 are connected to the device you are currently wearing. Habba, si, ahora para los que recien, se unen la reunión en interpretación en vivo en español está disponible y los miembros que deseen escuchar en español puede unirse al canal. Para unirse haga click en el icono de interpretación en la barra de herramientas de Zoom que parece un globo terráqueo. Una vez se unan al canal de español se recomienda que apague el audio primario para solo escuchar la interpretación al español. Thank you, Pablo. Interpreter Charles on the Spanish side can we please do a mic check so I can make sure the Spanish channel is up and running? Thank you, Charles, that worked fantastic. All right, Madam City Clerk, I see a quorum of the council. Can we go ahead and call the roll? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Council Member Tibbetts, Council Member Schwedhelm. There. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Tibbetts. All right, thank you so much, Madam Clerk. For the public, just as a quick note, we're doing something a little bit different today. We have both our study session on the budget as well as our regular council meeting. We also have closed session, which we normally start our day with. Today, council is actually going into closed session last at item number 18. That's to facilitate greater participation from the public in the other items that are before us. Before we jump in, I just wanted to give our host an opportunity to remind folks on how to access the Spanish channel and then to remind the public on how they'll be able to participate in today's meeting. Madam host. Thank you, Mayor. Just a gentle reminder for our interpreter, Charles, on the Spanish channel to commence translation if it's not already doing so. And then for those of the public who wish to listen to the meeting in Spanish, you can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpreter icon on your Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you clearly hear the Spanish translation. Pablo, can you please repeat that in Spanish? Para los que recién se unen a la reunión, interpretación en vivo en español está disponible y los miembros que deseen escuchar en español pueden unirse al canal. Para unirse, haga clic en el icono de interpretación en la barra de herramientas de Zoom que ahora parece un globo terráqueo. Una vez que se una al canal, se recomienda que apague el audio primario para solo escuchar la interpretación al español. Thank you, Pablo, and that's back to you, Mayor. Thank you, and Madam City Clerk, could you please walk us through how to provide public comment at today's meeting? Yes, after each agenda item is presented, the mayor will ask for council comments and then open it up for public comment. The host in Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the mayor has called for public comment, the mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand and if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the council and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item, but also submitted an email, e-comment or recorded voice message public comment, your email, e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or played during the meeting. Additionally, there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters at items 13 and 17. This is the time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council. Throughout today's agenda, when the mayor calls for public comment an interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation services. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the Brown Act. We ask those listening on the Spanish channel but wishing to make a public comment, turn off or leave the interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called so you can join the main channel to make your public comment heard and translated into English. This icon may now look like a circle with an E-S in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening to Spanish. Thanks. Thank you, Madam Clerk. So as I mentioned at the outset we have two different sections of our meeting today. The first is going to be our review of the budget. This is actually a two-day process. So we will hear presentations from staff on this until about 3.30 or four o'clock depending on a good breaking point. And then we'll recess that part of the meeting, go to the rest of our meeting and come back tomorrow at 10 a.m. to finish up our deliberations on the budget. Mr. City Manager, you wanna give us a kick us off for item 3.1? Sir, item 3.1, review of fiscal year 21-22, operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. And we can skip ahead in the slides. Go to slide two. So this is laying out the agenda that you're going to be experiencing over the next two days. I will point out that it is a fairly hefty exercise. This process is for the staff to relay a proposed budget to the council, entertain questions from the council, allow council to provide direction to staff to think of other alternatives or other proposals that we can adopt into the final budget, which will come back for its hearing commencing on 6.22, June 22nd. Next slide, please. So I would just like to take a moment and thank the staff, especially the staff that's involved in the financial management of the organization. And that ranges from departmental program managers to administrative service officers in the department to the finance team and the budget analysts that are working with our finance director. This has been a change in process in an attempt to begin a way that we are coming back to the long-term finance and audit committee and ultimately to the council and the community earlier in the process. So we've started to institute some changes that I'm gonna walk the council through some of those early parts of that exercise so that we can start to get feedback direction as we go into the next budget year figure out what programs the council wants to support and in addition deal with our long-term structural issue proactively. Next slide, please. So one of the things you're gonna see here is and the departments will specifically talk about the impacts that are going on within their organization but this is a list of additional needs requests that are in the budget right now. There is some flexibility obviously to look at these individually. There are things that departments have asked for that you will see that are currently not funded. Some of these are either a one-time cost or have an ongoing cost. And that's one of the things that we're trying to flag for the council moving forward because it's ongoing cross creep up. It becomes really, really hard on the organization to figure out where the revenue offset is going to come for these particular costs increases. And I'll just point to one item that is currently in the budget which is the mental health collaborative pilot program but really doesn't have an identified resource to it to sustain it past that initial pilot phase. That doesn't mean there aren't opportunities but what we're going to be looking for from council and the long-term finance committee as we get into the next year is where is that resource going to come? How are we going to go through a process to identify that resource and bring back that conversation both for the council and the community earlier than it has ever happened before within this organization? We're really shooting to launch those conversations with the mid-year budget update as we go through and flag these ongoing costs and identify a resource to or alter our compact in what we're funding moving forward. So that's an example of one item that right now is in the budget, has no long-term, doesn't have an ongoing revenue source associated with it. So we need over the next year to build to that revenue source and that allocation to sustain that program moving forward. So it's both a flag for the community, a flag for the council and a flag for the departments involved in how do we sustain that activity? One, and I'll give you an example of something that is missing from this as we go through this enterprise and we discovered that we had creatively figured out a way to fund some community engagement programs that are currently not in the budget. And I suspect the council is going to direct us at the end of the study session to find an appropriation to cover those about $150,000 worth of costs. Currently they're not in the budget. As we went through the process, staff had find creative ways to take one time funding and fill that hole in the budget. What we need to do is start flagging these ongoing costs and these costs increase moving forward and identify where the resource is going to be. So we're not caught in that situation. So again, I suspect we're gonna add to this list as we go through. This is a list of staff recommendations. It isn't the final list. You will see other needs as we go through the presentation that still need that are not funded and council may have questions and assigned tasks to the staff to look deeper at those particular items and propose how we might move some of those items forward. Are there any questions about this particular slide before I move into the next slide in the deck from council? You're not seeing any hands, let's keep moving. So the next slide is a slide that we are moving forward. One of the real challenging items for the staff to manage was hold, as you know, in the long-term financial plan was holding $5 million of a treated positions open for five years. These positions have been on the books in the department and it's a mixture of positions and services. And again, the departments will talk specifically about impacts when they get to their presentations. But this is one of those places where this is part of our proposal to eliminate these positions and then this funding in the budget. And we probably will need to reference back to this as we go through the presentation and its totality. The one thing I will call council's attention to is that there were already five positions eliminated essentially when we rolled the police department back to baseline. So that essentially eliminated them. They remained on the books, but they were unfunded and there was no resources. So we will be rolling those off as part of the proposed budget. However, what council will notice is that there is about, there's only $3.46 million worth of savings accrued here. We are proposing that on 610, the long-term finance committee, look at it and look at a program to figure out where the additional $1.5 million of savings that we can accrue over the next year, begin that process and bring back to council a plan on 622 that would address how to accrue those savings. Again, those savings don't need to be from personnel costs. Those can be from ongoing recurrent costs in the conversation and staff will be bringing back that presentation on 610. Following on that 622 to authorize and figure out how we can move forward with additional cost savings in this budget cycle or at least by the time we reach the budget process next year. And I'll remind council that is part of the critical compact to achieve the fiscal sustainability that was forecast by management partners, $5 million of savings over the next five years or so. And then in addition, a limitation on additional hiring as well as exploring other revenue and cost-saving measures. So right now this is the proposed reduction scenario and just for you to understand, there are still out there an additional $40 million 47 vacancies beyond these 21 that you're seeing here. 19 of those are general funded positions and it's about $2.5 million in general fund. The reason we're not proposing that is that those vacancies actually inordinately hit one department about a little over a third of that hits the community and development and engagement department. And because that is a while it's not a full cost recovery and it's a revenue generating part of the operation, we do not feel comfortable moving those particular positions forward as a part of the compact. But there is still 47 vacancies and 19 of those are in the general fund but we need to figure out a process to identify additional cost savings within the organization over the next year. Any questions on this slide? Council Member Spledo. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. McGlynn, do we have a slide that has the actual FTE totals? For me, this is somewhat out of context where police where you're losing six-position firefighters five, do you have the totals somewhere in the slide show? If we don't, we'll go consult that. If we don't, we will have something during the course of the presentation, we'll bring it into the conversation. But I will review that with staff. It's a lot of slides, I'm not sure it's there, but if we miss it in the general introduction, we'll get that into the conversation as soon as possible. Because that would be helpful for me to put all of these into context. And then will we be having the impact of these cuts once the departments actually make the presentation? So will we hear from Chief Navarro what are the impacts of these six positions? Yes, yes. All right, then I'll save those questions for Chief Navarro. Thank you. And we'll probably have to reference back to this slide, but absolutely that's part of what they will be presenting. Thank you. All right, I see no other hands. Next slide. So we wanted to start with a conversation, just getting to the council. The measure O baseline calculation, just as you're entering that conversation. As you noticed in the proposed budget, all three are over. I will say violence prevention is nominally over, police and fire are over. You will see that there are embedded cost escalations in each of those agencies that are mandated and that we have little control over. And one of those things that is impacting the entire organization is pension costs continue to rise. So unfunded liability. So I believe the figure you're going to see later in the presentation is about 75% of our costs, our personnel costs of those 75% personnel costs about 17% of that 75% is undefunded liability costs. So almost 20% of the agency's personnel costs are regarding pension and pension obligations moving forward. Any questions on this slide? Next slide. As part of our regular presentation, we also bring back to council a demonstration of where we are in terms of the increasing obligation that council mandated as part of the resolution against real property transfer tax. So this is building 5% a year. The current amount that needs to be budgeted for homelessness and affordable housing services is 40% of what we're projecting is a $3.5 million real property transfer tax revenue amount. That would calculate out to 1.4 million. As you go through the budget, you'll notice that actually in the proposed budget, we are at 4.1 which is still larger than what we're projecting as the 3.5 in terms of real property transfer tax. But this was, this is an agreement that the council had to present this on an annual part of the budget process. And there are the details. I'm happy to answer any questions. And if I'm not expert enough, I can call on Alan to answer any questions that might be necessary here. And I see a question from council member Fleming. Yeah, I hope this is not too far in the weeds, but I'm curious to know have we taken into account the unusual conditions that the real estate market is in when we have our projections on, or are we basing it on actual recorded and assessed properties? I'm basing it on a couple of months ago that might change in real time. That might increase a little bit, but it would still be well below. But that might, depending on where we close the year, there might be additional revenue coming in in that area council member. But right now, this was based on, I think it was a couple of months ago, was the last figure that we had and we projected out from there. But yes, the real estate market is incredibly hot right now. Well, right, I mean, but it seems that, I guess what I was going with it is that it seems that transactions are down, but costs are up. So I'm not sure where that's gonna shake out in terms of actual dollars in our coffers. But as you see, it's significantly over last year's budgeted amount. So it's almost $750,000 increased. Okay, thank you. And I will say it is very helpful to see this chart with the year over year actuals leading into the budget because that is one of the questions that we received from the public pretty frequently is you budgeted for this much, but how much did you actually end up doing over the course of the year? So I wanna appreciate this slide. Next slide. And I believe at this point, I is my pleasure to introduce the Chief Financial Officer for the city of Santa Rosa, Jan Mazik. And Jan, it's off to you. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and council members. Before I jump into the presentation, I just wanted to take a moment to thank the budget team. I am a novice at this and they have really done a lot of effort on the budget. And I wanted to be sure that you know just how valuable they've been to me being you and coming into this process. Next slide, please. So the citywide expenditure budget is comprehensive and includes operational as well as financial activities. Enterprises within this fund include parking, transit, golf course, water and wastewater as well as storm water. The citywide budget, within this fund there are also some special revenue funds as well as debt service funds. In the proposed CIP for the upcoming fiscal year, you'll note that it's doubled the amount that is in the current fiscal year 21. Reflecting investments to be made in the sub-regional treatment plants that will be carried out over the next year. If there are no questions on this slide, I'll move to the next slide. Are there any questions? Next slide, please. This is just a representation and graphic form. It indicates the allocations on a percentage basis to all funds included in the citywide expenditure budget. Next slide, please. Next slide. So this slide is intended to do a couple of things. One, certainly highlight what fiscal year 21 which is a current year we're in would look like in a pandemic with pandemic considerations in mind. And it was juxtaposed with 2019-20 actuals which was perhaps the last normalized year of operations. Our expectations for finishing the current fiscal year and that of comparative performance against the adopted budget might have appeared comparative and conservative. I think for budgetary reasons, we usually tend to err on the side of caution. So revenues I think proposed for the current fiscal year might have been a little bit conservative. And I think you see indications of that because performance across broad categories has have exceeded revenue performance expectations with the exception of hospitality revenues via trans-TOT revenues and parks and recreation which were really decimated as a result of cessation of most of those activities. Other activities across the board performed exceptionally well. Sales, tax, utility users' tax and other taxes outperformed what might have been expected. From an overall performance perspective, we're projecting to end the current fiscal year with an across the board increase of 4.7% ahead of the adopted budget for fiscal year 21. Are there any questions? So, Jana, just to, I wanna make sure that we're clear here. So what you're saying is, and I get it, given the pandemic and the uncertainty that we had, you're saying that we ended up taking in 4.7% more in terms of revenue than what we had budgeted for last year. Yes. My understanding is, recalling that I wasn't here, my understanding is that the city had adopted a budget and then, or at least had a prospective budget and they made some revisions to that budget and that became the adopted budget for fiscal year. So I think there were a couple of changes in there and I think what ended up being adopted was even a little bit ahead of what was initially conceived for the budget for the year. So can you remind particularly, since we have a number of folks in attendance who are not your usual suspects who are here every single budget year, can you remind us all what happens when we have additional dollars that came in above what our projections were? Where does that money go? So we've got that 7.668 million that came in above projections. So where did that go in terms of our budget? Well, I think one would expect because as I understand it, the budget was probably adopted with a deficit that might have been about 18.1 million with reserves being used to balance the budget. And so unused reserves actually would just return. There's nothing to return. It's just less of a draw on reserves is what would happen. So I think in short, you're looking at one half of the picture, which is the revenue expenditures also climb during the course of the year. For example, there was expenditures for to create safe social distancing vis-a-vis the hotel Sandman. So while revenues climb, expenditures might climb as well. And I think we'll see some of that conversation as we move forward. In addition, but in general, what would happen without climbing expenditures is those would be pulled back into the reserves. So if there weren't climbing expenditures, there weren't other costs. The simple process would be to go from increased revenue into reserve. That would be the process, Mayor. Great, thank you. Next slide, please. So this slide is taking it where we're projecting to finish the current fiscal year, vis-a-vis what will be forecast or what we're proposing to be forecast for revenues for the upcoming fiscal year 22. From my perspective, I think of the upcoming year as likely a year of transition. I think from an economic perspective, there may be some fundamental shifts in how and where people prioritize spending and the way in which we do it. Even more broadly, economically speaking, I think there may be other considerations that also influence business and personal responses post pandemic. So what you'll see is a forecast that reflects moderate increases across the board with a couple of exceptions. On the more robust side or sales tax projections where we project an increase of 9% given expectations regarding general retail and food products. And in this number actually, it was suggested that we adopt or propose this amount by Avenue Insights, our consultants on some of our revenues. I think we're also bullish on the resumption of close to normal parks and recreational activities in the coming year. We make no assumptions as to grant revenues that might be taken in. We record them as they come in. And expectedly non-recurring revenues, stimulus related, that is, will ease as well in the coming year. I think overall our budget shows an uptick in total general fund revenues of 3.8%. You know, one of the things I think we have in the year ahead of us is the opportunity to make thoughtful and impactful deployment of some non-recurring revenues received during the current year. The quality of those decisions will matter greatly over the longer term as they carry the potential to boost and or potentially alter infrastructure and economic trajectories within the community. At this point, are there any questions on this slide? Looks like Council Member Sawyer has a question. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Jan. At what point during the next number of months will we be looking at these projections and looking at as to whether or not we actually have 6.5 kind of unused or unobligated, if you will, in this forecast, the mid-year, when would we be looking at whether or not we were accurate in some of our assumptions? Well, one of the things that we proposed, if you'll recall, in some of the changes we'll be making is that we will formally return to the full Council at mid-year to review at that point where we were projected to be for the fiscal year. And hopefully, we'll be operating within the forecast, but I think part of it will be conscientious decision-making as to whether we stay the course at mid-year or take corrective action if need be, if in fact expenditures or outpacing revenues. I think informally, perhaps to the Planning and Audit Committee, we'd like to return on a quarterly basis with just an update, but with the formal review process at mid-year, probably in January, after the December month close. Great, I think at one point, whether it was on that subcommittee or in the full Council that you mentioned, just kind of a monthly review as to how things are moving along, is that a little bit too much work to anticipate? Actually, I think monthly probably is not enough of a picture, and by the time we finish the month, we're sort of, or closing the month, we're halfway through the following month. So I think it would be perhaps more informative to come quarterly to the committee, and then at mid-year to the full Council. That sounds prudent, thank you. Okay, and I'll just make a quick comment. I know you said that the sales tax projection, the increase of 9.1% is what some of our specialists are telling us to expect. I'd be a little bit surprised to see that just because I think this year, what we found is people shifted most of their expenditures online, and I think a lot of that will continue. So I think more people will eat out, and I'm good for us to use this, since that's what our experts are telling us to do, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if we hit that 9.1% increase for our sales tax. Mayor Rogers, you may be surprised, well, you may not be surprised. I actually did ask that question. Did we take most of it already, or are we likely to see it? But the budget team sort of hung firm on that number and supported it with Avenue Insights, and so here it is. So point well taken. All right, I appreciate it. Let's keep moving. This is just a representation on a percentage basis of the revenue slide that you just saw and how it breaks down as its share of the general fund. Next slide, please. Next slide. I thought the revenue slide was really sort of uplifting, if you will. The expenditure slides always turned out to be a re-grounding of realism, but in any event, big picture salaries and benefits make up 77% of the FY22 expenditure budget. So that doesn't really leave a great deal of room for what I consider to be financial flexibility elsewhere in the expenditure budget. Operationally, we're proposing to contain expenditure growth to 1.5%, as you can see at the bottom of the slide, even with some significant increases in certain categories, which I'll talk about. Per's liability increased by roughly 6%, which equates to about $3 million. In IT, there's a 9% increase though, but that reflects additional costs for plan review software. Professional liability insurance is up over 27%, had about half a million dollars. But altogether, I think the overall change in the budget is 1.5% greater than it is in the current fiscal year. Any questions? Council Member Sawyer? I think he's got a lingering hand up. Let's keep going. Okay, next slide, please. Again, just a graphic representation of proportional expenditures in the general fund. This is a point of clarity, Jan, if you will. I had a note down from earlier that we had 17% of the salary and benefits comes from unfunded liabilities. This slide says 12%. I just wanna make sure we've got the correct number down. You've got the correct number, it was my mistake. Okay, thank you. All right, next slide, please. Different, personally, I love graphs. And so this chart tells me a lot. I know it's three-dimensional, so sometimes that's a little bit challenging. But what this slide is by category and by percentage of change. And so the colors of gray, salaries, benefits, professional services, clearly what you're seeing, the big uptick is we talked about professional liability insurance in the previous slide. O&M projects, I didn't touch on that, but they're down somewhat. And it's just a graphic representation of the information we just talked about on the two previous slides, and this is how it looks. But I just find it helpful just to see it at a glance. Next slide, please. Error expenditures by department. Just big picture, internal service costs remain flat from fiscal year 21 to 22. That's the first grouping above. The downward shift in the city council budget is reflective of FY22 being a non-election year, and thus the change in expenditures. Community and government, intergovernmental relations last year was a new department. When consolidated, activities were somewhat broader, have become somewhat broader with citywide perspective. And the result is, I think, a reasonable, accurately reflection of associated activities given the change at the beginning of the fiscal year. Next slide, please. And again, just a graphic representation, sort of as where the change is in overall budget. You can see the intergovernmental relationship relations department there with one of the biggest increases. Anyway, it depicts the numbers in the foregoing slide. Next slide, please. And I think, yeah, these are expenditures by department. I think we can move to the next slide. Transfers out, these are other general fund expenditures. Transfers out reflect departments and costs that are not resident in the general fund, but that are nonetheless general fund supported. So dominating the transfers out include homeless services and related costs, the capital improvement fund, and other miscellaneous funds, such as parking, transit, and housing. Next slide, please. One of the things you've seen this slide before, albeit not in this presentation, but trajectory is important. And that's the reason this is looking backward over some period of time at what are performance. Performance meaning the measurement of revenues or expenditures against revenues is how I would say it and how the overall budgets performed. Performance over several years is really intended to perform as to financial trajectory, which is perhaps seen better seen on the graphic which follows. Next slide. So again, a representation, but you can see sort of the positives and the challenges. And in this slide, what I've talked about before is that this is representative, this is not just Santa Rosa, this slide is pertinent to Santa Rosa, but I think it's reflective of other challenges that all governments face today with the typical challenges that I've talked about previously, being social, environmental, organizational, as well as financial. And I think this will remain one of our challenges, but again, with one-time revenues, perhaps we have an opportunity to sort of alter or at least moderate some of these challenges. And that concludes my remarks on this discussion, portion of the budget. I'm not seeing any hands. So Mayor Rogers, if I could step in for a second, Jan, I understand that staff is working on providing an additional slide to be presented at this point in time, looking at FTEs within the organization. And we want to walk through that prior to going to the departmental slides. So I think this was a question in relation to Council Member Schwedhelm's question earlier about the total number of full-time equivalent positions by department within the organization. As you can see, we're looking at approximately 1254 for the current fiscal year, adjusting to 1,235 for the end of the year. Councilor, are there any questions on this slide? All right, Jan, before we go into each departmental presentation, I did want to know, do you have the number for what percentage our pension obligations are currently funded? So I know we were at 101% back in 2008 before the stock market tanked. I know we were down, I want to say, as low as about 82% funded. Where do we sit now? You know, Mayor Rogers, I don't know that I have the answer to that. I don't know if possibly Shelley does or Allen does, but it's probably easy enough for us to figure that out and come back. Okay. I mean, that's always a moving target up and down, right? Yeah, yeah, I completely understand. If you could just get back to us, that'd be great. Okay. And I see a question from the Vice Mayor. Because I am lightly blind, can this slide be emailed to us so I can pull it up bigger on my iPad? All right. Sure, yes. Thank you. Yeah, I don't know whether it'd be later today or if we can do it on the fly during the meeting, but it'd also be great to upload this as an attachment onto the agenda so the public can pull that up as well. Okay, we'll do. All right, Jason, should we keep going? Yes, please, Mayor. At this point, we are going to move into our departmental budgets, starting with the fire department. So Chief Westrop, looking forward to having you walk us through. Thank you, Mr. Nutt, and good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the council. Scott Westrop, fire chief of the Santa Rosa Fire Department and with me today is Jim Herron, our ASL. And we're going to walk you through our proposed budget for 21-22 and we'll kind of be going back and forth. Next slide, please. Next slide. All right, so for the first two slides, I'm going to turn it over to ASO Arand and he'll walk you through these two slides and come back to me. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and council members. I'm Jim Herron, the ASO for the fire department and I'm here with Chief Westrop to present our department slides. As a preface, I kind of wanted to let you guys know that this budget cycle was especially challenging as we were asked to prepare two different budgets that were vastly different scenarios. We did the first set of budget guidelines based on our historical way of doing things which was flat budgets, let's just get it done as far as we can. And I believe most of the city completed that and then we were told, change a plan. We're going to compare actually and set up to the prior year's budget and keeping it flat. We need to compare to 2019, 2020 actuals which was a whole different curve for us. We were also asked to cover any increases in city allocated costs with decreases in other line items. This was a challenge but so what I'm really trying to say is what we're presenting here is a hybrid budget based on a combination of 2019 actuals, 2021 budget and salary and benefits based on the current MOUs. So with that, I will like to go into our first slide here, the uncontrollable costs that when you see in front of you. As a note, you'll notice that it's pretty short list for us in fire and the biggest increase is the $682,000 increase in PERS unfunded liability. That's a huge bump that I think you're gonna find across the board with everybody. That's clearly uncontrollable for us. Another cost for us in fire was we increased our contract overtime by half a million dollars based on anticipated increases in our strike team activity. These costs are fully reimbursable for Cal OES so it's kind of like a wash but it's worth noting because it is a cost increase. The rest of our uncontrollable cost escalations are pretty minimal here since we were directed to cap all services applies at the 2019-20 actuals. So any increases we would have come up with would have been had to be deducted from another line item. For example, our dispatch for Redcom were fully anticipating a probably $50,000 increase that we did not put in the budget this year because I would have had to reduce another line item by 50. So that was left off. Next slide. These are the, oh, sorry, the controllable costs. Again, they were escalators. We increased our outside plan review cost by $40,000 which was driven by organization and citizen needs and the projects approved in a timely manner. This is something we're dealing with right now. We have a lot of people that want the plans done yesterday and we're struggling to stay caught up. So we increased the use of outside plan review to try to help us with that. We also added a fire inspector mid-year to support vegetation management. This was done at the beginning of the year. It looks like a cost escalation but it really was based on a budget revision mid-year. So again, very limited controllable cost increases listed here because of the scenario I told you before about matching to 2019, 2020. And at this point, I'd like to turn it over now to Chief Westrup to discuss the impact of the FTE cuts. Well, and before you go to that, Chief, I have a quick question for you, Jim. You mentioned for the uncontrollable costs, the $500,000 for your increased contract over time, it is reimbursable. How long does it typically take Cal OES to reimburse us for those costs? It varies, but for example, last year, they're all coming in pretty relatively quickly I would say three to four months at the most. For example, this year, we're up over $2.5 million in strike team revenue because we had a very heavy year last year. So I monitor those pretty carefully and we know exactly where we're at. And over the last year or so, they've gotten much faster at sending those monies to us. So then should council expect to see this both on the expenditure side as well as on the revenue side? Yes, and that's what you'll see. Budgeted revenues were in there as well to be a little more conservative. My budgeted revenue for strike team, I budgeted about 80% of that cost in overtime costs because what we receive in reimbursement, there's other costs embedded in that. We've got a 14% admin cost that they let us add on. Other things like that, so it's not all strike overtime. So to be conservative, I budget my best guess at what our strike team revenue is gonna be. I take 80% of that and that's what I use as my cost for contract overtime. Great, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. Council, the other questions before we go to the chief. All right, chief, you're up. Great. Can we switch back to slide five real quick please? So real briefly, before we get into the actual 2021 budget, a 21-22 budget, I just wanted to take a moment to sort of clarify as council member Schwedholm sort of alluded to what the impacts are to the fire department with this reduction of five FTEs. So the fire department holds 151 FTEs in total. 132 of those positions are in operation. So from the operations bureau chief down to the firefighters that are on the fire engines, that's our funded positions. We've typically in the last year or so we've been running at 146 full-time FTEs or FTEs across the department, which translates to 127 in operation. So we've been running those five positions life for a while. And to sort of put it into context is we have 39 positions that are filled on the fire engines or in the battalion chiefs rig every single day right now. We could have that up to 42 with these positions. And what that does is we have to have those 39 positions filled. It's not like an office where if I call in sick or if the ASO calls in sick, the office is vacant. Those are the mandatory positions we have to have on the floor to provide protection to the community. So anytime somebody calls in sick or is on vacation, those positions are vacant and they have to be filled in order for us to meet our response time standards and our staffing models. So we're a little bit nuanced in that. And sometimes I just want to make sure that everybody's clear on what we're talking about here is they're not office positions, they have to be filled. So that creates a position where with only 39 people on the roster and we could have up to 42 is that that it creates an overtime slot, right? So we have to fill that position with the body. So it creates overtime. What the extra positions are slated for and what the reason that they're over our normal daily staffing is there would be two extra people on duty per shift. So if somebody called in on vacation instead of plugging that position with overtime, we plug it with one of the extra bodies. And so that's really the nuance in this is that we're keeping our minimum staffing with these positions that are slated to be or proposed to be eliminated from the budget. We keep our daily staffing normal but it eliminates our ability to fill in those overtime positions that we are currently filling with overtime. Now through analysis we've gone through and we looked at a bunch of different ways to meet our number of $945,000 to eliminate from the budget. And the problem we went run into is the fire department's a bit nuanced in that 82% of our budget is in salaries and benefits. So that leaves us a smaller slice to actually have some variability in our budget with. And when you look at our service and supply budget it shows it translates to $4.1 million. But if you take out all of the uncontrollable costs that we don't really have any say on we end up with a service and supply budget of right around $700,000. So if you figure you take a 10% cut out of $700,000 or a 20% cut out of $700,000 it's nowhere near that mark. So that turns into we have to look at we have to look at people or programs in order to make those cuts. So we went through, we've been through this many, many times but we went through it again and we determined that in order to meet that $945,000 this is what we have to present to council to consider. So what that means for us after this two variables is that number one we went through and did a cost analysis and what it shows is those overtime positions those positions that are filled with overtime that's about $53 to $55,000 conservatively per year more than it would be to fill those with a full-time body. So there's actually an overtime savings in filling those positions. And then it gives us the ability to be flexible not only in our daily staffing but also when we upstaff when we get a red flag or a PSPS or a flood we can also upstaff a little bit easier with extra personnel on board to keep our daily staffing normal. And what it equates to is if you look at five position it equates to two firefighting resources. So when we do an all call like we have done in the tubs nuns, Kincaid and the glass fire when we do an all call and bring everybody back that gives us the capacity for two additional firefighting resources that can be on the road with two to three people per apparatus that might go out. And really the message I wanna convey and we're gonna get more into this as the city manager alluded to in September's long-term financial plan committee meeting is really the internal impact that it has on the organization. So having those additional bodies there reduces the amount of mandatory overtime that's inflicted upon our employees. And what that does is it reduces the wear and tear on employees both physically and behaviorally. So meaning mental health, behavioral health. So it really reduces that wear and tear by not impacting them to where they're on duty for 96, 120, 144 hours on a road during the peak season. It gives them, it gives a little bit of flexibility in there and a little bit of relief to our crews. It also increases our capacity to commit to strike teams and also backfill. So if we send an engine out to Medesino County or LA we obviously have to bring people back in. So it increases our ability to send resources out to help our neighbors in California but it also increases our capacity to backfill. So that's why those extra positions are important to us. So the long story short is this, is that between our service and supply budget and where we're at with personnel, we are about as lean as we can get and we're trying very hard and we're working diligently not to impact service delivery but we're right on the precipice of having to do so with any more cuts. So that's the story we wanted to tell about our five positions and as we get towards the end we can answer any questions you have about that. So with that, I will turn it back over to Jim to handle the general fund budget for 21-22. Okay, if we can look at slide 31, there you go. This is the general fund proposed budget for the fire department by category. As you'll see from here, the we've gone up by 1.5, almost 1.6 million or a 3.6% increase. The majority of this came from salary and benefit increases that you can see in the change column. Those are two rather large ones and the biggest by far is the benefit side where we had an increase in the CalPERS unfunded liability costs of about 682,000 of that 770. The rest of it was made up of an increase in workers comp and a reduction in the normal CalPERS retirement. So overall benefits increased by 771,000. The salaries you see there looks a little unusual that they look like they increase at a smaller rate. That's a little misleading because of the fact that remember we have five eliminated positions in there as well as a transfer of one of our other positions to IT and increase and MOU step increases. So it looks like we've only gone up by 200,000 but there's some major cuts that came out of that. So that's why those two numbers look a little bit unusual. One other thing to mention is the contract overtime, like I mentioned, is up $556,000. And as I explained to Mayor Rogers, the budgeted strike team revenue this year is just under 1.5 million. I budgeted 80% of that or 1.2 in contract overtime which was an increase of $556,000 there. The other big thing is if you'll go down the table, if you'll look under information technology that shows an increase of $197,000 or 28%. Again, that bears a little discussion because 153 of that increase or 153,000 of that increase is that salary swap out we talked about above where we had an IT person funded by the fire department working here, she got promoted and is working now in IT and we're going to have a position in IT that they're gonna carry and we're gonna increase our IT cost to make it up. The bottom line for the budget is it's a wash. So, but it does look unusual. It bears telling you that that's why that number is up to 28.6%. The other big number is the admin cost plan. As you can see, we went up by 13.8%. That's $400,000. So those are the major impacts or the major reasons why do you see the cost increases going up so much in the general fund? As Chief Westrop mentioned, we're very people heavy, 82% is salary and benefits so we don't have a lot of wiggle room elsewhere. We're very tight and we did a lot of shuffling around to make the numbers come out, but by the end of it, it's a mathematical exercise is what you're doing. We're not moving all around a lot of money there and there's not much we can do about it. So we're just monitoring as best we can. And unless there's any questions, I'll go to the slide 32, which Chief Westrop will handle. Thanks, Jim. So as we start talking about undefunded additional needs requests, there's two categories that you'll see consistently throughout these presentations. The first is with COVID is related to the American Rescue Act and the second is non-COVID related group that relates to other funding mechanisms such as the PG&E settlement. So quickly for COVID related impacts, there's a $500,000 request for professional services agreements. As you recall, in a communication, I sent to council a few weeks ago in regards to the Fire Prevention Bureau and our plans to be a process being backlogged due to COVID, both from the perspective of the inability to do the work in-house and then the sharp increase in plans to review. And I laid out short, medium, and long-term plans to resolve that. The short-term plan was to internally absorb costs to build out our PSA with Bureau Veritas and Coastline Engineering to get working on that this fiscal year that we're in. And then in the next fiscal year, request the $500,000 for PSA work to actually continue reducing that backlog. And then long-term, it's gonna be as part of the Vegetation Management Program funding is to hire a second plans review examiner. It's difficult to attach a body to that for the backlog that we're in. That's why we're opting to go with contracts because as you know, it ebbs and flows, development ebbs and flows. And so if we attach a body to it and we get into a big eb, then we're in trouble with having a body on board. So we wanna get this backlog caught up and then get the second plans examiner on board and continue on a path more on a normal process with plans review. The second item is station remodels for three of our fire stations. We have temporary engineering controls in place to divide particularly the living quarters. So particularly in some of the dorm rooms where it's one large dorm that had short barrier walls in place for limited privacy. We've had to put temporary restrictions in place. So this is looking at a remodel of three of our fire stations to make those temporary restrictions permanent. It also increases our privacy in regards to diversity, privacy in those dorms. So it sort of has a twofold effect but that request is in there as well. And moving on to non COVID related additional needs requests. The first one is $1.5 million for two frontline apparatus, the type one fire engines that you see on a daily basis. They're in queue to be replaced this fiscal year. We are replacing a 21 and 23, four year old engine. And so typically we struggle with where we're gonna find that kind of money and so we're making the request out of here and I'll get into what our plan is moving forward shortly here, but that's our request for this year is to replace some very old apparatus that are costing us too much in maintenance and they have too much downtime. So that's request number one. The second one is, and these will be prioritized in later slides, I'll just go down the list for ease of your tracking. $4 million in a capital fleet replacement program funding. So we don't have, and my first point leads to this is we don't have a mechanism for replacing our capital fleet assets. So fire engines $750,000, a truck is $1.2, $1.3 million. So we don't have a replacement fund for that. So we see here is an opportunity for that seed money to go into a replacement program. And what we've done is we've developed sort of a all a cart menu, so to speak, that lays out with our fleet replacement forecast. So for instance, in this case, with a $4 million initial investment in a capital fleet replacement program, that leads us to for the next 25 years and into the future is right now would be a $400,000 per year ask. So it's inversely proportional. And so if we were to put in $5 million into the fleet replacement program, initial investment would go down to $300,000 a year. So we're looking at that seed money that's never been there for the fire department, never been there, existed in the city and is leading to these issues where we have to come out and find ways to creatively finance buying fire engines or fire trucks. It's that seed money that we've needed that we haven't developed in the last 15 or 20 years to continue forward. So we don't have to keep coming back to council every year and asking for these big ticket numbers. We have that at our disposal as we move forward. The third item on the list, and I very missed not to put this in is a $15 million for an additional fire station, whether it's the relocation of an existing station or new construction of a new station. We've developed a sort of pros, cons, risk analysis of what each one of the stations we need to build come with. For instance, station nine is a great station location. It's in the Southeast. It would service Mount Taylor as far as the movie goes. But that comes with the need for additional bodies. We already own the property, but we would have to have an ongoing cost of additional bodies moving forward with that. Whereas we could go with something like station 11 or station 11, when we own the property, it would not come with bodies. We would just build the station on the existing footprint. That station was built in 2009 and it was supposed to be, it's in a temporary facility. It was supposed to be there for five years and it's been there for, since 2009 as a temporary building. So there's different options in there. We do have some capital investment in three of the stations that need to be built, station eight, station nine and station 11. So we have a little bit more skin in the game there. So it's just asking for that seed money so we can put forward another fire station that we need to rebuild. 1.4 million dollars for the hot EOC. You've seen this time and time again. This is to take an existing building at the MSC and convert it into a full-time, technically competent state of the art emergency operation center. There's some other funding opportunities with the hot EOC out of the federal government that we're looking into as well. And Mayor Rogers has been part of those conversations. So we'll find out more about that later. And then lastly, you'll see it's actually number two on our priority list is approximately $200,000 for a new fire inspection database. It's a new program that we utilize for CUPA, engine company and fire prevention inspections. It creates an advanced production of reports and communication directly to the state. And the purpose is routine reporting, training, audits and things we have to go through as a CUPA agency. System can also be configured to talk directly to finance so any billing that needs to be done, it can go directly to finance. So it would really be a big win for our fire prevention bureau as far as tracking and reporting goes. And so the ask is in there for that as well. There's a question from Council Member Sawyer. Very good. Council Member. Thank you, Mayor. I was having a hard time unmuting. Chief, could you explain to me how the, I mean, the rest of the city has fleet replacement program. Is the fire department separate from that because of the high cost of the, when you have to replace a piece of equipment, the high cost of it? Because the rest of the city does participate if I'm not mistaken in a fleet replacement program. That's correct. So our smaller vehicles such as our, the SUVs, the command staff drives and the fire prevention bureau drives, those are part of the fleet replacement program. But because these capital items are either they're nuanced in that we can't go in and into a fleet purchase and buy a bunch of similar dump trucks or tractors, whatever the case may be, they're selected and there's changes with technology and with configuration. So, but they are very expensive. Number one and number two is that we have to go out and spec it very specifically for what we're looking for at the time. Thank you. That makes sense. That's from Bersuad Elm. If I could just clarify with you, Mayor Rogers, do you want questions each slide or wait for the end? If there's, if we're doing a transition and it seems natural, go ahead and put your hand up and we'll ask. Otherwise we can ask at the end as well. Okay. Well, since we've already asked on this one, let me ask Chief West for this stuff. So regarding the 500 K for process professional services agreement, I was very appreciative of the memo you sent out on April 29th. The question I have is what impact will this have? So my question would be regarding fire inspections and plan check. What is your expected turnaround rate? What do we tell the community currently, our fire chiefs expects those plan checks to get turned around in what timeframe? So our typical timeframe for that that we want to get back to is four to six weeks. Right now we're at 10 to 12 weeks with a 400 backlog. And so we're getting back into that four to six week and also the expedited home owners or developers or whomever can pay an expediting fee. And right now the expediting fee does no good. And so we get into an expediting fee as well to where we're actually able to expedite plans coming out. So four to six weeks on standard with expedition, it would be sooner than that. And so this investment of half a million dollars would get us back to that. And I know your memo outlines some long-term strategy. So the community expectation would be invest this and we'll get to this level of service that this community expects. Am I getting that right? That's correct. It's the short-term stop gap with a small investment that we came up with internally to bolster one of our contracts to have a third party vendor help us close the loop or close the gap on the backlog. And then with this $500,000, it would be a full-court press to get everything we can involved to clear that backlog and back to a place of normalcy when we have the second plans examiner come on board. And so there's gonna be a recruitment timeframe for that. So what I'm trying to do is close each one of those gaps, the two-month gap to the end of this fiscal year, the gap to we get the second plans examiner hired and then moving forward, we should be in a better position. Great, and then this is exactly the data that I always wanted to make that decision. And then that next bullet point is 7.5 for three fire station remodels. That's the first I've heard of that. Was that presented during any of the options for the PG&E settlement funds? It wasn't. We were trying to, during the PG&E settlement funds, we were trying to keep it much higher level and look at very strategic broad goals. The reason that we added this into the American Rescue Act funding was that it was very COVID specific to reduce the ability, you know, we have, and this has been a big struggle through COVID, the fire department has a very unique living situation that our crews are with each other at least 48 hours a day in very close quarters. The stations that we're talking about here are station three in Coffee Park, station four in Bennett Valley and station seven in Oakmont. And those stations are all very small, they're all butler buildings. And so the ability to social distance is pretty much impossible. So we created these temporary barriers and we're looking just into the future. We're probably gonna face something else like this. You know, COVID could be continued, whatever the case may be is making that more permanent. And at the same time, we can take the opportunity to increase our position for recruitment and diversity by creating a better privacy situation. So it just does lead me to ask, since this is the first I've seen of that, are we currently in a legally compliant situation with what our housing situation is at those three fire stations you just mentioned? Yes, we are currently legally compliant. And so this will take us to a next preferred level versus a legally compliant level. Do I have that one correct? Yes. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, my last question too is the non-COVID related. You may be expecting this one as we've had some discussion with PG&E funds and for station five. Initially the cost for that was 15 million then the last time came to council was 21 million. I see this 15 million fire station relocation and construction surfaced again. Can you share with us a little information about what's the difference in those two different funding? Absolutely. And I wholly was expecting this question as soon as I typed that number in there. You're gonna meet your expectations, Chief. Yeah, thank you. So for station five, one of the big issues we have is the area we chose to put the station and the land that we chose to put it on. So almost $6 million of that cost is moving dirt and leveling that land and getting it prepared to be built on because it's never been built on before. So that's really where that $15 to $21 million number came from. So if we look at, for instance, station nine, which we own the property for, they're currently landing construction equipment on it. So it's very compacted. It's very flat right now. So station nine, we don't need to do a bunch of land movement. So it eliminates that $6 million number. Station 11, there's already a parking lot. We don't even need to go through CEQA to build station 11. Station eight and station six, which would be moving the stations off their current location, not adding bodies. We'd have to purchase property and what we would do is be much more, we would learn from previous lessons and make sure that we're buying property that is not gonna get us into a prolonged or very expensive venue of having to move a lot of dirt or to go in through a huge CEQA process. So, and then again, we also have some money set aside through CIP for station eight, station nine and station 11. So we have some capital on hand to put in towards that as well. So that's why we landed on this $15 million number is due to lessons learned and where we have to put these stations moving forward is a much more convenient for lack of a better term position to put the stations in. And is it safe to assume you've also factored in the escalating cost of materials in this that they just been skyrocketing everything I've heard? Is that factored in this figure also? It's factored in, the recent news of a sheet of plywood being almost $60 is obviously is a huge problem. So we're hoping the supply chain kind of catches up this. It'll be a while before we're using wood products and things like that. So we did factor that in and that's one of the reasons the cost is so high in general to build these buildings at $1,000 square foot. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other questions council? All right. All right, next slide please. So the additional unfunded additional needs request is one of the things that we really, really struggle with in general and get a lot of questions about is our non-contract overtime. And just to make it clear for the council when we're talking contract and non-contract overtime contract overtime is the overtime Jim was talking about that strike team overtime that we reimbursed for plus about 14%. So that's fully reimbursable. Non-contract overtime is typically MOU, MOUs related overtime costs. So vacation, sick, industrial, jewelry, leave those kinds of things. So the issue that we run into is for the last five years our non-contract overtime budget has been about $2.88 million. It has not changed. Jim Wintherin did a analysis in the last three to five years. Our average is $4.1 million. So we're seriously under budgeted in that line. So what this budget request is for is to bring us closer to what our actual spending is in the non-contract overtime line. I've told you that I've already told you the analysis that we have to fill the seats every day. So we did a staffing report obviously as most you recall in 2019. And that showed that we needed to hire these six positions that are currently taking on our roster plus additional 14 if we wanted to eliminate the overtime problem completely. So that's sort of the long-term goal is to get into that building the roster out to where if we have a sick leave or a vacation leave position open up, we can plug that in with an already a hired body. On the short term, we're doing things like improving our injury and illness prevention programs both on the physical and behavioral health side. We've added a lot of behavioral health assets to our inventory for our employees to use with the idea of reducing that injury or sick leave time usage. And then long-term, it would be adding those positions. So a lot of times you'll see in bigger cities just as a comparison because the question did arise earlier where you'll see a five-person engine company or a six-person truck company. So if somebody's sick or on vacation, they don't fill that spot with overtime. They just have the bodies there. So I don't think we need to get into that vein yet. That is one of the issues and one of the reasons that the staffing study showed that we needed to get into this over hiring by 14 positions place in 2019. So really what this budget request is for is to true up our numbers and align it with what we're actually spending. So we're not pulling from another line item to try to balance our budget appropriately. And I'm not surprised to see there's a couple of questions Mr. Mayor. Vice Mayor. So my question was Chief, if we allowed additional staff, I know that the equation is bigger than just salary, right? So how much is one person that salary benefits everything? Because if we're spending 1.2 on average, if we're spending 1.2 million, how much is it set out of body? It just doesn't make sense to me. And so if it doesn't make sense to me, I don't think it makes sense to the people that are watching. So Jim and I have had this conversation expecting this very question for some time. And what it is, it's this great dichotomy of needing the extra positions, but the extra positions don't completely close the gap on the overtime line. So the number that we're using for the reductions, the $945,000 number is $194,000 per body fully vetted. So what the difference is, and I said this number earlier is to hire that position for overtime annually, it costs us between $53,000 and $55,000 more than that. So you can figure it's gonna be right around $250,000 per year for that body. So that's the difference in the numbers. And so really we're trying to do two things. We're trying to shore up that number in our daily staffing, so we're reducing the overtime. But on the other side, we need to bring up that number so it's short up and it's actually what we're spending. And what you're seeing is the difference isn't made up. So if we were to hire all five of those positions, that only saves us between $250,000 and $300,000. It doesn't make up the gap of $1.2 million that we have in the overtime line. So they're all sort of commingled, but it is a tremendous dichotomy on one hand to have $945,000 proposed cuts. And then we're asking for 1.2 in overtime, but we always end up having to move numbers around in the budget in order to balance our budget at the end of the year to make up for the shortfall on the overtime line. Okay, thank you, Chief. Thank you. All right, I didn't see any other hands. Great, thank you. And so to bring us home, I will turn it back over to Jim for the last couple of slides. Okay, we're on number 34. And these are the, this is just a little table showing all the funds that fire touches. As you can see, the majority of it is general fund. 92% of it is general fund driven. The other big component is measure O, which most of you are familiar with. So on this particular table, you'll see on measure O, there's a net change of $197,000. And that's essentially made up of increases in overtime. Again, strike team overtime and a benefit increase on the PERS unfunded liability in workers comp and healthcare. So overall that $197,000 increase in measure O is made up of 186 of that is made up of salary and benefits. The other 10 is an increase in liability insurance, which I believe Jan talked about. So that's where we're at with measure O and that's why it's gone up 197,000. The other big changes in the capital improvement fund down below, that's essentially, we have a, we get some CFF, capital facilities fund, or we get some money once a year. It's in the neighborhood of 400,000 that we split between three fire stations. That's the primary driver behind that. The reason you're seeing a difference of higher than that is you've got 551 in 2021 and 379. That's a couple of grants. Anytime we get grants, in this case, we had NOAA radio grants that you're hearing all about, so we're handing them out. And a weather station grants, those are in there from 20 and 21 and they weren't repeated in 21, 22. So it looks like a decrease, but it's really not. So overall the big takeaway on this is most of our budget lies in the general fund with the balance really in measure O. And with that, we can take any additional questions. All right, council, any last questions for the fire department? All right, thank you gentlemen. Thank you very much. Thank you. Before you leave, chief, I believe there was one more slide for you on slide 35. Oh, yeah, Jimmy got one more button. Oh yeah, that's the same. I already talked about that in 34. It's all related. I do see council members, what Helm took this as an opportunity to put his hand up. Okay. It's more of a question for you, Mayor Rogers. This is the first department that's making reference to measure O funds. And I understand there are some challenges with measure O oversight that they haven't approved this budget. I would like council to handle any questions about that or are we just assuming each department's measure O funds were spent appropriately. Mr. City Manager, I'm gonna forward that question to you. I say at this point, I'd appreciate receiving any comments that we can get relating to measure O. I will discuss it with the city manager and chief financial officer as well as the two chiefs and we'll bring that conversation back to council at a later date prior to budget adoption in June. And I'll also point out we've got a fire here. We've got police next. If we put some of those questions on the table, we can create some space in the discussion tomorrow as well for the to have as answered. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, and with that, Mayor Rogers will move on to the police department and I'll introduce Chief Navarro. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the city council. Rainer Navarro, chief of police. I'm here with our administrative service officer, Pam Lawrence and both of us will be available to answer questions. I'll be going through each of the slides and then if you wanna dig a little bit deeper, Pam will be there to assist with some of the more specific line item budgets. And then I know Council Member Schwedhelm, you had a few questions that came up regarding impacts. We're gonna, I'll address that at the end of our seven slides. We can talk a little bit more about that and then we'll also be going over some of our measure impacts also. Next slide, please. So this is our slide regarding our uncontrollable costs. You, it was very similar to what you saw with the fire department on this, on how the slides are gonna be presented. For us though, you'll see some numbers there on each of those lines. Those are the amounts that, the increased amounts. That's not the actual amount of each of those light items but it's actually the increase from last year. You can definitely see our PERS unfunded liability has been, has increased by 17%. We've had a significant increase in our public safety consortium costs. The consortium is made up of several different jurisdictions. We pay the lion's share of the cost because we are the busiest agency and so they do it by percentage. We've seen some increases in our radio infrastructure. So our radio tower releases and new equipment. We've seen some increases there. And with those, with these costs going up, paying these costs will continue to help us address the communication issues that were outlined in the after action report and then also assisting in navigating the natural disasters that we see and fire disasters that we see on a regular basis. We had a increase in costs in our substation. So we have a substation on the west side of town on West Steel that was actually provided to us at a very nominal cost, but they ended our lease. They're doing some expansions and we had to move. So we are seeing some increase there. We've seen some increase in our phones. And so the $18,000 increase really goes towards all of our phones going into the dispatch center and also addresses the iPhones that we provide, our field staff. Those iPhones are really important because what they're doing is they're actually taking, they're taking the place of a phone, a camera and several different apps that we are gonna need to have in the future. So we no longer have to issue cameras to each individual officer. We no longer have to issue an audio recorder to each individual officer. They can do that through their phone. We have the phones allow us to connect with our body or cameras so they can input information. Makes it a little bit quicker when they put it into our evidence program. And then also as we start going into the latter part of this year, we're gonna be diving into the Racial Identity Profiling Act which is gonna be mandatory in January. And that's gonna, the officers are gonna have to put in a significant amount of information into this new program. They're gonna be able to do that through their smartphones. So we wanna make sure that we have them ready and available for all of our field officers. And then there's several other bullet points on there. You'll see they most, these are all increases based on contracts with outside services. And basically cost for business is going up everywhere. And so we're seeing a significant increase in several of these areas, specifically accident toes, our prisoner transports. We used to rely on the Sheriff's Department to provide transport. They no longer do that. And they now each jurisdiction has to provide their own transport when we arrest somebody from out of the area and bring them back to Sonoma County. There's an increase in some of the, again, the way they do testing for DNA and blood draws to address significant investigations and DUIs. There's other, several other internal or uncontrollable costs that we have that are related to internal funds. And we'll go over those in the next few, in a few more slides. And then one of the biggest unknowns that we have that is hard to control is our overtime costs. And we'll go into that a little bit more, but one example is with the last fire, we spent a significant amount of money, $300,000 in overtime, overtime alone, just in response to the glass fire. So those are some significant uncontrollable costs that we have. Next slide, please. This slide outlines three significant controllable costs that we have. Again, with other outside professional services with the costs going up, there is an increase in the first two specific areas. However, we can control that by, once we hit the cap, we can stop towing cars, basically. But our large vehicle tows that there's a significant increase there. This year we're gonna be budgeting $54,000, which is our three-year average. We actually spent about $70,000 last year, but we're going with our three-year average on that. One of the big issues about the cost increase here is because large vehicle tows usually require some sort of special disposal. So the tow companies have to go through a significant hazmat disposal to clean up any of the, the issues that they have with these towed vehicles that they're taking. We're also seeing increases in the abandoned vehicle, or the Abatement Vehicle Officer program. And again, we see more and more cars being towed and the cost more to tow those vehicles. So far this year, for 2021, we've spent about $110,000 on tows. And so the total amount within our AVA program pays for our AVA officer, and then up to a certain amount of tows. And then the small community outreach team. So again, that's just a small amount of money to allow our newly formed community engagement team to have some funds as we loosen restrictions up and start having opportunities to provide more and more community engagement opportunities. That's gonna allow for some funding to put on events such as coffee with a cop, community police experiences, and then also go to certain specific events such as Cinco de Mayo and maybe other fairs that we're invited to. So we're looking forward to having, even though it's just a small amount of money, it's gonna help this collateral assignment that we're starting up. Next slide, please. So this particular slide shows our general fund proposed budget and to start off with, per the city council's direction last year, we took the department back to the baseline. And to do that, we cut five positions or froze the five positions. And then to meet the department required target, we had to cut an additional police officer. So those are the positions that you saw early on in the presentation by the city manager. The salaries line item you can see has decreased because of these cuts. The salaries do include our overtime. And so again, with our overtime, that's a significant issue for us. Last year, we spent about $400,000 on overtime just to backfill due injury and staffing shortages. You have certain minimum staffing levels that we want to keep in patrol. That helps us with our response times and try to keep them down. Right now, what we're seeing is our, over the last several months, we've seen our response times starting to creep up. And I'll go over that a little bit later in our presentation. We've, again, we've responded to emergencies on a regular basis. The overtime, again, was about 300,000 for the last glass fire that we had. And our fighter average for overtime is about 3.1 million. We're currently going to budget about 1.9 as directed by the city. And we will be working with the long-term finance committee on how to address this in the future. You can see our benefits increased. Again, that's due to our PERS liability that we talked about on the earlier slide. Our professional services line item shows a significant jump percentage-wise. And so that is, the city manager talked about the mental health response program that we were putting on. This is where the money has gone. This is, this particular team is going to assist us in addressing, again, the issues that have come up and that has, that has become a council priority for us. So we have about 1.1 in that particular area for that program. We also have several other things in there such as our radio agreements and contracts and several of our other professional services contracts that we talked about, such as the DNA testing, exams such as psychological and polygraph exams for our new hires and prisoner of transports and blood draws. Our vehicle expenses, you can see that went down. It is a little bit, it can be a little bit confusing. We actually are seeing our garage rates in service costs go up from the city garage. But as that goes up, we do have almost all of our vehicles in the vehicle replacement program. And that allows us to be more fiscally responsible with handling and maintaining and replacing our vehicles. We do have a significant amount of that cost is in fuel. However, what we've seen is with the implementation of hybrid vehicles into our fleet, which we are still transitioning into, we've already seen a reduced fuel consumption. So as we start replacing our older vehicles with the hybrids, we're gonna see continued reduced fuel consumption in the future. The other, one of the other things I'm gonna bring up again, information technology that has gone up, that's for our PC replacement and IT overhead that the department is now absorbing and our training is in the other miscellaneous category. And there's about $308,000 worth of training. And the majority of that is for mandated or required trainings that we have to send our staff to. We also have the, at the bottom note, although there's no change, the CIP and OMM project, that is used to pay for, that is going to be used to pay for the auditor. And then the upcoming staffing study that we're gonna be doing later this year. Last year we paid our after-action report and the OIR reports that you viewed last week. And then also the, or two weeks ago, and then also a department security camera system. So in the future, it'll be used mainly for our auditor and then our staffing study for this year. Next slide, please. So again, our mental health response team, they're a one-time funding that we are requesting. Again, per Council's direction, we are working with Whitebird Clinic on a Kahootz-type model for Santa Rosa. This is gonna provide a team of non-sworn specialists to respond to calls involving individuals experiencing mental illness or a health crisis or people who are under the influence of the controlled substance. It's kind of a Kahootz-plus model because we're gonna be looking at things more than just social work, right? So there'll be, there is a mental health professional, a homeless professional and then a paramedic on this team. None of the staffing is sworn. So there will be no police officers on this team, but they will be working with us and through our dispatch to dispatch them to these particular calls. Year one is, it's not a full system. This is just the pilot program to get us started. It's 10 hours a day for seven days a week and the hope is to expand this program to a point where it can be 24-7. And so what we're looking at right now is we are in active conversations with several other entities, private partnerships in the county to see how quickly we can expand this into a full-time model and then how do we sustain that over the long-term? So again, you see the three-year projected proposal for us as we go forward, but this will be a, we want this to be around for a while and we're in conversations right now on how to make that happen. Go to the next slide. Yeah, Vice Mayor, you've got your hand up. Yes, Chief, I had a quick question. Why such a large jump between year one and two and then a smaller jump in money's allocated for years two and three? Part of that is again, the expansion into increasing the time and also increasing vehicles. So we'll have to add additional vehicles and equipment to go into the vehicles if we were going to expand the team into longer hours. Got it, thank you. And then just to know that I think one of the things that we're going to see out of this is last year, about 17% of our calls were homeless related and we're hoping this is going to help out with that CAHOOTS Plus style response to our community. Next slide, please. Council Member, sir, you have a question? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Chief, is under controlled substance, is alcohol considered a controlled substance? Yes, I would consider that a controlled substance. So if somebody's having a lot of times you may end up going to a call and you really don't know what it is. So they may be either intoxicated or they may be under the influence of another controlled substance and that team will be able to, we're hopeful that that team will be able to manage that and get that person to the appropriate help. Thanks for that clarification, appreciate it. Next slide, if there's nothing else there. So this particular slide shows our entire proposed budget. This includes Measure O and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we, this slide and the next slide. You can see that, although our general fund is increasing for this Kahoot style model, we are seeing a reduction in Measure O. That reduction is about $500,000 and it equates to basically three officers who were cut from the SRO program earlier this year. We are, and I'll go into more Measure O information on the next slide. We see a reduction in the federal asset forfeiture. It basically is 40, it's reduced to $40,000 just to align with the prior year actuals. We have the supplemental law enforcement line item just so you know that is our funding for the body more camera program. That funding will run out at the end of fiscal year 22-23. So we've got about two more years of funding within that line item and then we're gonna be working on what does that look like to be able to fund that camera program. It is invaluable for us, it's helped us tremendously, not only in our investigations but it also helps us out when we're dealing with, or trying to address accountability and any complaints that come in and we've actually seen a reduction in complaints with these when we went to the body work camera program. So it's very important to us to keep that program in the future. Our, the asset forfeitures, state asset forfeiture that's used basically specific to narcotic related operations or training and investigative needs. And then the capital improvement fund, that particular line item is a, that's being used this year for the public safety building generator. We've had some issues during the fires where our power goes out. This is a matching fund. Cal OES has funded $300,000 for the generator. So this is a sitting match and we are gonna be using that to basically stabilize and keep our station going, including our dispatch center, which was run 24 seven. Next slide, please. So again, this is some of our non-general fund budget highlights. Again, we talked a little bit about the federal narcotics asset forfeiture. It's been realigned. The measure roll funds, again, we reduced it by three officers. And so what we did in anticipation of the cuts, we held, we've been holding these vacancies since the beginning of 2021. After some people, some of our staff members retired, we've held those vacant and those are gonna be cut. As this really kind of goes into the general fund discussion with the number of positions that we've lost. So since 2018, we've lost a total of 15 and a half positions. Seven of those have been sworn. Eight and a half have been civilian positions. With the staffing cuts that were proposed, that's being proposed for this year, we will be down to 251 positions. 174 of those will be sworn. 77 will be civilian positions. We try to have around 85 in patrol. And we are below that number. And some of the things that we try to do is to, you know, we borrow from these other assignments to try to keep our response times low. Some of the things that we've been impacting. So before you ask the question, Council Member Schwedhelm, we have seen a reduction in our community engagement. It's been a little bit more difficult in some of the engagement opportunities. So in addition to COVID, we don't, we no longer have a gang unit. So once we lost those positions last year, we have no way to staff the gang unit. We now no longer have an SRO team. And those two teams were our primary officers who were directly involved with the Violence Prevention Partnership. They were involved in our Cinco de Mayo planning and events and staffing those booths. And they were the kind of our go-to staff members to go to any particular last minute community meetings that would come up. And so we no longer have that ability to just pull from those special assignments. We've seen our response time starting to increase. They're starting to creep up over the last eight months or so, actually since August. And so where our goal is to be at six minutes for our priority one response times, we're at almost seven minutes right now. So we're starting to see those and then the other priorities creep up. So we're seeing an increased, so reduced staffing, increased response time and less ability to address community engagement. And then also some of our investigations have, we've have a lower clearance rate in some of our crimes. One of the things that occurred in 2020, again, our crimes against persons increased by about 6%, but our clearance rates for crimes against persons dropped by 6%. So those are some of the impacts that we are having as we address our current staffing issues. That does conclude our slide. So be happy to answer any questions. Okay, I'll start with Council Member Sawyer. Thanks, Mayor. Chief, what is the status of your calls for service and your response time is going up by the calls for service directly proportioned to the response times, would you say? Or is it the nature of the types of calls that we are taking more time to get to? So we have, at the beginning of 2020, our calls dropped significantly just because of COVID. And then, but we saw them start to creep up, around May and June, they started to increase and they've been continually increasing. Our response times, for each priority, we try to make sure that we're getting to the priority ones as quickly as possible. And those are the domestic violence, potential suicide calls, prowlers, shootings, fights, stabbings, that sort of thing. And those are the ones, over the last several months, it's increased and we're now almost at six or almost at seven minutes. And that's where we want to see that six minute line. Our priority twos, those are usually our alarms, kind of verbal disturbance, checking the welfare of people. That is over 11 minutes. So it takes us about an average of over 11 minutes to get there. Again, they're incrementally starting to rise up. Our priority three calls, those are cold reports like a theft report that may have happened a couple of days ago. Traffic hazards, noise complaints, those are over 21 minutes in average right now. And then our priority four calls, those are things such as parking complaints, towing vehicles, abandoned vehicles, phone calls to officers. Those are at almost 30 minutes. Yeah, yeah, that priority one call, that seven minutes can feel like a really long time and it does give me a high level of concern. Thank you. Vice Mayor. So I have a couple. Thank you for your presentation, Chief. The first would probably be the measure oath funds in us not having the game prevention or intervention. This is a time to get feedback, I'm assuming. So I really would like to see how we can get that back because we know that game prevention and intervention that the measure oath funds are supposed to assist with that. And it really starts when the children are a lot younger before they get into games in such activities. In addition to really wanna see us out there in the community again, coffee with a cup before I even thought about being on city council. I was able to participate in that and really see who patrols my neighborhoods. And it actually allows the residents to speak to the officers that patrol their neighborhoods. So I do like that program. And I wanna look at increasing training, non-mandatory training, but the enrichment of officers. I think that it is so important. Like we need to have the mandatory training, but we also need to have training that allows enrichment of our officers. So if we can, I know I'm asking a lot, but I'm probably the one that should be giving. I would like to see those things implemented. Thank you. I think again, it comes back to being able to have the time and then the funding. And so our training has remained flat. We have not been able to increase it. And again, the majority, you know, especially as we come out of COVID, one of the things that we're gonna have to do is to make sure that we're, because a lot of training was suspended because we couldn't do things in person. We try to make the best out of doing online training, but we're, as things loosen up, we've got to start getting people back to make sure they're wearing compliance with all mandatory trainings. And that's gonna be taking priority. And so that's really what our training budget's for. And we do what we can to try to find, you know, training that is enriching. You know, if we can find free training, great, or local training, you know, we are trying to do that. But most of our training right now is gonna be dealing with some of the mandatory training that we have to be cut up to speed on. But we will continue to seek those out. Thank you. Council Member Svato. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, I'll just keep on this one of questions in the comments. So you mentioned you're doing a staffing study. So I know the department historically has looked at obligated and unobligated time. And I know the definition that this community had used for to be considered a community policing organization, about half the time would be proactive. In other words, officers, meeting community members, some things that we heard from some of my colleagues, building those relationships. And the other half would be responding to calls for service, doing reports and whatnot, right? And it's concerning to me that the response times to priority one calls have increased to seven. In my understanding, correct me if there's new information, the only way you can adjust that, you either need to stop responding to some calls, priority calls for service, or get additional resources. Is that still fairly accurate? Yes, that is accurate. We are currently looking at response times and calls for service that we respond to. And so the thing that is new to this council and to this community is our work in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Have you factored in how that will be incorporated the police department and how will your members of your organization be able to start learning about this? Because the bottom line is if I'm calling 911, I may not be interested in hearing that officers are not 10, eight on the streets, right? They're doing more training. How have you factored that into these response time, this additional training and education to make some of these cultural changes that this council has been talking about? Well, we, I mean, we are definitely doing the best we can. I think the biggest thing for us is that we do want to, we're trying to maintain that level of service right now. So if somebody calls, you know, we provide training to our dispatchers to really try to triage each particular call. And so they will figure out if they need immediate help or if they need a phone call back, you know, what have you. But most of the issue that we have are, you know, we don't have staffing, the call times are going to go up. And so it is, you know, there is a customer service piece of it and we want to treat all of our neighborhoods equally. And that's just, that's the struggle that we're having right now. I guess I don't really have an answer on what we can do, what the solution is based on what we have right now and what our proposed budget is. We are going to be addressing reevaluating calls for service. We are going to be addressing looking at what kind of trainings that we do, but we've got to get to prioritize the mandatory training and then our minimum staffing levels to try to bring those calls down. I guess to put it from a council perspective where I'm struggling is I see that's really, there's two options that we can provide you feedback with. It's either saying stop one of these type of calls so you have more time to do the DEI work, the community policing, get the emergency response times to the low seven minutes. Either we can do that by either adding resources or stop responding to some calls for service. Are there other options that aren't in either of those two categories? Yeah, I think those are the two major possibilities. The only other possibility again would be overtime that just burns people out. And so I think the biggest piece right now is add more resources or we stop providing specific services. Okay, thank you. And then can we go back to slide 40 about the mental health of response team pilot program? Because I think you test based on it. And I think all of our interest is eventually we want this to be 24 seven. And it looks like we're $1.4 million short of that. You talked about meeting with different community stakeholders. Have you heard or are there some willing participants in the community that'll help fund this operation to get us to that 24 seven more quickly than three years? Yes, that's a good question, council member. We are getting a lot of positive feedback from the community, not only the community in general, but actually are some of the stakeholders in this. And so I don't know if I can give you exact names, but I do know that we're speaking with members of public health or in the health community and then also the county. And we're actively trying to work on raising other funds. So almost like a public-private partnership to be able to expand and increase that team quicker. So we can get to that 24 seven model before year three. We can get there quicker and then we can actually sustain this program in the years to come. So those are happening right now in the partners that we're talking to. They seem to be very encouraged and they seem, they appear to be very willing to try to assist in some of this public-private funding. And given what's projected here for a cost of year one, year two, year three, if we receive no outside funding, this council will be having a discussion, okay, now last year, if we commit to 1.1 million, next year we're gonna have to commit 2.2 million, that if that funding is available, correct? That's correct. Okay, and then additionally, I know going federal government's passing the CAHOOTS Act, it's my understanding that in order to get some of that reimbursement from Medicaid, your emergency response team has to be 24 seven and that would then open up the opportunity to apply for reimbursement from some costs. And I'm not even sure if it's just the police money but for the program, is that still your understanding of that CAHOOTS Act? Yes, that is true. We have under our grants that you can put out for and you can also get some funding through some new legislation, but you do have to have a 24 seven model before that kicks in. Okay, so again, given what we have here on slide 40, year three, we'd have to come up with a 2.5 million before we qualify for any of that and that would be 100% city funding. That's correct. Okay, all right, those are the questions I have on that one. If you can go to slide 37, I had a question about blood draws. So this said cost escalations, uncontrollable costs, blood draw cost increase. Have we solicited feedback from the fire department because I think we have some trained paramedics or EMTs and I apologize for that classification but I believe one of those class of employees have the ability to do blood draws. Have we explored using our own resources versus going outside to make the assumptions blood draw is not from the city employees from an outside entity? Yes, so we have explored that with the fire department. We were having conversations or discussions with fire starting several months ago. There's a couple of things that we still have to work through. I think one of the biggest issues is that ambulances are especially equipped for blood draws and the fire apparatuses are not. They would have to be, there would be some costs associated with equipping the engines. And then I think the other thing that comes up is if there's a blood draw, who responds to that, right? Is it the closest engine company? If that's the case, if they're in their rig, it takes a full rig off and if it's one of the busiest, if it's a busy engine company, it could take them offline for a significant amount of time. So we're working through that. I think the biggest thing that we can do, we're gonna continue those conversations with fire to see if that's something that is an option for the future. And so I know you had mentioned that we just have a 13K increase. What's the total cost of a blood draw contract? Do you know? I believe it was about $32,000. Pam, am I correct? Yeah, hi, everybody. So the cost increases going up to about 151 per draw and we do about 20 a month. 20 a month. I guess I would just encourage because to me it is a controllable cost. If there are some things in chief, if you had mentioned what they are, I mean, is there something that would prevent a police detective to actually bring the patient to where the resource is, right? We do that. And I'm just thinking operationally, it may be a way to save the costs for those type of programs. So I'd really appreciate further exploration on that because I think it is a cost that we could control. So thank you. Those are all the questions I have. Thank you. All right, thank you, Council Member Chief. I had a couple for you as well. First, I kind of wanted to punctuate the point that Council Member Schwedhelm was making. It'd be great for the council to hear what resources the police department needs to be able to implement the DEI work that we are talking about. And I'll have the same question for the HR department. Really just asking where does the budget that we're proposing reflect the values that the council is trying to espouse in our community as well. And so I know that a lot of the programming is being done on the HR side, but when we come back for the final adoption of the budget, it'd be helpful for me to see where the police department feels like the budget that's being asked for is reflective of that principle as well. And if it isn't telling us what resources you do need to be able to meet that obligation or that you feel like you need to meet that obligation. The next question I had for you was about the abandoned vehicle towing. Is any of that cost recoverable? Yes. So for abandoned vehicles, we receive about 180,000 a year from the county, but that also covers our community services officer salary. Okay, so with the $15,000 here for the cost escalation, does that mean that our reimbursables will also go up at the same time or is this uncompensated escalation? That's uncompensated. Okay, and there's no recoverability on the individual who abandoned the vehicle? I don't believe so. Chief Navarro, do you know? No, I don't think so. Okay, perhaps something for a conversation down the road is how we potentially do that and for individuals who don't have the finances to take care of their vehicle, how do we monetize if there's a way to do it, the city having to take care of these vehicles that have been left in the public's right of way? But I don't have an answer for you on that. And then the last one I had for you, Chief, and it's a random one. It's, I saw that Katadi in their budget discussions today actually have a component of it that matches their climate goals in having their police department vehicles, their fleet, when they get replaced, have to be electric vehicles or non-combustible engine vehicles. And I'm just wondering if this is something that the department has started to look into from a performance issue, from a cost issue, and from a climate issue. So right now we're working on transitioning over to hybrids. There are a couple of electric vehicles, patrol vehicles that are out there. I know Fremont has, they have a Tesla, but I can tell you, when the battery runs out, you're, it's done, you have to tow it back to the yard. They actually had one of their cars, basically lose power in a pursuit. So those are some of the issues that you, that we need to think about, but we have not started exploring fully electric yet. Other than, we do have some, we do have some zero motorcycles that are assigned to our downtown enforcement team that are electric, and those work out very well. It is something that we can look at in the future, but right now we're trying to transition over to the hybrids. And usually what we do is go for you, we work with fleet to get on the fleet pricing. And so a lot of what fleet has us, we work with fleet with most of the, most of the vehicles that we get and are basically giving them specs, and then they will provide, this is how we're putting it out. But we'll definitely look into that in the future. I appreciate that, Chief. As somebody who drives a hybrid and Envy's friends who have fully electric vehicles, I can tell you the performance is generally, and Tom's smiling, the performance for the electric vehicles is generally preferred, although I do understand that there are circumstances that are less than desirable. So I'd be interested in us pursuing something around that as well to see if we can, again, meet the values that the council has espoused in our budgeting. Councilor, are there any other questions? Council Member Fleming. Hey there, couldn't help but jump on the bandwagon around fuel efficiency. One thing that I noticed continually when I'm going around the neighborhood is officers' cars idling, and not when they're dealing with a situation, but just when they're hanging out. And so I just wanna put in an additional plug to remind folks to conserve where possible, since we're all getting to the point where we have to conserve everything, both for financial and climate change related goals, but thank you for the presentation. Yes, thank you, and Council Member Fleming, we do idle our vehicles a lot because we do have a lot of power that's being generated for the computers and the light bars that in the radios that are constantly going. So part of being able to, we do have some backup batteries, but it doesn't always do the trick, and we have to continue to keep the cars running. And so the hybrids actually accommodate that because they'll shut off when they don't need it, and then they'll turn back on when they need more power to juice the batteries up. Thank you, and helpful information. And Mayor, if I could chime in here just to add, the fleet will be coming to the Climate Action Subcommittee here over the course of the next several months to talk about a vehicle procurement program, specifically focused around hybrid and all electric vehicles. The goal there being that we can start to address, we can start to address some of the issues that you're having discussion with the Chief Navarro on. There are new technologies coming out that will address some of those idling issues that are more in line with our Climate Action Plan. And so please look forward to that conversation coming in the fairly near future. All right, thank you, Jason. I for one think that the Chief would look great rolling around the community in an Nissan Leaf. Thank you, Mayor. Do we have any other questions for the Chief? Okay. Council before we move into the next, thank you, Chief, and thank you so much, Pam. Council before we move into the next department, we're gonna go ahead and take, let's call it a five-minute break and then we'll come back for that department presentation. All right, Madam City Clerk, let's see if we have a quorum. One moment, Mayor. Thank you, Marius. I am ready as a little slow today. Just give me a second here. I'm having some technical difficulties with my program. It's all good. Okay, we'll call Council Member Tibbets. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Still here. Here, Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. All right, Mr. City Manager, let's go ahead and resume. I believe next up is transportation and operations. Leading off that presentation is Assistant City Manager Jason Knott. Thank you, City Manager. Thanks, Mayor. Please allow me to present the Transportation and Public Works budget if you advance another slide. Talking about things that are uncontrollable costs. One of the concepts that's coming forward is a series of state legislation that could result in impacts. One of which we talked about when we went to implement the zero waste plan or the zero waste ordinance, and that's SB 1383. When we were in discussing that originally and trying to identify what some of the concerns might be, the consultant that we had, R3 that was looking at that particular plan identified a need for additional staffing in order to comply with the rules of 1383. There's no funding that comes as the state approves its laws like that. And therefore it is something that as we start to see this implement and roll out, become starting January 1st of 2022, we expect that there's going to be impacts to the local agencies. What I've shown here is simply the potential staffing needs in order to support that new law. But there may be other components of this such as living within the law is a requirement that we purchase and acquire compost, depending upon what ultimately gets approved within the law that could be significant on the order of half a million to three quarters of a million dollars worth of compost that we would have to purchase and distribute. So while I only show the one particular component here, there's a number of other things that may be moving forward. There's other bills that relate to how we might be able to see telecommunications systems coming forward and how that could impact our systems within our traffic and signal facilities. And those could have specific and direct impacts to the city as we're responsible potentially for making improvements to those facilities in order to support those new telecommunications activities that come forward. We also continue to see an increase in the number of, in the type of utilities costs. And we don't expect to see that slow down. Some of our hope moving forward will be in a study that we're currently doing, which is an energy audit and a microgrid audit that we'll be bringing to the Climate Action Subcommittee here later this summer. Maybe it'll give us an opportunity to at least cease some of the increases that we may see to these utility costs moving forward. But at this point in time, this is our anticipation as we have costs of about $126,000 at least for this year that are gonna be expenses that we don't have control over. Next slide, please. Some of our controllable costs are things that we implemented in and of ourselves. And as we've talked about, or you may have heard over the course of the last year, we've had a substantial increase in the number of acts, number of asks and requests of our real estate team to the point where we're actually not able to achieve and deliver all of the projects necessary for some of our capital improvement programs. We're struggling to keep up with some of the requests coming within the downtown area. And so we're specifically looking at trying to add an additional staff member and add some additional resource so that those requests have something that we can bill against in order to get the types of professional services that we need. For example, as we're looking at trying to do an RFP for lots 10, 11 and garage five, trying to come up with a professional service that can help us do the title report, help us do the appraisal, help us do some professional marketing, help us to be able to reach out to those developers nationwide that may show interest in doing a comprehensive about a study or a comprehensive development at that location is gonna be important. And so that's part of why we've made this specific ask in addition to just being able to provide capacity so that our increasing water sewer and general fund capital programs have the support they need because everything is coming forward with additional real estate acquisition costs, whether it's time associated with needing additional right of way, whether it's some of the easements that were required, whether it's trying to just do additional evaluations associated with those capital projects that only the real estate team can do. So that's why this particular request is coming forward. You saw it on the initial slide that Sean showed as an additional need, but it is a controllable cost. It's something that we believe we have the ability to be able to say, yes, this is an area that we need to be able to keep up the pace with the things in our expectations for the services, or whether we can continue to control and contain the amount of effort that we're putting in this particular area. Next slide. Looking at our general fund for the proposed budget, as you've looked to reduce the number of staff members, and again, going back to slide five, not asking you to change Ms. Clerk, but just trying to relate back there, there are seven positions that the department is looking to trim as a part of the exercise that Mr. McGlynn explained. In those seven positions, you see the net change of about $412,000 in a reduction. That does then get balanced, however, with the benefits where we have a slight increase. A portion of that slight increase actually goes, as you've heard from the other two departments, is a PERS function, as those employees remain in our retirement system. We still have costs associated with that moving forward. And therefore, even though we're reducing staff members in an effort to control our day-to-day costs, there is an ongoing benefits cost associated with that. From a professional services, the cost of providing services, whether it's janitorial, HVAC, continues to rise over the course of time. And in order to ensure that we have those professional services to keep us in clean and functioning organizations, we're needing to keep pace, which causes that increase. From a vehicle expense, just like you've heard from the other two departments, those rates have gone up in an effort to ensure that we have good, common maintenance practices and our equipment is kept in a good condition. Utilities, as you heard me say, earlier PG&E continues to rise, as well as other expenses from the utility standpoint. And we just need to make sure we're adjusting it to keep pace. On the operational supplies aspect, there is about $116,000 increase in the budget associated with the Roseland annexation program. There's a component of that that relates to our operations on a day-to-day basis. That is aside and different from the capital expenditure, which you'll see when we get into the capital improvement program likely tomorrow. Information technology continues to rise. A lot of this has to do with some of our COVID adjustments. With a number of our professional staff working remotely, we did adjust the technology components to provide them with mobile devices in an effort to ensure that they have continuity of operation while they work from home. That did increase the cost of providing service for our department. We will be over the next year looking at how we can adjust that so that that number can start to come down. As we look to reduce the number of desktop devices we have and retain just simply the laptops that we were able to acquire during the course of the last year. On the general fund administration cost plan, this is just our overhead from the citywide cost allocation plan. This really is us working on the reorganization that took place a year and a half ago. And the department is still playing catch up in making sure that its budget is constantly, is established in a way that actually reflects the newly formed program that includes now parks maintenance and parks planning. And then we do have a minor increase in our CIP and O&M projects. And this relates specifically to the real estate increase. A large portion of that does come in the form of a single amount that not only will the staff but our professional services will be able to bill against in an effort to ensure that we have the right kind of professional services moving forward. When it comes to the reduction in staff, the city manager asked us to kind of describe for you what that looks like. As it stands, we'll be losing four skilled maintenance workers. What that relates to is we'll actually have to cut the special projects crew that we have in our street maintenance team. What that involves will be, we will no longer be constructing pedestrian ramps. We'll no longer be doing concrete repairs. We'll no longer be repairing and replacing storm drains and pipes that are not part of a capital program. These are things that our team that's within the organization will go and make these types of repairs in an effort to address specific complaints that come forward. As it stands, at this point, once the loss of these staff members we'll only be making those repairs as a function of a capital improvement program in the future. In addition, it'll also address, it'll also impact repairing ballards when we have ballards that get knocked down dealing with survey monuments and also the cleaning and ongoing debris management associated with our storm drains throughout town. It reduces our program in the storm drain side not quite 50%. This is not the storm drain program that deals with the two vector trucks that we have. This is really the day-to-day hand removal of leaves during flood response and winter events. We also are gonna be looking at reducing two groundskeeper positions. The impact of the reduction of those positions will force us to close the majority of the restrooms in our parks. Our groundskeepers, their specific job is the ongoing upkeep and maintenance of those or I'm sorry, the janitorial aspect of those bathrooms. They also do litter patrol in and around the parks and we will see a substantial reduction in the amount of day-to-day litter patrol associated with that. There are a couple of ways we may be able to address some of those concerns. We may be able to look at our janitorial contract to see if they can pick up some of those costs and some of those services, albeit that will counteract the cost savings associated with the reduction of those staff members. And then on the electrical side, we are also losing one electrician within this. At this point in time, that position has been vacant for some period of time and the staff has done an excellent job of keeping up with the program. We do expect that that will limit our ability to be proactive in the future. We typically have a reactive oriented program relating to streetlight repair and maintenance as well as our facility repair and maintenance. This will just simply further delay our ability to be able to respond to some of those requests as they come forward. Next slide. When we think about unfunded additional needs, obviously you've heard me talk for several years about all of the different needs that are out there within the aspect of the $5 billion worth of infrastructure that were responsible for maintaining and the needs are substantial. And I felt it was just, I felt at this point in time, what I would do is I would identify those that we recently talked about as a function of the PG&E settlement funds. These items with a couple of minor exceptions showed up in the presentations that you saw between December and March. These are some very high profile critical projects that we believe have merit moving forward. We do know that the funds are very tight. And so these are just items that we wanna make sure that we're putting in front of you as you're gonna see from other departments as well. A couple of things to highlight, the police department recently upgraded their radio system and provided a brand new digital system that other departments can transition to. Transit is one of those systems that would benefit from being able to move over to that system recognizing and you'll hear later in the study session about their budget. There are operating on a fairly tight budget and they would be asking if there was a way for them to come up with the $100,000 capital need to be able to transition each of the radios and the 29 buses that we currently have to the new radio system. With that said, the expectation is that future buses that we would purchase would come already equipped with that new radio and that would be accommodated as part of that capital expenditure. We also talk about the Herne Avenue interchange as an evacuation route, as well as something that's an economic development benefit for the South part of town. It is an area where we've got substantial congestion that relates not only to impacts to police and fire travel, but also to their ability to be able to really develop at the highest possible level from the retail and commercial standpoint in both of those two quadrants, the Southwest and the Southeast. It is a substantial bottleneck. You also heard not just the public, but you heard both Chief Westrop and myself talk about a number of fire recovery aspects, whether we were dealing with looking at implementing fiber optic and CCTVs with the idea of trying to produce flushing plans that would allow us to increase evacuation routes, but also looking at some of the direct impacts, whether it's recovering the pavement that was damaged, not only during the debris removal mission, but now during the fire recovery mission. We've had a huge reduction in the pavement quality in both the coffee park, the Hidden Valley and the Fountain Grove neighborhoods. The difference visually in those streets and the structural damage that we've seen is significant. And so that's one of the other items that you've heard about and we thought we would just go ahead and identify here again. And then the last piece that I put on here, which was just identifying that we are looking at coming forward later in the summer, early fall with the results of the energy audit and the microgrid recommendation, they are gonna have a series of implement, series of recommendations for different types of programs and projects that could be put into place. I put a number down, that number is not set. There's no specific recommendations at this point in time, but I do believe that does provide a general order of magnitude of the types of substantial programs that you could see coming from that recommendation. Next slide, please. In addition, we were also asked to look at the ARPA funds and what those might be used for as well. While we did take the opportunity during the course of COVID to implement and modification to our city-wide HVAC units, the heating and air conditioning systems were retrofitted with bipolar ionization units in an effort to really try to address the aerial and particulates associated with COVID as we recirculate air through the ultraviolet systems and those bipolar ionization units, address, clean and scrub all of the COVID components. I had a 99% plus ratio and it was a huge benefit to the staff that was required to be in the offices during those periods of time. But also the staff that we're gonna be bringing back in over the course of the next several months as we begin to return to a different type of service following the relief provided by the state. The idea that we have here relating to HVAC replacement and upgrade really is we've got a very antiquated system. Several of those units are still relying on a coolant substance that is now no longer readily available in the market. It's something that we've been told and we need to phase out over the course of time. Circulation is certainly a major issue. The bipolar ionization units themselves are only as good as the circulation associated with each of those buildings. Many of the buildings that we occupy are not currently configured in the way that the way they were when they were originally built. And so the modifications associated with the circulation, the ventilation isn't necessarily up to speed with the current configuration of those buildings to support the staff. And therefore we see a strain on the equipment and that's why you see this particular item in here. It is a hefty number because we do own 108 different structures and majority of those structures have more than one HVAC unit on the roof. When we brought up the concept of some of the fire recovery under the PG&E, we really did talk about the idea of installing fiber optic utilization of CCTV. This is something that the ARPA funds are really looking at trying to implement more from the standpoint of connectivity, especially with the number of students and personnel that were out in the community working from home. The connectivity and the broadband aspect is really limited in a number of areas with the West and Southwest and Southeast being some of our hardest and most challenged areas. And so the ARPA funds are specifically called out or I'm sorry broadband is specifically called out as an identified use of the ARPA funds. Again, throwing a number on the table, we put just a number on the slide for just for scale that would provide a substantial impact and benefit to being able to outfit the Southwest, West and Southeast with fiber optic at least on the standpoint of a backbone system. There would need to be an additional investment in order to be able to get either to the home or to a wireless device that would allow better connectivity in each of those communities. The other thing that ARPA came up with was just general investment from the benefit of increasing the number of employment opportunities so that we can start to see a return to business. And so these last two items, one I've already talked about the energy audit, it could also fit within this criteria. But the other would be something akin to a citywide park playground and ball field improvements. I just kind of provided an idea of what a program could look like, how that fund might be implemented just to give you a scale and concept if you requested more information in the future of what types of things we may be able to utilize as an investment under the ARPA program. Next slide. So this slide provides you with a snapshot of just the entire fund balance within the transportation and public works. What you'll notice is about 30% of the fund that you'll see here is within the general fund side of the department. About 30% comes into the capital improvement program, which is a general fund part of the capital improvement program, not necessarily a water or water enterprise. And you'll see more of that as we get into the capital improvement program discussion. And then the other 30% really is about the enterprise. It's about transit, it's about the golf course, it's about our fleet enterprise. And that's what makes up the majority of our department budget. As you can see, we have made strides as we looked at how we were gonna address this particular budget year at reducing our overall budget impact. As you heard from the other departments, we did start with the 2019-20 actuals, recognizing that during the course of that time, we had substantial changes in operation. During the first part, or I'm sorry, during the last part of that year, we had staff members off of work to provide for that highest quality health and benefit of their support for approximately 10 weeks. That kept us from realizing quite a bit of in-service activity, whether you were on the transit side, whether you were on the road maintenance side, whether you were on the fleet side. We went down to very bare bones operations during that period of time. And then earlier during the course of that year 2019-20-20, you remember, we dealt with the concave fire and a fairly significant response to the concave fire, but also a huge amount of evacuations, one of the largest evacuations within our community. And that had a substantial impact in our ability to support operations within the department, which also had a reduction in our service ability. And so all of those things within the 2019-20 actuals created a baseline for us. And then we took what we knew were the most appropriate activities at the levels that they should have been implemented during those times and added those back in to produce the budget that we've put before you. That does include some reductions. We did find that we had a reduced need for some of our supplies and services. With that, we did go forward and reduce some of those numbers. And that's why you end up seeing the reduction of 4.1% in the overall departmental budget. And with that, that concludes my presentation for transportation of public works. And I'm happy to answer any questions. All right, thank you so much, Jason. Council to be at questions. Council Member Spudhelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Jason, can you just reframe, because I heard the transportation public works, general fund reductions. One of the impacts I heard you say is that if you were to lose those seven positions, restrooms in all the park facilities would not be open. Did I hear that correctly? That is one of the impacts that we'll be moving forward. That we'll be presenting or that I am presenting as a possible option. We look at, it takes about just over two FTEs to do full janitorial litter pickup. I'm sorry, full janitorial on the bathrooms and litter pickup in the parks. We have four groundskeeper FTEs within the organization. The reduction of two of those FTEs, we have to choose something tangible that allows us to reduce the amount of effort or the amount of hours that we're gonna put into the service. The reduction in the number of bathrooms or bathroom stalls is seems to be the easiest direction for us to be able to go. And so while we don't believe that we'll have to impact every restroom stall, we do believe that it will be a little over two thirds of the stalls out in the parks. And so some restroom stalls will remain open. For example, at Finley Park, we currently have I believe eight individual restroom stalls. We may close six of those and leave the other two open so that the remaining two groundskeepers can pick up some of those, some of that janitorial service. But that reduced hour and reduced service level is what we're really gonna be looking for. And so, because I believe you may have been around during some of the great recessions when a lot of our parks went brown, the two FTE groundskeepers positions, what are their impact might our community members see as a result of if we choose to cut those two positions? Well, we are gonna see a greater increase in the amount of just general trash and debris. They do go around and pick up general garbage that's around. This is different than the debris response team. Their focus is on larger products in and around our community, even in parks. But the smaller day-to-day stuff really is focused around the groundskeepers position going and trying to keep our parts looking nice and clean as well as keeping the bathrooms clean. So that'll be the primary impact. And then what role, if any, because I saw on slide, this slide here, slide 50, Measure M parks expenditure was 139K. And I saw one of the early slides, slide 13, Reckon Park Revenue was 2.5 million. I'm making the assumption a lot of that revenue is Measure M, is that accurate? That is accurate. And we will be talking about Measure M expenditure plan. As council may recall, back in 2019, 2020, council created and adopted an expenditure plan for only years one and years two of Measure M. Years three through 10, we were asked to go out to the public and return with a public-driven expenditure plan proposal. COVID derailed our ability to be able to collect all the information. We started with our first one in March of 2020 and we didn't pick up again until January of 2021. We've now concluded all of those meetings and we've now started to consolidate the data that we received. The Board of Community Services got a chance to hear that information and we expect to bring that to council. Council Member Schwedhelm, what you may hear is that the recommendation for the public may allow us to offset some of these costs but without having a defined and approved expenditure plan, I'm not willing to incorporate that in here at this point in time. I guess that's where I was going with this because I had mentioned against the many community members if they heard of the potential consequences of this level of cut, they may say or prioritize Measure M to not use those cuts. It's information they didn't have at the time. So just a thought. Yes, yes. And with council direction, even in the lieu of an expenditure plan, we could, if directed, we could incorporate that into this. And I will tell you that the preliminary information that we're hearing is that the community is okay with 50% of Measure M going towards maintenance. Maintenance is somewhat undefined at this point and that's one of the things we wanted to get more clarity before we brought to council, but this could be one of those areas where we could focus that effort. Okay. And then could you also give us an update because I know a couple of councils ago we invested in the Portland Loo. I know it's there on the structures there. Can you give us an update as to when that would be operational or would this impact the operation of that asset? So the Portland Loo project is complete. It is functional and ready to open. Council several months ago also approved an extension or I'm sorry expansion of the services provided by our janitorial contractor that services City Hall as well as the transit facility to clean that bathroom. At this point, it is not closed because it's not ready. It's closed because we have all of our public facilities closed as a function of COVID. So when we are prepared and ready to reopen our public bathrooms, the Portland Loo, we will develop a community oriented ribbon cutting or opening event and we will set that in motion. That particular facility would not be impacted by this staffing change because we are utilizing contract services and council already approved that expenditure. Great. So again, if I heard you correctly then as the rest of the city's facilities are opening up the Portland Loo would also be included in that grand opening or whatever we wanna call it. That's correct. Great. All right. Thank you so much for those answers. Councilor, are there any other questions? Okay. Thank you so much, Jason. And I think next step is director Jennifer Burke for the storm, the Santa Rosa water proposed general fund budget. Thank you. And thank you, Mayor Rogers and members of council. The next few slides are to review the general fund portion of Santa Rosa waters budget, which is really a small piece of the stormwater and creek budget. The stormwater and creek program is also funded by the stormwater enterprise, which we will cover later on in the study session. Can I have the next slide please? So like other funds, we were asked to put together some information on uncontrollable costs. Really there are two for the general fund portion of our stormwater budget. We have an increase in the information and technology costs really related to implementation of our new asset management program city works. And then we also called out our utility costs, although this is a very small number based on actuals and rate increases, but because it is a large percentage on the next slide, we just wanted to call that out as well. So if we go to the next slide, this is an overview of the stormwater general fund portion budget. In addition to the uncontrollable costs mentioned on the previous slide, really the main driver in the increase in costs is due to salary and benefits. If we go to the next slide, please. And then here is a summary of all the Santa Rosa water funds with the general fund piece on the top row. Again, this is a very small portion of our overall budget. And we will discuss in detail the rest of the water budget when we get to the enterprise section of the study session. And so that really concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions that the council may have. All right. Council member Schwedhelm. Sorry, there's a legacy hand. All right. Jennifer, I think it's pretty straightforward. My one question is just if we're anticipating any additional funds necessary because of the drought and any implementation of additional programs that we might do. So Mayor Rogers, great question. And any funds that would be needed for drought response would be coming from the water portion or if applicable to reductions and indoor the wastewater portion but would not affect the storm water budget. Okay, great. And those would come from the enterprise? Correct. That would come from the enterprise funds. Great. Thank you. I see no other hands. Thank you. Next we have community development and engagement and assistant city manager Claire Hartman will be leading off these series of presentations. Okay. First of all, can you hear me? Okay, great. Okay, great. And we have a team here today to present our budget slides. So I know they're getting on deck right now. We have a portfolio of seven divisions and we have 135 FTE. The divisions that we have in this portfolio include planning, building, engineering, development services, economic development, housing, community engagement and recreation services. So with that, we actually have three, a three part budget presentation. We've broken it up into recreation and community engagement, which Jason Parrish and Magali Taylor's will present. Then we'll move into planning and economic development, which I will present with the assistance of Kate Goldheim. And then lastly, we have housing and community services which will be presented by Megan passenger. So with that, it looks like Jason is on and hopefully Magali has made it on as well. So with that, and what we can do is we can do questions after each of these sections. So recreation and community engagement, questions if you have them, planning and economic development, stop for questions as well. So with that, Jason kick it off. Thank you very much, Claire. Please advance the slide. Mayor Rogers and members of the city council. My name is Jason Parrish, the administrative services officer for the community programs and engagement portfolio. So the first item under controllable costs is as part of the community empowerment plan is recognizing that multiple parts of the plan are currently distributed throughout the city in various different departments. And so part of the community empowerment plan is tying into the city council budget as well as the potential for community promotions budget. Please advance. So here you can see the overall combination of the recreation division and the community engagement division. The reduction shown on this slide are a piece of the total reductions as you were presented on slide number five, the recreation division had an effective reduction of $170,000 in services. This included two part-time positions that will impact the ability to rent facilities at the Finlay Community Center, as well as the ability of the neighborhood services unit to provide neighborhood-based youth services. So the overall reduction that you don't see in the salaries line is basically offsetting the other regular positions and their colas and the other increases that they would otherwise be scheduled to have. So as well, the recreation division will be closing down the snack bar at the Finlay Aquatic Center, which follows the closure of the snack bar at the Ridgeway Community Center two years ago. And so this will eliminate the need for the staff oversight as well as the attendant temporary expenditures and the other inventory control and the purchasing that has to go along to ensure that the facilities were stacked at that time. So what you can see here below is that there are significant reductions in general-funded administration as well as a modest reduction in the overall information technology costs associated with the two divisions. If you could please forward. So right now, what I'll do is turn it over to Magali Tellis if she is already on the call to be able to talk about the community engagement program. Thank you, Jason. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit more about kind of where community engagement finds itself now in terms of unfunded additional needs request. As you all know, last year we were worth $150,000, sort of get us started with the community empowerment plan. And what we found is that community responded very well and would like to continue to engage with the city and would like to continue to find ways, different ways, different modalities in person, meeting people where they are, of course, when it is safe to do so. And as well as continuing ways and electronic and virtual to continue engaging with community and hearing what they have to say. So we would like to continue implementing the community empowerment plan, continue our listening sessions, but expanded out to different neighborhoods that we've not had an opportunity to attend. And we're also looking at growing our, the Mary Lou program, which is a lowrider patrol program and expanding that into a series of speaker sessions, thinking about lowriding as an art form, bringing in community, bringing as an opportunity to educate community about not just the city, community engagement, our police department, using these different functions as an opportunity to bring information to people where they are. And we'd also love to re-implement NeighborFest annually. And the last time that program was done, we were able to reach over a thousand residents. And community has also really expressed interest for something like a Citizens Academy. And we'd love the opportunity to be able to provide as beginning for cohorts so that we can get community sort of very involved and engaged in going to taking a deeper dive into city council and policies and boards and commissions. We also have our engagement HQ program, which is called Let's Connect SR. And we're hoping to this year enroll over 35,000 community members. It has a potential to enroll everyone at the city of Santa Rosa and beyond so that community members could be, have opportunities to participate in surveys, polls, and be of today on what community engagement is working on and other opportunities to communicate with the city. So with that, I will turn it over, I think back to Jason, unless there are questions. Yeah, let's get a question from Council Member Fleming first. Okay. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. My question goes back to, let's see, I wanna say slide, or is more a question, let's see, recreation and community engagement, let's see slide 56, where we have recreation and community engagement. One of the things that I'm curious to know is why, we have these significant presentation from Fire and Police, which we're hearing about the depth to which these different departments have had constraints related to COVID. And through my work with Council Member Sawyer and now Council Member Alvarez on the Economic Recovery Task Force, it was really clear to me how much of a Yeoman's job that recreation did in terms of advancing our council priorities. So I'm curious to know, one is, was the approach to look at what council priorities are or to just say everybody needs to offer up something to cut? Because to my mind, it seems to me that we're cutting from the areas that are having the highest impact in protecting community and engaging with our goals at this time. And just wondering where, if any, there is alignment with what direction Council gave during our goal setting and these cuts in recognition of what some of these departments have been done. And I'll just add before I get your response, I'm really troubled that recreation only got a slide in here during this time and want to express a sincere thank you to all of the work they did to keep our most vulnerable families safe when school was not in session. Thank you. At this time, the instructions that were coming out from the finance department on what our budget targets were, we were looking at that very considerably in an interest of both, how do we trim our budget overall by the $171,000 in a ways that can overall minimize the impact to some of the core services that we have that the council has expressed interest in, such as the youth community services as well as the overall operating hours and ensuring the broadest availability of programs. And so in the overall strategy that we were employing was with the family aquatic snack bar was a single thing that we could remove that would allow us to both make a reduction in services but still have the core service of the aquatic center taking place. So the overall neighborhood services has been maintained at baseline as was presented earlier, I think around slide six or seven. But in this case, it really is a work that recreation is going through as we come out of COVID where we had extremely impacted services across the board when we could actually conduct our services. And now what we're trying to do is look at as we're coming out of COVID and seeking to re-imput, implement overall recreation services. How do we do that in a way that both recognizes the fiscal constraints the city is going through as well as our own desire to reinitiate all of our revenue generating services at this time? Okay, I guess where I'm going with this would just be a request that going forward, if it's not possible today that in general that we have a way that council goals are incorporated into more explicitly in the budget presentation because the budget is the greatest tool that we have to express our goals. And it's not personal to you, Mr. Parrish, but I am disappointed to see the lack of tying back to our goals in terms of that were quite clearly laid out in February. And council member Fleming, if I could just add, we do have an outline that our team is happy to share that aligns all of our proposed budget and program with the specific council goals that it aligns with. So happy to. Yes, thank you. And my comments were more specific to recreation, but I do appreciate that, Ms. Tejas. And I would just add that our budget as proposed aligns with council goals as best as we can with the resources that we have and then where we don't have them, you see them come up as additional needs or as controllable costs, where we might look for other sources of funding throughout the budget or through one-time funds. So we are trying to be creative, maximize the use of existing resources, but then also acknowledge where those resources do have a limit and we need to look for other opportunities. Thank you. Any other questions from the council? I don't see any other hands. So the final slide is just a summary. Overall, where the general fund program as we discussed previously, but as well the measure of fund for kids reflecting the overall moderation of the funding available for both the violence prevention program on the community engagement side, as well as the neighborhood services measure field services on the recreation side. So what may not always be obvious to the city council, but it has been running there for years is the change for kids fund. So this is where utility billing gives customers the option of rounding up their utility bill, which is then deposited in the change for kids. This is an extension of the activities our neighborhood services and measure programs are providing. So as we face fiscal constraints in the past with measure O, the change for kids has provided a relief valve where programs wouldn't be curtailed immediately, but could be restructured and reevaluated in a more considered way to maximize the benefit overall for the public. So the state grant funds in 1920 was a combination of two different years of reimbursements related to the violence prevention program and the supplemental activities they do working with the county's probation department. And so as far as giving kids options and additional resources to be able to maintain themselves in their neighborhoods. And I will be able to pass the presentation back along to assistant city manager, Harman, so that she could go over the permitting and economic development department. All right, council, any other questions? All right, it's all yours, Claire. All right, if we can advance this slide. You can go to, yeah, that one, great. All right, so planning and economic development. We have a FTE of 68 individuals. Again, it's building, engineering, economic development and planning. So first slide here talks about our uncontrollable costs, things that we can't control. And one of those is a revenue source that we have been relying on for the last several years to fund code enforcement staff. And this revenue source is called the admin hearing fund. And this is a revenue source that we collect through the abatement process through our progressive code enforcement process, which in the end, if the last resort is to go to admin hearing fee, that's where if we win in the case then we can collect, we have collective penalties and fines and have assessed liens. And you've seen that a number of times on your council agendas. It was in 2017, there was case law that came online and it changed everything for us in terms of how we were able to collect that revenue and also the type of revenue that we were able to collect through that process. So for example, we used to be able to assess a lien on the property and collect it at the time of property tax. So that was actually quite fruitful. And we're able to stabilize our code enforcement operation, which is otherwise just 100% funded by general fund to offset that cost, that staffing cost with admin, the admin hearing process. But what the case law changed for us is that we are no longer allowed to collect penalties or fines through that process. We can only do cost recovery of permits or the service costs that are involved in working with these individuals. So as you can see here, our revenue had been at $400,000 which was sufficient to support code enforcement. And now we're looking at a dismal $30,000 a year. We have known this since the case law came out and we knew that we were adhering to that. So we've been moving forward as quickly as we can without having to be a total shock on the general fund system. But here we are today asking for $272,000 to increase general fund to our code enforcement section to compensate for this loss of revenue. One of the things I would say is we are looking at solutions. We are interested in a master fee study and I think code enforcement should participate in should the city move forward with a master fee study. I think we should look at the fees and cost of service for processing nuisance issues. We should also look at evaluating or creating a nuisance ordinance that would also address the processing steps. And those would help offset the costs that it takes our staff to really go through the motions to abate the nuisances. Next slide. So this is our overall budget for general fund for planning and economic development. You can see here what's proposed as a $15.2 million budget. I wanna talk a little bit about cost recovery because it does come up with our department quite a bit. We are somewhat cost recovery. We're not completely cost recovery and I don't think we ever will be, but we're enough that it's worth noting and respecting and balancing with it. At best we're probably about 50 or 60% cost recovery because we do intake permits, we do plan checks and we do inspections and all those can be covered in fees. However, as you know, not all of them are up to 100% of the actual cost of service. We did a cost of service study too many years ago. We are overdue for reevaluating our fees and doing a new master fee study, but we do have some deliberate subsidies for to encourage people to get permits, for example, or permits that are beneficial to community development, beneficial to the community. And so we do try to balance that responsibility when plans are submitted to the city and they pay their fees. We have a responsibility to respond with service, right? That's what they're paying for. That's what we need to provide. But we're a general fund department, so we go through this and it's also hard to predict how many fees we're gonna get. We do our best and I think we do a pretty good job of that, but it's a balancing act. So we come before you every year and ask for the general fund to cover the cost of service that our applicants have applied for. We do have non-revenue generating aspects to our department and that's not going away and these are essential functions of planning and economic development. For example, our economic development team, they're essential in good times, they're essential in bad times. We rely on them for promotion, retention, attraction, and quite busy in these last couple of years, post-fire and during the pandemic. We rely on the front counter staff. Again, they are providing information, advice without a fee. We do entertain quite a few public record tax and we provide quite a bit of information for the public in that regard. We have our code enforcement team, which I talked about, and then we have our advanced planning section that supports our public policy and community engagement. And so there are gonna always be sections of our department that we don't have a cost recovery system for, but they're essential and we put that into the mix. So as you noticed in our last presentation with recreation and community engagement, we were not immune to the budget reduction exercise. There was a couple of exercises. First, we looked for absorbing some information technology costs, which we have. And then we were asked to dig deeper, looking at our frozen position list and absorbing some of that into reductions affected this year. So we don't have a lot to cut. So we strategically selected what we thought would be least impactful, but to be quite blunt, these will be impactful. These will be felt. So one of the first things that we needed to, one of our reduction outcomes was to eliminate a vacate. It's currently a vacant position. It's an administrative technician position. And this was to identify them. Slide five of the complete presentation that you have today. Administration technician is a position of about 100,000. And this is the lead for our department for Public Record Act. We get quite a few public records act requests. In fact, we get about a thousand a year and that's been steady. We've already beat that record this year and we don't see that slowing down. What this position does is it consolidates these requests and manages them across our four divisions. And oftentimes there's a lot of redundant searching that goes on across the division. But if you don't have the facilitating position, there's a lot of redundancy efforts. What happens as well as we start getting challenged during response times for our public records. So this is something we'll have to pay attention to because there are penalties when you are delayed in responding to Public Record Act. And we'll have to address those as they come up. In addition, that position is key to managing all our contracts because we are a tight department. We do leverage our resources with many, many contracts. These are associated with general plans and EIRs and economic programs and whatnot. So right now, just to give an idea, we have 32 contracts in play, almost $5 million for contracts. So this position is critical to helping us manage that. What happens when we don't have this position, which is what's happening right now since it's vacant, is that responsibility is distributed across all the staff and you don't have that clearing house system, that quality control that saves time and money for the city. In addition to this position, we also have looked to professional services. One thing that is very difficult to replace is our plan check, our planners, our technicians, our inspectors. There is a learning curve when you come to the city of Santa Rosa. So our last resort is to ever look at our staffing for that. So what we looked for is our professional services. So you can see that we're putting into the budget a $308,000 budget reduction of professional services and that will be felt. We've done fairly well despite the emergencies and the combining of the rebuild center with our department, but we will start to see delays that affect even our prioritized projects, our downtown projects or affordable housing projects. It just is what will happen. We only have so much bandwidth and we're doing the best that we can, but this will be felt. For example, wait times, building inspections. We anticipate increase from three to 15 days. Building permit review completion will increase from six to 12 weeks and public improvement plan review from six to 12 weeks. Subsequent review is four to eight weeks. So essentially when you start losing that leverage with the professional services, it's exponential, the performance impact. It's not incremental, it's exponential because we do try to leverage the efficiency of our plan review. One of the things that we hit early on in this pandemic was efficiency through electronic permit intake. So it's been a little over a year as we know and we have since set up an online permit center that's taken in over 12,000 permits. So that has gained a lot of support even by many customers who were new to that concept. Staff was new to that concept. We were able to make that work. That will help, but it won't solve the impact of that cut. And then just to illustrate how specific these cuts are for us, we also are reducing our planning, training and conference budget by an additional $10,000. So here we have a presentation of this budget and I'm presenting an item that is a $10,000 cut of planning training, but it's impactful. The planning staff is, this is not mandated training, it's not required training. They can work as a professional planner without training. But what the training gets you is state of the art education, annual education on community engagement, economic recovery, wildfire preparedness, land use planning, all of these things, environmental law and we are getting very, very lean in that budget. So probably with the proposed budget we're looking at having planners have training once every two to three years. Next slide. Okay, so unfunded additional needs requests. So this is, these are the needs that are not on slide four of your overall presentation, right? So these are the unfunded additional needs identified by staff for your consideration. So the first item is our enhanced infrastructure by an enhanced district. And we're looking at, this is one time money asking relationship to the question that was brought up earlier. Yes, this is directly related to council goals. And this is a important tool that we'd like to have in terms of our downtown incentive package. We have lots of tools for downtown and what we're finding is we need all of them. Most of our applicants have cited and are using the layering of our incentives. And we have applicants that are quite interested in this one as well. So that enhanced infrastructure finance district, this is something that we would work on with the county to launch it. But our next steps would be to do an infrastructure finance plan and a fiscal impact report. And these are not studies or plans that we can do in-house. If we could, we would try to find capacity. We do look creatively to do that, but these are not reports that we can do at house. So those would be the next steps. And we're ready to do this now if we can find some funding. The second item is our city's government center. So this is not the county center. This is the city wants to pursue its city government center. We would be ready for our next step. This is just a good to give you a heads up ballpark. We still have to spend a little bit more time drilling down exactly the costs. In fact, our next step for this would be a study session with the city council. We'd go over sort of the scope of services that we would expect in the next phase, the phase two. We would drill down the scope of work for each of these items and lay that out for you. And again, look for different opportunities to get it funded. So this one, the next step is a conversation with the city council, but the EIFD, we're ready to roll on that if we can find funding. Next slide. The item that we have in our portfolio that would be eligible for one time funding specifically the American Rescue Plan Act would be our Santa Rosa tourism, business improvement area assessment revenue and the loss of the revenue due to the pandemic. So our fiscal year, 1819, we received in terms of TBIA revenue, we collected $739,000. As you can see here, 1920, the revenue collected was 614,000 and then a substantial drop due to COVID. And you can see that revenue estimate at the year end, fiscal year end would be 250,000. We're thinking that it will come back up as we open back up, but it's not gonna open back up to prepare what we lost. So we will be looking at American Rescue Act funds for that. I wanted to explain a little bit about what we use this money for. This revenue does support our economic development team and it does help with our general fund costs for, what, I'm sorry, it helps fund our staffing for economic development because as we know it, this is related to the work that they do, but it's mostly for the programming of that staff, right? So our resource, our asset is the team that is in economic development, but they need programming funds and this is where they get it. In fact, about 60% of this funds is targeted to that. And it's a lot more than just marketing of lodging or tourism. They've gotten very creative about leveraging this money and they've spent it for much broader purposes. For example, in 2017, after the Tubbs Fire, we're open for business campaign. That was a concerted effort, was one of the programs that was funded out of this. The Outdoor Santa Rosa is 100% funded with this money. The Open and Out program that we supported through the pandemic was supported by this. And then it's also as broad as supporting childcare businesses because again, the relationship of supporting the lodging workforce, this is one of their number one needs and so we use that money for that. And next slide please. So this slide is basically a summary of our general fund plus all the other expenditures combined. Obviously general fund is heavy here in our portfolio, but we have some other funds and we talked about the tourism, the VIA and the admin hearing fund. And we can move on to the next slide. And I'll talk about the Art and Loo fund. So with the Art and Loo fund, what it is is, it's a 1% of total construction costs if you're developing a project that's greater than $500,000. You pay 1% into Art and Public Spaces fund. And then we collect that and we do community art programs. Projects can also do on-site art, but this revenue collection is for when they pay the in-loop fee. So Ebsen flows with development. Development has in terms of permits has been actually pretty stable. So this fund is looking quite good. In fact, we're projecting 308,000 this year, 2021-22. And then here's some examples of the things that we're looking at for this next year. So parking garage project, we have maintenance issues with our existing art and grants for temporary installations in underserved neighborhoods. So we're excited about this year because we have funding and we have a great program ahead of us. And then we've talked about the administrative hearing fund. Basically what we're looking at that is to transition from what we were relying on, which was the way that admin hearing fund was set up initially transitioning to reliance on the general fund, unfortunately. But at this time, that's what we have. And then the Santa Rosa Tours and BIA fund. Again, we need to repair the loss in revenue and we're gonna be looking at their American Rescue Plan Act funds for that. And with that, I can take questions. All right, Council, any questions? Just other than taking a longer timeline, Claire, does the position reductions put any current projects in jeopardy? Yes, I mean, that very well could happen because there's a lot of projects that are relying on layering of financing for their projects, whether it's public financing or public slash private financing. So right now, just like they're using a lot of our layering of incentive tools that we offer, they're using a layering of finance tools. So yes, I think we will be in pretty tight spaces working with our deadlines and trying to make projects that have especially affordable housing grant deadlines. There's only so much we can do. We're already challenged right now to do them, frankly. But this will, we might lose a couple. Okay, Council Member Fleming. Yeah, to follow on to that, I mean, given what a priority this is for the council and the community and how much value it brings to the economic health of our region, I'm curious to know why you're not asking for additional funding for where you need it. Because to my mind, it would seem that we should be analyzing everything through a values lens. And I don't mean like moral values. I'm talking about economic values, although sometimes those two could be intermixed here. So what would you need to not have things hold up these goals of ours? Well, it's tough because we're part of a structural budget issue across the organization. And we're not exempt from that. So we need to look somewhere. And we did make a decision. I completely disagree. I understand that we're part of a larger thing, but this is the economic driver that allows us to do the other things. And so I don't know if the instruction comes from the city manager or the CFO to do things like this. But I appreciate that you may be following orders, but it really troubles me that we're not looking at this through a values-driven lens of providing for the city what the city is asking for. I'm sorry to cut you off. And I appreciate your comment. To my question, like what is it that you need to? We're happy to bring back additional scenarios in the hearings scenario. There's also potential to use our funding to address that. But the council is free to say, we want to add resource here. And then we would just need to know as staff where you want us to remove additional resource. We're happy to address that and take that perspective going into the budget hearing. And I do appreciate that. And so the follow-up question is, what is the resources that are necessary? And perhaps it would take time to gather an answer to that question, but I would like to see the answer to that question come forward with the final budget so that we do have the opportunity to follow through with what we said we wanted to do. We absolutely can do that, councilman. Thank you. Are there any other questions from council members? All right, saying then. Thank you for that part of the presentation. It does look like we're at 330 here. This feels like a good stopping place. Mr. City Manager, are you comfortable with stopping here today or do you want to push through through the Housing and Community Services presentation? We're comfortable stopping here and picking up at the next, at tomorrow morning. Okay, then we'll go ahead and continue the rest of this conversation until tomorrow at 10 o'clock. And council, we will take a half hour break and come back at four o'clock for our regularly scheduled council meeting. All right, Madam City Clerk, can I see a quorum? Let's go ahead and call the roll and resume our meeting. Okay, councilmember Tibbetts, councilmember Schwedhelm. Here. Councilmember Sawyer. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Councilmember Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Councilmember Fleming, have you joined us? Okay, let the record show that all councilmembers are present with the exception of councilmember Fleming and councilmember Tibbetts. Great, thank you so much. And Madam Zoom host, as we are going into our regular meeting, can you please remind folks how to access the Spanish portion of our listening on Zoom? One moment, Mayor, can you hear me okay? I had to switch headsets. Yep, we can hear you. Thank you. For those of you just joining the meeting, Spanish translation is available in Zoom. If you wish to join the Spanish channel, you can click the interpretation icon on your Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. And once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend that you shut off your main audio so you can clearly hear the Spanish translation. Great, thank you so much. As was mentioned earlier, the council met doing our brief budget overview for the day. We will pick that item back up tomorrow at 10 a.m. So we'll see folks on the Zoom at that point. We'll continue to move through our regular council meeting here now with item number six. And it's our first proclamation for water awareness month. And councilmember Schwedhelm, I believe this is you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think a very appropriate and timely proclamation. So whereas water is essential for every living creature and is a precious and limited natural resource that must be stewarded wisely for future generations. And whereas the city of Santa Rosa is a purveyor of the water resource in the Santa Rosa community. And whereas the health of Santa Rosa's growing population and the wealth of our community depends on a reliable, high quality water supply. And whereas because water is a precious resource, why is use of water to be considered a way of life? And whereas Santa Rosa water encourages citywide understanding and appreciation of the value of water efficiency. And whereas the Santa Rosa community has long demonstrated a commitment to using water wisely by minimizing water waste, installing over 56,000 water efficient toilets in nearly 15,000 high efficiency clothes dryers and converting 3.6 million square feet of lawn to low water use landscapes. And whereas the implementation of water use efficiency programs has resulted in an annual reduction of approximately 866 metric tons of greenhouse gases and 6,498 megawatts hours of energy. And whereas the city of Santa Rosa is the owner and operator of the regional water reuse system and is one of the largest recyclers of water producing high quality recycled water for many purposes, including irrigation of parks, commercial businesses and a community garden. And whereas for every drop of recycled water used, a drop of potable water is saved and all citizens are encouraged to be your part, be water smart. Now therefore be it resolved that Chris Rogers, the mayor of the city of Santa Rosa on behalf of the entire city council proclaims May as water awareness month. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you council member. And receiving the resolution tonight is Claire Nordley. Claire, I know you're queued up. Do you have any comments? Hi, good afternoon. This is Claire Nordley. Sure, I would like to just say a couple of words if that's all right. Thank you, Mayor Rogers and members of the council. I'd like to just take a minute to highlight some of our water awareness month activities. First, obviously we have this proclamation and the presentation of three water use efficiency awards which will take place in just a few minutes. We also had the eco-friendly garden tour which took place this last Saturday on the 15th and featured multiple Santa Rosa low water use gardens. We also currently have a water awareness month coloring contest for kids. The completed coloring sheets will be shown on city connections and our social media page by the end of this month. And for over 25 years, Santa Rosa has offered a suite of best management practices and rebates to encourage smart water use. This year especially, there's no water to waste. Thank you for this proclamation. Thank you so much for all you were doing. Council, do we have any additional comments? All right, I'll go to public comment and see if anybody'd like to speak on this item. And I see no hands. Madam clerk, did we have any pre-recorded voicemail public comments? We did not, Mayor Knobb on 6.1 or 6.2. Great, we'll go on to item 6.2. It's the presentation for the water use efficiency awards. Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. And Council Member Schwedemstad, as well. This is a great time to be acknowledging the efficient use of water. Then we have three of these to award this evening. Mayor, do you know if any of the three recipients have they indicated the desire to speak to these items as yet? I will go ahead and look and see if, if I see any of them on the Zoom. Okay. Can you say Ms. Baker? Okay. Okay, so we have Ms. Baker, then that'll be the third, the third one that I'm going to read. And that's what I can do. I can take them out of order. So I'm going to first start with the Landscape Architecture Award. Certificate of Achievement and Baker Landscape Architecture. Your efforts as a lead design firm for the Sonoma Marin Saving Water Partnerships Landscape Design Template Project has helped hundreds of residents rebuild from the 2017 fires. Principal Anne Baker led a multidisciplinary team to develop beautiful front yard landscape designs that emphasize low water use and fire safer plants that meet all city requirements. Over 40% of all rebuilds have utilized these three templates and also gave generously of her time to help the city create realistic architectural renderings to show homeowners what each template design will look like once installed and is signed by the mayor on this date. Thank you, Council Member. And Ms. Baker, did you want to say a few words? Sure, I can say a few words. Thank you so much. My name is Anne Baker. I'm with Anne Baker Landscape Architecture in Petaluma and it really was an honor to work with the city and Sonoma Water on the rebuild effort. And just want to commend the project managers there for coming up with a great project that really met homeowners halfway in the rebuild experience, which was a difficult one for many people. And I also want to thank our project team from Christy Jarvis to Panoram Design Group, Equinox Landscape and Daily Acts for doing its teller job. It was a great experience all around and thank you very much for this award. I appreciate all that you do on the dais. Thank you, Anne, and good work. Congratulations. Thank you. Next, we have a certificate of achievement for the UC Master Gardener program, program that's been going for a very long time. They do great work in the community. The Garden Sense program has provided over 400 free in-person garden consultations in Santa Rosa to Santa Rosa Water customers. Your efforts provided our customers with the knowledge they need, successfully participate in our cash for grass rebate program. The master gardeners also work closely with Santa Rosa Water to provide our customers with free educational workshops in 2020. Congratulations to the UC Master Gardener program. And council member, I do see that another hand has popped up. Let's go ahead and finish the resolutions and then we'll take public comment on this as well. Excellent. And the last one, another certificate of achievement and I apologize in advance for perhaps mispronouncing this last name, but it is to Mr. and Mrs. Miracle. This award is for going above and beyond most customers to conserve water. For many years, you have participated in multiple ways of water-saving rebate programs. This includes removing your lawn, upgrading your irrigation timer to a weather-based system, installing a hot water circulation pump, buying a water efficiency washer and getting ultra low flow toilets. You now use over 50% less water than similar households in Santa Rosa due to these changes. Well done and congratulations. So I will take it to public comment. I see Leslie with your hand up. I need to unmute. My name is Leslie Hart. I'm the garden sense coordinator and I'm calling in to thank you very much for our award. Much, much appreciated. And I specifically want to thank Thomas Hare from the city of Santa Rosa who applied for us for this award. And also to Sonoma Water with whom we've had a partnership since 2013. And you can find garden sense on Sonoma County master gardener page and feel free to go ahead and apply for a free visit from us to help you reduce your water use, especially this year. Thank you very much. Great, thank you so much Leslie. Thank you council member for reading all of the proclamations and congratulations to everybody for the well-deserved recognitions this year. As the other council member said, this is definitely the year for us to be celebrating those achievements and showing folks what's possible throughout our community. Council members, do we have any other comments before we move off of item 6.2? Okay, we'll keep moving then. We have no staff briefings today. So we'll move on to item number eight on our agenda our city manager and city attorneys reports. Madam city attorney, do you want to start? Certainly, Mr. Mayor, this afternoon I do have nothing to report. So I'll pass it over to the city manager. Thank you. Thank you, Sue. And I have nothing to report either. All right, that makes it nice and easy. Do we have any statements of abstention from the council? All right, seeing no hands go up. We'll move on to item number 10. That's mayors and council members reports. Who wants to start? We'll go with the vice mayor. Thank you, mayor. I would like to appoint Henry Hunt to the cultural heritage board. Okay. Thank you so much. Council members, what help? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, keeping on a water theme, I did want to update council on some of the topics that were discussed on May 3rd at our water advisory committee meeting. First of all, water supply conditions. Sonoma water staff provided a water supply update. Both reservoirs remain at historic low levels for this time of year. To reserve supplies in both reservoirs, Sonoma water reported that they will be filing a temporary urgency change petition. Again, it's something you've heard this before. Many of you probably have never heard those four words put together prior to this drought condition, but we will continue to be hearing them over the course of the next several weeks and months. So we'll be filing the change petition with the state requesting to continue reduced flows in the upper Russian river, reduce minimum in-stream flow requirements on the lower Russian river, which will result in decreased releases from Lake Sonoma and committing to a 20% reduction in diversions from the Russian river compared to 2020 for the months of July through October. A reduction in diversions will result in reduced deliveries to the water contractors. Next point, Sonoma Marin Water Saving Partnership summer drought outreach campaign. The WAC received an update from Sonoma water staff regarding the activities of the Sonoma Marin saving water partnership, including the regional summer drought outreach program with the new tagline, drought is here, save water. The partnership is transitioning to an aggressive drought campaign with multimedia outreach and other events planned throughout the remainder of the year. Additionally, we talked about the 20% voluntary water conservation resolution in response to drought conditions. The WAC unanimously adopted a resolution requesting the members of the Sonoma Marin saving water partnership voluntarily reduced their water use by 20% over 2020 levels. This item will be before council today, which is item 14.1 for those of you keeping track. We also talked about the temporary allocation of water deliveries. The allocation of water during the shortage continues conditions is outlined in our agreement for water supply with Sonoma water. For the agreement, the Sonoma Water Board adopted an allocation methodology in 2006. Our water supply agreement further provides that as an alternative the WAC by unanimous vote in determine how water is allocated through the water shortage. The WAC unanimously approved a temporary alternative allocation of water use this summer should the state board require Sonoma water to reduce deliveries to the contractors. The temporary allocation is an equal reduction deliveries for all of the four month period from July through October of 2021. The technical advisory committee will continue to develop an updated allocation methodology to replace the 2006 version that accounts for historical investments by contractors in water conservation and local supplies. The updated methodology is planned to come before the WAC for consideration later this summer. As long as you know if you have any questions, thank you. I thank you, council member. Are there any questions for council members what helm on this? All right, do we have any other updates from council members? Council member Sawyer. Thank you, mayor. The economic development subcommittee held this monthly meeting on Tuesday, May 11th during which we discussed two very important topics. First with a passage of SB 93 which is the state's hospitality right to recall legislation. The subcommittee revisited our split recommendation to bring consideration of a local ordinance to the full council. Given the labor proposed local ordinance is essentially identical to what was passed statewide, we unanimously decided to withdraw our recommendation for consideration of this item by the full council. And for those of you that may be interested in the differences between the state law and the proposed local version, the state law allows for a five day notice period to employees as proposed to the 10 day whole period for employees to decide if they want to be rehired and we felt that was very, very close so we let the state prevail on that. And the second one that was proposed by the state also enforcement in the state law goes through the labor commissioner as opposed to the request that there be a city filing on behalf of employees for their option for a private right faction. So we decided this was very, very close to the state law and decided to pass on bringing in any changes or recommending any changes. The second item on the agenda was the introduction and discussion of project labor agreements. This generated a fair amount of public input which was very important. This was a very robust discussion but we came to recognize that it may be a bit premature in that the topic is not linked to council's current list of priorities. And we understand we'll be getting the new council priorities in the next month or two. So we'll hold off reconsidering this until we see the new list. That said, there was general consensus that this is not an urgent issue especially in consideration of the economic recovery programs and initiatives that staff are currently working on. Not unlike many departments in our city their plate is full and overflowing. So we will be back in touch when we have more information on PLAs. Great, thank you council member. So I have a couple of things to report out on. We had our Sedoma County Transportation Authority board meeting last week where we went over the MTC plan Bay Area 2050 plan that's available online for folks to look at if you were interested. Particular point of contention that came up in the meeting was the omission intentional omission by MTC of the projects for SMART going from Windsor to Healdsburg to Cloverdale. That's something that this council will obviously want to keep appraised on just because if it's not in the plan it's not eligible for state nor federal funding which means it would be fully reliant on the sales tax measure Q for SMART in order to get that funding and would impact pretty significantly our region. So we're working on that issue. I'll also report out that we had a climate action subcommittee meeting and one of the items that we heard was a discussion about banning new gas infrastructure gas station infrastructure throughout our community and with unanimous direction from the subcommittee we are developing what a potential program could look like similarly modeled towards Petaluma and other programs as well but the subcommittee did have a desire to continue that conversation and keep moving that idea forward. Two quick appointments here tonight. The first in discussions with staff they found that it was particularly valuable for us to have a formal ad hoc committee that focused on homelessness. So we will be reconstituting that with council member Schwethelm and the vice mayor who are already our representatives to the CDC as well as the continuum of care having the ad hoc in place will actually allow us to be a little bit more nimble as we try to stand up additional homeless services programs and collaborate with other jurisdictions. We also given the drought conditions and the potential for public safety power shutoffs this year we're also going to reconstitute our fire ad hoc and that'll be myself council member Schwethelm and council member Tibbets who will serve on that ad hoc committee and that'll be a very important part of the discussion and opportunity for staff to work with us as issues arrives going into fire season. But that will keep moving on our agenda. We have two minutes that are available April 27th and April 20th council were there any amendments to item 11 council member Sawyer. Thank you mayor it's really very minor but on the April 20th special meeting I did arrive after roll call due to some technical issues with my equipment which is not altogether unusual but I did attend the vast majority of the meeting. So the clerk can either leave it checked as absent or not and I just thought I would clarify that. Thank you. I think we can make that amendment council member. Let's go to public comment to see if there are any additions from the public. All right I'm not seeing any hands pop up. Without objection council will show those as adopted with council member Sawyer's attendance being reflected. Mr. Mayor they did the minister reflect apparently he had four minutes of technological challenges that shows he joined us at 504. Yeah we'll fix the check box. All right and with that we'll go on to consent Mr. City Manager. Item 12.1 resolution acknowledging receipt of a report made by the Santa Rosa fire chief regarding compliance with sections 13146.2 and 13146.3 of the California health and safety code. Councilor there are any questions about item 12.1? It's saying done we'll go to public comment. If anybody in the public is interested in commenting on item 12.1 go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your zoom or if you're dialing in via phone hit star nine. Okay Madam clerk I'm not seeing any hands raised. Did we have any pre-recorded public comments? No there were no voice message public comments for item 12. Okay council I'll go ahead and bring it back. Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you Mayor. I move item 12.1 and wait for the reading of the text. Second. All right motion by the vice mayor second by council member Sawyer. Let's go ahead and call the roll. Council member Schwigam. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Yes. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. Let the record show that the motion passes with six ayes with council member Kibbutz absent. All right thank you Madam clerk. It's not five o'clock yet so we'll come back for a public comment for non-agenda items at that time. And then said we'll go on to item 14.1. Item 14.1 report resolution requesting community wide 20% reduction of water use through voluntary water conservation measures. Jennifer Burke director of Santa Rosa water leading us off. Thank you city manager McLean and thank you Mayor Rogers and members of council. As was mentioned earlier on some previous items in recognition of drought conditions we are here today to ask the council to adopt a resolution requesting a voluntary community wide 20% reduction in water use compared to 2020. Peter Martin our deputy director of water resources and I will provide some background information including recent actions that have been taken by the state, the county and the water advisory committee for the WAC. We'll also review the programs, tips, tools and resources that we have to assist our customers and talk about next steps that may be occurring later this year. If we can have the next slide please. So thank you. As a reminder to the council and the public we do purchase 95% of our water supply from Sonoma water which is the region's water wholesaler. Sonoma water's water supply comes from the Russian river which you can see depicted on the slide here. They manage releases from our two local reservoirs Lake Mendocino which is up north by Yucaya and then Lake Sonoma. They manage releases to meet municipal and industrial water supply as well as minimum in stream flow requirements as governed by their water rights permits which are commonly referred to as state water board decision 1610. As we all likely realize we are in a second consecutive dry year with last year being the third driest year on record and this year unfortunately shaping up to be the driest year on record for our watershed. In recognition we started taking actions late last year and earlier this year. We have been coordinating closely with Sonoma water and the other water contractors and earlier this year in February Sonoma water filed a temporary urgency change petition and they petitioned the state water board to reduce flows in the upper Russian river preserving water supply in Lake Mendocino. If we can go to the next slide please. In addition to actions that Sonoma water was taking Santa Rosa water started in mid December by messaging about the dry year. We launched our multimedia dry year campaign and this effort was supported and supplemented by the Sonoma Marine saving water partnership to provide this campaign throughout the region. Since it was still early in the winter at that time there was still a possibility for rain which could have significantly changed our water supply outlook. But as we all know if we go to the next slide the rain did not materialize. As you can see from this graph these are the rainfall totals for our region. In Santa Rosa we are currently at 12.86 inches which we should be in a normal time at 36 inches. In Ukaia which is where Lake Mendocino is located we're at about 13.5 inches and the average should be 34. The rainfall typically occurs in sort of the November through April timeframe. So we're pretty much out of that rainfall period. And so as I mentioned it's looking like this may turn out to be the driest year on record. If we go to the next slide. So as the potential for rainfall got smaller and smaller there were a number of additional actions that took place in particular on April 21st. The governor came up to Lake Mendocino and he declared a drought emergency for Mendocino and Sonoma counties. And you may have heard since then as dry conditions are pervasive throughout the state additional counties have also been declared in drought conditions. If we go to the next slide please Sonoma County then followed suit on April 27th and declared a drought emergency asking for water conservation implementation and requesting additional funding assistance from both the state and federal government to help us with various drought related response. If you go to the next slide please. So both reservoirs are currently at their lowest level forever for this time of year. While Lake Mendocino is a much smaller reservoir and typically has a one year supply Lake Sonoma is a significantly bigger reservoir and has multiple years of supply. So we're really preparing for and making sure what happens if we have another dry year. So we're taking action now to preserve water in Lake Sonoma. In addition to what we're gonna be asking of the council today Sonoma water as council member Schwedhelm mentioned earlier did indeed file another temporary urgency change petition late last week asking to lower the minimum in stream flows from the current requirement of 75 cubic feet per second which is normally the requirement for dry conditions to critically dry condition requirement of 35 cubic feet per second. This will help them preserve supply in Lake Sonoma. They also asked that the reduction in the upper Russian river at 25 cubic feet per second remain throughout the remainder of this year. In addition to the request to reduce the minimum in stream flows Sonoma water also committed to reduce their diversions from the Russian river during the months of July through October by 20% compared to 2020. Once the state acts on the temporary urgency change petition which we think likely will be in June we will know what the amount of reduction in diversions from the Russian river that will be required. Once that is known Sonoma water will then allocate water to all of their contractors including Santa Rosa and then we will as staff determine the appropriate stage of our shortage plan to implement and we will be back in front of council with that recommendation likely in June, maybe in July. In the meantime, we are asking our community to act now by voluntarily reducing their water use by eliminating water waste and improving water use efficiency. So I'll turn the presentation now over to Deputy Director Martin will provide an update on water shortage information the actions of the WAC and the tools and the resources that we have to help our customers reduce water use. Deputy Director Martin. Thank you very much. Good afternoon Mayor Rogers and members of the council. As you heard, Director Burke gave a very good overview of how we got to this point right now and I'll be kind of pulling it all together and talk about how we'll be moving forward. So next slide please. Lake Minasino, I guess you all are probably very familiar with these graphics from Sonoma water at this point is currently at about 36,000 acre feet of storage or 43% of their target water storage for this time of year. At the May 3rd Water Advisory Committee meeting to Sonoma water, Sonoma water staff really emphasized the critical nature of what's going on in the situation in the Upper Russian River. We were reminded that the order that they're operating under which was filed back in January this year that allows them to reduce the releases from Lake Minasino to critical minimums expires at the end of June. So as Director Burke mentioned, if that order is not extended and paired with substantial reductions and inversions in the upper watershed, Lake Minasino could drop to minimum storage levels by October. It's notable that Sonoma water doesn't have control over the upper Russian River users for the most part, but has been part of a larger coordination with the State Water Resource Control Board and is part of discussions with the variety of diverters in the upper Russian River. It's come up with voluntary reduction agreements throughout the remainder of the summer. Next slide. Currently, storage in Lake Sonoma is about 145,000 acre feet or about 59% of their target water supply curve for this time of year. It is lower than we've seen during the most recent historical drought. But obviously they're continuing to monitor this and make actions as appropriate, like filing a new temporary agency change petition. The outflow into Dry Creek is about 100 cubic feet per second. As a reminder, the previous temporary city change petition by Sonoma water did not cover the lower watershed, but this action today will continue their, excuse me, the action this week, last week, will allow them to reduce their diversions or excuse me, releases by about a little more than half going into the summer and fall and preserving critical storage for storage for their contractors and the threatened and dangerous species in the lower watershed. Next slide, please. So in response to these critical drought conditions, being experienced throughout the watershed, the Water Advisory Committee to Sonoma Water took action at their meeting on May 3rd. A resolution was passed requesting contractors that received water from Lake Sonoma urged their customers to reduce their consumption by 20% over 2020 levels and take action immediately to help customers achieve these reductions to preserve water stored in Lake Sonoma and Lake Minnesino. Next slide. At the same time this month, we've transitioned into a regional summer drought campaign the tagline, drought is here, save water. This new campaign will be initially configured around a goal of helping customers achieve a 20% savings in their homes or businesses. Our focus at Santa Rosa water is gonna be on simple changes that can help our community save water immediately including suspending or reducing outdoor irrigation, finding and fixing leaks and replacing non-efficient water fixtures everywhere possible. There will be a multimedia radio, digital and print advertising efforts and those will be planned in bilingual English and Spanish. And of course, you will get to start to see high visibility signage and advertising throughout Santa Rosa. Next slide. Additionally, we are happy that we launched a drought webpage for Santa Rosa water. The new webpage is intended to be a one-stop shop for information on drought for Santa Rosa waters customers and the community. The latest information on conditions and conservation requests and restrictions will be centrally located on this webpage. We'll also include helpful info and frequently asked questions and leaks to tips and water use efficiency programs will also be provided. And finally, customers can directly link there to report water waste they see in their neighborhoods or out in their community. That link is srcity.org save water. Next slide. So staff of the water department have been working for quite a while but are getting some work to make sure that a message is being carried internally and our operations are consistent with the message that we're projecting to the public. We're meeting regularly with other city departments and making sure that they feel that they have the support of the water department and the tools they need to make adjustments and respond to this community-wide request. We're making full use of radio, social media and digital advertising to direct the public to resources available to them to save water now. Obviously, this aligns very nicely with Water Awareness Month. As you can see, we have the coloring activity and several other activities going on this month as well. We are coordinating with the Sonoma Water and our partners in the region, including the Sonoma Wren Water Saving Partnership to ensure consistent messaging and a rollout of conservation requests all up and down throughout the watershed. So you will start to see signs and banners with the drought is here, save water logo in the region. And a larger banner was actually just placed in the corner outside of the building where I currently reside at the Municipal Service Center South. So look for these signs to start showing up around the city over the next few weeks. And of course, one of our best communication tools is messaging that is included in customers' bills and on their envelopes. A good example is in January and February, we included bill inserts directing customers to resources to save water now. And we saw immediately a 500% increase in water use efficiency requests and phone calls after those bill inserts went out. Like the one you see before you that shows water saving opportunities to replace turf. Next slide. Other activities, the department is beginning to launch or starting to take shape to get us through this summer. We'll have a regional drought drop-by event planned through the support of the Sonoma Renn Saving Water Partnership on June 12th. This will be multiple locations in Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties. We'll be having one here in the city from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds where we'll be handing out buckets so people can reuse water in their shower as well as other water saving devices and tools for our customers. This month we began water waste patrols throughout the city. We're doing those early in the morning, getting out there and notifying folks that maybe have broken sprinkler heads or water running off into the gutters. They would receive what you see there, which is an hoops tag. It allows us to follow up and educate the customer about the issue as it comes up. And then of course you'll see increased visibility of campaign and resources for our community to achieve savings now. And then of course we're continuing to coordinate citywide on a drought response with parks, for instance, planning and economic development and also the fire department and others as well. Next slide. I'm very excited to announce that we have a series of garden workshops that will be coming up in the summer focused on low water use gardening techniques and implementation. We partnered with the UC master gardeners and daily acts to develop content and hopes these workshops throughout the remainder of the summer. At the moment these workshops are limited to virtual offerings but that may change depending on public health directives. Right now we do have one workshop in Spanish and are looking to expand those offerings as part of our contract partnership with daily acts. Signups will be available on our WaterSmart web pages. Next slide. And as we have been, we continue to direct our customers to resources we have available to them to use water efficiently in their homes and businesses. Customers are being asked to sort of complete a do-it-yourself water checkup in their home or business. We have DIY home checkup kits that allow customers to do an evaluation of the water use efficiency in their home, find and fix leaks and follow up with our water use efficiency team if necessary. We're asking customers to check toilets for leaks every few months. We provide free dye tabs, replace old shower heads with high efficiency models. We also provide those for free. Fix leaks quickly and replace old faucet aerators with high efficiency water aerator fixtures as well. We also continue to offer in-person outdoor irrigation checkups to help customers dial in their outdoor water use this summer. And we have a variety of water saving rebate offerings that I'll discuss more on the next slide. Customers are encouraged to visit srcity.org slash watersmart and email or call our water use efficiency team at the contact info below. Next slide. And just a reminder, we do everything we can to incentivize a customer's investment in water use efficiency by offering a variety of rebates for homes and businesses. Many of these rebates do require pre-inspection before any work is started. So customers should seek out information or consultation water use efficiency staff before starting their projects or purchasing devices in order to be eligible for a full rebate. For our business community, we also offer several targeted rebates for large landscapes, commercial kitchens and other operational process improvements in their businesses. Next slide. So I'm just gonna try to recap here. I know Director Burke had kind of went through some of these steps earlier, but I just wanna highlight some of the next steps of the regional water supply measures and what we're gonna move on throughout the summer. We're continually preparing for this critical situation as you know, and we'll ramp up our conservation messaging activities over the next few months. Today we are asking the city council to pass a resolution implementing a voluntary community-wide conservation request in line with other cities and water suppliers in the region. Santa Rosa water is working with Snowm Water and its contractors to update the water shortage allocation methodology which will better help the contractors to understand the cutbacks in deliveries this summer after the temporary urgency change petition is approved by the state water resources control board. We expect that the state water resource control board will respond to Snowm Water's temporary sea change petition that was filed last week sometime, hopefully in June. This will allow staff to better prepare to formally launch the city's water shortage contingency plan according to those essential demand scenarios and reductions from Snowm Water's deliveries. And at that time, Santa Rosa water staff will return to city council with a recommendation for the institution of a water shortage contingency plan stage and institute mandatory prohibitions and restrictions likely in June or July. So next slide. So today we're recommending by the board of public utilities and Santa Rosa water staff that the council by resolution request to cut water customers reduce their water use by 20% through voluntary conservation measures over 2020 levels. And we should go to the last slide here. Santa Rosa water of course is here to help you save water during this time. You can visit our water smart resources at srcity.org water smart or and then also we have the drought webpage which I mentioned earlier, srcity.org save water. That concludes my presentation this time. All right, thank you so much, Mr. Martin. Councilor, are there any questions? Director, I've just got a quick one for you. As I talked to folks about water in the community, the number one question that I get is about our urban water management plan and the findings that we have the water available over a 20 year period to meet our housing demands while at the same time messaging around this individual drought that we find ourselves in. Is there a resource on the website or somewhere that I can better point people to so that they can understand the difference between where we currently sit and what we see in terms of long-term development? Thank you, Mayor Rogers. That's a great question. And that is one of probably the most frequent questions we receive also in the water department. We are in the midst of updating our urban water management plan. We will be bringing that forward to the city council, I believe on June 8th for consideration. Folks can go directly to our website, which is srcity.org slash UWMP, which stands for Urban Water Management Plan, to take a look at the current Urban Water Management Plan and provide comments. Drought and water shortages are very common in the climate that we do have. And so we are always constantly looking at planning for the needs of our general plan, looking out at what the requirements are to ensure that we have enough water for our general plan. But we also have the ability to respond during shortage conditions. So long-term, based on all of our water supply portfolio and mix, we have enough supply for the general plan. During times of drought or shortage, we have our water shortage contingency plan that allows us to reduce use as needed and also requires in higher stages that developments basically have a zero net impact and bring their own water. And in some cases, two, three and four times the amount of what their new demand would be. So we definitely factor that in. It's part of everything that we're planning for. And again, I would encourage folks, if they have questions, they can definitely contact our department, but they can also go to srcity.org slash wwmp for the latest draft of our plan. Thank you so much, Director. Council, any additional questions? All right, we'll go to the public for public comment. You're interested in commenting on this item. Go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. All right, seeing none. Madam clerk, do we have any pre-recorded voice mails? We did not, sir. All right, then I'll bring it back to council. Council Member Alvarez, do you want to put the motion on the table for us? Absolutely, thank you, Mayor Nair. I have a resolution. Resolution of the council to see Santa Rosa with what some customers produce water used by 20% through voluntary and conservation measures. And I will wait for the reading. Second. So motion by council member Alvarez, a second by council member Sawyer. Let's go ahead and call the roll. Council Member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council Member Sawyer. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Council Member, I'm sorry, Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with council member Tibbetts absent. Right, thank you so much, Director. Thank you, Mr. Martin. We look forward to talking more about this issue on June 8th. Council will go on to item 14.2. Mr. City Manager. Item 14.2, report motion resolution and urgency ordinance, appointment of the interim city manager and establishment of compensation. I will turn it over to Amy Reeve and Sue Gallagher for the presentation. And I do believe, Madam City Attorney, that we have to make the findings of urgency for us to be able to consider this item tonight. Is that correct? That is correct. Can you explain for the public what that process looks like and then I'll entertain a motion from the council? Certainly. The issue is that the council had, there's two documents that control what can be heard by the council during a council meeting in terms of what's on the agenda. So our council's existing early agenda policy and as well as our new open government ordinance, which is not yet technically in effect, but the council has a directed staff to implement that ordinance early. Both of those require that any item be placed first on a preliminary agenda posted several weeks before the final, before the council meeting, before it is placed on a final agenda. There's an exception though, that allows an urgent item to be placed on a final agenda that was not on the preliminary agenda. If the council with a vote of at least six council members finds that there is good cause and good cause means generally that the issue that the issue has arisen come up quickly outside of the control of the council. The council did not have control over the timing and that to delay hearing of the item would prejudice either in private individual or the operations of the city. And we believe that the council can make those findings in this instance. The, we have the resignation of our existing city manager and we had the time that it took out of council's control to do a solicitation, to do a recruitment for an interim city manager. So I leave it to the council to determine whether it is comfortable making those findings and moving forward with this item. All right. Before I bring it to council, I'll go ahead and check public comment first and see if there's anybody in the public who'd like to make a comment about those findings, right? Seeing no hands. Madam vice mayor, I think you were about to speak. I'm going to try. So I would like to make a motion or an urgent item with good cause for appointment of a city manager. Can I make it a second? I'll second. All right. Motion from the vice mayor and a second from council member Alvarez. Madam city clerk, could you please call the roll? Yes. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Was that you council member Fleming? Yes. Thank you. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with council member Tibbets absent. Okay, with that we have item 14.2 officially on the agenda. Ms. Reeve, do you want to take us away? Yes. Thank you mayor and council members. I'm Amy Reeve, the director of human resources. And before I go through the presentation this evening, I'd like to turn it over again to city attorney Sue Gallagher to explain a change in the adoption of the resolution this evening. Thank you, director. Aye. Good afternoon mayor and council members. Once again. We have, I would ask for some changes. We are bringing forward the council's appointment of Jeff Cullen as interim city manager. And we have two documents we'll be asking the council to consider. One is a resolution for that appointment and the second is an ordinance that will set his compensation in accordance with state law. And our charter which requires that salary have been a city manager be adopted by ordinance, I'm sorry. We are, this has been a very quick turnaround. As you know, the interviews for the interim city manager were just late last week, mid and late last week. And we have been working, we have reached agreement with Jeff Cullen, your appointee, your designated, your selected appointee. We have reached agreement with him on all the terms of his employment agreement. We are though still working with CalPERS to ensure that his start date is consistent with all of their regulations. So we, I do have some revisions to both the urgency ordinance and to the resolution, which we will, which we can address after director Reeve's presentation to address that timing issue. Ultimately, the urgency ordinance, the council may go forward and adopt that urgency ordinance with some minor revisions. The resolution can also be adopted but with some more significant resolutions with a return to council next week, I would propose on consent with the final employment agreement. Again, I wanna emphasize, this is not any dispute or any issue between the city and Mr. Poulin. That's, we've worked out all of the terms of the employment agreement is simply working with CalPERS to ensure that we are consistent in every step with their regulations. So I will hand it back to director Reeves. And then once we're ready to, once the council is ready to consider the urgency ordinance and the resolution, I will offer those revisions. Thank you. Thank you. So as Sue mentioned, the resolution and urgency ordinance before you this evening will likely come back next time via consent, but we will go through the presentation so that we can establish an intention to appoint the interim city manager and to establish the compensation for the interim city manager. But we can go to the next slide, please. So in summary, city manager Sean McGlynn has announced his resignation and the city will be conducting an extensive open recruitment for his replacement. It is anticipated that the recruitment could take six months or more and to ensure a smooth transition and uninterrupted city operations, the city council does seek to appoint interim city manager to serve in the position until a new permanent city manager is found. Next slide, please. The recruitment process for the next city manager could take between six and nine months realistically and will include significant community engagement and outreach, as well as a nationwide search for a diverse and qualified candidate pool. Jeffrey Cullen is being recommended for consideration as the interim city manager. And Mr. Cullen brings 41 years of local government leadership, including nine years previously serving the community of Santa Rosa as the city manager. With the ongoing pandemic and the recent declaration of fire season, the leadership of the interim city manager will be essential in managing the city's response to the ongoing public health emergency, the resulting impacts to the city's budget and local business community and economy. The conditions of drought, wildfire risks and ongoing city projects and initiatives and any emergencies that may arise as well. Next slide, please. It is recommended that the city council by motion find good cause under the early agenda policy and the open government ordinance to consider this item notwithstanding that the item did not appear on the preliminary agenda. Staff recommends that council find that the resignation of city manager McGlynn and the time needed for the solicitation of the interim city manager are exceptional circumstances beyond the control of the city council and that any potential vacancy would impose a substantial burden on the city's ability to conduct its business. And by resolution that the city council point Jeffrey Cullen to the position of interim city manager and adopt an urgency ordinance establishing the compensation of the interim city manager at the amount of $117.95 per hour. Under the city charter, five affirmative votes are necessary to adopt such an urgency ordinance. Next slide, please. Any questions or Sue, did you wanna add anything about the next meeting? Yes, if the, certainly if the council has any questions when the council's ready, I will offer up proposed revisions to both the ordinance and to the resolution. Okay. Council, do we have any questions? Council member Sawyer. Thank you, mayor. Madam city attorney, so I have this item. Are these are the changes that you would be making to this item? I assume that they would be lengthy enough to need some fair amount of revision to what I'm seeing before me. So we would be bringing this back next week. Are you looking for a continuance to do that? Actually, I have, thank you for bringing that up. You actually, the council actually has two options. One would be to move forward tonight with the ordinance and a revised ordinance and revised resolution, the revisions of which I would read into the record. And you may want to do that to kind of confirm to the community that yes, you have made this selection and you are intending to finalize the appointment of Mr. Cullen. Alternatively, if the council would prefer we can have the full, both the ordinance and the resolution on the calendar for next week. The one issue with that is that the ordinance itself, I believe, I'll confirm but I don't believe that it can be on consent. It would need to be on the regular calendar. The resolution and approval of the final employment agreement can certainly be on consent. So a couple of different options. One, continue the whole thing to next week to adopt just the ordinance tonight, continue the resolution to next week or adopt the ordinance and a revised resolution tonight with a separate resolution that simply adopts the, that approves the employment agreement on consent next week. So three options. So I could read the resolution as far as I have it and then have you with the additions that will be now be stated by the city attorney and then you could read the necessary additions. Yes, we can do it that way. And actually the title of the resolution is changing as well. So you may prefer to have me read the title and then you make the motion to adopt that resolution as revised. Oh, that sounds much more simple. I won't make you repeat what I said. So. All right, so director, I've got a question and it's the hourly wage is fairly specific. How did we come up with what the hourly wage is and what are the rules surrounding it for the public? Thank you. So CalPERS requires that when we have an interim appointment such as at this interim city manager appointment that we bring that individual in at the rate of pay that the outgoing employee was paid. So in other words, this is the same rate of pay. It's the hourly equivalent of Mr. McGlynn's current salary. So it was the easiest negotiation of your life? It was, yes. Councilor, are there any other questions? All right, we'll go to public comment on this item. See if there are any hands. Are there any voicemail public comments? You received no voicemail public comments on this item there. Okay, thank you. I'll bring it back. I'll just say really fast off the top. It is not lost on me as I'm sure it's not lost on the rest of the council that Mr. Cullen even prior to having this discussion tonight has been on our call listening to the entire budget meeting for the entirety of the day. So we do appreciate not only that but the willingness to step up and serve our community at a pretty pivotal time for us. I think you and I have a conversation over the weekend and I think we both agree that Santa Rosa's challenges are great but the opportunities are there as well for us to be able to do some impactful things for our community. And I just am really grateful and wanted to express on behalf of the council how grateful we are for Mr. Cullen's willingness to come back and serve the community that he currently lives in and has grown to love as well. Councilor, are there any other comments before we put a motion on the table? All right, then I'm gonna bypass council member Sawyer and I'm gonna go straight to Sue to see what the suggested language looks like. Sure, thank you, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let's start with the resolution on the new title of the resolution. We'll read a resolution of the city council of the city of Santa Rosa appointing Jeff Cullen to the position of interim city manager and directing staff to return with an employment agreement for council consideration at the next available council meeting. That would be the title and the amendments are, and I will, there are a couple. The first is in the fifth, whereas which had a blank for the start date would be revised to read, whereas Jeffrey Cullen desires to serve as interim city manager of the city of Santa Rosa during the recruitment of a new permanent city manager. It's the end of that whereas and the end of that change. The next whereas so that's the sixth whereas that references an exhibit A which was intended to be the employment agreement. So we will simply delete from that whereas the phrase as attachment A two and instead say which will be memorialized in an employment agreement to be approved as deformed by the city attorney. And then the now therefore be it resolved is revised a little more significantly. I will read how the revised version reads it's relatively short. Now therefore be it resolved by the council of the city of Santa Rosa that the council appoints Mr. Cullen to the position of interim city manager subject to an employment agreement to be finalized and returned to the council on the consent calendar at the council's next available meeting. That is the final revision to the proposed resolution. So my response would be so moved including revisions articulated by city attorney Gallagher. Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Motion by council member Sawyer second by the vice mayor. Are there any additional questions or comments from the council? All right, madam clerk, let's call the roll. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Yes. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six eyes with council member Tibbetts absent. All right. Thank you so much. Again, thank you, Mr. Cullen and staff. Thank you so much for your diligent work on this. Amy and Sue, I know it's been a lot for both of you and your teams and we just really appreciate the effort. Thank you. We do have still the ordinance to go. So. Okay. If I might for the ordinance, I would add to the there will be a revision to the actual ordinance language, but also two additions to the recitals. So in the first whereas after first whereas has currently four subsections, we will add a new subsection D which will read and let me clarify. These are the facts that are serving as a basis for the finding that it's an urgency to adopt this ordinance to be effective immediately. So a new paragraph D, which is current city manager, Sean McGlynn has announced his resignation period. New subsection E, new subsection E, recruitment of a permanent city manager is likely to take six months or more period. And then the current sub paragraph D turns into sub paragraph F and reads as it's currently written, which is that the interim city manager is integral to manage the city's response and then lists some of the issues that is facing the city. Then in section one of the ordinance itself is revised. The first sentence of section one is revised to read compensation shall be paid to interim city manager, Jeffrey Cullen at the rate of $117.95 per hour beginning on his employment in June, 2021 and continuing throughout the term of his employment period. The second sentence remains unchanged and that is that no other benefits incentives, compensation in lieu of benefits or other form of compensation shall be paid. The rest of the ordinance remains as written. So moved, including revisions articulated by city attorney Gallagher. Second. All right, motion by council member Sawyer and a second from the vice mayor. Let's call that roll. Council member Schwedhelm. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Yes. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes with council member Tibbetts absent. Okay. I'm gonna take a personal point of privilege here and I'm gonna go ahead and go to Mr. Cullen who's raised his hand to say a couple of words. I just wanted to say thank you to Mayor Rogers and the city council. I am looking forward to joining the team and working on the council's priorities, getting reacquainted with the staff and community. I have some time scheduled later this week with city manager McLenn to download a lot of information that he's gonna pass along to me. So this is an exciting opportunity for me. I look forward to working with all of you. All right, thank you so much Mr. Cullen and we're looking forward to it as well. Council, any other comments or questions? Great. We'll move on to our next item and that's our public comment for non-agenda matters. If folks are interested in speaking on non-agenda matters go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom or if you're dialing in hit star nine on your phone. Okay, we'll start with Kathleen followed by Gregory. Good afternoon council members. I'd like to remind you that our homeless neighbors in Santa Rosa are trapped in an evolving door of perpetual misery of endless encampments that leave them with no legal option to rest. These sweeps are expensive and there's no end in sight. I ask that you stop these sweeps immediately. I'm further asking you to consider the fastest and least expensive option that can put an end to this tragic guacamole game. Transitional villages with safe parking tents and prefab units in any kind of combination can provide desperately needed stability, hygiene, medical and behavioral health services and other services such as job retraining that can help prepare residents for permanent housing whenever it becomes available. Please designate at least $1 million in new funding for homeless housing and services with a call for matching funds from the county. Our neighbors need a helping hand and I beg you to be part of the solution we need now. Thank you very much. Thank you, Kathleen. We'll go to Gregory followed by Adrian. Good evening. I know two things tonight to be true. The first is that you have a lot on your agenda and you've been working really hard for the very little money that we give you. The second is that you value public input that you really want to hear and you want to partner with the community in all the decisions that you make. So I'm really confused about the public discussion you had earlier today. It was a review of the budget and it was very valuable to listen to. I sat through the whole three and a half hours and quite a few of my friends did also but they kept waiting for the time in which they could participate and it never came. Now that's very much out of your character. That's very different from the way you conduct this meeting and lots of other meetings. So I'm really confused. I don't know whether it was just an aberration that somehow you had to move through a lot of information and you consciously said, well, we just don't have time for the public. We get their emails and that's enough. And if you think that's enough and that that's gonna become the common way of having either special meetings or even hurriedly public council meetings, then I'm gonna be even more disappointed in you. Take another look at what it took to put that agenda together and what might have failed and please don't repeat it again. You need us, we need you and we need a healthy dialogue that you have to value, please. All right, thank you, Gregory. Next up is Adrienne. Hi, my name's Adrienne Lobby. I am the president of the board of SAVE, Sonoma Applied Village Services and also the co-founder of Homeless Action. I'm gonna continue the theme of homelessness here. I got a picture today of Coffee Lane with about 10 RVs, very nice and neat, up against the curb. And they noticed that these people are slated to be removed any minute now. And I did attend the budget meeting and I noticed that the public works has over $100,000 a year that they spend in towing large vehicles. And they're looking for $34,000 increase in the coming year. Not all these are homeless people in RVs, but the ones that you do tow, you are towing people's homes away. So while you're spending money and too much money to tow everybody, you are also decreasing what you wanna have, which is more housing, more shelter. I don't have to tell you there's a crisis of homelessness in Santa Rosa. You've declared it an emergency year by year. We have 1,800 homeless people in the city and over 1,000 every night without a place to sleep that's legal and safe. We need a variety of help. We need overnight parking sites, 24-hour parking sites, RV parking sites, and we need at least one non-congregate, in other words, a non-dorm room site for people. We have plans and saves that we'd like to share with you and cost analysis for how to do all of these things. But the bottom line is, you're gonna wanna do stuff this year. You're gonna wanna do, I think, a fair amount of things because the problem's not going away, the sweeps are now incessant and very, very traumatic. They don't fix anything. So I'm gonna join Kathleen and say, please put a million dollars aside. Aside, in addition to whatever you decide to spend on Sam Jones, put that money aside for your projects, the things that you all wanna do, that you wanna plan or project or pilot to take care of things in your neighborhoods and your districts. You know, it's a moving target. We've got the PG&E fund, we've got some state funds, we've got some federal funds coming. Make sure that you have a good matching fund and a good flexible fund for the things that those funds won't fund. And let's move forward together. I am really very appreciative of all of you for your attention and your discussions and your care for the homeless people in our community. Thanks. All right, thank you, Adrienne. Madam Clerk, do we have any voicemail public comments? We received no voice message public comments on item 13 or 17 non-agenda matters. Okay. And I did wanna, I'll bring it back to the council. I did wanna just reply back to Gregory for a moment. It is, I think, just an awkward way that the meeting was scheduled where we have our budget study session that is both today and tomorrow. Tomorrow there is time that is slated for the discussion with the public for public comment on it. But it is definitely something that we'll keep in mind and make sure that we don't schedule it the same way as we move through our budget next month as well and into the future. So I think it just happened to be us trying to make sure that we had both our special meeting and our regular meeting able to have happen here today. In fact, council, we are ready for closed session. So we will go ahead and recess to our closed session. It is the last items that we have on for today. We will come back to report out at the end of it. And then just as a reminder, we'll pick back up with our budget discussions tomorrow morning. Mayor, we need to take public comment on closed session. Oh, thank you so much, Stephanie. So we will do that first. Looking for hands for anybody who's interested in speaking on our three closed session items. Okay, saying none. Do we have any voice mails? You received no voice message public comment on closed session. Great, then we will recess the open session and we will go into closed session. Thank you so much. Hi, Charles, I see your hand is raised. Do you need me to move you over to, let me move you over to the main channel in a moment. Hi, Charles, go ahead. Yeah, hi, Dina. I just wanted to make sure you still wanted the interpreters present for this portion of the session. Yes, we are in closed session. I know this is an unusual order of things, but yes, we want you to hang out. I think they are on their last closed session item. And I don't know how long it's gonna take, but yes, please stay on the line. We will open it back up to open session. Of course. I just wanted to make sure that you guys did want us to hear that. Yeah, and I should have said that. Okay, thank you. I'll put you back over. Perfect. All right, Madam City Clerk, you there? Yes, I am. All right, I see a quorum of the council. In fact, more than a quorum of the council. Let's go ahead and recall the role and resume our meeting. Okay, council member Tibbetts. Council member Schwedhelm. Here. Council member Sawyer. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Tibbetts, who is absent. All right, Madam City Attorney, do you want to report out on closed session? Yes, thank you. The council met in closed session and discussed three items. First was the public employment of the city manager. Council gave direction to staff. 2.2 was a conference with legal council regarding the existing litigation. Case County of Sonoma at all versus PG&E. Again, council gave direction to staff. And council finally discussed item 2.3, which is also a conference with legal council on existing litigation. In this case, in the matter of the city's petition for review of action by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California State Water Resources Control Board. And again, gave direction to staff. Thank you. All right, and there's no further action on these items at this time. With that, that's the end of our meetings. We'll go ahead and adjourn. Thank you everybody for attending. We will recess, but we'll come back tomorrow with our study session. Thank you mayor. Thank you.