 Hi everybody. Oh great. It's live. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay perfect. Can you hear me? Yes. Do you want to hear me now? Yep. A few announcements. I'm going to move on to our high ball community television channel 25. Streaming on the city's website cityofsantacruze.com meeting remotely and I want to thank the public for staying home to be able to instructions on your streaming device once you've called in and listened through your phone. We know there is a delay in streaming so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device you may miss your opportunity to speak. Speak during public comments. You will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted once you've commented on your eyes and interests. And with that I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Hey Mayor, Council Member Byers. Council Member Byers. I think she sounds like she can't hear me maybe. Can you see if I can unmute her actually? Can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. Oh good. Okay. It's my screen keeps saying waiting. Waiting. Well we can hear you now. Okay. Okay. Council Member Byers is here. Council Member Matthews. Here. Brown. Entry to care. Folder. At the time of calling using the instructions on your screen and the Council for Deliberation. Here in City Council. I'll do a brief introduction and then I'll be turning it over to management partners that will be doing the update on the forecast. So just to start, because everyone knows the pandemic has had a half in our community as well as the finances. And the pandemic is in the middle of budget development. Can you hear me okay now? Let's get closer to my microphone. So as you know, the pandemic hit us in the middle of our budget development and little was known about what the impact would be at that time, particularly the long-term impact. And our initial projections were based on really limited information about the impact of the pandemic. So the proposed budget ended up being essentially a draft budget for the Council to consider. And then the adopted budget was really an interim budget recognizing that we would need to make changes and likely would only really get worse. We knew that we were expecting changes that would require a larger deficit. Because we recognize early that we would be facing deficits. We took early actions to slow the bleeding. We implemented a hiring and spending freeze essentially. We also implemented an early retirement program. And we began discussions with our labor groups to initiate furloughs. And I want to thank our employees who were willing to sacrifice in order to help the city implement the furloughs. We have 10% furloughs in effect as a result. These early actions have saved the city approximately $8 million. But unfortunately, it's not sufficient as you'll hear. The other thing we've done is hired management partners to assist us with updating our forecast. And they'll be presenting their updated model to you today. Not surprisingly, the update is not good news. The budget picture has worsened. And it is really at a scale comparable to the Great Recession. So it's a longer term structural in nature. The council has recognized the need to act and appointed a budget subcommittee comprised of council members Myers, the mayor, Cummings, and council member Brown, which have been providing input into the modeling and will be developing recommendations for council consideration in September. Unfortunately, there will be very difficult decisions and actions before the City Council in the coming weeks and months. And the purpose of today is to clearly present our outlook to you and to the community to present possible strategies and outline next steps and get your feedback and the feedback of the community. We're not asking council to take final action today. Action will be required at your second meeting in September. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Andy Bellnap, who will be kicking off the presentation from management partners. And then we'll be happy to answer questions as we go through the presentation and after the presentation as well. All the City Department heads are here as well, so they're all available to answer any questions you may have about the individual departments or any aspects of the City budget. So thank you. I'm Andy Bellnap with management partners, and I'm here with my colleagues Steve Toller and Bob Leland. And just this first slide, just a little bit of an introduction to our firm worked for hundreds of California cities and understand municipal budgeting and municipal operations. And that's really what we're brought in by Santa Cruz to help with. And as you know, cities in California actually throughout the United States are experiencing a fiscal emergency. And Santa Cruz brought us in to help get an early start on addressing the impacts of this emergency. Next slide, Bob. Could I have the next slide, Bob? Oh, thank you. Just to give you an overview of today's presentation, we are going to be addressing three main topics, our updated forecast, some comparative research done with cities that are similar to Santa Cruz, most importantly some budget strategies which we've developed in consultation with the city's executive management team and also our own experience working throughout California. And then we're transitioned into the Council's and SAF's discussion of next steps. And just let me introduce these three topics quickly. The forecast represents our best impact or best estimate of the impact on various revenue sources that the city relies upon. We probably need to underscore that this is a work in progress as we don't have a particularly good understanding on the COVID-19 recession. It's unlike any previous recessions in terms of its timing. It's come on exceptionally strong fast. But there's been significant federal stimulus applied, which has helped. And there may be more of that, so there are significant unknowns. But the bottom line conclusion from our forecast is that use of reserves alone won't be enough for Santa Cruz to maintain its solvency, that budget strategies are going to be required beyond using the reserves. So the second part of our presentation concerns some comparative work we've done with other cities. This is important not because there's any such thing as a perfect comparison. Santa Cruz is a unique city unlike any other city in the state. But there are some value in getting comparisons because you can reflect on how other cities provide municipal services and how their staffed and what their budgets are and so forth. We judge Santa Cruz is in some ways more vulnerable to this recession because you are both a home for higher education, which is significantly impacted and a tourism destination. We also judge that Santa Cruz may be more resilient in this recession because you are a regional tourism draw and people are still anxious to be able to get out when they can do so safely and visit locations that they can access using usually their vehicle. So the third part of our presentation, we'll talk about strategies. And as I mentioned, these are developed based on discussions with city staff but also our own knowledge of how California cities operate. And it is clear that some consideration of revenue increases or expenditure reductions or a combination will be required because reserves alone are not going to be sufficient. Everything that we suggest has been tried and proven within California local government but of course Santa Cruz is unique and so your strategies are going to be developed through public discussion and will be customized for the Santa Cruz setting. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Bob Leland who's going to talk about our forecast and then Steve Tolar is going to talk about the comparisons and the budget strategies. Thank you, Andy. This is Bob Leland. I'm going to start off by taking a look back last May when you were doing budget hearings. Staff presented at the time a five-year projection of annual shortfall in the general fund and then resulting general fund balance. As you can see, after being in the positive in fiscal 19, fiscal 20 year we just ended, it was going to be a $10.4 million shortfall. However, that was shown as improving significantly over the next couple of years and by fiscal 23 the general fund would be back to running surpluses. However, the big shortfall caused by these three years of negatives would pull the general fund balance into as low a level as $16.7 million and even by fiscal 25 the general fund would still be in deficit. Obviously that's not something that can be allowed to happen but independent of budget corrections. This was the view back in May. I should note that the balance projection here is for the available balance only. It excludes the city stabilization reserve which is another some $17 million. Okay, well that was then. This is now. The forecast and deficits are significantly worse than the original city projection. Here on the left you see the annual surplus or shortfall and there's a lot of red ink there. I should note that the reason why fiscal 21 looks better in comparison to the fiscal years on either side of it is the fiscal 21 now includes the furloughs and the early retirements the city manager spoke to. It also includes almost $800,000 of CARES Act funding. One thing that this forecast does not include is any potential money from prop 15 the split roll measure which is on the November ballot. That is still speculative at this point and frankly the bulk of the revenue won't be coming in until fiscal 25 and so it's beyond the time where the city needs to take action. Basically the fiscal year 20 budgeted revenues are almost $10 million higher in the city forecast than they are in the current forecast. So the main concern is on the revenue side. The expense estimates were generally on target. The chart on the right shows fund balance and the blue line is the reserve goal. Ideally that's where we'd like to be. The green line is general fund balance and that's available balance plus stabilization reserve. That shows it with no recession. So there was going to be downward trend in any event even without recessions. It's just that the with the recession which is the red line you hit negative territory more quickly with the furloughs and the early retirements and with CARES Act funding reserves would be depleted by the end of the fiscal 22 year and so we are in fiscal 21 now. So we got a year to take action and so you've started to do that but you're going to need to take further steps at corrective budget actions in the current fiscal year. Now the risk factors some of which Andy alluded to they begin and end with the coronavirus. The first wave isn't finished. Cases are continuing to increase throughout the state and the county. There has been some reinstatement of controls. The largest growth in cases now is the 18 to 40 age range and a lot of unknowns surround K-12 school reopenings. There have been some pretty rocky rollouts throughout the nation. A widely available vaccine is going to be the key to long-term recovery but not only having it available but having people use it and having the faith in it. In terms of the general economy unemployment rate remains quite high just over 10% in the U.S. and almost 15% in California so we're significantly worse off than the U.S. as a whole. Home values though do continue to climb. There are enough buyers chasing even though the available homes for sale have diminished. There are enough people chasing those sales to keep values up. New construction and home sales have slowed nationwide and statewide but values are hanging in there. There is going to be an expected glut of empty office space especially in core urban areas and suburbs are going to regain daytime population. We still have no replacement for the CARES Act and that expired the end of last month. As Andy mentioned in terms of tourism the city has more of a regional draw so less reliant on people flying in but commercial flights are down 70% from July of last year. Hotel occupancy nationwide is only 42%. There's still a concern about the safety of large groups and what you're seeing is virtual conferences, empty convention centers. A special risk for Santa Cruz is that you're a college town and that situation has been evolving over the last couple of months. Classes are basically online. The overall on-site student population is going to be lower which is going to hurt local merchants further and some of these changes may just become permanent fixtures of campus life. We're just going to have to watch and see how that evolves. A couple of other key economic trends. I mentioned unemployment rates. The chart on the left shows the U.S. unemployment in the red line, California at the blue line. You can see how that has escalated. The State Department of Finance indicates the potential for unemployment to rise as high as 25% in California and significantly higher under what they call an extended disruption scenario. The table on the right shows changes statewide in taxable sales is put together by the HTL companies as of June of this year. There's a lot of red ink there. The first column here of the fiscal 1920 is for the fiscal year just ended. There were massive decreases emanating from really just a three, three and a half month period at the end of the fiscal year. A lot of those negatives are going to carry over into the year that we're now in 2021 fiscal year. The one bright spot is really online sales. As you can see, big jump last year, another big jump this year. A lot of that is from people changing their buying patterns, ordering online as they stay at home. But it's also aided by the Wayfair decision on out of state sales. And so that that is kind of the bright spot a little bit for the food and drugs that are taxable. But that is it's been a big impact hurting the sales tax. Take a look at revenues for the city divided these into two categories, the highly elastic revenue sources, which are the ones being affected in real time, very responsive to economic changes. And we have high losses for sales tax, TOT, transfer tax, admission and parking taxes. And we will have an impact for business license tax next year. There's a one year delay there. And then some medium losses for construction permits, other fees and fines. You can see on this upper chart the significant drop off in revenues from the prior fiscal year. This chart is showing historically the blue line is the actual amounts for these revenue sources compared to the red line is budget. And you can see how initially the budget was assumed to be at this higher level. Clearly, we're not there. We're significantly lower. There will be a recovery over several years back to the green line, which is where you would be without any recession. And then by fiscal 27, we're assuming recessions being on about a seven year cycle will have another recession, not as bad as this one, but that tends to be the cycle. Okay, so these are the elastic sources and they comprise about 43% of the total general fund revenue. Now you take a look at the lower chart. These are other revenue sources and they tend to be more stable. There was this one jump which you can ignore, which is the past tool of the POB proceeds. But other than that, you can see that there was a decline in revenues in response to the great recession, but then pre stable quotes been slow but steady over the last several years. And we're assuming that it will be relatively steady going forward. So the property tax wouldn't be hit for two years anyway, and we're assuming a minor impact. Minor impact for utility user tax and no losses for cannabis tax and all other revenues. And again, this other revenue category does include about $800,000 in the CARES Act, but it does not include any potential revenue for Prop 15 split rule, which wouldn't be available until around 24, 25 fiscal year. So one of the things that you can do with the model that we prepared for the city is come up with a wide range of scenarios of potential revenue impact. What you've been looking at is this middle case, the baseline, and that's about a $24 million revenue loss. As the chart shows, you can see the upper green line is the revenue without a recession. The lower line is the revenue with a recession. And the yellow area is the projected revenue loss. So this is an L-shaped recovery over four years. In theory, we could have more of a U-shaped recovery. Initially people were talking about a V-shaped, but that ship has sailed. It's going to be a longer recovery than that. And even now, for this best case, you really need everything to go right from now on, which is unlikely. Over on the right, you have an extended L-shape, which could rise to a $32 million loss. There are some risks and the worst case is probably more likely than the best case, but we're here in the middle right now on the baseline $24 million of loss. Comparing back to the Great Recession, there are some lessons from that period. No two recessions are alike, and this one is certainly unique. But note again that in the Great Recession, it took three years for the city to get to their peak loss, which occurred in fiscal 10. And then it was still high for the next couple of years, and then tapered off relatively quickly by fiscal 14. The elastic revenue sources, including sales tax, TOT, were actually running better than they had prior to the recession, and property tax was still running below. So this shows you that it could take multiple years to hit a peak, and it can take multiple years to recover. Over here on the COVID-19 recession under this baseline case, major impact right out of the gate, 11% loss driven by the elastic revenue sources, largely the ones that we mentioned, the sales tax, TOT, admissions, parking. These are the ones that were the major loss, and we're seeing a gradual improvement so that by fiscal 24, basically no remaining loss. You can also see, looking back on the left, the Great Recession had a more significant involvement with property tax, which we're not envisioning to be the case when we look over here on the right on the COVID-19 recession. So small property tax impact, large immediate impact on the elastic sources, multiple years to recover. Now switching for a moment to the expenditure side, here are some of the key assumptions. For salaries, we're using the current MOUs, and thereafter, 2% colas are assumed. As I mentioned before, we have a 10% furlough built-in and the impact of the early retirements with a one-year freeze on positions. A handful of positions will be filled sooner than that. We're assuming no general fund FTE increases. We would like to be able to have the capacity to increase staffing to deal with increased workload and population over time, but when you're in a deep hole, stop digging. So we're not assuming any FTE increases. We do have built-in step increases, and we also have built-in salary savings from vacancies, and also we have savings from employee turnover because over time, positions vacate and are typically refilled at a lower step level, and our model has a factor built-in for that. So the net of step and turnover savings is about a 0.25%. So ongoing colas and this impact are about a net of 2.25% increase a year. Health we're assuming a 3% growth over time and part-time at 2% growth. Vacancy savings I mentioned is at 4% going forward, which is less than it's been in recent years, but we're assuming 4% is more reasonable long-term. So pension costs, at the time this was prepared we had the 2018 valuation, the 2019 valuation just came out, but we do have built-in the investment return of 4.7% that CalPERS just had for fiscal 20. We assume a better year in fiscal 21 because the years tend to up go up and down alternating, and then on an ongoing basis we're assuming a lower rate of return 6.2%. That's the level that Wilshire associates, one of the major advisors to CalPERS projected for an average over the next decade. The discount rate we're assuming declines slowly from the current 7% to 6% over the next 20 years. CalPERS hasn't made a commitment to change that yet, although their intent had been to try to get that down. The discount rate is 7% now, 30 years ago it was 8.75%. There has been a slow reduction in the average level of return over time, so we think it is prudent to build-in and assume discount rate decline. Because of lower investment returns and lower discount rate over time that is going to add about $2.5 million a year in costs by fiscal 29 compared to the ongoing 7% discount rate in investment returns, which is a pretty optimistic assumption. In terms of non-personnel costs, 2.25% is what we have for O&M costs. Debt service per the current schedules. Capital grows on the base established in the fiscal 21 budget, except that we do build-in a million dollars for general CIP transfers starting in fiscal 22 to address some unmet capital needs, certainly not all. Capital has a 3% growth. And then there are a number of transfers out to the WARF IT equipment. Those all continue with a 2% growth. The ongoing transfer equal to 10% of the TOT tax for the Economic Development Trust is assumed to continue. And we will watch the WARF for the need both for the year just ended and in fiscal 21, the need for higher transfer due to whatever revenue losses they may be incurring. So let's go back to our three cases, the best case, worst case and baseline here in the middle. The shortfall projections are, they're high, sort of regardless of the COVID loss. COVID loss is important, but the reality is under the best case of COVID losses, we're still looking at $8.7 million average shortfall compared to the worst case, $10.2 average million dollar shortfall in the middle 9.4. Now, this shortfall again that you notice this only $3 million shortfall in fiscal 21, that is after the furlough and the early retirements. So this is the remaining amount of cuts that need to be made over time. So the question then becomes what do we need to do in order to balance the budget? In this baseline case in the middle, we have just filled in an assumption of $12 million in assumptions phased in over two years. It does take time to develop some of these strategies. And so we're assuming all of the savings doesn't come already in the year that we're in, but would be spread over this year and next. $12 million in solutions, which would then be fully implemented by fiscal 22, would be 10% of total expense, which is not insignificant. Given that you would have a slow but steady increase in balance by the time you got to fiscal 26, you could actually restore four and a half million dollars of the 12 million in cuts. And you would be then more or less at the reserve level here on the blue line. Similarly, we did the same thing for best case and worst case. The best case still requires 11 million in solutions phased in over two years. That's about a 9.1% total cut. And then on the worst case, it would require $14 million in solutions phased in over two years. And that's an 11.6 million, or I'm sorry, 11.6% reduction in expense. In all three cases, by fiscal 25 or 26, you would be able to start restoring some of the cuts. Now, to take a look at these level of cuts in the context of the Great Recession, you have this upper chart which shows you how much below the pre-recession general fund spending trend did the city wind up as a result of the Great Recession. And it shows that over a seven-year period from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2016, the reductions below what would otherwise have been the case averaged 13%. So under the baseline, we're talking about about a 10% reduction, which is a little less than the 13% average over this period during the Great Recession. There were a couple years where it was worse. Fiscal 12 was the worst year, 21.8% below, and fiscal 13, 17.7% below. So what we had done was going back to fiscal 2009, we grew those expenditures at 2.75% a year. And it took until fiscal 2019 to catch up with that trend in all years in between the city was lower. Now, city staffing took a big hit. The chart here on the bottom shows general fund employees only, and the peak was 544 general fund employees in 09 that dropped all the way to 378 full-time equivalent employees, which was a 30.5% decline. There has been a gradual increase since then, but even in fiscal 21 at 474 FTE, still significantly below the pre-recession peak. There had been back then also some revenue gains. The city enacted some land leases with the utilities that brought money into the general fund, and then there were also rate increases for the UT and the TOT. The situation we look at now is revenue options are more limited. There is still a quarter percent potential for local sales tax, but of course, if anything were to appear on the November ballot, it would probably be facing economic headwinds. Even on the March 2020 ballot, only 68% of general tax measures passed versus 94% of general tax measures passing on the November 2019 ballot. As a result, a lot of what our attention has been focused on is reductions in spending. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to Steve Toler, who's going to walk through the research comparing to other cities and also a list of budget strategies. Great. Thanks, Bob. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor and members of the Council. One of the areas that we looked at was, really, how does Santa Cruz line up with respect to other agencies? We took out a few different factors with that. One was in the area of, well, Bob, that just bailed out of it. Would you mind going back on it again? Minor problems here. I can drive it now. Okay, there we go. Thanks. We looked at other agencies that are full service California cities with a similar population, but that have that mix that you have with respect to being college towns, tourist destinations, or perhaps both. And as Andy mentioned earlier, no two cities are alike. You were clearly unique at the community that you have. And so we tried to find some agencies that would be of similar. We like to compare two different areas. Number one is, what are the revenues that are generated by each of those agencies? Because that speaks to what the general fund resources are to be able to provide services. And the other is, really, to what extent is the city then investing in staffing to provide those types of services, which over time has staffing, city staffing has increased in cost for a variety of different reasons, not the least of which is especially where you were situated of trying to maintain a competitive compensation plan to be able to recruit and retain employees, quality employees, to do the work that you are asking to be done for the community. And when we look at the revenues, we see that Santa Cruz's general fund revenues in comparison to these other agencies is below that average level. Your revenue per capita is about $1,600 per person per year for the population. And this is just your residential population. It does not include the ebb and flow of daytime population, nor does it include, in this case, the student population that you have at UCSC. But the same is true with all these other agencies. We have not incorporated the likes of UCD over in Davis, SLO, down in San Luis Vista, UCSP, etc. And so your revenues are a little less than what some of these other agencies are in terms of what they're generating. When we also look at the staffing levels, the full-time employees that you have serving the entire population, and this is total staffing, not just general fund staffing, you're a little higher than the average. Now, in a couple of cases, part of the reason for this is that you do full-service water and wastewater services. Most of these other agencies do as well. You have a higher level of treatment that you do. You also maintain reservoirs and other things that some of these other cities might not that would require additional staffing. But by and large, when you look at staffing, it's a little above what the average is. The other note I want to make here is that, as you may have heard, Monterey really out the gate in the May-June timeframe made a decision to do some significant staffing reductions given what they were expecting in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts to their budget. And so these numbers have been reflected based on what Monterey had done. So again, staffing levels a little higher, but some of that is also attributed to the fact that you are full-service city. You have made conscious decisions to have city staff provide services that you can be able to better manage and control the outcomes in terms of expected service levels. The other thing that's relatively unique with respect to Santa Cruz compared to these other agencies is also the need that you have not only being the county seat, but really being the collector of some of the issues that are going on in the community as it relates to homelessness and some of the social issues that you're having to face and address even as the city. In fact, this next chart shows a comparison of homeless population from the latest point-in-time surveys we were able to access from each of these cities. And this goes back to the January 2019, which will be different, of course, than what it is today. But back in 2019, at that point in time, Santa Cruz's homeless population was larger than any of these other agencies by which we have compared to. Santa Barbara is second, and then the others fall to about a third of your level with San Luis Bisco about just shy of about 500 and these other agencies, you know, relatively smaller. And you see the breakout between those that are either sheltered, which is the light blue and the more teal color, which is the unsheltered population. And again, your unsheltered population almost exceeds the total of every other agency individually. So there's no question that that is having an impact in terms of how you are responding to services. And you see these, you know, percentage of the, you know, what is the percent of Santa Cruz's homeless population compared to the entire homeless population in the county? And again, you're the highest in that area. And then as well as when you look at homeless individuals per 1000 residents, you know, 18.2 compared to the nearest ones, I saw a lot at 10. So it's clearly an issue that you're having to address as the city and not getting probably as much assistance as might be available or expected or hoped for from from the county or other agencies to be able to assist. And so it's no wonder that you're having to expend the resources that you are in dealing with those areas and all the other things that go along with that. And part of it also feeds into the affordable housing issues that we're seeing in the greater Bay Area and, you know, along the coastline there between Santa Cruz and Danter Monterey. So it's clearly, you know, some drivers that are driving the way that you're providing and the level and extent that you are providing services. I'm going to switch over now to talk about how our other agencies addressing the recessionary impacts. There's five areas by large that there are tools that they're using to be able to address those fiscal impacts that range from making sure that they've got all their ducks in a row, if you will, when it comes to federal reimbursement, you know, accounting for those costs. And those are things, of course, that your finance staff and your department heads and your operating departments are doing and tracking those costs, whether they be for the opportunities to be able to leverage additional grant or funding sources or whether it's just for being able to report back on the close to $800,000 of CARES Act money you've got through the state and in that area. You know, there are some budget and accounting actions that agencies will use in terms of either, you know, slowing down or reducing the amount of money they're setting aside for internal service funds like fleet or facilities or information technology costs and other things. Looking at the way they're allocating costs for administrative departments, looking at the fees and charges to ensure that they're getting closer to full cost recovery, you know, tapping existing available reserves that are not restricted, that are completely within the governing board, in this case, the council's discretion to use, or in the cases of cities that are really in dire situations and dealing with solvency issues, looking at interfund loans, and that's, of course, not something that you're at at the present time. Agencies are also reducing and deferring their investment in capital assets until they get some, you know, stability in terms of where this recession is going and seeing some, you know, light at the end of the tunnel. They're also looking at workforce reductions and implementing things that range from hiring freezes, something that you're doing for this one year in 2021, eliminating vacant positions, temporary furloughs and layoffs, temporary furloughs is something that you're doing right now. And some agencies are also reopening bargaining agreements, you know, with agencies to be able to work together with labor and staff in terms of addressing the issues. And then finally, are other operational reductions, you know, range from recreation programs, closing non-essential facilities, reducing work week for administration. So there's some different tools that all agencies are using, and these are, you know, tools that your staff have already considered. And in some cases, as I mentioned, as I was talking about this, I've already started to implement at least on a temporary basis until which time you figure out what the magnitude of the problem is, which Bob just shared, and what other strategies might be available. And so as we started looking at different strategies that could be used for consideration, we like to think of it in terms of really fiscal sustainability planning. How can the agency create a sustainable community as it relates to the fiscal side, the resources that you have that are available? And really, it's this concept of being able to ensure that you can make good on the obligations that you have in providing the services that you're able to provide within the community, given the resources that you have. And the strategies that we typically identify are in two large buckets. They're either trying to maintain service levels to the full of success possible. And if some of those solutions aren't able to maintain service levels, then it's looking at reduced services. And the areas of maintaining service levels include expenditure controls and cost shifts, which are just basically words for how do you squeeze a nickel a little bit better in terms of the cost of providing services. Service delivery alternatives would mean shared service opportunities that may exist, whether it be and consolidating services with other agencies like parks, maintenance, or fire, or police, or other things. Or either outsourcing or insourcing, depending on if you have capacity to be able to insource services from other agencies that are likewise also hurting financially that are within the same geographic region. And the other area, of course, it looks to maintain service levels and to provide the resources that are necessary to provide service levels at that level is very revenue enhancements. And whether that be tax increases, increasing the base through economic development activities, increasing fees to be able to ensure that the delivery of services are being paid for at an appropriate price for providing those services. And again, to the extent that those three areas do not provide that fiscal sustainability to you long term, then you're going to have to look at service level reductions. And that's how we evaluated the different strategies that we identified. We looked at various factors, such as the potential for the community that may not may not support a certain strategy to push back technical or operational difficulties for implementation. Can you implement it in a timely fashion? And what is the level of disruption on both service delivery as well as the city organization itself? And when we compare that to the fiscal impact, when you're looking at the need to find strategies that will equate to $12 million per year starting in fiscal 21, we had to scope this at a certain level. And so there might be some strategies that are out there that might be able to save some money, that might be able to reduce costs or generate additional revenues. But we tried to focus on those items that were potentially more big-ticket, those items that are really over about the $500,000 level. And so that's what you're seeing in terms of the different strategies that we identified. And when you compare that, then, to the level of difficulty of implementation, then, you realize what are the areas where we can see that high fiscal impact and the minimal difficulty. Those are the areas that are the I wouldn't say no-brainers, but those are the ones that have more opportunity for success than those that would generate less than $500,000 when we require a significant amount of lifting to get there. So we considered that in terms of the strategies that we've identified. And it's something that you as a city council and staff are going to have to think about in terms of a potential rubric, if you will, or a quadrant analysis to help you in identifying what the appropriate strategies are as you move forward. So let me get into the strategies. The first slate of strategies that I'd like to talk about are those that are trying to maintain service levels to the fullest extent possible. And before I go into each of the strategies, and I'm only going to give a broad brush stroke, top level, perhaps one sentence of what each of these are, is that all of these, all of the estimates that we've identified as a result of this were not as a result of detailed analysis on our part that wasn't really what the focus of this was. Instead it was more of identifying those strategies with reasonable potential fiscal impact that could be brought forward for consideration. Some of them have a little bit more precision in terms of what the numbers are than others. And in some cases, the others are going to be defined about how you actually define what that strategy is and how it will be implemented based on your expectations for service levels, the need to get to the $12 million that Bob indicated in terms of the model, and how operationally they can be enacted. So with that kind of as a background, let me just quickly go through what each of the strategies were. And again, we've sorted these into the four categories that you saw a few slides earlier. The first area is in the area of revenue enhancements. One of the options could be to increase the hotel tax with a transient occupancy tax rate. You're currently 11%. If that were to go up to example 14%, that could generate an additional $3 million on long term for the city. The second is raising the local sales tax rate from the current half cent and replacing it with a three quarter cent sales tax, increasing it by one quarter percent. And for Santa Cruz, that would increase an additional $3.6 million of revenues for the city to be able to pay for the services that it provides. There's a third concept of implementing a parcel tax. Now this could look like a whole bunch of different options. One could be a parcel tax that is related to landscaping and lighting, called landscaping and lighting district. Another could be a parcel tax that relates to perhaps dealing with parks maintenance activities, community benefit issues that may be coming up. Another that is being reviewed and tested by a variety of different cities across the United States and even in Canada is the concept of a vacancy tax that there's an impairment that's going on in the community for parcels to be left vacant and there's the ability to implement a tax in that area. So there's a whole bunch of different options there. We estimate that depending again on how you size this and what the totality of parcels would be that would be incorporated in that, that could range up to about a $2 million impact for the city. The fourth area is looking at your parking meter fees and there could be the potential to increase up to about $750,000 for that. And the fifth area is also fees and charges in terms of ensuring that you're recovering costs to the full-assistant possible areas, especially public works and development services, and that's what the focus is on these two where there are transactional businesses going on between a developer, property owner, customer, and the city. And so therefore they're typically as a view by cities that okay those should be reimbursed down to the cost recovery, up to the cost recovery level. And so that's what the potential is for those areas. Let me shift over to the right-hand side, come back to the left. The second area is in the area of expenditure controls and cost shifts. And again this is the concept of being able to reduce expenses but still provide the same level of service. The first area is in deferring cost of living adjustments for employee groups for one year. That has the impact of about million and a half dollars. And to clarify that by having that cost of living which right now is built into the model assuming that it goes up, by virtue of deferring that for one year it has an ongoing impact in the model. And so that's what that strategy is about. It's not assuming that cost of living adjustments are deferred forever and ever, it's just the one year impact of that being implemented. The second is in the area of cost sharing, things that you've done in the past but additional cost sharing. I mean pensioner health care cost is another option. Conducting a citywide organizational assessment is this item number eight which would be looking at the organizational structure and the way that services are delivered citywide that could and based on our experience of doing a lot of those types of studies could yield savings as much as a million dollars. Some of which might be as a result of some other strategies that might be identified here but in and of itself doing an organizational assessment given the size and the nature of the services you're providing have the ability to generate that type of savings. There's the option of freezing either merit or step increases for staff for either a short or a long period of time. If it was done just for again a one-year option that would then start up again in the following year it has the potential of saving $800,000 because it's reduced that growth in that one year. Stopping the trend but right now you're transferring a certain portion of your transient occupancy taxes to your economic development trust. You could suspend or stop that transfer for a short period of time. Remember Bob indicated that starting in fiscal 21 you need to find about $12 million in budget solutions to be able to resolve the gap and restore reserves up to the prudent levels that would be required but you could end up restoring about four and a half million dollars starting in 26. So this could be one item for example but could be a short term if it was identified as well as all these could be. Item 11 is introducing options for additional retirement incentives that would give you the opportunity to be able to leverage those positions that would become vacant and freeze those or eliminate those depending on the operational needs down in the future and how much resources you have. Another area that could be done is this concept of number 12 which is shifting police and how police services are provided from sworn officer positions to non-sworn officer positions and again something like this could be done in conjunction with strategy 11 or some other strategies perhaps and it gives that opportunity to be able to address some of the issues that you're dealing with in a different way perhaps using community service officers rather than police officers and the reason that that shift ends up saving money is because of the the benefit costs are lower for non-sworn positions as they are for sworn so this is kind of under the umbrella being able to look at you know imagining how police services are provided perhaps it would come up we've included a conservative estimate about what that could mean depending on the extent. The area of service delivery changes items 13 and 14 really relate to how you're handling some of your risk management issues right now you're doing those in health with staff and so this would be the concept to be there outsourcing and entering into an insurance risk pool for some of the administration of liability insurance as well as workers compensation and how you're handling the administration of that so there's will be opportunities for some service delivery changes there again concepts here with all of these strategies these 14 strategies is trying to maintain service levels to the fullest extent possible to the extent that the some of those are either not selected or not able to be implemented or don't give you the fiscal impact that was hoped for originally then you're going to have to look at reducing service levels and there's there's you know variety different strategies that could be looked at here and you know what one of the questions that we tend to get is that well you know some agency just say okay we're looking at 10 percent let's just do 10 percent across the board and that's an option that's an option for the city to implement and so we look rather at what where are there opportunities perhaps to look at the types of services that you're providing and where might there be opportunities to be able to get a more strategic fashion I guess reduce some of those the first area is reducing services you know across multiple general fund departments instead of the 10 percent you know across the board instead this one would look at being able to eliminate half of your currently vacant positions that way it does not have an impact on any existing staff which is something that's important you know from an employee morale perspective and so the sum of all of those positions you know equates to about eight million dollars per year and so looking at half of that would be just shy about as an opportunity the second area is in the area of recreation program subsidies right now the general fund is is subsidizing a lot of recreation programs that's typical of various agencies to try to allow for maximum participation in the community to be able to the live work and play feature right in terms of the of the community those recreation programs come at a cost and so this concept here is to look to strive to reduce the subsidy that the general fund is is making towards those recreation programs and so that could either be done in the area of making the programs more cost effective retooling the programs looking at different ways to provide that service at a lower cost or looking at and or looking at the cost recovery of what you know the fees are that you're charging for those classes or programs and increasing those to a certain level or even also looking at you know recreation programs again in light of service level reductions that are not that are not achieving that full cost recovery or maybe very far from that it may not have a lot of draw in terms of number of folks that are that are providing those that are I'm taking you up on those programs and so it could be a combination of a whole bunch of things it doesn't just assume that you're just eliminating recreation programs but it's really looking more at how can the general fund reduce the subsidy that is paying for recreation programs and we've evaluated that based on the current draw that you have you know if you just curbed that up by about 30 or 40 percent that would get you about the one and a half million reducing funding for social service programs is another option you're currently spending a million dollars towards helping to fund social service programs and that is something that some cities are not doing some cities are doing at a lower extent so there is the potential there that would have an impact of course all of these will have impacts in terms of the services that are provided within the community whether the city is providing them them itself or whether they're being done through the the resources that you're providing to see those services being provided the the next area item 18 is reducing service the service delivery capacity in your management and analytical areas within the organization and so that would be in terms of perhaps changing the span of control and changing the level of management that you have within the organization or even the analytical support that you know your different departmental operations rely upon for research and analysis or whatnot so that that has a potential dollar impact there of about $2 million so just over that the area 19 Santa Cruz for a variety of different reasons not the least of which is that you had a thriving redevelopment agency before the state took it away from all of us right is you still have a very a very well staffed economic development area and that's reflective of of you the investment that you've been putting in that but I want to make sure that it's not just understood as economic development because the economic development department oversees a variety of initiatives including including your housing program property asset management your arts programs and also you know finishing the the administration of the the successor agency and all the programs that are in there until it's finally able to be completely dissolved in all of its enforceable obligations or time and so if this strategy were implemented it would have an impact on all of those different types of services and that's been valued at just over a million dollars with the potential again depending on the direction that you would want to go and what you would want to invest in finally is in the area of park maintenance standards which I know has been tough especially given the fact of the regional draw that you are and since people can't travel they're pounding the beach right now right and so reducing park maintenance standards would be an opportunity to be able to to to look at really reducing the the level of effort that you're doing in terms of maintenance whether that be weeding mowing blow you know deferring perhaps some you know capital maintenance that you might need to do in different parks again all of these come at a cost in terms of reducing service levels but the city will need to think about those as a plan B if some of the other options that are exercised are not wanting to move forward there so the total of what we've identified is about 29 million dollars your target is about 12 million and again remember that it's not just on the cut side there's also the potential for revenue enhancements that those might take a little bit of time to to get implemented for not the least of which is that as we go through this recession the city is going to have to evaluate what the likelihood is of being able to move forward with the different revenue enhancement opportunities and the appetite for the community to be able to support those so next steps and then we'll turn it back over to staff and if you have any questions for us is you know today we we wanted to present the forecast to you and also the members of the public that may be watching this and potential strategies you know at this session now it's going to be you know you providing direction to staff to be able to develop the more detailed you know plan in terms of how the different solutions that you want to pursue could be implemented and that would be presented to you for for your consideration and then ultimately you would have to approve those for implementation and you know you and the staff will have to then implement those those strategies so with that that concludes our presentation mr. mayor i guess i'll turn it back over to you and we're available to answer any questions great thanks i think it might be good next to council members to hold the questions we have just a few slides of some recommendations that come from the subcommittee and so i'm going to turn it over to laura to briefly show those recommendations based on the conversations that we've been having and then we can return to council for further thank you mayor this is laura schmidt your assistant city manager and as uh the mayor alluded to the budget committee has been working over the last uh a couple of few days on going through management partners high-level recommendations and presenting for you a summary of uh potential focus areas that they were most interested in so that's what the next few slides represent the first one is regarding the revenue enhancements and in the brackets the number references the management partners uh budget strategy recommendation so the ones that the budget committee was most interested in were sales tax parcel tax and they talked about various options underneath that and then specifically related to parcel taxes is the vacancy tax the other item that they were interested in was full or cost recovery recommendation number five for public works and development services and then number four parking fees but in limited areas and then the final one which was not on the budget strategies was for management partners is to reinvigorate the look at sky selling sky park in scott valley and this is the sale has been considered and authorized previously by council so any members of the budget committee have any comments on the revenue enhancement all right i'm going to move on in the expenditure control and cost shifts and the service delivery change areas under management partners budget strategies um one of them was liability insurance and workers compensation service delivery changes so that combines items number 13 and 14 from the recommendation that one was interesting for the subcommittee the other one is the city wide organizational assessment and uh the corollary to that was exploring regional shared services for certain areas so that was number eight and then additional retirement incentives possibly putting out a new package for employees that didn't take advantage of the fiscal year 2021 package that was offered and then Santa Cruz police department sworn to non-form transition of some of the physicians and then funding of the economic development trust slowing it down for a limited number of years and specifying the number of years that we would do that and then the final area of interest was potentially freezing merit increases are any council member budget committee any comments on this one i just um maybe for a point of clarification on the trust um i believe laura that we confirm that that slow down um would not would not uh would not affect some of the current projects current housing projects we have on the books i believe we discussed that yesterday but i just want to double correct yes we would definitely need to coordinate with this with the economic development department as far as making sure that what is existing in the trust would cover the projects in the pipeline thank you you're welcome on the reducing service yes it was about ed to as well don't i got it thanks thank you on the reducing service levels area so this was the second of the budget strategy five that you just saw for management partners managed uh conducting a managed process to reduce service levels and underneath this umbrella would be items number 15 and 18 to potentially eliminate funding and vacancies were operationally sustainable so we are carrying numerous vacancies on our books and those vacancies translate to budget and when we eliminate a vacancy the budget gets reduced so we would potentially look at some of those vacancies management partners strategy had said up to 50 percent of possibly eliminating some of those words operationally feasible reduced management and analytical capacity was item number 18 and then looking at the viability of reducing economic development housing property asset management arts and successor agency programs was number 19 and then parks and recreation doing a fee analysis but mitigating program and facts that was number 16 council members on the budget committee wanted to look at potentially the fee recovery and going to more of a fuller cost recovery model but was they were not overly interested in reducing the recreation program levels themselves any council member budget committee comment on those yeah actually i do have one if i could um it's it's more of just a comment uh related to service level reduction um so we were very clear that i mean i think we were conversation and i'm pretty sure that there's a consensus on the desire to um you know make cuts that are furthest from service delivery that people rely on on regularly in our town and so in with respect to the parks and rec programs it reminded me with respect to parks and rec programming um we you know it's clear that there are a lot of vacancies there and that that is affecting service level already um so i just wanted to point that out that it's an area i think of of concern certainly for me many of the people who are communicating with the city council right now um and so i just wanted to kind of highlight that that it is it's something that you know i believe should be treated a little bit differently as we're making those decisions moving forward thank you council member brown as far as the next steps just wanted to reiterate what these had talked about is where we are in the process today we're presenting the potential the actual forecast from management partners and the potential strategies and recommendations from them i just gave you a summary the budget committees focus areas that they were interested in out of those strategies with the addition of the sky park potential sale so that's what's happening today based upon the conversation amongst you in the community today we'll get better idea of which focus areas you are most interested in and we'll take that and work with staff offline and departments to put together actual budget packages for implementation and then those budget packages for implementation will come back to council in the second meeting in september for your actual feedback and vote for which ones we would actually implement so that's what we're looking at in the next month with that i'll turn it back over to the mayor thank you laura any council members of questions for management partners or any questions they'd like to address for direct to the recommendations and for management partners on slide 24 what were the social services you're talking about the one million dollars this is the one million dollar funding that is in the city administration it might be in the city council budget that that funds nonprofit social service agencies so there's a total of a million dollars just over a million dollars that's funded for those agencies okay it's um council member golder this is laura there's actually about 1.96 million dollars that's funded across our core investment program as well as homelessness mental health liaison downtown outreach worker and hopes so it's actually 1.96 million in change and i think the recommendation on the budget strategy was to cut that in half thank you laura sorry thank you all and then the other one of the other questions ahead was can somebody tell me more like what's the vacancy tax looks like across the country or canada where where people are currently under strategy yeah let me uh let me give you at least the the benefit of what we've currently found thus far um you know it's interesting in summer in 2017 um vancouver british columbia um implemented a a vacancy tax um because they were dealing with some significant blight issues for property that was not that was just you know being left and not being vacated and so they implemented one that's based on an assessed value now you can't do that in california clearly um there are other agencies that um or washington dc and some other agencies across united states have looked at that um the city of oakland has implemented um a program i'll need to pull up the details of what they provided they have 10 different exemptions i know that they've included in there such as um you know properties that are um by low income seniors owned by low income um seniors low income or very low income owners um you know properties that are in process of being developed etc but they have implemented a um a fee um that um is exacted on those properties for which there is nothing that is um developed on it and that's just sitting vacated i believe they also have a different level when it comes to blighted property city of berkeley was looking at moving forward with a measure um and this election but as of our understanding yesterday and trying to reach out to them um they have decided to not move forward with that um at least with the staff that we we spoke with um so this is kind of an evolving issue that's coming up andy i don't know if you wanted to add anything further with respect to some of the things you're seeing well just that the uh that the public policy premise behind um these at least in in the in the oakland case is that housing should be used it should be occupied and they want to create an incentive for that occupancy i was i was hearing one thing kind of about vacant land or nuisance type properties and then another thing so is this commercial and residential or just every property in in oakland it's both and that's probably the best data point that we have so far in this uh because it's a california city uh and so there's there's a couple of interests that uh public policy interests one is of course the maintenance and cleanup of any blighted vacant properties and secondly occupancy encouraging occupancy uh of housing units and i i've got a little more data on on oakland if you wanted the more specifics on that would that be helpful i'd be interested to talk about it um so it was in 2018 when they passed that vacant property tax act um homes that are in use fewer than 50 days a year would be subject to the tax um and it's $6,000 flat fee um it's andy indicated it's for a condo duplex units ground floor commercial space um those are $3,000 a year but $6,000 for um any other any other property i mentioned some of the biggest i'm sorry oh i mentioned some of the you know big exemptions that they had in there also they exempted non-profit organizations and you know those that are going through the entitlement process um if there are owners that um are you know suffering a financial hardship and that opens up a whole pandora's box in terms of providing that information in a public setting to uh to um the city um or they have a you know demonstrable hardship um could be there as an exemption so that's kind of what what what they've they found in oakland what they're doing thank you that helps me understand a lot better i think i'll move on mayor i just wanted to let the rest of the council members know as well that the budget committee did ask finance to do additional research on the vacancy tax so somebody from finance is working with management partners as well as doing additional research to be able to get you information even exploring the vacancy tax a lot of it you know she has to export it and around and mayor if i can just add and then with respect to any decision around the tax measure there are other considerations that will have to be taken into account and in a process for that we'll have to do some polling in a sense of how the community feels about them and also you have to sort of weigh the different tax options in terms of their revenue impact and timing um amongst other factors to decide really which one to move forward with and at what time and also this has to be a certain amount of the public outreach to get a sense of support and that sort of thing so that the process that we'd have to embark to make a final decision and it would have to be made to be placed on the march should it be by january i believe a whole lot of time but they're a perfect segue to my concern which was had the timing of these various options when they would actually kick in and and help out our situation um the tax measures particularly um obviously there's a process and um i suppose a special election could be called for some types of taxes i know we have done that in the past during an economic crisis but you know even playing it out um if the recommendations come back to us in late august late september any kind of a campaign like this is going to take a number of months etc etc so it's really it's almost a year two solution rather than a current year solution so i think we just have to keep all of these things in mind some of them could be um more administratively implemented and kick in whatever the timeframe is 30 days whatever but the um tax measures although they are high ticket and may be um useful in the longer term are are not going to be the big solution for the fiscal year that we're in that's and then i just think that's another part of the grid as we look we you committee look over this is when would that what's the timeframe and that could actually go into effect that's just my comment on all of these and i did have one question what is parking fees in limited areas what did that mean on revenue enhancements it's on page two it's it's checked as number four i think the idea was there was uh trying to to uh increase parking fees in such a way that it would increase increase parking fees but in such a way that it wouldn't impact uh some of the local neighborhoods or a residential residential areas i think what's the what's the control all i have for now our presenters in terms of the um power plant we are expecting to see obviously mc office daytime population can you say a little bit more about what that is in terms of how it relates to Santa what a lot of communities are finding is that um people that used to commute into uh office space in in a large urban area are now working from home and so sometimes that home is in the city itself other times it's in a more of a suburban location so uh there's a lot been a lot of discussion about sort of the collateral damage of people not working in the office space uh where traditionally in downtown areas you've got this dense daytime population of people and now a lot of them aren't there a lot of the essential jobs are more distributed not so much in large office buildings they're in individual businesses or uh industrial types of sites and people are still showing up to work there but it's the downtown areas and the associated restaurants and other services that got used to serving that population that's what's really in the state of flux for Santa Cruz that you're a little bit in the middle there you're not a huge urban area but you are a regional center so to some extent that will probably be relevant but there are also a lot of people who live in Santa Cruz that may have commuted into San Jose so in that case some of your people are staying home okay no I appreciate that thank you for the clarity um I have another I mean I think some of what bursting is sort of seen underway in regards to name and online purchase studies at all well I don't there are crystal ball in terms of AI and automation isn't that good but it's clearly a trend and one of the things we're finding from this whole pandemic is that it's taking trends that were already in motion and it's accelerating them so you're going to see some places that uh you know when they staff up it may not be staffing up with humans and maybe just passing up with you know robots or automation of other sorts so uh that's too fine a detail to try to build into our forecast but what you say is clearly a trend yeah I think it'd be interesting to think about if we can try to have some foresight into what has been kind of predicted along the way and even if it's you know general staffing services we provided with different taxes we sort of talked about last time with the utilities and I mean how are we being mindful of these existing trends are already underway I last was the system suggestions maybe for the committee if that's okay and I think for for one I I appreciate data and I know that you have some organizational study as one of the options kind of what that could look like personally um I feel like we see within your presentation it'd be interesting to see if there's a financial study to understand better the financial process that we should do with our city as a place for that I also know that we've talked a little bit about and you had in your presentation around the cannabis revenues we had talked in the past sort of thinking about how to do a market study on that so it'd be interesting to see how we as a community are thinking about that as a potential revenue source as well or what makes sense in terms of our market then two last questions which is um you mentioned that our economic development department stands out and I'm wondering how do what does that look like in terms of the services other jurisdictions provide yeah and all of the Fandy wants to chime in with that as well but you know um every agency handles economic development a little differently um some agencies tuck it in as a part of their community development you know departments some can you know tuck it in as part of the city manager's office um you know it just it does depend on the unique circumstances for for each of the agencies um you know you you have a good number of staff that are dedicated to housing issues totally get that of what you're you're dealing with there um you know other agencies look to partner with non-profit organizations in terms of uh dealing with some of their um their their housing um issues and and really you know outsource that the the other area um that we see other agencies doing is looking at working with property managers to do property management um for any properties that they're still holding and deciding to you know hold them lease and you know clearly they're valuable properties but the question is um you know to what extent um are you able to still make sure that you're proactively managing those properties um and being there for the tenants that are in there but doing it in a cost effective way and some agencies have decided that they want to have you know private you know um enterprise doing that as opposed to um city staff I think that we've had this a hard time for for cities is just the the rising costs of employment um to you know be able to um have our employees whether it be health care costs or you know pension costs and other things like that so that's always something that's going to have to be evaluated Andy do you have any other further comments what you're seeing no I think I think you've covered it well and it's something that needs further study um we're just um suggesting that it's an area that is worthy of of some analysis okay oh I appreciate that it's around um like definitely trying to get as much information and data as possible so we can make kind of those informed decisions recoveries for recreation programming that we also look at how we could add to our scholarship potential funding so that way if you can afford to pay for full recovery for your participation how can we also cover the costs for those who can't and I think that would be a nice way to kind of balance the potential impact that that could have on our um lower social needs in our community but still being able to have them access our programming even if the costs are higher so just sort of a potential solution there and then we have some funding to the fund all right that that type of means uh based uh programming is definitely a best practice and it's something that could um improve your revenues as well you know I think every youth should be able to participate in parks and rec and that shouldn't be determined by your family's financial status and so if you pay for it you know great and personally as long as I can I will but those who can't I feel we can have an opportunity to use some of the um set aside funding that we have with our children some potentially or expand that to make sure we can cover those costs um I guess the last sort of thought I had was just around what the subcommittee was thinking about in terms of this kind of getting more information and then also around community engagement or maybe Martin if you want to speak to those repeat that again the the yeah wondering if you have any um insights in terms of how you're planning to use data and kind of get more information strategy around community engagement yeah with respect to um the budget strategies or just in general in terms of the community engagement because I think that well one of the things that go ahead yeah so you know that is going to be a critical piece of this in in in the multiple ways um you know certainly internally to employees that's an area we're doing webinars now informing employees uh you know in advance also we have to work with bargaining units so there's a lot of internal work that has to happen as we move forward with uh developing these recommendations and actions that will come council and that's what happened pretty quickly because we don't have a lot of time to take these actions particularly the first set of cuts and as you know these are more difficult ones because if they can't involve the revenue ones and some of the ones that take longer time so they tend to be more painful um and also there are the ones that probably may relate to more service related impacts and we're seeing some of that already I mean some of our parks already they're seeing some of the closures there and some of the impacts there so I think informing the community is a critical piece of that so we do have you know uh Elizabeth now really focusing on this part of it too working with the budget committee to ensure that we communicate to the to the public you know and today was part of that and the reason for doing the study session too to really first of all explain to the community that we have a major issue here that is going to require and have major and significant impacts for a community so we need to be clear about those things we need to get feedback from the community as we move forward and making some of these decisions so they can also understand the trade off particularly when it comes to um deciding between whether to move forward with revenue measures or not and making that that choice so we do intend on having a robust communications in outreach uh process as part of this as well um and uh we're fortunate that we you know we've added more capacity in that regard so we can hopefully do a much better job than we've done in the past but that has to be a critical piece of what we do as well are you also looking at an organizational study or what are your thoughts on that you know we've we've done some of these in the past um and and some of the some of this is inherent in some of these other recommendations and so I think we're certainly uh uh having these discussions with department heads as far as what are some of the organizational uh aspects of or operational uh consideration that we need to take into account as we look at some of these changes that have to be made some of them do require some counsel's direction and so far as policy decisions because they involve you know perhaps moving in into a contracting arrangement which historically we tended not to do that not to contract out as much for example and others involved uh uh when it involves uh consolidating services or emerging services or or doing partnerships those are a bit more longer term and also have some uh needs and policy direction and considerations from our jurisdictions and other jurisdictions so so I think yes we we do need to look at the uh the organization and how we can best do things in order to maintain essential services um and so I think that department heads are having those conversations and will particularly in the context of of uh what we have to do because as you see it's a long-term issue it's multiple years so there are things that we need to do immediately and there are things that we need to be looking at including you know how can the organization sustain what it has over the next few years not just in the immediate future have you or could you quantify the impact that has had on the city or has that come up as a conversation given that came up in sort of the economic consideration yes I mean as uh it was pointed out in the in the data you know Santa Cruz has a very high um density uh and level of homelessness or homelessness rate is one of the highest probably the highest in the state of California at least it's significant and the challenge for us is that uh quite frankly what affected the federal stimulus uh in particular uh uneven even state funding is tended to go primarily to the large cities and the counties and and much of it is intended to address homelessness and so we're in a difficult position where we have a large impact but it received virtually very little funding in this regard and so I think that's why we have we have been having some conversations that the mayor has scheduled conversations with state legislators and also with our federal legislators uh with this talk to uh really trying to change that dynamic and recognizing that cities like Santa Cruz who are county seats also have major needs in this area of health and human services and we need to be considered more like those cities and have higher level of funding so we have been advocating for that but I think in addition quite frankly we also have to really rely on the county also to be able to assist this in this regard because they are receiving the bulk of funding for these purposes and they have been doing more of that so they've stood up more shelters and uh but we need to really do more in this area and particularly in the current environment with the pandemic but we don't want to spread the disease and where we have a number of issues that we're facing that are pretty significant the other one that uh council's well aware of that I've uh communicated with you or recently is just at the level of uh encampment so we have up in the Povina and we have a major fire energy right there and we need to do something about that and we can't just simply go in there and spread you know homeless individuals throughout the county we haven't made a request to the county as the council knows to provide some assistance there but so I think we do need you know the county to assist us with providing more shelter capacity even if it's interim even if it's short term they have and I thank them for that but much more needs to be done and and the city of Santa Cruz just needs to really have more assistance uh because it's not a four function of ours either we don't have dedicated funding for this purpose so it makes it incredibly difficult for us to be able to respond to it and even more so when we're having a major budget deficit of course so it is a major error of concern and we need to do a lot more work to really get the assistance and resources that we need to be able to respond to this massive community need to be helpful I mean to be helpful or I'd be interested in knowing what that looks like in terms of economic impacts and how you can quantify what that means in terms of services that the city provides whether it be through law enforcement interactions or fire services to understand what the financial impacts are associated with that so we can just have more information to better understand how to do it we actually have done some of that in the past so I think we can collect some of that we have some of that data and I think we can certainly put it together and share it with you because it doesn't have a major impact you know on our parks you know police fire fire services public works it's really across the board even even our water agency with the specter our you know water systems so it's pretty significant and pretty impactful across the board yeah we can put that data together for you and then I guess my last question is in terms of the kind of the autumn like automation of different positions I know we know there's some that are really essential we heard from our water department really wanting to try to build up our workforce around those types of essential positions that she wants to be created here are there other positions that you're seeing kind of or your department head could maybe have some foresight around what that you know what that industry is looking like in terms of maybe not autumn is automation but just other types of efficiencies in terms of the future you know one of the things that's challenging for us not challenging but just to me off is that we are a service organization and to a large extent that does require you know personnel to provide those services you know certainly public safety in particular is one where it really takes people to be able to be responsive to those things and then the other big part of what we do where there could be more more automation or more efficiency certainly is maintain you know infrastructure trying to maintain our infrastructure is a significant part of what we do is a basic function so I think there we have been doing things there over the years to automate in a way that you know is more efficient and I think we can certainly look at continuing to look at that for example even like refuse collection and garbage collection the way we do it now is much more efficient and automated and many times what we've done is to increase it doesn't necessarily affect employees because we increase what we do so for example we probably have the same number of employees now that we do to collect both garbage and recycling that we had when we were just collecting garbage alone so I think there are opportunities to do that you know somewhat limited because again we're not a we don't provide you know indirect services or you know ours tends to be the kind that require human services but in this pandemic environment you know we're looking at doing things differently with respect to inspection services for example and I think we will too because we are going to have vacancies and one of the strategies that we have to you know employ in any case just to get to this difficult period of time even if it's not perfect and even if it's not ideal but maybe it's something interim is to try to employ technology in a way to you know kind of preserve those those vacancies and those savings so that we can limit the impact to employees and to the services that try to maintain them as much as possible right and the department has done it they're online but some of them may have some of the thoughts they want to weigh in happy to have them I guess my last my last kind of comment would be as we think about some of the like closures of parks or other types of reductions that we look at it through like you know an equity lens and I was talking to a neighbor who you regularly goes to the De La Viega park and doesn't go into the De La Viega golf course and so who can access different things based on their financial and how are we thinking about that in terms of closures yeah yeah that one is incredibly painful to me in particular I mean because I just went there on Sunday to the friends of sorry De La Viega park to take my granddaughter down to the creek and you know I've been doing that every weekend just biking down there playing around in the creek and this weekend it was actually too hot to bike so I drove down there and it was really heartbreaking when I forgot that it was closed and having to to come across the gate that's closed and although people can still go in the gate it's not the same thing to have the same little access and so I don't you know I don't think our community particularly now parks are particularly of use and important and so I think we do need to come up with ways to try to sustain the level of particularly parks and open spaces that we have available for the community and so that'll be something we'll have to tackle what those thoughts are sort of a rotating closure so it's not just sort of disproportionately closing one no I would have to ask that Tony to talk about that I think I think there was consideration with respect to you know what the various resources that are available across the park system and how they would be deployed and made available because we do have a series of different regional parks that have similar services to print to Della Vega such as Harvey West for example so I think there were those considerations and I think if Tony's on the one I think maybe can add to that I'm going to make a comment first in response to councilmember Watkins question about the cost of homelessness what would the city spends and I just refer you to the catch at final report included a report if you don't want to find it there it is there but if you can also look at one of our October meeting we got that report and it was about 17 million dollars 90 percent of which was law enforcement and I know that's sort of back of the envelope and based on the kind of what number of calls for service and but and so I do think it's worth trying to dive further into that but and I just to give you a sense of what that looks like it was in our last meeting agenda and my question is following up on councilmember Matthews point about the timing you know potential revenue enhancement sources obviously that needs to be considered in our matrix or in our rubric and I'm just wondering if because we haven't talked about that in the budget committee if that's the next conversation to for us to think about the steps to sort of just you know figuring out how that way you know weighs in on our consideration of what cuts we're doing now so I guess I'm just wondering what the next steps are to make sure we're addressing that as we move forward I'll try to answer that so so the next step is obviously we need to bring this back to the budget committee and one of the things that we do need to do is engage with the pulser to start try to look at doing polling and looking at the timing of polling just to get some some sense of we've done we did some but it was pre pre pandemic so I think we need to get some to collect some data on how people feel about various issues including raising revenues and then have the committee then look at the various options there might be there will be a need to do some outreach as well with stakeholders or potentially impacted sectors of the community depending on what's chosen and have some discussions there and then ultimately I think as councilmember Matthews pointed out to take all those things into into consideration to see if there is support to in the data supports bringing something forward in what the time would be to do that in the introductory presentation there was a review of unemployment stats and they were given for the US and California and I know they exist for Santa Cruz County at least as well so I think as these discussions go forward be good to have those local stats and the same on on lodging vacancy rates as well just a couple of observations the figures on the relative impact of homelessness in Santa Cruz were staggering I hadn't seen them compared in quite that way um recently and of course the the costs to the community are direct costs that that we allocate on contributing to shelter programs both facilities and programs to agencies that provide services there are the costs of response which are huge public safety calls for service and then there are also costs in economics as council members know the impact on tourism and the responses that are received from visitors in response to homeless experiences with the homeless phenomenon so I just put that out there that the costs break down into different categories but the the sheer volume for the town of our size was larger than I had expected regarding economic development one thing that strikes me is how much we expect out of that department there was some allusion to it in the presentation but uh we have a lot of affordable housing um properties programs et cetera that we existing ones that we oversee and we are ambitious for what we want to do in the future and that that rests in that department um the uh oversight of our fiscal properties there are lots of those they're pretty complex I think a lot of the properties that our um property maintenance division there overseas are not the sort of thing that you just spin off it's not like overseeing obviously something like that there's some pretty complicated properties just to put this all um in the in the mix um and then also bear in mind the importance of that department now as we are facing the biggest recovery economic recovery challenge in in this community memory I would imagine living memory so we've seen what they've been able to do and perform aggressively going after funding sources and so I just put all that in about what a heavy lift is expected from what it appears to be a relatively small department also just in general as the committee looks at eliminating analysts and there was another category job kit or trimming trimming analysts there again for many of our programs our environmental programs our park uh economic development we have done very very well on grants and grants don't write themselves and so I think so much of what we've been able to do over the year has been the result of aggressive and successful grant writing so just a cautionary note there um to maintain that capacity when we're going to need it more than ever those are just comments the council member Matthews and one thing I also wanted to actually I wanted to start with a question as well um because this is something that came up after our budget meeting my understanding is what we're really like focusing on right now is the six million dollar cut for just this year and not the 12 million for the first two is that a correct assumption to make or are we going to revisit this again or is it the idea that we kind of focus on what will the 12 million be for the two years and the reason why I ask is because you know after november we'll have a pretty we'll have a different sense of you know the competition of the senate what's your president's going to be what type of aid might be coming depending on who that is and so you know there's a possibility that after november and within the coming months we might actually see you know um you know more funding coming to cities of our size and so um kind of projecting out and making decisions on what you know um how to solve um fiscal constraints between 21 to 22 it seems like it's a little that maybe a little premature so I'm just I just wanted to get some clarification on whether we were kind of addressing our 12 million right now or just the six what what's being recommended and Steve and Andy be filthy to jump in or bob is that we do uh six million uh in the current fiscal year and then in the six million in the next fiscal year um and the reason for that is is is to sort of cushion the blow over the long term we don't know what kind of stimulus there will be um and uh uh you know hopefully there will be one but the longer we delay the more painful it gets it's a sort of a kind of get a balance of trying to be proactive but not uh you know overdo it so it's a it's a balance of using our reserves and trying to make some action some actions that will kind of help us over the long term um and so uh and those you know tend to be a little bit more challenging kinds of actions because they don't involve extra revenues uh some of the ones that require research analysis but i don't know if bob and steve and well just let me comment martin i think the mayor raises a really pertinent point we do not know what might be forthcoming we know what was in the package that was passed by the house that would have been actually quite helpful to local government um but it's been boggled up and hasn't gone anywhere uh what we're suggesting is you don't turn um an organization like Santa Cruz on a dime so you have to start planning now whenever we work with cities facing any kind of a fiscal challenge we always emphasize that time is not your friend because as time goes short you get pushed into a corner in terms of what you have to do so what we're advocating would be the six planning for the six million dollars obviously see what happens in november um hope we um may see some um some targeted federal stimulus uh even some needs-based uh federal stimulus which we really haven't seen so far they haven't tied anything to real need or real revenue impacts in in city so um we're advocating getting ready uh but the point you made is a good one there could be some good news we don't want to discount that possibility thanks in terms of the the budget committee work and the department direction that we're working under and the premise we're working under is we need to find six million dollars and what remains of fiscal year 21 and that is the specific tactical set of objectives we're going after for this fiscal year because we're not sure what's going to happen at the federal or state level and I think what management partners has also pointed out to us is that we have structural um organizational issues that have to be addressed as far as our operating budget so working under those premises that's kind of in the near term what we're going to be focusing on and then as far as the revenue focus areas that the council would give us direction on obviously as Cynthia pointed out council member Matthews pointed out those have long lead time so we'll start focusing on them based upon council direction and fiscal year 21 with the realization that the impact and the fruit of that won't happen until 22 or beyond that's been thank you for that clarification because I think that council member Matthews pointed earlier you know I think the as the subcommittee that's been looking on this I think we are looking at kind of you know like what are the things that we can do immediately what are some of the things that are going to take a longer term and a lot of what we recommended it wasn't just to get that 12 million I think right now what we've done is try to put a number of different items out there that we think that the community would be okay with other items as it relates to tax measures what's worth exploring but really understanding that there are going to be you know we do have to make that that six million cut now and so one of the things that we've been willing to cut in the short term and then what are some other items that maybe as we start thinking about 21 22 in terms of revenue generation or other areas to consider I think that that's part of this conversation is really trying to focus on what cuts can we make early and then what should we kind of consider for later down the lines applications uh council member Matthews and then vice mayor Myers yeah I understand there's no low hanging fruit at all but uh what's the stuff what you reach for and um looking over some of the um the pop out to me that uh 13 and 14 strategies outsourcing liability insurance admin and workers com admin um that's something that I don't know much more about that than I'm reading here but that seems like um something that could be investigated uh somewhat efficiently I I do remember and I don't know the timeline maybe a decade ago or so um the library joint power board at the time uh outsourced its um workman's comp uh administration and ended up I think maybe they switched providers is what they did ended up with better and cheaper service in the end so you know they just used to take a fresh look at it so that's one that seems clearly worth shooting core you mentioned also at some point looking again at retirement incentives etc those those seem like a short term look and I will just say in reference to the mayor's previous comment we hope we get the answer in November oh my god and then you know it's not till January that they're all torn in so even that longer term and then after vice mayor Myers if there's no further questions or comments we can open up the public for um public comments uh yeah thank you um everyone is that great great um yeah I guess the thing that I that really drew my attention um being a subcommittee member was um obviously the immediate uh emergency created by COVID-19 but um also the structural um the structural depth that that will continue to be there and I think that that is from the time I'm born out um in this analysis uh I know Marcine Bernal had given us sort of those indicators last the last two fiscal years but again um I think uh having to do diligence to make sure that we don't lose track of that structural deficit as well that's sort of out there in the in the horizon um my question for management partners is on your um sort of on your assumptions around CalTRA around the pension um you had put in I'm trying to tell my notes um I guess I'm just curious um whether or not you think the sort of assumptions that you built in for the pension cost um are conservative are they sort of I mean do you feel like these are conservative enough that we we we will be they're a workable number to to sink through with with some of the uh the items that we need to be thinking about in terms of the structural deficit I'm just curious well I think they're realistic um John Bartell who's a well-known private actuary has talked for a number of years about planning for this account rate is just percent over 20 years and we have that built in um Wilshire Associates which is uh one of the main investment advisors to CalPERS had a couple of years ago said 6.2 percent is a reasonable return over time you may have read very recently that CalPERS was talking about leveraging their investments in a way to try to uh pop up their return to where they would have a better chance of hitting 7 percent and there were a lot of concerns raised that that was a potentially risky strategy without for unrelated reasons it turns out that the their investment the head of their investments just resigned so that's all in a bit of a state of flux uh I think it's uh reasonable to assume a little bit lower level of investment return because when you look back over the last 30 years the returns have gradually been coming downhill it's just harder and harder with the amount of assets they have to uh you know maintain a return and especially in this current investment environment so I I do think it is reasonable I don't know that it's necessarily conservative although clearly the discount rate hasn't they haven't started to reduce it yet so it's maybe a little conservative in that regard but I just think it's prudent to um not assume the best going forward for for I appreciate that yeah and I um yeah I had read some of the recent recent information about some of the changes there so I was just curious about making sure that you know so I appreciate that analysis and feel like we're in good hands so thank you further comments from council members questions I will turn it over to the community for public comment so if there's any member of the public streaming this meeting who'd like to comment on this item now's the time to call in using the instructions on your screen if you haven't already done so you'll need to press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and once you've been acknowledged you'll have two minutes to speak to us on this item so again if you'd like to speak to us on this item please call the numbers on your screen once you've entered the meeting press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and you'll be given two minutes to speak and I also like to add to that if one of the numbers that you try calling doesn't work please try calling one of the other numbers on your screen act that much of this economic shutdown is the fault of the government there is no time to elaborate that the government COVID isolation strategy is quite controversial and there is no assurance anyone's lives will eventually be saved considering the collateral damage consequences of this disastrous strategy the full extent responsibility of this partly man-made economic disaster is largely on people like yourselves in every level of government clearly they lack the confidence and the wisdom the right of individuals to decide what levels of risk are acceptable to their private situations the economy liberty and pursuit of happiness have been thrown under a bus when the economy contracts that is not in itself any justification for raising taxes that should be thought of as a medial bloodletting to cure every ailment you need to provide value for services and not abuse the captive public with unjustified fees and tax increases you need to justify the extra service value provided for any tax increase or you did not deserve it if you have any good ideas to stimulate or really just free up the private sector economy from government restraint then that would be a justifiable and that's an expense otherwise there must be wise cuts the phrase essential services comes to mind and cutting non-essential services without really picking on anyone in particular high salary positions like climate action manager come to mind it's a good time to become extra efficient in areas where we get very little for our money especially in an area the city probably shouldn't be funding anyway or not at this extreme time it should be known recent surveys of the national public indicate two to one they do not favor defunding the police in any major way i would also remind the council the previous ad hoc survey showed here the police got a 250 percent higher approval rating than the council itself and also the fire department had a 400 percent higher rating the violent anti police mobs advocating defunding around this country are really only cash manifesting itself and are the ones needing a defunding real bad if the california public has taken a 15 percent cut in employment then that's not an unthinkable target for city employment cost reductions there is no free ride also please no advice from oakland gag me thank you very much is there any member other member of the public would like to speak to us on the item if so now is the time to call in please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and you will be given two minutes to speak would like to speak to us on this item now is the time to call in to raise your hand you will have two minutes to speak to us on this item because on this item i'll bring it back to council council member buyers hi thank you all i just got full service on zoom from the backtrack a bit um the uh i think a couple suggestions were the uh possibility for the cola uh freezing that and um there's another one i think the question on both of those i would i assume they reopening bargaining to go forward on those tell me yes or no yes that requires uh it would be fine yes yeah thank you and uh martin what do we still have a public trust fund i think it was called a public trust fund none of the money could be spent on operations correct there's lots of money what how much money is in it be no off hand i believe it's uh and uh can my my correct me here but i believe it's around seven million and so uh but you know those are the way we're looking at it now because of the significance of what we've had to draw down where we're including all of that in our you know our our reserves and some balances right it is a reserve it's a foreign reserve i just wanted to up to them that's right i now have just learned about the uh economic development trust or bob you may have the exact number i'm sure i think one thing that might be worth considering um in the subcommittee this just kind of came to mind is um you know based on how we might see ourselves moving forward with the items that we're targeting it might be worth this kind of breaking these out into different groups some of which can you know be implemented more immediately um those that are going to take more engagement so for example it sounds like for example merit increases or anything around the cola that would be require engaging with bargaining groups which would take more time and then tax measures would take a substantial amount of time so maybe if we can break them into um what are some of the things that we can implement more quickly and though it will take more time will actually help us kind of identify um those reductions are covered we can make it to here in the short term we're supposed to need to consider for longer term i just really quickly i got a number on the uh the balance for the public trust fund is five million on the main council on that is yeah i just wanted to follow up mayor on your point about working on this in the committee it's kind of what i was trying to get out with the question about thoughts on how we move forward so i'm i think that's going to be kind of uh really really important next task for us and um appreciate you bringing it up i wanted to raise the question of how we communicate with the commissions on a lot of these um i did suggest at an earlier council meeting that we invite all the commissioners to watch this budget session i hope some of them have but you know in the normal scheme of things that we were anticipating set back to parks programs or maintenance or more parking fees etc i mean pick your pick your topic very very often that would go to a commission for uh at the very least review and comment and i i don't have a solution to this but i think it's going to be important for the committee and staff to communicate and for the department head we are not in normal time and we're not going to take four months to come to the commission so it's just a heads up um but i think we do need to communicate with them and um let them know perhaps their their opinions have to be conveyed directly to council etc you guys figure it out but um i i don't see us going through the normal procedures for a lot of success mayor as as far as the budget committee process and the timing as you as the budget committee team members focus on which strategies they would like staff to look at we'll um the back side of it take care of the timing of it so if it is a revenue measure that we have to go out and pull for and get on the ballot we will prorate that into whatever realistically we would see the revenue the same thing with any of the other adjustments whether it's a koala and having to negotiate hr would assess when those patients have realistically happened retirement incentives all that you guys tell us the strategic focus areas and then on the back side of it the departments will translate that into the prorated dollar amounts in any given fiscal year no no so i guess a question given the suggestions that came from the subcommittee and then it seemed like councilman mathews you brought up the um exploring the outsourcing for workers comp and i was just wondering if there's other recommendations maybe that council members have for the subcommittee in terms of where we prioritize our time um there's anything that we should take off the list or if um there's any other additional categories that you all like to see that was on the list actually i just called it out but um and i did mention that the retirement incentive um a lot of these that seem more doable in the short time if there are some opportunities in sdpd to move some sworn to non foreign positions look at those um uh the parking fee increases again i don't know what was anticipated we did raise the neighborhood parking permit fee um one or two years ago can box it's still still reasonable so um there again um just because something wasn't mentioned doesn't mean itself we're doing i think the more important thing is what can be done on the the shorter time scale and and more simply take a take maybe a stronger look so i'm in golden thank you my comments earlier but i am making possible about what organ and having that data personally nation in that way for options for suggesting small creep fees but mine would not be uh specifically like for the wreck and little you know individual activities but for large group gathering like renting out some of our venues um looking into that another one would i would suggest would be looking with economic development about um encouraging um further like development of other businesses in town um businesses um to town that could um like for example like couple store something like that that would be a big draw and um and not with our local businesses either and then the third thing i would suggest is just very not that i'm advocating for anyone to get laid off but taking a very close look at every department um and maybe talking with department has about positions that no longer needed or not needed during this time and then could potentially be um scaled back or even eliminated because they're not they haven't been being used for the last you know six months and maybe won't be used for the next thing to add on to what you said and i think what councilmember walken just said i think um some of these opportunities for new businesses maybe that can be addressed as well in the recovery committee as we're kind of thinking about now that these spaces are vacant and given that we saw a decline in retail before this and now we're going to see an even steeper decline you know what should we as a community be thinking about in terms of what businesses can come in and not only be sustainable but you know we'll be able to you know help contribute to our tax base for the longer term so appreciate those comments so any further questions or comments from council members or staff yeah you know going forward uh as we communicate to the public i maybe this will be the work for elizabeth and and you mayor but um really framing it we are we are in an extraordinary crisis as we are looking for solutions we're looking to the greatest extent possible maintaining services at the direct level we've always done that when we hit a crisis we are trying to make the least impact on the most vulnerable people we are keeping it and then so that's that's kind of for how is it going to impact people people that are keeping their eye on is the city being smart about this and that will lead into how receptive they are to a tax measure we want to say well we are keeping open some vacancies right where you know what we're doing now to cut our costs really frame it we've done things they've they've made an important first step as we go into the next step we know it will be difficult but these are our objectives i'm just telling that story kind of frankly rather than just throwing out there we're doing this we're doing that and people go walk and message them get the following up on council member mouthy's point i i wholeheartedly agree the more people feel it the harder it is to convince uh uh them as taxpayers to raise their taxes and i think that in addition to kind of using our communications uh staff our pr team and talking about it what we're doing i think that making sure that we continue and potentially even improve upon or expand upon the services that we know people will see the impacts right so you know i'm just thinking about things like hearing from the parks director we may have to cut the person uh who we you know we don't have staffing to empty trash stands on west for example and you know people communicating about pile up of trash down by the beach and so there's some of that stuff is really going to be most on the forefront of people's minds i want to make sure that we not only communicate what we're doing but demonstrate that um directly to the community that's using our our facilities and it's unfortunate that we don't have a way to really capture uh revenue aside from the sales tax um of people who are coming the impact of people who you know the the tourism uh has on our open spaces there's no further comments um i'd like to thank management partners for providing that presentation today and for all the hard work you're doing to help us understand our fiscal situation here in the city of sanikers i'd also like to thank staff for all the work that they've been doing my colleagues on the subcommittee and for council members for taking the time out today and for those members of the public who were able to tune in to watch the first of um a few more budget committee meetings and i just want to ask real quick if laura is still on the line just around that timeline so the public's kind of aware of like next steps involved in this process um just kind of reiterate before we go at this point the council feedback will be um talked about more within the budget committee and the direction of the various focus areas from the budget committees with the layering on top of council member additional direction that we heard today will be given to the department and the department are current would be taking those focus areas to look at their operational budgets um to figure out how they could implement them we'll be packaging up all of that information and um you would receive a actual budget implementation package to look at analyze and adopt in the second meeting in september that would be september somebody helped me september uh 20 second december 22nd thanks fanny yeah so going forward um if we have you know further questions but also bright bright ideas or further comments on some of these things who those go to do those go to you laura i mean you know technically brown act they shouldn't go to the three council members um we're on the committee but we're all going to have thoughts and we want to relay those prior to the next meeting so what what's the best way to do that please send them to laura me and to kim your new finance director and we'll make sure that the information gets that into the budget committee agenda doesn't work okay or shared in real time as it comes in yeah thank you sure thank you all and we look forward to seeing you all again well those council members and staff will look forward to seeing you all next Tuesday if not before thank you thank you