better find and incarcerate our citizens than you do for housing them. And in council members bringing up SROs when it's outside their jurisdictional purview, the decision hasn't been made and talking about it as if it has in regards to SROs is insensitive to the community and especially to the school board. The data that chief presented about crime being on the rise is cherry-picked and very ignorant of long-term trends. Crime data for Sonoma County provided by the state shows drastic decreases in both homicides and property-related crimes over the past 40 years. Property crimes having decreased by nearly two-thirds homicides showing a 29% reduction. Car theft is down by 17%, larceny theft by 52% and arson by 60%. This county is bleeding both literally and figuratively. People are suffering and punishing them for suffering will not help. A notable study published in the journal for experimental criminology in 2016 shows clear evidence that an increase in officers does not equate to a decrease in crime rates. What it does is further criminalize those already experiencing extreme hardship. Increases in aid and accessible resources are proven time and time again to reduce crime and violence in communities. And that's really all I have to say. I thank you for your consideration. Thank you, Rigel. Next up, we have Kelsey, followed by Alan. Kelsey, I've enabled your permission. You can go ahead whenever you're ready. Hi, my name is Kelsey Vero and I am a member of the Police Accountability Task Force of the North Bay Organizing Project as well. I am also speaking in opposition to adding millions of dollars from the general fund to the police budget, especially for the use of SROs. In 2020, the SRO contract was suspended after calls from the community to reimagine our approach to the safety of our kids, acknowledging that police, including school resource officers, have a disproportionate negative impact on black and brown youth. This issue has not been resolved and there are many youths speaking out against officers on campus. It's alarming to me that officers are already on campuses and not even school resource officers, but just regular officers when the decision has not been made. And then these officers are cited as the reason that staffing is low, creating issues that then need to be solved with more staffing and more money elsewhere. And we know that the officers on campuses are not uniform in terms of where they're sent and on what campuses and what communities they end up in without that community input that the debate is still happening. In 2020, the concern among many for suspending that contract was that there's no budget for alternatives to policing that would provide for upstream solutions to the problems facing the community. I'm concerned that years later while discussing this budget, we're defaulting back to a system which is harmful and ineffective and with problems we have not resolved. If you earmark money for SROs in the general fund, but don't allow that money to be used for alternatives that are called for by the community that are evidence-based or restorative justice practices, then you're making the policy decision for the school board and the parents and the youth who will be impacted. In other words, it's a take it or leave it system. And that is always cited as the reason the community solutions continue to be out of reach. So I implore you to try to fund and allow for funding of solutions keeping an open mind in terms of what can be thought of and how we can proceed into a future that is safer for everyone and not have to sacrifice the safety of marginalized communities in order to give a security theater with our kids. Thank you. Thank you, Kelsey. Next we have Allen followed by Elizabeth. Allen, I have enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Yes, thank you. Thanks for taking my comment. My name is Allen. I'm also with the North Bay Organizing Project Police Accountability Task Force. I'm also a lifelong resident of Santa Rosa. I'm very concerned both the requests for more patrol officers and for adding SROs in schools. Based on actual crime statistics in Santa Rosa, homicides are down, robberies of all kinds are just level and the same property crimes are down to a third of what they were. In 2016, there was a study done by criminologists that determined that 40 years of studies consistently showed that the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small and not statistically significant. School resource officers have also been shown to not make schools any safer. The incident at Montgomery High, although it was very tragic, could not have been prevented by an officer on campus. The only thing that would have prevented that would be an officer in every classroom, which I think everyone would think is untenable. A study from the Center for Public Integrity found that black, brown, indigenous students and students with disabilities were referred to the campus police at twice the rate of others. I believe that putting SROs back in schools would be a reactionary response to make white students and parents feel safer rather than increasing safety for all by addressing the needs of all the students in more restorative ways. Thank you. Thank you, Island. Next up, we have Elizabeth followed by Brandon. Elizabeth, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Hi, my name is Elizabeth Ridlington. I'm Vice Chair of the City's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board. I am here today to address Council not as a member of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board, but just as a concerned citizen who wants to make sure that kids who are walking to school and people who want to walk, drive or bike around town can do so safely. I think that the Council shares many of those goals because last July, the Council adopted Vision Zero and set a goal of achieving zero fatalities and zero serious injuries on our roadways by the end or by 2030. More recently, in the goal setting session for the strategic goal of creating healthy and safe communities for all, the Council included the goal of ensuring safe routes to school and crosswalk safety. I had hoped that today's budget presentations, which were very thorough and well-prepared, would help clarify whether there is funding to implement progress toward these two goals, funding to implement some of the initial steps of Vision Zero and funding to improve crosswalks where we know children are at risk when they're on their way to school. But it wasn't clear to me from the presentations if that money is there. I know that staff care deeply about these issues. They have great data on police reports that have involved crashes of that have injured pedestrians or cyclists. So it's not a question of where to make changes. It's not a question of what technologies to use. It's really a matter of funding. A rectangular rapid flashing beacon, for example, installed at Hohen where Atticus Pearson was hit when he was walking to middle school back in January and where another pedestrian was hit two weeks later, costs about $25,000 and could have saved those pedestrians from serious head injuries. Even adding $200,000 into the budget would enable transportation and public work staff to respond more quickly to any subsequent incidents that are like this. I haven't forbid that they happen. And even better yet, funding like that could enable staff to begin to address some of the most high-conflict, high-injury locations around city. So I very much ask that you push to add a little bit of funding in here so that staff can make our streets safer for everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Next up we have Brandon, followed by Sean. Brandon, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Thank you. Mayor Rodgers, Vice Mayor McDonald, honorable council members and city staff, my name is Brandon Cho. And I'm speaking on behalf of Ephron Cuddeel, CEO of Gallagher Community Housing, a new nonprofit housing development entity focused on 100% affordable housing. We should certainly celebrate the hundreds of affordable units coming online in the coming months as you heard from Director Hartman earlier today. We should also build on that, much like the city demonstrated its ability to do through the rebuild efforts from the Tubbs Fire and getting homes and rentals rebuilt with urgency. As you heard in the housing and community development presentation from Director Basiner yesterday, the city and other housing funders will return to limited housing funds available. One time funds for affordable housing development will expire. Add to that, that a high interest rate environment in escalating construction costs, it will require a different approach from our government partners and private investors. Jurisdictions throughout the state, including the city of Petaluma, have taken the bold step and put their investment where their mouth is in making the development impact fees inapplicable for 100% affordable housing developments. Others have reduced development impact fees based on size of all units. While we appreciate the current efforts to discuss this item through your impact fee study, discussion alone comes up short. As the recent Gen H report on the human cost of the housing cost burden reminds us of what we already know, we simply aren't doing enough with urgency to meet the existing need. While modifying impact fees will have an impact on your projected budget, the returns the city and community will get in social, human and economic capital should more than overcome any potential gap. Thank you. Thank you, Brandon. Next up we have Sean, followed by Candace. Sean, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Sean, can you unmute yourself, Sean? Yes, hi, sorry. No worries, go right ahead. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, mayor and council members. I was just going to speak about one quick issue. I'd like to go there, but council member Chris Rogers brought up a couple of times about the labor negotiations and the cost of bringing in and out to site consultant. I haven't agreed with them. I actually dealt with that stuff for many, many years. And I echo what he said to the board and I hope that the city will look back at hiring in-house labor relations officer that other cities have. And you can do this in-house for a substantial cost savings as compared to bringing in and outside attorney to handle something that you all can do in-house. I think you'll also develop a much better relationship with your bargaining units when you have an in-house person, which over the long-term will benefit everyone. And I wasn't going to speak to anything else until I was hearing the stuff about the police budget. And I want to just actually commend the board in trying to forward think on school resource officers and at least get that into the planning phase if the school board changes course from the last couple of years and wants to reinstitute the program. I think it is wise to bring that up now in your budget hearings to plan for that in case it happens, if it doesn't, then it doesn't. But if it doesn't, you don't have to be revisiting this issue. And you've already got it in mind. So thank you, have a great day. Thank you, Sean. Next up, we have Candice, followed by Lee. Candice, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and Vice Mayor McDonald and members of council. This is Cadence Henkel-Allenson with the downtown district. First, I want to thank you for your time and attention to the study session. It's obviously been a long one, so I will try to keep it brief on my end. As always, a tremendous thanks to city staff on behalf of the DAO and the district, we really want to extend our acknowledgement for all the hard work that you and your teams do and our appreciation for your ongoing partnership with us and with the downtown business owners and your problem solving to address the needs, not just of downtown, but of the whole city. We really heard all of that in the study session yesterday and today. We also want to reiterate our support for the hiring of an assistant city attorney and hope that that position continues to move forward. I also want to reiterate council support for the comprehensive economic development plan and continuing partnerships that we'll invest in our downtown. As you all know, the DAO invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in our downtown every year and we're incredibly focused on creating not just a central hub that welcomes our community and our visitors, but also a downtown that helps to bolster the city's revenue through increased TOT and sales tax. With the amount of development that's getting started now or about to begin in the next six months or a year, it's really critical that we keep an eye on not just maintaining the services and resources, but increasing the services and resources as the population and the needs of the downtown grows. And I would say specifically paying attention to public safety measures and to law enforcement, including the potential expansion of the downtown enforcement team. The DAO is always happy to serve as a resource and support for all city staff, however it may be helpful. And again, just want to thank you all for your time and attention. Thank you, Cadence. Next up, we have Lee, followed by Hugh. Lee, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Hi, I'm Lee with the North Bay Organizing Project Police Accountability Task Force and also the Sonoma County Tenants Union. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate how difficult these decisions are. However, my concern today echoes what others have said regarding the extremely conservative values that disregard human rights and community care. The data is clear that investing money into community programs decreases crime while militarization and increased funding and policing does not. In fact, it does more harm. It does help the very wealthy who do not pay living wages, who hoard property, make it nearly impossible for working class people to live here. Please don't put our most vulnerable people in more danger. Please increase whatever community programs might help our houseless community and people who are suffering the most. I also would like to say that our public school to private prison pipeline can only thrive if our elected officials allow it to thrive. Police in schools have, the data is very clear there too. It does not help. It does not help any of the children. If it doesn't help one kid, it doesn't help all of the kids. We have an incredibly dangerous situation in the entire country and what we do know is that when we, our elected officials, invest in the community, those concerns, the safety of our community increases. I would hope that you would prioritize the comfort of those who are already in desperate need over the ones who already have so much. Thank you for your time and I yield the rest of mine. Thank you, Lane. Next up we have Hugh, followed by Steven. Hugh, I've been enabled your permissions. Go right ahead whenever you're ready. Hi, Hugh Futrell. I'm here to speak on behalf of the Downtown Action Organization, which I chair, which as you know, is made up of some 300 businesses and property owners in the Downtown Corps. We'd like to reiterate our strong support for additional public safety investment. The importance of that cannot be under-emphasized. The perceptions about public safety are daunting at times for Downtown. We're very appreciative of the investments the city has made in public safety, and we urge you to a couple of other things. One is the budgeting for an assistant city attorney that can deal with code enforcement and misdemeanor enforcement. The DAO views that as exceptionally important and we strongly advocate it. The second consideration is it would be extremely helpful if the Downtown enforcement team could be expanded so that it could be a permanent and not just transitory presence of police officers in the Downtown Corps. That would take a couple additional officers. Everyone always thinks that what they care about is the most important thing in the world. That's just the way life is. And economically, we know that you're under budget pressure. But Downtown is, as you know, the economic powerhouse for the general fund. Trans-inoccupancy tax, sales tax, and other dollars are massive. Anything that protects that stream of income and enhances it is actually physically prudent and not imprudent. And we strongly hope that you will strongly consider those additional investments. Again, we strongly support and appreciate the commitment of the city to the Downtown Corps. The other item we just mentioned was in respect to the parks discussion. I did not log in until partway through the meeting, so I may have missed it. But there is a question whether the budget that you saw fully reflects Council policy about retaining park impact fees within the Downtown Corps and spending those in a comprehensive way and what the relationship of the DAO is to that planning and expenditure. And we hope that that'll be considered before you take up the final budget. Again, thank you very much for your support. We are very, very appreciative, both for the Council and for the superb work and focus of staff in recent years and in recent weeks. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have Stephen. Stephen, I've enabled your permissions. Go ahead and speak whenever you're ready. Hello, this is Stephen Stankovich. I am the mall manager at Santa Rosa Plaza and also part of the Midtown District. The reason I am calling in today is to advocate on behalf of all Downtown businesses to increase security protection in Downtown, especially to advocate, to add extra Downtown enforcement team members from Santa Rosa PD. As many of you may have noticed, there has been a significant uptick in incidents, both in terms of transient and juvenile issues over the last few months. And we have lost out on considerable, business by not having a secure and safe Downtown. So we are strongly urging for more increased Downtown enforcement team members. And then also we are strongly advocating for having an extra city attorney added that will be able to work on misdemeanor and property claims. We want to strongly invest in the Downtown and we're planning to invest multi-millions of dollars Downtown as well as we're hoping to be able to develop housing and grocery, but in order to ensure that these come to fruition, we really do need a safe and secure Downtown that people want to visit and national retailers would like to set up shop. And in order to do that, we need a safe and secure Downtown. Thank you very much. Thank you, Stephen. Rhonda, we have no more hands raised as of right now. And no prerecorded comments. Correct, no prerecorded comments. All right, perfect. One more hand just popped up. All right, let's go for it. Michael, I've enabled your permissions. Go right ahead whenever you're ready. Great, thanks a lot. I want to thank the mayor, vice mayor and city council for the last two days and all the staff for all the detailed and good work. I just wanted to make a couple of comments. There was a bit of discussion around the person last mile related to SMART and the BIRD program. I think just fundamentally, the program was sort of the cart before the course because as it is now, it's directed to a younger demographic and we should have person last miles really supportive of all ages and abilities to get people to and from. And what that requires is really revisiting investment in active transportation infrastructure. And what I mean by that is designing networks that connect safe, low stress protected bike lanes. So that moms with children, young adults, children's can get from point A to point B and feel safe doing that. And I think just overall, traditionally urban design has been around designing cities around autos and not people. And a good example is if you look at land use in the city of Santa Rosa, I think it's upwards to 48% of land uses for vehicle infrastructure parking lots. That could be used for housing, for parks. If we revisit how we're going to distribute in budget funds for alternative forms of transportation. And also, I think the number was 1200 vehicle lanes, miles are in Santa Rosa. That's a whole lot to maintain. And I think if we continue to support this vehicle infrastructure, you get to a point where it's unsustainable and you can't afford the maintenance. And if you look around different cities around the US, you see examples of this, where cities have gone bankrupt because they can't afford the vehicular infrastructure. So we need to rethink things and refocus on our urban areas as vibrant, burdened places for people to walk, ride their bikes and use other forms of transportation. So thank you very much. Thanks for all your good work. Thank you, Michael. There are no more hands raised in Zoom. Thank you. So I did want to thank everyone for the public comment. It has been a long two days and know that we have been taking notes. City manager, assistant city managers have been taking notes myself and I'm sure council members have been taking notes about some of the questions, comments and concerns that have been raised today. One that I would like to address before we adjourn this meeting is talk about the SRO program. And why I would like to address that is for a couple of reasons. So I will start to go through my list. We need to talk about the SRO program because we're talking about the budget right now. And so we just want to be prepared, not that we can make the decision and we know the decision is not ours. But if a decision is made in the future by the school board, we need to know what does that look like for us fiscally and how can we support the school board by supporting our children in our community. So that is one reason why we need to look at that while we're looking at the budget to be proactive and not be reactive after our budget has already been approved. Additionally, we have officers that are currently responding to calls every day that the schools are open. These officers are not trained specifically for in our SRO program or anything else. So we're just looking at it from a standpoint of how can we best keep our children safe. We've also reached out to the Santa Rosa School Board to request that we have a ad hoc committee or a committee that can discuss ways that the city can work with the school board. What does that look like and how can we move forward? Just wanted to address that topic and do know that the rest of the topics in question, comments and concerns that have been brought up will be addressed. Thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned.