 Good afternoon. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting for those just joining the meeting live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the Interpretation icon in the zoom toolbar. It looks like a glow. Once you join the Spanish channel We recommend you shut off the main audio. So you only hear the Spanish translation interpreter. Will you please restate this in Spanish? Bienvenidos a esta reunión para los que recién se unen Y desean escuchar esta reunión en español lo pueden hacer para unirse pueden hacer click en el icono de Interpretación que ahora parece en la barra de herramientas de zoom parece un como un globo terragio Una vez de una canal también se recomienda que apague su audio primario para que solamente se escuche la interpretación al español. Mucha gracias. Welcome everyone to our May 9th 2023 Santa Rosa City Council meeting. It is now 1201 and we will be starting our meeting. Welcome Madam Madam City Attorney is coming down. Welcome Madam City Attorney and welcome Madam Madam City Manager and fellow council members sing a quorum Madam City Clerk may you please call the roll. Thank you Mayor. Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Council Member Okrepke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Chris Rogers and Council Member Alvarez and I would like to through the mayor ask Council Member Fleming to make the statement regarding participating via AB 2449 remote participation. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I'm requesting to participate remotely for reasons of child care. Very first child. Can you please read through the statement that was provided regarding participation remotely on members of the public with you in the room over 18 and the additional statement. Yes. Hold on. Let me hold that up the statement please. I request to attend this meeting remotely under AB 2449 applying to just cause provision in order to provide child care. I will participate both audio and video turned on throughout the meeting. In this room I am accompanied by nobody over the age of 18. Thank you Council Member. Thank you. Okay. So we have no closed session items today so we will go on to item three and that is our study sessions. I would like to remind everyone that public comment will be taken on this item tomorrow May 10th after all departments have had their opportunity to make their presentations. So if you would like to make a public comment please know that it will not be heard until tomorrow. Madam City Manager take it away. Thank you Mayor. Item 3.1 is a review of physical year 2023-2024 operations and maintenance and capital improvement budget. I'll turn it over to Budget Director Veronica Connor. Thank you. Good afternoon Mayor and City Council Members. My name is Veronica Connor and I'm here to introduce our sorry here to introduce our fiscal year 23-24 budget study session item. This is our opportunity to present a deep dive into our fiscal year 23-24 proposed budget. We're looking for feedback from Council, questions from Council before we return in June with a proposed budget for adoption. So today I'm going to turn it over shortly to both Marrakesha Smith and Alan Alton for some opening comments. We'll then come back to me for a citywide budget overview and a general fund budget overview as well as a staffing summary. And today we're hoping to get through all of our administrative department budgets as well as information technology and housing and community services. And tomorrow we will come back here to go through Fire Department, Police Department, Planning and Economic Development, Parks and Recreation, TBW, Water as well as our Capital Improvement Program. And with that I'll hand it off to our City Manager. Thank you. So good afternoon Mayor and Members of Council. So today we present to you the fiscal year 2023-24 Operations and Maintenance budget and Capital Improvement budget. So I would like to thank the directors and their team, the budget team who had a hand in curating all of these long hours and to all the staff members who participated in this process. I don't want to paint a gloomy picture, but I want you to understand the narrative. So we are embarking on a challenging year. Revenues are beginning to level off. A couple of things I want you to think about is MOUs. Our MOUs are going to be opening this budget cycle. We need to prepare to bring back one-time funded projects back into the general fund and we have a few major projects that we have committed to completing. So staff have been asked to maintain a flat budget in light of the upcoming financial projections. Budgets have been prepared in a manner where we can best problem solve for our residents and our businesses. Adjustments are welcome and we are prepared to provide you with additional information as requested. Alan and I have developed a formalized process to respond to your questions regarding the budget. Today and tomorrow staff will capture the questions from the study sessions and you may also send additional questions to myself, Alan or Veronica. We will incorporate those questions into a master document and send those back out to you. We will respond to all questions and provide sufficient responses prior to the final budget adoption in June. So we want to thank you for your support. Again, we're here for feedback and we want you to take a deep dive as the department is going to their analysis. A couple of questions that I would like to get some clarification on is do you want to ask questions throughout the process or would you like to wait to the end of the presentation to answer your questions? Ask your questions, excuse me. I think we'll give council members the opportunity to ask questions after each department has given their presentation. Okay, great. And again, if we do not have the response at this time, we will compile a document and send those back out to you. So thank you and I will turn it over to Chief Financial Officer Alton. Thank you. Thank you. Mayor Rogers and the rest of City Council. So what I'd like to do in my comments is just take you through our process and let you know kind of where we are both now and looking ahead. So from a process standpoint, every year we assess what resources we have to build a budget. We try to understand the revenues that are available and when I'm saying this, I'm speaking primarily about the general fund. So just to make that clear, we've embarked on a goal to be as realistic as possible in our revenues to provide the resources to put together a budget that meets the needs of the community and the council. So we start with a first pass and then we have many other passes as we go through. We study what is, what trends we have and what we hear in the general economy. I guess the way that I could say this is the economy in general right now is unpredictable. There are data points that would lead you to think that we are headed to the deepest pit possible and then others that show that we're booming. So what we try to do is minimize the noise of that. Take it, use it to kind of inform where we're headed, but we look mostly at where our trends are within Santa Rosa itself. So in general, Santa Rosa, what we see, we're moving rather steadily, but we are, as the city manager pointed out, we are starting to level off, especially in our sales tax. So where we had a lot of growth from a sales tax standpoint a couple years ago, we're not seeing that anymore. We do think that our, that we are faring a little bit better here locally than what the national or even state trends are. And that's typical for us. We tend to outperform those trends, but so, but we are seeing a definite leveling. We're also seeing the same thing with property tax. And I bring those two up because they make up almost half of our general fund revenues. And so those are the things that we look at for developing our budget as a whole. We are seeing positive signs still as we come out of COVID. Travel and hospitality industry from a revenue standpoint is doing well. And we're seeing that and we hope that that that continues. We're actually forecasting that to continue. So as I noted, their state and local trend or national trends, we employ a sales tax consultant to help us look at not only what we're, what we have done in terms of our sales tax. Categories, general retail, transportation, those types of taxes or sales taxes. But we also, what they do is they tend to then fold in what more of the state and the national impacts and they build a forecast off of that. So Veronica later on, we'll talk about our five-year forecast. But what we're doing with sales tax really with that is we're veering slightly away from our consultants. We're being a little bit more optimistic than they are in terms of how Santa Rosa is going to grow. That said, even with that approach to revenues, a realistic approach to our expenditures as well, we are going to propose a budget that has a deficit of two and a half million dollars. And what you're going to see on our long-range forecast is that that deficit will grow as it goes out in the later years. And I don't want to steal too much of Veronica's thunder when it comes to that, but basically we have our best guests on revenues, our known costs, and the bottom line is our expenditures are outpacing our revenues. So those are, that's what we're faced with. So we do have some mitigation tools that we can use. So we have, like I said, known costs, we have a pension stabilization fund. That's something that we set up that is helping us to address our unfunded liability for our pension costs. And that will be able to provide more relief to general fund operations instead of having that cost come directly out of there. It doesn't, in the far ends of our UAL mountain, if you will, it doesn't mitigate all of it, but it does do quite a bit for that. We also have what we've put aside with PG&E settlement funds is a fiscal stability reserve. And the reason why we set that up was because we knew that we were going to come back into a deficit situation. What this is, it's money that allows us to provide short-term relief to the general fund to be able to correct the imbalance. And the idea would be is that we correct that and then get back to a long-term balance budget. Right now, there's, after using the amount for this year, there's about $24 million, $24.8 million of fiscal stability reserves remaining. Which sounds like a lot, but those go away very, very quickly. So what you'll be seeing in the coming years is a different general fund budget coming to you. There are stuff that we need to deal with after the passage of this one of how to correct that imbalance for the 23-24 or the 24-25 year and going forward. Especially as many of those funding programs potentially come back into the general fund. So somebody had to be the doom and gloom on this, I guess that was, I drew that short straw. But that's where we are and with that, unless you have any questions for me, I'll turn it over to Veronica and she'll move through the operating budget. I think we can continue. Thank you. All right, so as we lean into this budget today, we're going to start at a very high level. We're going to start with the city-wide numbers, focus in then on general fund and then finally on the staffing level. And before we turn it over to departments, I'll be happy to answer any questions. So looking at our city-wide resources, this includes all funds, all departments, all entities. And city-wide this year for fiscal year 23-24, we are budgeting about 503.2 million of revenues. The first line up there for general fund, we're budgeting 201.9 million and we're going to talk about the general fund in detail in the next section. So I'm not going to speak about that one here. Our enterprise funds down below, this includes mostly our water funds but also our Bennett Valley Golf Course, parking, transit, stormwater. And we are looking at about 182 million dollars with the revenue in our enterprise funds this year. Most of that increase of 7.1 million occurs in our water funds. Water is anticipating a rebound of water usage after the drought and this is also in line with their rate model. Our special revenue funds, we're looking at 37.5 million dollars with the revenue and we're seeing a small decrease year over year. This isn't a true decrease. Back in fiscal year 22-23 we had a one-time appropriation for ARPA funds. Part of our ARPA appropriations were done with the annual budget so there was a one-time revenue appropriation last year which makes it look like there's a small decrease when in actuality things are increasing steadily in all of our special revenue funds. Which includes things like our public safety special tax which was previously measure O. It also includes our gas tax, capital facilities fees, things of that nature. Other funds is mostly debt service. This also includes our special assessment districts and these are staying year over year, pretty steady, no significant changes. Our housing authority will stand out to you with a year over year increase of 43% that year over year change of 21 million. Most of that 20.7 million is a round eight state infill infrastructure grant that will be coming our way. So you'll see that on the expenditure side too. We see the revenue get appropriated here as well as the expenditure which lends to a pretty significant year over year jump. And then finally our successor agency every year we have a debt service payment so we see the revenue come in and the expenditures go out and that stays steady year over year. So all told 503.2 million citywide in revenues. And then staying at the citywide level this slide details the expenditures. And I'll point out to begin with that that total line down near the bottom 534 million this compared to our revenues on the previous slide. This suggests about a $34 million deficit or just under 34 million. This is planned spending of reserves in many of our funds including enterprise funds and water so this isn't a dire financial situation. What happens is sometimes there's unspent appropriations or unspent fund balance that we appropriate at the budget cycle to spend. And you'll see more of this in the talk of enterprise funds in the department sections. So the first line item our general fund again we're going to discuss that one in detail in the next section. Our enterprise operating expenditures are increasing by 5.3% mostly due to staffing costs salary and benefits and all of our water funds and enterprise funds. Our enterprise CIP this is mostly our water CIP projects that are appropriated which have remaining steady with just a 2.2% increase. Our non enterprise CIP has a little bit more of a jump of 5.6 million. These are all of our CIP projects that are funded from various funding sources such as gas tax and capital facilities fees. We made an effort this year to appropriate anything that was in fund balance that had not been appropriated trying to get these put into specific projects. And you'll hear more about this too in our capital improvement program section tomorrow. Our special revenue funds have a pretty significant increase in appropriations in fiscal year 23-24. You'll see the 45.7% increase. This is a big percentage increase but not a very high dollar amount at 7.5 million and can really be explained with two different funds. One in our police public safety special tax fund they are using about 2.5 million dollars of their reserves to purchase a Roseland substation. And then the other one is we are appropriating 4 million dollars in our ARPA fund reserves for homeless services. ARPA funds are temporarily paying for homeless services and they did so in fiscal year 22-23 as well but we didn't appropriate that with the budget cycle. So we're seeing kind of a one-time spike that isn't consistent year to year. Other funds as I mentioned this is mostly debt service a little bit of special assessment and our expenditures are staying pretty flat. And the housing authority you'll see here again that big jump in expenditures which is due to that state infill infrastructure grant. And that is if I didn't mention it before it is specifically set aside for six affordable housing projects that I'm sure housing will be happy to talk about more in their department section. So all in our total budget is for 534 million and when you split that out between the capital improvement program and our operations our O&M budget is about 460 million and just our capital improvement program only 74.9 million. And this pie chart is just a visual of the table we just looked at on the previous slide. It just shows the different segments of all of our different funds within the city. So the general fund 38 percent is our largest fund that's why we dedicate a whole section to talking about it. And our enterprise operating funds follow behind and that is again mostly our water enterprise funds and our CIP funds both enterprise and non-enterprise make up about 14 percent. And then we have housing authority at 14 percent and special revenue and other funds making up the rest of that. So moving on from the city wide we're going to focus in on just the general fund now. So as Alan mentioned in his comments just a few slides ago we are proposing to you today a budget that has a deficit of two and a half million dollars. So our total revenues and transfers in for the general fund are budgeted at 204.2 million which are just shy of our total expenditures and transfers out at 206.7 million. And we're proposing that that two and a half million dollar deficit be spent out of our fiscal stability reserves. So back when we received PG&E settlement funds council made the decision to set aside 40 million dollars of that for fiscal stability reasons. Alan mentioned we did appropriate 10 million of that last year for our pension stabilization trust. We also spent 2.7 million of that in an effort to get all of our fire apparatus and engines into the replacement plan and we needed a significant upfront investment. So if we were to use this two and a half million dollars out of these fiscal stability funds that will bring us down to 24.8 million. And again these are completely set aside from our general fund reserves that we have to have by policy. So this is a separate separate thing and we're hoping that this can sustain us through this year. So looking at our general fund resources this is a pie chart that shows the different revenues that the general fund has that come in by category. Sales tax and property tax are the largest sources of revenue in the general fund. They make up over 50 percent. We also have intergovernmental interest in other at 3 percent. That's just a small piece. Our recreation revenues are 1 percent although we are seeing them recover quite well in the coming years. Interfund charges. This is revenue that we receive from other funds such as our enterprise funds that pay for the administration costs in the general fund. Permits fines and charges at 7 percent. That is a lot of our pet revenues. Other taxes consists of a few big ticket items such as our transient occupancy tax our cannabis business tax franchise fees business license. And then we have vehicle license fees at seven and a half million and our utility users tax. So this financial table is the same information as what was on the previous pie chart. It's just in numerical form instead of a visual of a pie chart and we're going to go over some of the year over year changes in some of these big categories. So I mentioned property tax and sales tax these two take up or make up over 50 percent of the resources in the whole general fund property tax. We see will be increasing by about 4.6 percent year over year. Worth noting is that property tax has various categories rolled into property tax. The biggest one is the property tax that homeowners pay. And that category we're only seeing about a three and a half percent increase year over year. But there are other smaller categories such as supplemental property tax personal property tax that are increasing at much higher rates which kind of bring that percentage change up sales tax. Alan mentioned a few slides back. We're starting to see level off. We have seen significant growth coming out of COVID and our consultants are predicting a much more conservative outlook in fiscal year 2023. We have gone away a little bit from sticking with the exact consultant numbers. We want to be a little more optimistic. We don't want to hold back resources for the general fund. We want to be as realistic as we can to make sure we can fund our operations here. But we are still predicting about a one point six percent increase or about a million point two year over year. Worth noting too is that that twenty two twenty three number that we adopted we are expecting to come in just a little bit shy. We don't think we're going to hit that number. So when we see a year over year increase budget to budget it may differ from actual to budget. Utility users tax revenue has been increasing. A lot of the revenues in here are based on PG&E and energy costs. So as those costs go up our UUT goes up as well. Vehicle license fees are increasing by a million dollars year over year. This is in line with just past trends. Permits fines and charges. Again most of this is our PED revenues. This also includes fines and forfeitures and various smaller fees associated with our fire department. And that one and a half million dollar increase is mostly associated with our PED revenues. We're trying to bring budget up in line with what actual revenue we see coming in. Interfund charges I mentioned is revenue we see from other funds paying the administrative costs of the general fund. And that is all done through an outside consultant that works on our cost allocation plan. And recreation revenues we have increasing at seven point one percent as things are recovering from COVID. And then the final line in our governmental interest and other this is our miscellaneous line item. It shows a drop the reason being in fiscal year twenty two twenty three we had a one time grant that was appropriated with the annual budget. It was not repeated this current year. So it shows a decrease but our regular funding sources in this line item have stayed have stayed stable. In addition to revenues coming into the general fund we also have some transfers in. This is a little different. It's just resources coming from other funds that come directly to our general fund. Our special revenue funds every year contribute just a little over two million dollars. This is mostly from Measure M and gas tax they contribute to the general fund to help assist in some of the administrative costs associated with those capital improvements. They also contribute to the improvement program costs special assessment districts also contribute a small amount for administrative costs. And our parking fund transfers a small amount in for the downtown community benefit district. So all in we have two point three million dollars of transfers in from other funds and that has stayed steady with the previous year. So switching gears from revenues and transfers in that's all the resources we have available to appropriate. We're now looking at the expenditure side of the general fund. We're looking at where we are putting all of our resources and this pie chart is pretty clear that most of those resources go straight to salary and benefits. I always like to give the reminder that in the general fund we are very people heavy with public safety and administration. The majority of our costs go to pay for the people here. And on the right hand side of that slide are all of our various services and supplies categories such as professional services vehicles supplies utilities etc. So this financial table is just a breakdown of the previous pie chart which gives us a little more detail of what we're looking at. As I mentioned salaries and benefits are the largest expenditure in the general fund. They make up about seventy six percent overall salaries are increasing by two point three million year over year. All bargaining units are slated for a two point five percent cost of living increase. And we also account for any merit or step increases that we think will be coming this way. Benefits are actually increasing at a higher percentage than salaries. This is a trend that we've been seeing happen for several years now that benefits are just at a steadier pace than salaries year over year. The biggest contributors this year for benefits are mainly in our retirement costs which are a function of salaries not necessarily our UAL but just our normal retirement. We've also seen big increases in workers comp as well as health care. Our professional services increased by six point three percent just under a million dollars. Although half of that five hundred thousand dollars of that nine hundred thousand dollar increases a one time appropriation for labor negotiations. We're going to be going into negotiations this coming fiscal year. So five hundred thousand of that had to be appropriated for consultant costs. Vehicle expenses is going to be a recurring theme in all the department budgets. We're seeing significant cost increases associated with parts. There's been a 15 percent markup on parts but also a good chunk of this increase has to do with our fire department bringing their equipment into the replacement program. So in future years we won't see this continued year over year spike. There's one year we're kind of stepping up to a new level of appropriations and from there it will likely continue to increase but not at such a dramatic level. Our operational supplies have been held flat. Utilities we were expecting to see a big jump in PG&E costs this year. But to the department's credit they all made a big effort to keep their budgets realistic examine them closely didn't just spike their budgets in association or just in direct relation to what they believe energy costs will be. So we do see a four hundred thousand dollar increase there. Our IT costs that is our cost allocation plan for IT department. Most of those increases come from the salaries and benefits costs for our IT staff. And our liability and property insurance we're seeing a significant jump in the general fund. A few things are going on in this line item. One we have fire and earthquake insurance which is just a small piece and that one stayed pretty steady it only increased by about eight thousand dollars or three percent. The majority of this increase comes from our liability and auto insurance. So the city is self insured but we do purchase reinsurance through a JPA and a few things are happening as I mentioned one is the JPA is increased increasing the confidence level from 80 percent to 85 percent which affects our premium. Another factor is that our premium is based on payroll so as payroll increases our premium also increases. And then finally there's just been due to the overall outstanding losses within the JPA not necessarily due to the city's losses but overall they have had to increase our premiums as well. So a few of these factors have all come together for that pretty significant hike in our liability insurance. Other miscellaneous has stayed flat in our capital outlay. Well that's a pretty small dollar amount. It has decreased that just says that we don't have any planned spending in twenty three twenty four of additional vehicles or additional equipment. And then finally our O&M projects have increased by just four point eight percent. So still looking at general fund expenditures this is the same pool of money same pie. We're just looking at it now by department instead of by category. And the takeaway here is that our largest two departments in the general fund are police and fire. We also have Parks and Recreation TPW. Santa Rosa water and HCS have very small portions that are funded by the general fund. So they're barely visible here but our administration departments PED and non-departmental make up all the various departments in the general fund. And again this table is the financial format of the pie chart we just saw. Same pot of money still two hundred point three million dollars worth of proposed expenditures. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the departments because they will each have their own section to really dive into these numbers. But I will highlight some of the big changes we're looking at in housing and community services. We see a big drop and even though that's a big percentage it's a very small dollar amount. And it's just because in the current year HCS has been able to secure a grant to pay for some of their tenant and landlord services costs. So we'll see that expenditure budget return next year likely in fire. In fire we see a seven point four percent increase. Mostly again you'll hear about it probably be repeated a few times their apparatus and engines have been put into the replacement program. So we're seeing this increase in their budget this one time. It won't happen continually year after year after this. You'll see some big swings in Park and Parks and Recreation and Transportation and Public Works. We're going to talk about this later in a slide too that there was a reorg that took place this year. The Parks programs were moved into the previously named Recreation and Community Engagement Department. And Community Engagement moved into one of our administration departments. So we're seeing some big spikes in some departments and big drops in the others. And we will talk about more of those in the department sections of that reorg. And Santa Rosa water did increase by 14 percent mostly due to a staffing change. We added an FTE who was partially funded by the general fund partially funded by the enterprise funds. And then non-departmental is always one that sticks out because it's a negative and a little challenging to understand. But I'll do my best to try to explain this one. And again we will revisit it later on. But what non-departmental has in it is various expenditures that just don't belong with any one department and they don't rightfully belong in any of these other categories. So we've created a non-departmental category. And the largest expenditure in there is an offset for our administrative cost plan. So on that top line item, administration, that includes finance, HR, city council, city manager, a lot of our administrative departments. And a lot of the costs in those departments are spent supporting all of the departments below it. Housing and community services, fire, planning and economic development, etc. So in order to fully capture the costs of these departments, our consultants have put together assigned costs for administration in each one of these. So in police there's a little bit of administration costs and fire a bit of administration costs, etc. And to avoid double counting, we have to put a negative amount in non-departmental. So that's why you'll see a big negative amount in there because it's offsetting costs that have been double counted. And that negative amount grows every year because our budget grows every year with salaries and benefits. So while it was 8.9 million last year, 9.6 this year, that negative amount is getting larger in accordance with our general fund budget getting larger. So not the easiest concept and it does stand out, but we're happy to help with that one if we can. And then finally, in addition to expenditures, the general fund always also has transfers out. So these are just direct transfers to other funds. This year the general fund is more proposing a transfer of about 200,000 to the Bennett Valley Golf Course. We think we're going to have to do this probably fiscal year 23-24 and 24-25 while the golf course is getting its operations up and running. The general fund every year also transfers some funds to the CIP projects. I had mentioned a few slides back, there was a one-time grant that was appropriated in 22-23. You'll see that in the CIP line. 22-23 was a $5.3 million transfer. This year it's dropped down. That was just a function of receiving a grant. The revenue came in and the expenditures went out. So this year we are only transferring 2 million to CIP projects. The general fund every year funds about 1.2 million for ADA projects. We also receive money from the county every year for Rosalind Pavement. We get 600,000 about, so that comes in through revenues and just goes right back out into a project key. The general fund transfers is going to transfer 1.3 million to the parking fund to pay for parking violation operations. We receive the violation revenue in the general fund and then we transfer out the funds to pay for that operation as well. Real property transfer tax is revenue received in the general fund and by council policy we are required to transfer out a portion of this every year to affordable housing and homeless services. We are seeing a decrease in real property transfer tax due to the housing market slowing. While we haven't seen home prices drop we are seeing the number of home sales start to slow and real property transfer tax is a function of both of those. So as that is decreasing our revenue budget is decreasing so the amount that's transferred out decreases as well. And then finally Ms. Elanious the general fund does transfer funds out for our courthouse square debt service, our art and lieu fund and various other small items. So continuing our discussion of general fund expenditures our public safety special tax which is in a special revenue fund for police fire and violence prevention has a provision that every year we have to maintain a certain level of funding within police fire and violence prevention in the general fund. So this slide just shows that we are staying in line with what is required. Our general fund department costs exceed that baseline calculation so all three of those departments have met that requirement. Real property transfer tax I just mentioned a couple slides back. We like to remind council every year where we are with this policy council passed a policy a few years back requiring increasing amounts of our PTT every year to go to affordable housing and homeless services. This year we're at 50% so next year we'll be 55% and so forth until we reach 100%. And as I have mentioned too for the current year for fiscal year 22, 23 and 23, 24 ARPA funds are paying for homeless services. So at the moment all our PTT that's transferred out is going to affordable housing that may shift in future years as ARPA funds expired but for 23, 24 all those funds are going to affordable housing. And then to touch base again about the reorg that's happening this year that you'll be seeing more in the department slides just to give you an overview. So the regional parks and Bennett Valley golf course operations from our TPW department were moved into department nine. Department nine used to be called recreation and community engagement but now we are calling it parks and recreation. The move of those two operations all the parks and Bennett Valley golf course that includes about 31 FTEs and about 9.6 million in O and M budget and 5.4 million in capital projects. So it's a pretty significant move and you'll see these swings in the department section. We also added a director of parks and recreation. And then finally the community engagement section that used to be in recreation and community engagement is now in our community zero department or communications and intergovernmental relations department. So we've done some shifting around. And then to conclude our general fund section we have our forecast for you are five year forecast. A version of this was shown at council goal setting couple months back and it's been revised since then. So now our first column fiscal year twenty three twenty four is the budget we're proposing to you today with a two and a half million dollar deficit. And the takeaway from this slide is that as the years go on that deficit grows our revenues are not keeping pace with our expenditures. And just a couple things to point out between fiscal year twenty four twenty five and twenty five twenty six you'll see a jump in the transfers out. This signifies when our ARPA funds expire and the general fund starts paying for homeless services once more. We did try to build into this model anything that we are aware council has agreed to. There's a number of things out there that are not yet decided on such as any contribution from the general fund for the Herna Avenue hub. Safe parking when ARPA funds expire for safe parking anything that has been discussed but not fully decided on we have not put in here. We also have not put in a recession as Alan mentioned there's been various judgment calls on whether or not a recession is going to happen. If so how bad so we are not being overly conservative by assuming a recession will be taking place. We have not put in any staffing growth and most importantly we haven't put in any assumptions for cost of living increases beyond fiscal year twenty three twenty four all bargaining units are out of contract at that point. So starting in fiscal year twenty four twenty five and on we only have a one percent assumption for step and merit increases for staff and with salaries and benefits being such a significant part of our general fund expenditures. If and when those bargaining units are all back in contract we will know what those colas will be in the out years and we'll add them in and we are without a doubt going to see those deficits exacerbated. So this concludes our portion of the general fund discussion. I'm going to take you through our staffing summary and after that I'll be happy to answer any questions. This is just the last piece of the citywide and general fund view of what's happening in our next year's budget. So overall this is our authorized FTE staffing summary at a very high level. This slide you will see many departments with no staffing changes. That's not necessarily true. There's quite a bit of staffing changes in the next slide. This slide just shows that they all net to zero. So the total headcount for most of these departments hasn't changed. And same with on this slide you'll see in the recreation and TPW departments there's those big swings of FTEs. That's a result of that reorg that we mentioned. And again while there may be small changes in some of these departments we'll get into the details of what is actually happening behind those numbers in the next section. But all told the citywide headcount for fiscal year 2324 is 1285.5 full time equivalents. That's up from 7 from the previous year. So breaking that down now in between general fund and non-general fund. We're first going to look at the general fund staffing changes. And I just want to mention before we see a lot of these changes that any elimination of a position here are all vacant. We are not eliminating filled positions. And budget is kind of a time when the departments really want to evaluate the positions that they have any vacancies and say maybe this isn't what we need for our operations. We'd be better served with something else so it's a time to sort of do some shifting around and moving. And we did make a big concerted effort then in a lot of these changes to keep them budget neutral. Given the condition of the general fund and some departments even if there was a budget differential we're willing to cut their services and supplies budget to make up for it. We did our best to only add the most critical positions and to keep everything else cost neutral. So in the city manager's office a senior admin was eliminated in favor of an admin analyst. In the city attorney's office we added an assistant city attorney. And in finance we eliminated an accountant auditor in order to add a payroll supervisor. And in the fire department a limited term building plans examiner was eliminated in order to add a limited term community outreach specialist. In planning and economic development a code enforcement officer was added. There was a limited term senior planner that was grant funded and that term expires that position is being eliminated. And then a senior admin assistant was eliminated in order to add an admin analyst. In parks and recreation we added a director in order to direct this newly formed department. And we eliminated a senior admin to senior admin assistants added a recreation specialist and an assistant parks planner. And I will note that assistant parks planner is paid for by a park development impact fees. So even though it's in the general fund the general fund isn't actually funding it. And then you'll see the reorg moves to FTEs were moved out of parks and recreation to zero and 31 FTEs were moved in from TPW for a net change of 30 FTEs. And on the other side of that reorg we see parks we see TPW giving up 31 FTEs which moved into parks and rec police eliminated a police technician in order to add a field and evidence tech. And in water a quality control associate was added this one is in their stormwater function so it's paid for partially by the enterprise funds and partially by the general fund. And in communications and intergovernmental relations this is also part of that reorg to community engagement staff were brought into this department. So all in the general fund saw an increase of three positions and one of them as I mentioned is funded by park development impact fees and one of them is partially funded by stormwater enterprise funds. So really it's the general fund is picking up the cost of just one and a half FTEs. And now we're going to just look at the detail of the non general fund position changes. So these are all of our various enterprise fund etc. positions. In the risk management internal service fund they eliminated a senior admin and an analyst in order to add to human resources technicians. In finance a parking enforcement officer just a half time one was eliminated and we added a half time parking operations aid that half time addition is in addition to an existing half time one. So now that is one full parking operations aid and we eliminated a parking program coordinator in order to add a parking supervisor. And the water enterprise funds utility system supervisor was added a wastewater operations supervisor. And a skilled maintenance worker was eliminated. In I.T. an I.T. supervisor was added a technology application specialist was added and this one is being paid for specifically by our planning and economic development department and they're having this position added to assist them with their technology needs. A senior I.T. tech was added and an I.T. section manager was eliminated. This is a net change of two and I do want to mention that I.T. has kind of a multi year plan going to reorganize some of their positions and they do anticipate being able to eliminate an existing position next year. Once all these positions are filled. And then finally and measure our public safety tax the police department will be adding a police sergeant funded by those special sales tax funds. So all in within the non general fund we're adding four positions. And then finally the human resources department does review reclassification requests of filled positions. We were just looking at all the vacant eliminations and additions. There will be three filled position reclassifications going through with this budget. One in the general fund where a street maintenance superintendent is being reclassed to a park maintenance superintendent. One in the enterprise fund where a water quality supervisor is being reclassed to a water quality manager. And one in the internal service fund in I.T. where an I.T. section manager is being reclassed to an I.T. deputy director. And that brings me through the whole city wide and general fund section. I'm happy to take any questions before we pass it off to departments. Looking at council are there any questions. No no no. Council member Fleming do you have any questions. I do not. Vice mayor McDonald. Thank you mayor. I just have a couple of questions for you. Of the RPTT attacks. What does the policy say and define how that 50% is broken up between homeless services. And affordable housing right now. So it doesn't the policy does not stipulate what portion has to go to homeless services and what portion has to go to affordable housing that's at the discretion of the department. Which has allowed some flexibility for this time when ARPA funds have paid for homeless services and allows funding to go elsewhere. I'm not sure if you covered this yet or if it's in the next part of the presentation but I saw the purge rate was an increase of about 5.7%. Are you going to go through that for us Alan later in the presentation. We actually aren't touching on the purge rate later in the presentation. So our UAL costs this year have actually stayed pretty flat. Our normal retirement costs have increased and as I mentioned they are a function of our salary costs. So we usually see our normal retirement costs increase with what our salary costs increase by and go ahead. Yeah. Are you. That was that was right. I was just going to add on that that with the UAL what we're seeing for this year for 2324 is the result of the strong purse performance in the stock market a few years ago. So so that's why it's sort of dipped a little bit and then next year in 2425 that's when we feel the the hit from the losses that they took and we go we go up. So we have a little bit of a lag and then we start that that mountain of a UAL costs. Can you tell me what the current rate is for purge for us. Like the percentage. I'll be great if you can get that back to us and can you tell me what UAL stands for. You got it. It's the unfunded actuarial liability. So that's our additional costs on top of our normal retirement. Thanks council member Roger. But you can't whisper to me I won't hear you. So I just want to do one more question. You talked about park impact fees and that they're funding one of the department or a person with that. Can you tell us what what those can be used for. And I don't know if that's the only specific fund or if there's other funds that we maybe have in the city that we can use for specific purposes. I'm not clear on that or how will we find that information out. So yeah I can't unfortunately get too much into the detail off the top of my head but I can tell you our park development impact fees. We have four different zones. We collect impact fees on development that occurs there and I don't know can't speak to the regulations around what it can be spent on. But for this purpose there is one assistant parks planner that will be added that will be funded by those. We're happy to follow up with more information at a later time. Just more out of curiosity on that for me just to hear that we have some funds and just always curious what we can use them for if they're specific. Yeah actually I think that position is being funded by by Measure M as opposed to the park development fees. So a little bit broader of a of a grant there. I think that just about covers it. Oh one more sorry about that of the two point five million dollar deficit. Can you tell me what percentage that is of the overall fund or is it just out of the general fund. If it was like a one percent of the general fund deficit or how do you calculate that two point five. So if it is two point five million of a general fund I'm sorry you're asking what the percentage of all of our general fund reserves are of the general fund. So of the deficit does that come straight from the general fund as a deficit or is it a combination of CIP budget and general fund. It will come entirely from the general fund reserves. Okay so if I am calculating it would be about a one point one percent of the general fund. Of a two hundred million dollar budget about if that's the calculation you're looking at yeah about one percent. I think if I'm calculating it right I'm just kind of curious how we're targeting I mean a one percent deficit. Of that large of a budget is actually it's not terrible. It's amazing so although it paints a picture as we still have a deficit I do want to keep in mind that's a very small in the general sense of talking about a large budget like we have. Any additional questions from council members. I had a couple of questions. One would be the two hundred thousand that is going to the Bennett Valley golf course is that a loan or are we is that we're just giving that. That's a subsidy so it's not a loan we do not expect to receive that back. Perfect I just wanted to clarify. And then the second question is well I guess I can ask that a different. The Bennett Valley golf course still does have a loan out to parks correct that at some point we hope the enterprise fund will be self sustaining. And then we'll go back to look at recovering those funds. Yes. Thank you vice mayor McDonald. Sorry I'm looking through my notes. You said that as far as our liability insurance on the cars that it went up with the payroll increase. That's interesting to me that concept because what I've known around insurance and liability is the more that we actually pay staff. There usually is a reduction in specifically workers compensation rates so I'm curious how they would increase our risk management if we actually are paying our employees. More or how the JPA is actually figuring that out for us. That's that's not consistent with what I've seen in the past in business models. So I'll have to defer to our risk manager to get to that level of technical expertise. But yeah my understanding was that premiums are loosely based on payroll. It's one of the many factors that goes into it. It's not the only factor obviously but that's one of that as payroll increases as does our premium. Thank you. Any additional questions from council. Seeing none on behalf of council we'd like to thank you very much for the presentation and I'll hand it back over to our city manager. Thank you Veronica if you could call the next department up. Sure so as I mentioned today we plan to get through our administrative departments as well as IT and housing. And so first up we have city council and city manager will just do back to back. So you will see a lot of new faces this budget cycle so some of those are due to promotions and hiring of staff. So we'd like to welcome all of our new employees who this is their first budget cycle and know that they've done a good job at helping us prepare for this day. Good afternoon Mayor Rogers and council members. I am Cindy Benziara and I will be presenting the city council and the city manager office budgets. All city council programs are funded by the general fund. The city council budget is nine hundred and thirty four thousand one hundred and seventy dollars which is a decrease of forty point nine percent. The council members salaries and benefits increase seventy one thousand dollars due to the salary increase approved by council on December 14th two thousand twenty two. There are no elections this budget cycle so there has been a decrease of six hundred and thirteen thousand dollars and community promotions funding allocation of one hundred and five thousand dollars has moved over to the planning and economic department. That concludes city council. Are there any questions? Are there any questions from council? Seeing none. Okay so we'll move on to the city manager's office. The city manager's budget is three million twenty nine thousand seven hundred and seventy five dollars which is a decrease of fifty five point nine percent. Next slide please. The clerk's office is flat for this year. The homeless services, CIP and the ONM projects have moved to housing and community services. And the general administration has increased by one hundred twenty eight thousand for adding the administrative analyst position and deleting the senior admin to offset that cost plus nineteen thousand in IT costs. The changes again are the to that fund the addition of one full time administrative analyst offset by the elimination of the senior admin assistant and the homeless services moving to housing and community services. The accomplishments for the city manager's office this year have engaged in more than one hundred stakeholder meetings discussing the needs of our community. We have launched clean Santa Rosa and augment quality of life services. The next event will be May 12th in district four. We've adopted the project labor agreement which is close to completion. It's currently with the city attorney's office and will be implemented by July one. The employee appreciation awards we want to thank city council for your support on this. They were halted during covid they have now been restarted during the fall or excuse me this spring and have gone forward to recognize all the employees over the last three years. We've hosted developer roundtables as we work toward the council goals for housing for all and we will be holding additional roundtables for the capital improvement projects. The challenges of this coming year will be the recruitment and retention which is not unique to the city of Santa Rosa or private businesses. This is true for many jurisdictions. We have also long term budget stability during this budget cycle we will begin the city negotiations and contracts as well as renewing programs that are currently being paid for by one time funding. Sources and we'll continue to focus on our quality of life issues. That's it. Do you have any questions regarding the city manager budget. Are there any questions from council. I just have one one note. Is that all right for the mayor. Yes. Yes council member for me. Thank you. I just wanted to go to the adoption of project labor agreement. It sounds like the council adopts policies in the city manager implements them. So I just wanted to clarify is the city manager adopting the ordinance or is the manager planning to implement the ordinance. So thank you council member Fleming that would be implement but we just wanted to point it out because we knew how critical project labor agreements have been. It's been a discussion for some time so we will make certain that wording is changed on the slide. So it's a future plan implementations. It will be accomplished. Excellent. Thank you so much. Council member Rogers. My apologies. I know you said it but I didn't catch it. The CIP and O and M projects being moved. Yes. What were those projects. So we can discuss those when housing and community services comes up. So we will go through that when Megan comes up and gives her presentation that includes homelessness. OK. That's that's what I was looking for. I thought it might but we'll talk about it then. Thank you. Are there any additional questions from council. Seeing none. Thank you very much for your presentation. Madam city manager. Yes. So the city man the city attorney's office will present next. Thank you. Thank you and good afternoon. Madam mayor and council members city attorney's office budget. Next slide please. I need to work from here. Can we get some assistance at the table. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our budget isn't is funded entirely by from the general fund. It's all general fund monies. I do want to note that we do recover attorney's fees in some of our cases particularly in code enforcement but in some others as well. For example in the PG&E litigation we did recover our attorney's fees. All of those proceeds do go back into the general fund. Similarly we do also recover monies sometimes in our litigation when the city is a plaintiff and those monies also go straight into the general fund. So our total budget for this year is four point three million dollars a little bit more than that. The change is four hundred and eleven thousand seven hundred and forty nine. That reflects two elements. One is our standard merit and step increases our colas and increases in the cost of benefits. And then the more significant change is the addition of one assistant city attorney. Our costs for I.T. have decreased by about five thousand dollars. So it's an overall increase of four eleven seven forty nine. Next slide. So again our general fund change is the addition of one full time assistant city attorney. The cost totals two hundred and thirty one thousand in salaried benefits. We are that additional assistant city attorney is needed to address essential city needs. We have a very lean team and the needs of the city far outstrip the resources we have. So the new assistant we do anticipate that they will provide needed assistance for increased real estate services. Also provide support for the city wide contract review to address some concerns that have have arisen. And then we also recognize both from departments and from a couple of council members a desire to have increased support and services for code enforcement. And with the new addition of the assistant city attorney we do expect to be able to do some realignment to address that that request as well. Next slide. We've had a very busy year this past year. We led the charter review process worked very closely with you the council also with the charter review committee meeting every other week for many many months. And also working closely with the city clerk of course the result was a couple of successful ballot measures as well as other proposals that have been brought to council for future consideration. We had a heavy litigation load this past year. We've been successful in resolving a number of key matters at little or no cost to the city. We also provided substantial support and engagement in the 2020 redistricting or the redistricting following the 2020 census and also in the election process both for the district elections and for the city's ballot measure to extend a measure. Next slide. We also provided extensive legal support for a number of high priority department initiatives. I won't read them all but yes the extension of former measure O now measure H the gas station ban short term rental ordinance and quite a few others. We also focused on neighborhood safety pursuing and successfully abating several drug houses establishing receiverships for properties that were in serious decline. Animal control efforts and code enforcement and related ordinances in connection with those so really a focus on quality of life and neighborhood safety. In relation to that we also did a lot of work and have partnered with the housing community services team on homeless issues as well. Challenges are biggest challenge this year will be that it will be a year of transitions as you know that we have facing both the retirement of both the city attorney and the chief assistant city attorney. So there'll be some new leadership some fresh ideas and I would expect some potential realignments particularly with the addition of the new assistant city attorney and all of that is towards maintaining enhanced and enhancing. High quality legal services excellence in legal services. Second biggest challenge is our continuing litigation we have several cases that are very significant will be very time consuming they involve serious personal injury and civil rights and also we have a construction claims a large construction claims litigation that will be going to trial we expect this year. Those will keep our litigation team very busy throughout the year. And then finally we continue to have as I mentioned a very lean office and department legal needs outstrip I mean the departments not our department but the department the needs of other departments for legal services does outstrip what our resources are. But as I said before with the addition of the new ACA we do anticipate some realignments so that process will be going forward this year as well. And happy to answer any questions. Looking at council for any questions. Council member Ocrack. Thank you. Thank you. So you said multiple times that the needs of the city for legal services not just the city attorney's office but the needs of the city out outstrip I believe is with your term the. The resources that are available and then you also said that you run a very lean department you're only adding one person but then when you describe that one individual's responsibilities is about four different things. So I guess my question would be because I've heard this from community members and you touched on it a bit yourself would be would it be possible to add an additional assistant city attorney specifically to go after fines and civil penalties. I know you can't budget it to be revenue neutral that's not responsible. But with the goal of at least in a year to two years it being a revenue neutral position basically being the work they do to bring in fines offsets the cost of them as an employee. Is that a possibility. We've we've been looking at that we're looking at in our within our office a number of avenues to increase our own revenues to bring more money into the city to help fund our services. In terms of a position being revenue to neutral. It's very difficult to do and I know there's a particular interest in pursuing litigation and code enforcement and fines and penalties. We are able in that context to to gains additional revenues in the past our general approach in code enforcement is to gain compliance rather than looking for cost recovery cost recovery. Yes we try to do that but really the focus is on compliance. We're talking about trying to shift that a little bit maybe be a little bit more stronger in our pursuit of recovery. My experience here and in other jurisdictions is that it's really difficult for that position to end up being fully revenue neutral. Can we increase those revenues. Yes but can it be 100% revenue neutral. That's doubtful. We are looking at other avenues as well in terms of getting our our resources than the our costs incorporated into some of the city's fees to be able to recoup that way. We'll also be exploring some other avenues to to enhance our our ability to to recoup costs. Okay I appreciate that and I am all for you know compliance before being punitive but I think when anybody violates a code of ordinance of some sort you know it's not to quote one of my favorite movies be nice until it's time to not be nice. And I think having that tool in our toolkit so to speak is something that could be beneficial. And I don't know if there could be maybe a temporary or a pilot program if you will for that kind of a position but I'd be interested in seeing something like that. And I'd be happy to explore that as well. Thanks. Council Member Rogers. Thank you Mayor. First is a point of clarification. Is that a Roadhouse reference. I just wanted to make sure. So Sue as much as I hate that you're retiring you are. Talk to me a little bit about as you were coming in as a city attorney you're talking about a reorg that might happen within the department. How this position if we approve it will be in the middle of June. The new city attorney is anticipated to be here in August. So they'd be coming in either right in the middle of an anticipated reorganization or would at least have the tools to potentially further that. Talk to me a little bit about the timing. Sure. And you are right. There's going to be a delay between the time I leave and the time a new city attorney is able to step in. Or so you claim. Yes. And what I would do I wouldn't given that we're going to be facing that transition. I don't think it's right for me to make any substantial changes in our office. I think the new city attorney has to be able to weigh in and shape how they would like that to be. I want to clarify too when I talk about realignment I'm not talking about a complete rehaul overhaul of our office or reorganization of our office. It's really about aligning how our resources are set. We currently have two sections one that is primarily litigation although they also do advice work and ordinance work. And then there are other teams primarily transactional although they'll also get involved in some litigation now and then as well. So how that gets shaped and how this position I think it's very important for us to develop the real estate expertise in house to address a lot of the efforts that are going forward now. All the surfacing properties but even going forward beyond that I anticipate a growing need for that expertise within our office. To be able to have additional support for contract review contract processing. I think we'll address some of the concerns that we hear sometimes from departments. We're also very strongly looking at some streamlining of contracting processing even with our existing resources. So does that give us any room for that individual to also take on some of the litigation. I'm not sure but we have we have a current vacant chief position depending on who takes that position and what their areas of expertise are. If that person has litigation background that may open up additional litigation resources. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. So I would like to before I leave start at least the recruitment for the new position assuming it is approved by council so that we have that in the works. We have already started the chief recruitment. I have determined at this point that I will not make the appointment but we will have people ready to go for the new person who comes in. So what I would like to do is to be able to have it set up so that the new person who comes in the new city attorney I would work with them. I will give them my recommendation but they are free to make their own choice. So yes some realignments and I don't want to scare my department because what I'm talking about is tweaks not an overhaul of our of our of our department. So that's really helpful. I'm just looking at it from a budget perspective that if we're budgeting over two hundred thousand two hundred thirty one thousand for the position. The likelihood is that it's not going to be filled until a little bit later in the year. So there may be some cost savings that come back to the city and turn back after that. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Are there any additional questions from council members saying none. Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you. We'll have communications and intergovernmental relations. Good afternoon Mayor and City Council. I'll be going over the communications and intergovernmental relations budget. Can you can you introduce your name for the record. Yes. Lawn Peterson director of communications and intergovernmental relations. As I mentioned I'll be going over the communications and intergovernmental relations office budget. In this case moving forward this year we did see an increase in thirty three percent in the transition of community engagement into. Thank you. Into the our our our department. Currently we had eight and with the other two staff members were a total of 10 for the new department. Total it's one point nine percent of the total budget being proposed. Thank you. As I mentioned the changes you'll see it's three hundred and thirty seven thousand in salaries for those two positions plus forty four thousand increase in some services as well as other elements that are making that transition of the thirty three percent increase. Going over some accomplishments for our department we have the education that led to the reeducate reauthorization of the city's public safety special tax. We secured more than fifty three million in federal and state funds through a legislative program adopted the twenty twenty three state and federal legislative platform. We secured and successfully launched the civic ready public safety messaging notification platform that replaced Nixle. And we also established a strategic citywide grants team to increase efficiency and go after additional funding to offset budgets. Thanks Helen. Some challenges that we have and opportunities we're looking to redesign the city's website to improve the ability to find information and quickly engage with city staff and services. This is a big deal for us. I think that you know that the big picture vision is we're looking to refresh the look and feel apply best practices to our website and make it really easy to find information. Why we kicked off this project and we expect to launch at the end of November. We are currently and actively solving issues throughout our website looking for content that's outdated. We're developing a race to make sure that departments and as well as our team understand their responsibility to keep those pages updated. And so we're continually looking at that. In addition to that we're also with their alignment of the engagement department. We're looking to reimagine what Sarah looks like in the merging of that. And really it's a better alignment of resources for both events and communications and engagement. And also just getting organized within this team. We've already seen some great progress in that effort. The last part here and this is a global piece is the retention and recruitment for staffing. So we've been working with HR on a we're hiring campaign and we'll continually move forward with that to try to solve some of our staffing issues which HR will talk about. And with that that concludes my presentation. Happy to answer any questions. Looking to counsel for questions but before I do I just want to give kudos to your team for pulling off Cinco de Mayo in a very short time and it was very successful. So thank you very much. Any additional questions. I just just real quick I just want to highlight that was a citywide effort. There was a lot of things going on that week and while I was involved it definitely is a team effort. Daryl and his his group Jason water TPW. There was a lot of people out there doing a lot of stuff all evening. Super awesome event was really happy to participate and see so many people come out after the rain and during so. Thank you for that line because I did not know all the departments that were helping out. So thank you very much. Lots of big team effort on this one for sure. Councilmember Rogers. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So Lon talked to me a little bit about the reorganization and moving community engagement into zero specifically the deputy director of community engagement position. Who are they going to direct? Because as I understand it it's a fairly lean department. And then to how is this going to be integrated into the rest of the work that the department does. The great question. The department is a small department. And I'm currently working with the city manager to restructure the senior engagement position to more of a manager level based on like the structure throughout the city. So it's consistent as we're doing the climate comp and class study. But I think the intent is given that as much to your point it is a small department. We already have a director within the department. So it was and this position would oversee the one coordinator position as a part of the team within zero. How this works better is that we've always supported engagement with our communications efforts. And so this really just aligns what we were already doing in a much more unified way. In addition to what community engagement was doing like on the front end and theirs. Sierra was also doing engagement. I think even when I got here I was like well what's the difference. I think a lot of it it's a lot of the same things like they have surveys and they were doing that. We have a survey program. We're doing it. Some of our coordinators are doing as much like a community outreach like TPW is an example. I'm constantly working with that team getting out in the public doing public meetings and things like that. And so it's really kind of I mean barring the department name engagement. We did a lot of engagement. I think there's a lot of similarities and we're trying to move them over and we've already seen a lot of improvements. It's really helpful from its staffing perspective. Hence the event that we just pulled off. I think it was it was it was that's an example of how those alignments are really more beneficial to the city as a whole for sure. I'm mostly just asking because at my time on council this position started with the public really asking for an executive level position around community engagement. That was the director position that then became a deputy director position. It's now being moved again. It's always felt a little bit listless in terms of has a great intent with not a strategic plan around it and not a lot of support for the department. And so having the Ciro office be stood up I think within the last two years always felt a little bit duplicate the duplicative I suppose indeed. And so I guess my question really is is there a need for a deputy director of community engagement given the new construct or are we keeping that title for that position because it's a legacy position. I we are intending to make it a manager position given the structure within the department as there's already director as myself. I'm taking over cab personally. I work with chair weeks on the current agenda. And so I think the intent is that to not have two directors in the department. So it'll just be me and doing some of those higher level things in coordination with the city manager's office and council direction. Anything to add. OK. Thank you. You're welcome. Vice mayor McDonald. Thank you for the presentation. And I agree it makes sense to combine those. I think previously office of community engagement was in HR. If I was if I'm correct was that the department it was sort of under under the city manager was under city manager's office. So on this three hundred thirty seven thousand dollar budget. That's just moving that from that department over to your department. Isn't that correct. It's not an additional correct fine going out. OK. Yes. We came in flat on our budget for zero. And it was just the addition of those things plus other expenses that it makes sense to me with everything that we're doing with engagement that it has to have the communication component. So it makes sense to me that we're doing this realignment whatever you need to define as far as management or director positions that would be up to you and city manager obviously. But I do think this is a smart move for us just as far as getting the word out about what we're doing and making sure that we have that communication tool in place. So thank you. I just want to clarify that three hundred thirty seven thousand. Thank you. Seeing no additional questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. I've been raising my hand. Councilmember Fleming. Yeah. I just had a question for Mr. Peterson around community engagement around bringing community engagement into zero. And if we've heard any positive negative neutral supportive or otherwise feedback around the change. I'm sorry. I kind of didn't hear half of that. First thing have I heard any positive. Did you conduct any community outreach about moving community engagement into zero. And if so what did you learn. We did not do any outreach on that. Okay. Thank you. Yeah I think you know from a strategic standpoint I think it's the best practice to align resources. And I think it's consistent with most cities throughout the state. To have those those functions integrated as working in collaboration together. All right. Thanks for the information. Thank you. All right. Seeing no additional questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you. Before we move on I would just like to request that councilmember Fleming that you actually put up your zoom hand. So when I look over I can see the zoom hand and you don't have to raise your own hand. That would be helpful. Thank you so much. Yes ma'am. Madam city. Oh. Madam city manager. Thank you. So human resources will be next. Good afternoon. My rogers members of the council. I'm Dominique Blankey. I am the interim human resources director and also your risk manager. All right. So human resources is comprised of two funds. We have general fund and then we have an internal service service fund for risk management. So going over just a screenshot of HR the general fund there was a change of about 33%. And the risk management fund was about a change in 10%. So some of these general fund changes is more for the professional services. The union contracts are opening up this fiscal year. So we allotted some funds toward labor negotiations as we do not have a current labor negotiator. So we had to set aside funds for that. And in addition to that we also have two separate ongoing contracts for $70,000 for other legal needs for employment questions and investigations. In addition we also added about $60,000 and that's to help pay for the employment award ceremony, the employee service awards and the employee appreciation lunch that we put on. And then we're going to move on to the risk management programs. So I'm going to kind of take these ones line item by line item. The risk management like I said it's an internal service fund. So some of these have multiple programs within them. So the administrative staff and supply section there was a change in about 184,000 or 9.4% increase. That goes towards salaries, benefits and the addition of us eliminating a risk management analyst and our senior administrative analyst and then adding two human resources technicians. And those two technicians report more under the benefits. The city health plan. So this is comprised of the city health plans and Teamsters health plans. So the Kaiser plans are EPOs or PPOs and the HMOs. Those saw a slight increase throughout depending on which plans and which programs. In addition to this the renewals for our medical plans are on calendar year versus fiscal year. So we kind of have to project out. So depending on the plans we build a 5% kind of buffer in there or 9% depending on the volatility of the plans. Typically the medical ones for the PERS health we bring in a 9%. But again they also follow the union contract. So what contributions are made by the employee versus what the city is making. And then we go down to the workers compensation line item. There was a slight increase of about 9% or 481,000. So the workers compensation fund is comprised of or how we fund that is based off of the actuary that we receive on claims expected to be paid. In addition to that there's also the GPA so the third party administration administration fees that we pay for that program. And then also that is based off of our self-insured retention as well. I think we have like one self-insured retention head under that which is 500,000. In addition to that the dental and vision we did reduce that for the costing of that went down and then also so we didn't have to assess the apartments because that risk management balance fund supported that. So we were able to reduce that to give some a little bit of a less benefits to the employees or the cost of that to the departments. The benefits still stay the same. Other employee benefits are sort of lumped together. So that's your short-term disability, your long-term disability, and a life, accidental death and dismemberment. All those services are rolled into those. So we saw a slight increase of 9% which dollar-wise it was about $71,000. The liability insurance fund that also saw a slight increase that is made up of two different JPAs and third party administrators. So we have CalTIP which is for our transit authority. So that's one of them. And then the other one is for our liability which is slip, trip, and falls. And that's an increase due to based off of the pool itself. We used to be get redistributions out of our excess but that has, the trending is not there anymore. We could potentially be looking at assessments. So this year they moved from a 80% competency to an 85% competency. So there was that 5% that the JPA members had to bring up in premium. On top of that, there is a base number that they do for the calculation in excess insurance. So the excess insurance basically as a function of payroll. So as your payroll goes up, they charge you, you know, per sense on $100 a payroll. So as our payroll goes up, typically our premium also increases. So that's kind of where we're seeing that difference in the funding of that $640,000. And then our earthquake insurance did remain flat this year. And then property fire insurance, we saw a minimal increase of $8,000 on that. So it's a total risk management fund program change of a 10% overall. All right. So human resources accomplishments. To date we've had 158 new hires and 77 temps. We've done 105 recruitments. We are looking at our managing our workers comp in a different way. So we've been really working hard on having that one-on-one conversation with the employees and really doing reach out. We've looked at safety. We are assessing all the injuries. We're going back to the departments. We're holding meetings. We're looking at trending. We're really trying to contain those costs at a lower level and really get involved in those. Thank you. So with that said, we successfully hired two risk management analysts. One to oversee the workers comp program and another as a safety officer within the city. And those are kind of, well, the safety officer is a new position for the city. It's the risk management analysts, but they're overall safety wide for the city, which is new. We've completed several of the DOT commercial driver program enhancements. We've done comprehensive grant funding, traffic control, training for water parks and TBW. And we've utilized creative recruitment techniques such as bus wraps and tartar getting ads and brochures. And we've partnered with Lawn's team too for outreach on those positions that we're recruiting for. We also implemented a new benefits enrollment system online, which 90% of our staff utilize this year. We transitioned our new stipend benefit administrator for the city wide stipends. We had a huge turnout for our benefits fair this year. That was the most we've seen around 750 employees. We've done a training needs assessment completed organizational wide and we're moving towards implementing those. We also have that three year training plan that came out of that as well. We're looking at HR training and organizational development site. We're looking at a redesign there. And new employee welcome is redesigned and streamlined as well. We went down from three days. I think now we're down to a day and a half and we're looking to eventually make that completely online. And then we're also providing monthly learning aids to the departments. Thank you. Always are the challenges, and again, you'll hear it everywhere, is attracting qualified candidates and then retaining them. Staffing shortages have impacted everybody and we're trying to get back to restoring essential services and quicker response times. Significance requests for coaching and training assistance throughout the organization. And then obviously insurance challenges due to the state of the overall insurance market. It's a hard market right now. We're seeing increases everywhere, even within other JPAs. So I know it's not just us. That is it. Do you guys have any questions? Looking at council to see if there's any questions. Council member step. Just curious how many vacancies over the course of the past year. So I know that we're currently at like a 9.8% vacancy rate, which is about 125 employees. That's total vacancies. How many employees left? I suppose I'm asking retired or otherwise transferred out. I would have to get that number. I don't have that handy. Okay. Thank you. Council member Rogers. Thanks mayor. Talk to me a little bit about the equity priorities that we have and how they're being implemented through the human resources, staffing and budget. So the equity, sorry, I'm not. Can you repeat your question? Yeah, so the council's focus on equity inclusion. We obviously be created a position two years ago. We're actually being integrated into the budget and in the staffing plan that's being presented for the department. Okay. So we are working, thank you. So we are working on recruiting the DEI coordinator position. I believe we are hoping to make an offer at the end of this month. We are also still working with the collaborative and that person's going to head up those initiatives within the department and citywide and kind of do the kickoff for that. And so that's kind of where we're out there. And so we'll be integrating, I assume, some of the recommendations from seed in our structures and practices moving forward once that plan is developed and implemented. Correct, yeah. I'm looking over those policies and procedures, yeah, through the DEI and rewriting and yeah, it's a whole body of work. Excellent. And then the 500,000 that's being allocated for the labor negotiations contractors. One of the things that I've heard every single time we've done bargaining since I've been involved in the city is that our outside contractors drive up the cost of the negotiations because they're paid hourly or based on the scope. When I see a figure that says 500,000, that tells me we're either anticipating a really difficult negotiation or that we're anticipating it will be really expensive to bring in a consultant. So my question is, why not just bring somebody in house? This is one of the few areas where I see contracts that make a lot more sense to me to hire somebody who is solely dedicated to that issue and would still be significantly cheaper than what we're budgeting and you get rid of that accusation from folks that, you know, half a million dollars is oftentimes a lot more than the amount that we're off from our bargaining units when we first sit down at the table. Correct. And so we are looking at, like I said, hiring the deputy director, which is also the labor negotiator within the city. Currently that is vacant for the labor negotiation side. So this is more of an earmark to save that. And of course we are trying to recruit for that position and get that person here. But since the contracts are opening up, we wanted to be prepared and not, you know, chasing the ball at that point. Just in case kind of as a backup plan and this can help offset between, like I said, where we end up between the labor negotiator starting and if the contracts are opening up. Because you have to have time to facilitate those relationships with the bargaining units. And also they may need legal advice. So that's kind of what that contract is in place for, an earmarking. Okay. So the intention is not to both hire somebody whose job is going to be partially at least to lead these negotiations and then also bring out outside counsel? It's probably going to be a hybrid because I think we're going to find that position labor negotiator. I'm not sure how long that's going to take us to fill. That's a hard positions to fill. And like again, we don't want to be behind the ball. And so this is more of a precursor and a marker so that we have the backup should we need it. And then if they need it as well. Okay. I'll just say it gives me a little bit of heartburn to see half a million dollars for a consultant when we have a position that's supposed to do this also. I get it if it's difficult to hire. Yeah. And then also the chief assistant city attorney is also for the labor and the unions for their advice and having that position vacant as well. We have no one to really lean on at this point. Councilman real quick. Yeah, just one quick question. So the risk analyst you hired or the risk specialist you hired for safety. Do they have any sort of certifications like a certified safety management specialist or any sort of OSHA certification? Yes. They have a time. Yes. I have like seven or eight. It was a long list. Yes. Vice mayor McDonald. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. My question is around the HR training and organizational development, the redesign as well as a new employee welcome and redesign. During goal setting and development we talked a lot about how long it was taking from us from the beginning to the end where we actually get somebody in the seat is part of the redesign and some of the funds that are maybe being designated for that. Is that going to help shorten that window from I believe it's between 90 and 120 days from the time we start that process to make sure that we're actually getting folks in the city and in the fold quicker. Yeah, correct. That was kind of some of the harbors that you would get a new employee finally in the seat and they would be gone for three days right for their new employee orientation. So now we've gotten that down to a day and a half and then the goal is to get it down to maybe half day and it all be remote so that throughout their three months probationary period they can get all that training that they mandatory that they do need. I think maybe my question is a little different than my understanding was that from the time we started the process of interviews to actually getting them in a seat not just during that probationary period. Do we have anything going towards that in this budget to help shorten that timeframe so that we don't have folks coming in they're ready to work for us and then they sit at home for three months until we actually can get them out out working. Yeah, so we are looking at that our background person or company that we're looking at that contracts going up so we're looking at alternative that tends to be kind of the sticking point is background is taking a little bit too long even though we're trying to initiate and get things back quicker. So we're going to be looking at different background checking services and try to streamline that and make that a little bit quicker for a turnaround because that can take anywhere from two to three weeks. And so that's really what's hurting as I think we've really worked on trying to do efficiencies within the department from you know interviews to offer letters to the background initiating the background. So we're really looking at processes that way and so we're hoping to improve that with a different background provider. Thank you and thank you for your efforts and I appreciate the redesign of how to onboard folks and making it more streamlined so that we can get them actually doing their job as opposed to taking classes from us and organizing organizational information. So thank you. Thank you. Any additional questions from Council? Seeing none, thank you very much for the presentation and welcome to your new position. Thank you. Madam City Manager. Thank you. Our next department will be Finance. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the Council. This is Alan Alton, the Chief Financial Officer and I will go through this. The finance department by fund, we're made up of two main funds and then two smaller ones. The general fund makes up the bulk of our budget. We came in flat through that and I'll go into that a little bit more in the upcoming slide. The large decrease in the parking fund has to do with deferring projects and I will go into that as well. This just provides you a nice overview of this. We have our pooled investment fund that these are charges for our investment manager that manages our investment portfolio. They manage about $560 million of that portfolio. So these are the costs for that service. And then we have ongoing debt service that we are retiring related to the old redevelopment agency. So if we're looking by program and this mixes funds but we can go through here. So the general administration and I'll hit on the more larger changes here. So far, like I said, our successor agency, those are debt service. The parking services. So this is part of our parking fund and that's the ONM part of it. We kind of break it up into two. So we have the enforcement side and the ONM side. So what we did with the parking services ONM is we held our costs down as low as possible as we've talked about here before. And I'll get to a slide in the future about it. But the parking enterprise fund is challenged to say the least. Still recovering from the COVID pandemic and the changes in parking attitudes and in the downtown. So what we are trying to do, we have a philosophy of trying to hold our costs down as much as possible. And where projects are not needed, we defer those off to another year or we move money from already existing appropriated projects into hit critical needs. So we're kind of doing the everything we can to keep our costs as low as possible in that fund. Financial services makes up of finance reporting and budget and AP and those types of areas. We went down there. That's a net reduction that includes the deletion of an accountant auditor. In order for us to add a payroll supervisor. So what we looked internally was we knew that we needed a payroll supervisor while it's a small group. It's one where the payroll manager really needs to be separate from the actual line group. And it works better to have a supervisor do the direct management of our payroll specialists. Which frees up the payroll manager to do compliance work, labor costing, all of those types of things that really take a lot of the time away from supervisory work. We tried doing having one person do both. It did not work, so we've rectified that. And in order to add that position, we then looked at our accounting and budget area and found that we could move some operations around tasks around and free up an accountant position to be able to eliminate that to offset the costs. Our purchasing and area grew due to just salary and benefits costs increases revenue. So this is what remains of the revenue division. I think in the budget for next year, you won't even see a line item from them. They'll be absorbed up into our administration group. Last year, we did a reorganization where we moved all the water funded operations to the water department. It made more sense to have the actual paying department directly oversee that group instead of going through finance as kind of a go between. What remains is a small group that manages all of our accounts receivable. Basically, any general fund revenue that comes through the city goes through them. So they are what's remaining. The reason why this line item decrease is that when we did the reorganization, we anticipated that there would be more of a need for them to charge time to the water billing group to cover for them. And it turns out that we did not need to do that, so we're decreasing that budget now. And then payroll and benefits, you'll see that we have added the position. That's why that went up and CIP and ONM projects, those are specifically the parking projects that I mentioned before. So this just summarizes what I went through on the other slide and then going into our accomplishments. So, you know, compliance is very important for us. You know, we are happy with the fact that we have produced a clean audit for fiscal year 22. We are also able to manage the quarterly submission of our expenditure reporting with Treasury for our ARPA costs. This has turned out to be a challenging effort to say the least. And I'll get to that in a minute. But to be able to meet those deadlines, it is a cross the city effort with the different program managers. And I want to recognize that they do a lot of work of trying to get the information together. And then we sit down and try to navigate a U.S. Treasury portal that is not fun. But we make that happen. We've also, we've talked a lot about the 115. Those funds have been invested. They are actually, our earnings have been positive there. That's a function of the time when we were able to transfer the money in. So we were, we actually were able to get that fund started when toward the trough of the market correction and have been able to see some gains in that. So we actually are positive in that area. And like we've mentioned before, our goal is to utilize that to maintain the principle that we have, especially in the general fund, but we also set one up in the water fund as well, of maintain their principle and be able to use earnings and interest to offset UAL mitigation or UAL costs going up in the future. We implemented an electronic W2 process. This was the help from our payroll folks and our IT department, which will be hopefully a result in less work for our payroll folks of stuffing W2s and also be more convenient for city staff in general. And then we were able to fill 16 open positions and eight of those we did through internal promotion. So that's also part of our goal is to try to develop from within and poach from other departments wherever possible, which we have done. So moving into our challenges in the finance side. So as I alluded to before, grant management both from the Cal OES side and ARPA and CDBG, all the other ones, but definitely what has come out of the recovery process from the Tubbs Fire is something that has morphed and grown over time. When we had the Tubbs Fire, we had a consultant Ernst and Young help us through that initial process and without them, I don't think we would have been able to do nearly the amount of work that we're currently doing now. And it resulted in a lot of money coming back to the city, which was desperately needed because we spent a lot through that disaster. But over time, there are more hazard mitigation grant programs that come along with those disasters. CDBG was able to carve funds out for our Fire Station 5 rebuild. All of this adds layer to essentially one person in my department that does the grant management through this. They work with all the other departments, but there is essentially one person that has that responsibility of ensuring that we meet our deadlines, get everything in correctly, have all of that information documented and ready for the audits that we will get at some point. So I think internally what we're looking at is how do we develop the infrastructure from a personnel standpoint to be able to manage all those grants. And that kind of goes into the next point here of the continuity of the resources there. Like I said, I started during the Tubbs Fire working on this along with Jose Morales, who is dutifully taking notes behind me. We started that program. He did the lion's share of the work from the finance side. And he has now moved into a different position. We've hired a new person behind him. There are going to be other folks that have either left the city through retirements or will leave the city through retirements before the Tubbs FEMA projects are concluded. And definitely before any external audits happen after that. So being able to figure out a way to have that continuity of staff, internal staff resources is something that we are working on. Jose and team has come up with good procedures, manuals, things like that. Just the basic stuff, but things that really didn't exist. We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants, especially when E&Y left. And to be able to kind of keep all of that documentation there, we are doing a good job presently. But I do think it's a challenge going forward. I do think we're understaffed in that area. Or that we need to look at it a little bit differently in how we do that grant management. And those are things that we need to figure out again. I'll be the first one to tell you. The last thing I want to do is add staff if I can't offset it with some other costs. There are sometimes potentials to offset admin costs with some of these grants. So those are things that we could look at. But other than that, we would want to focus with our internal staff resources that we have and maybe change the duties around to be able to be more efficient, I guess, would be the word. And then the other thing that we need to do is the need for automation in my department, particularly in process improvement. There are a number of things that we do that I remember when I came here almost 25 years ago. We were still doing it the exact same way. A lot of it is paper centric. And we know we need to change that. It takes some time for us to be able to identify it, understand new processes, figure out ways to either automate or make it more efficient, but also cost effective at the same time. So these are some kind of ongoing things that we have. But just initially diving into it, you know, it means pulling people away from their normal assignments to think about how to do those assignments differently when they're really challenged to actually complete the assignments that they're trying to do. So, you know, that's where me and my leadership team kind of come in to try to figure this stuff out. But these are on our short term plans for doing things differently in the department. And moving on to parking. So we're providing a fund summary for you here. And I think Veronica mentioned earlier how some of the enterprise funds are drawing down from their reserves. This is an example of that. So again, this is where we are in the parking enterprise is to understand what the new normal for our revenue is. And right now it's not meeting up with our expenditures. So we are running a deficit. It is considerably lower than the deficit that we ran last year. But again, a lot of that is because we figured out a way to be more cost effective with the expenditures that we are currently doing, meaning shed certain expenditures that we don't need to do, but also to move uncritical needs out. And so I know that at some point we're going to have to do those. The things that are not critical are going to become critical, but we'll figure that out as we get going. Our main thing that we want to do is figure out what the right amount of revenue is and then develop our expenditure budget around for that. Our reserves, or we don't have a reserve on here, and I'm going off the top of my head, but I would guess that it's probably around four-ish million dollars. We will know that more in October. But I have a little bit of room to play there, not a lot. Right now, as we try to stabilize that fund and then come up with new ways of providing that service to the community, we are doing studies to try to figure out what are the best ways of running a parking operation in Santa Rosa, especially post-COVID. Those are things that we will continue to do. And next year, hopefully, we'll be getting closer to a more balanced budget in that area. And then, so for our highlights in the parking fund, we've been working with the Downtown Action Organization to try to provide clear and consistent parking rates. This is something that we've heard loud and clear from them. So some of the things that we've done is that we made the free parking from Small Business Saturday to New Year's Day free going forward. So that is now a permanent, as opposed to a temporary program that we would reevaluate on an annual basis. And we also made the first-hour free in all of our parking garages. And that's also something that helps provide less confusion to folks of not knowing where the garages that have the first-hour free and who don't. So now they all do, and hopefully, we'll result in more parking in those garages. We've, I've mentioned that deferring the non-critical projects to save money and again to try to build reserves wherever possible. We did reorganize our supervisory structure within the department. So we used to have a coordinator that really was the second in command and there wasn't a lot of redundancy or backup for that. So we've gone to a more normal supervisory model that has an operations and a maintenance supervisor that allows to provide some backup and redundancy in the department. And we feel that it's a cost savings and an efficiency booster. And then we did some changes with our parking enforcement officer of eliminating a .5 officer and increasing a .5 parking operations aid to be a full-time FTE. And we felt that that was a better use of those resources. So with that, that should be the end of my deal. And before I go into non-departmental, I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Thanks, Alan. How many FTEs are we devoting to grants management right now? Well, it's a decentralized process. So in my department, I would count myself. So it's really probably one, really, and then one transitioning away. So it's one. And then in other departments, they'll have program managers that will manage either all of their FEMA grants or will have special... They typically go by project for the FEMA grants and also for the ARPA grants. So there may be multiple or all under one, but that's something that I can get back to you. Has the work that Scott and Lana have been doing on additional government grants, has that been affecting the time from your department? No. No. And that's actually really good work. And I think that that's part of the area where we can help with some of the grant management part of incorporating that management part or at least the communication within there could help with that. Look, every grant that comes in is important. And we need to go for those because as I've mentioned before, we have finite resources, right? So we need the grant resources coming in. But they do come in at a cost of the ability to manage those grants and to do the paperwork around there. So these are things that I think that we can... I would want to look internally to try to figure out the best way of doing that grants management and to be able to absorb those costs that come in from getting the additional grants. If that makes sense. It does. I'm just glad you highlighted the issue because it's a critical back end piece and especially as the city does more and more work in the space we're going to need to figure out how to manage it. So thanks for bringing it out. You mentioned automation as well. Am I correctly inferring that we're talking mainly about additional software packages? I'm looking at that, yeah. So currently right now we do a lot of... And I'm focusing more on our... In the remaining revenue groups or revenue and collections section. So we do a lot of that work that's heavily... It's quite the administrative burden. And I know that there is technology that's out there that could ease that burden both for our staff and potentially for the customers that need to pay into it. So those are the things that we're looking at. It's just finding that they're pretty expensive. And so it's whittling that cost down to make it make sense. And to go along with what our current staffing is now and what our future staffing may be in a couple years. I'm glad you're looking at those options. They're needed. I just wanted to shine a spotlight on Brian and his team because they're going to end up in his lap. And I'm assuming we'll be hearing about those in his presentation. But it's necessary to look at those. Final question for me. What's an example of a non-critical parking project? That's a good question. So if we have... Let's say that there is an overlay of a lot or something that we will put money into but we don't need to do right away. We're either building money up for it. That would be clearly one of those. We could push that out, extend the life of the lot or just deal with the lot longer that way. Anything that is critical that comes to like say garage elevators or any of the structural components of a garage those are the things that we act on right away. But it does take us a while to build up money for those but those are the things that we try not to defer off at all. There are other things that may be some software items that we've looked at and there that maybe don't work as well as what we thought. So we shed those and either do it internally or try to find a better package. So it's those types of things. We go through a pretty extensive review of what we can do either through our own maintenance staff or our own ops staff and what we can and then the critical versus again those things that we can push off a year or so. Understood. Thank you. Council Member O'Reilly. Thank you very much. Council Member Stapps told my question about the deferred projects but I will take this opportunity to commend you on the positions filled internally. I think that succession planning and providing an opportunity for upward mobility within our organization is something that is should be of the highest priority for all departments and I just want to commend you for that because while it's not a silver bolt to solve our hiring woes it is something that another tool that we can use to help mitigate a slowdown of our government. So thank you for that. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you Mayor. Thanks Alan. I do have a couple different questions since we're talking about the deferred maintenance. Have we done any cost analysis on the things that we're deferring to say well if we pushed off a year or two is it actually going to cost us more in the end. So and I know that that's typical around some of the things we have pushed off around streets and roads and those types of things and specifically our facilities. So in your department is only the parking garages that you're deferring those maintenance programs with or is it other departments as well. So what I'm just talking about here is strictly with parking and so I yes we that all goes into to the analysis right. And you're right by by holding off a project there's a good chance that we're going to by the time we finally get around to doing it we're going to increase the cost of it but it may also allow us to do other things at that point and it's worth that extra cost. So that kind of all goes through it. For example you know we're scheduled to resurface lot 10 which is the one that's behind it's off of Fifth Street behind Russian River Brewery. So you know we there are opportunities for us to put in electric chargers there electric vehicle chargers. And it's going to take us more time and this is actually one where we've already have the money budgeted for it. So this isn't deferring for a cost savings but this is deferring for potentially having a better grower lot at the long run if we're able to have EV chargers or at least the infrastructure and to be able to put up EV chargers in there after the fact but that takes time and so it moves it out. So yes I would imagine by the time we are we we are ready to go with that we've probably increased the cost as I know yeah we've increased the cost of that by you know an amount and but we are also looking for different types of grants that might be able to come in and and fill that gap that's there or we take the hit in the reserves but hopefully our we've been able to hold cost down in the meantime that has built up our reserves and our revenues start coming in as they were post COVID or pre COVID and that helps bring up our reserves and so all of those things go into that analysis for us to be able to make those types of decisions. So yes we put a lot of effort into that and what makes sense and what doesn't. Thank you and then I know we talked about grants a little bit and I appreciate councilmember steps questions around that. My questions are do you think there's grants that are available to us but because we don't have a staff member that's specifically looking at them from a perspective of all the different parts of the of our organization. I mean wouldn't it be of us to think about having somebody specific on staff that could help not only support the current person that's there but actually be looking for those grants that are available. Right so I mean my focus is primarily on the back end of those grants and how to manage them after we get them so but I believe under the grants committee that we have now that Scott and Lon are working with. We work with a somebody that helps us a consultant that helps us put grants together or some of them to help write those and I know that in the departments they have very qualified subject matter experts that their job is to write grants and to go out and find as much money that can to come into the city so I think from that standpoint we're in pretty good shape my concern was more in the back end of the management process the reporting process not necessarily management. I think that's important as well sometimes you can have a grant for $25,000 and it sounds great but by the time you have staff that actually does all the reporting on it it costs us almost as much because of the management of it. And then the last question I have is under the O and M part of your budget expenditures. What does that stand for exactly? Is that operating and maintaining? It's operations and maintenance. Okay and is that including staff costs? Yes in the case of... Is this in the finance department? I'm sorry I didn't hear exactly. So I'm just wondering if that included the cost of staff and that O and M expenditures? So if it's an O and M project it could but it's mostly just a short term project that is going there if it is O and M as a part of the... Slide 72. Page 72. Oh okay that helps. Yes so those are staff costs I'm sorry yes those are absolutely staff costs. So I'm clear the staff costs are outweighing the revenues and transfers in? Yeah so you're on this page we have our O and M expenditures so that's going to be our salaries, benefits, services and supplies. So all of that comes out to the 5.2 million dollars sorry 5.6 million dollars and then correct the revenue amount that's coming in is 5.2 so the delta ends up being our deficit that we have. So it also could surface and supplies? It's the O and M expenditures I just kind of it's one line that's covering salaries, benefits and all of our services and supplies so those are any contracts, operating supplies, ENR costs, all of those types of non-salary related costs that go to operations. Okay I'm just trying to see is it actually costing us more to operate the parking than it is to actually get the money in from the parking. So that's where I was trying to see is what part of it is salary and benefits and what part of it is actually maintaining our parking garages and the parking areas. Right so the revenue that comes in through this these are all through our parking permits, our parking, our metered parking all of that and that's the revenue that comes in that should support all of the how the business operates and how we maintain all of our infrastructure. So if we don't have enough revenue to support all of our infrastructure and run the program then yeah that's it's not going to last long. So that's the challenge right so then what options do we have at that point? What we are doing is consciously drawing down reserves holding our costs down as much as possible. Drawing down our reserves in order to plug the gap with the hope that parking will return to a level that better supported the operations. If that doesn't happen then we need to look at what our options are after that which is either figuring out how to raise our revenue or cutting our expenditures. Are there any additional questions from council members? Seeing none would you like to continue? Okay this is me again I think I can go through this one way quicker than the last one sorry about that. We have a non-departmental so Veronica and actually Dominique have kind of hit on a lot of these. Non-departmental is an area in the in our budget system that isn't owned by anyone department so it's just out there and we pay a lot of costs that benefit the city as a whole out of it. So in this case we have an overall decrease that is driven by our general fund cost admin that Veronica talked about a little bit before and then we have our pension obligation bond, our fire station capital lease that's fire station five, yes it burned down but we still need to pay the payments on it and then our courthouse square capital lease. Then we have all of our programs that go into this of our general fund insurance and contract services so our general fund insurance that includes both fire and earthquake insurance. Those increase a very small amount but our liability and our auto insurance which did go up more that was what both Veronica and Dominique discussed with the $600,000 increase. Contract services those are appropriations for our sales tax revenue consultant and an audit cost through there that is supported largely by additional sales tax revenue that comes in that more than covers the cost of the audit or of the contract cost. We have our LAFCO payment in there as well. We have payment for the Sonoma County Transportation Authority debt service that I mentioned in the other slide and then our general fund cost allocation, plan cost and again Veronica went into that. We do have our animal shelter payment that's in here. We do expect that increase to go up in 23-24. We budgeted rather conservatively for this but we do expect an increase there. Then we have our county admin fee which is fee for two Sonoma County in connection with property tax allocation and collection and we've increased that to go along with our past trends and then we have our non-program expenditure. This is kind of a catch-all but what that catch-all includes is where we put our vacancy credit. That vacancy credit is about $3 million which represents about 2% of general fund salary and benefits. For the general fund changes, we kind of went over this a lot. Again, increases for the general funds portion of liability firing earthquake insurance, $1.1 million decrease in general fund administration which really just is a negative amount to go along with the positive numbers that are in the other departments. It's an offset. It comes to a zero in our expenditure budget but it's just a way of showing the cost-borne for general admin activities and non-general fund departments. We had to have an offsetting negative somewhere otherwise we would have an over-inflicted budget and then we had $500,000 decrease in non-program salaries and that's again increasing our vacancy credit going from $2.5 million to $3 million. Again, another negative number that we have there. And with that, happy to answer any questions. Are there any questions from Council? Seeing none, thank you very much for that presentation. We'll now hear from Information Technology. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald and the rest of the Council. I appreciate being here. My name is Brian Tickner. I'm the Chief Information Officer for the City and here to present the Information Technology Budget. So IT is an internal service fund which basically means that we recuperate 100% of our costs by charging out to the departments through what's called an IT cost allocation plan. And we have within IT two funds. One's what we call the Information Technology Fund which is our core services around IT infrastructure, software and support. And then our Technology Replacement Fund which is focused specifically on replacements of PCs, laptops and Windows tablets basically. This year we have about an 8.2% increase that we're proposing and this year goes into some of those details that breaks us down by program. So within IT administration, we have about a $102,000 increase. Of that, 18,000 is made up of liability and auto insurance increases. 79,000 is in overall city overhead. That's IT's portion of the city overhead that's all put into the admin key there. And then the remaining 5,000 is around salaries and benefits. For media services and IT GIS services, those increases are all salaries and benefits as well. In IT development, that's our software application services group. So that's a rather large number there, 419,000. What that's made up of is, so our group there is software programmers and application support specialists. We have about 75 in-house developed programs as well as 32 third party softwares like our financial system, our HR payroll, permitting system, our water billing system, those kinds of systems. So of those 32 systems there, we pay in the neighborhood of just over $2 million for support and maintenance and ongoing subscription costs. 226,000 of that $419,000 increases in that area this year. But of the 226,000, 205,000 is specifically around city works, which is our work order system that's recently gone live over a year now. Those costs we've been paying for the last three years is a city, but in the past they've been paid for either by the water department or the water department pooling money from the other departments and paying that. Starting with this budget year, we've pulled all that into the IT cost allocation plan so that it can be more properly allocated. So that 205 of that increases, once again, money we've been paying, but it's now in the IT budget. The remaining 165,000 is around salaries and benefits, including the proposed addition of one new position that I'll talk about in the next slide. IT customer support is also going up, and that is also around salaries and benefits that I'll talk about in the next slide. And then our PC replacement program is salaries and benefits. And then for us, the ONM projects there reflected the 23,179 increases specific to PC costs, the costs of PCs for the replacement program. So that does not include salaries, benefits or anything like that. That's specifically for equipment, and that's about 2%. So I mentioned some position changes coming up. So we have about $456,000 of our increases related to salaries and benefits. Some are around step increases and colas and benefit increases, but others are what we are looking to do as part of a mini reorganization of the department. So I've been appointed the IT CIO for just over a year now. And so during that time, we've really kept a prior position. I was in IT section manager's position vacant so that we could really analyze the organization of the department and figure out what we thought was best going forward. And for that, what we would like to do is eliminate the vacant IT section manager position and add a senior IT tech that we will assign to our help desk. We currently have one person assigned to our help desk that we'll see later. We have close to 11,000 tickets coming in last year. And so we'd like to allocate that as a second level, second tier person for our help desk to help support our city better. And then we have a one FTE IT supervisor that is conditional upon an internal promotion. So earlier Veronica mentioned kind of a multi-year process for this. Part of why the salaries would go up is we want, what we want to do is have a promotional opportunity that would promote somebody into a new position as an IT supervisor, and then we would eliminate their position that they were in. And then we would have that position oversee our application specialists that are supporting these 32 software applications. With that elimination we would basically, so at one point we'd never be using the two salaries. So whoever's in that position now would be using it and then once they're promoted we'd eliminate that other position. And so we would recuperate that and then eliminate the position officially after that to save the funds. We will however, so that's around the reorganization. In addition to that, we have proposed adding one technology application specialist that would be reporting into PED on a daily basis but still part of our IT team. We have one, what's called a TAS in PED today. But due to the volume of work that PED has and the number of technologies they use and are continuing to deploy out and the demands of our public that's using their services, we really need an additional support specialist there and so we're proposing adding a position for that and then I've already discussed the 226 increase in the software. As far as accomplishments go, this past year we did complete the development of a four-year IT strategic plan that aligns with council goals. There's six areas of focus there. We have it around digital services, security that includes physical security as well as cyber security. Around hybrid services, support and maintenance personnel and process as well as governance and accountability. The second item there, we deployed and enhanced online services for internal staff in the community. Some examples there is the My Santa Rosa app that has been live for just over a year now both on the app as well as reporting online. We have over 3,000 issues reported by the public through that application in actually the first 10 months of its use. We have map-based tools that assist with homelessness for our internal staff to view as well as public-facing maps for that. We've also expanded online tools for permit applications and are doing some electronic plan review now both fire as well as planning economic development. We also referred earlier the third bullet point, nearly 10,000 or sorry, nearly 11,000, 10,980 to be specific internal service requests this last year from our employees looking for assistance on various technology issues. We've also spent a lot of time hardening our cybersecurity measures and completing a cybersecurity assessment. We've rolled out in that regard multi-factor authentication citywide. We've upgraded our firewalls. We've upgraded our remote access technologies. We've continued to provide citywide training and we do phishing testing for citywide as well to phishing campaigns to help hone skills and improve our skills there in that area. We also have completed the cybersecurity assessment which is provided as a roadmap and we're currently working on a plan to address the items that have come out of that. The next item we spent about a year ago now but we upgraded this city council chambers for public meetings and broadcasts. We've added some new cameras and some of the monitors here. The broadcast equipment that's down in the media room as well as adding automated closed captioning that's saving us tens of thousands of dollars a year and we're still honing the accuracy there but it is saving us a lot of money as well as offering Spanish translation services so now we're able to broadcast in basically in English as well as a Spanish language that includes captioning at the same time both to YouTube as well as our public TV channels. And then we've also enhanced our in-house built service request system for emergency operation center use which saves us about $22,000 a year there. As far as challenges go, I mentioned cybersecurity it's you know it's really a global issue that continues to expand and become more sophisticated. We spent a lot of time and effort there and we know that we will continue to focus areas there focus our efforts on that. We also as far as challenges go really balancing support and maintenance with new IT projects and so the demand for IT services continues to increase you know to the tune we mentioned you know the 11,000 service request that's up 2,000 from the prior year which is also up 2,000 from the year before that and so part of that I think is coming out of COVID but a lot of it is continuing to increase and we're on pace to probably do could be more than 2,000 this upcoming year as far as an increase goes and then we also are asked to work on a lot of IT related projects which is great that's what we're here for but it's really that same staff that's addressing these 10,000, 11,000 tickets in addition to what last year was 32 new IT projects that could range anywhere from 40 hours to six months worth of work really depending on the scope and what's involved or if it's a full new implementation something like the city work system or some other large systems take you know years plus and then finally the emerging technologies and regulations as far as challenges go we have in addition to regulations that we also that are imposed upon the departments a lot of times we need to improve our technologies to adhere or to conform to those regulations so we have some things like upcoming solar automated solar permit issuances that we have to have live by September working with pet on that we have initiatives around tracking of waste for waste material for construction projects there's some initiatives around email address requirements and website and things like that so in addition to working on these regulations we also have emerging technologies coming out at the same time that we need to stay current on while we're also continuing to support our older technologies or the ones that we implemented previously to try to maximize our investments there and get the most out of those so really we're we're trying to kind of balance all those at the same time which frankly makes IT kind of exciting too but it is a challenge those are the slides I had are there any questions looking at council for any questions council members that have questions not a question so much as a few words of thanks Brian first for advocating so strongly for the IT department no one ever pays attention to IT speaking as someone formerly in the industry so I'm glad you came out here and spoke forcefully it's a difficult job in a complex environment like this with all the applications you have to maintain all the different departments but thank you for focusing specifically on cybersecurity that's something that almost every business doesn't pay enough attention to so I'm glad you really made that a focus of your remarks again just a good work thank you thank you yeah we definitely have a lot of plans in the future we're working on there as well so I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for the phishing emails they definitely keep me on my toes and a little paranoid I may add but at least I'm learning what they are and also to say sorry that I'm probably like a thousand of the additional two thousand of the tickets that are put in but we do have everything working correctly now so thank you very much and thank you very much for the presentation thank you councilman vice mayor McDonald thank you mayor I just have a question on the new IT person that you'll be hiring will that help support those eleven thousand requests that are coming in and as Mayor Rogers thank you for a thousand of her request I probably have the other nine thousand so so thank you your staff is always really professional and extremely patient for those of us who maybe aren't from an IT background so I appreciate that and then that was my main thing was wanting to make sure that those tickets were being handled because we know when somebody can't work whether it's remotely or in office if they had that problem that that needs to be taken care of just to clarify there so we have one gentleman who works the help desk that's his full-time job he isn't necessarily completing eleven thousand tickets but he's the one responsible for making sure that he'll complete roughly half of those and then the other portion goes to the rest of the staff in IT to address and so it's really a full team effort there but what we're expecting to happen as we add this tier two person is that a lot of those tickets instead of pulling our staff from working on the projects that they're working on to go do a support ticket it'll get escalated to a tier two person that can hopefully address say at least another half of those tickets and so we're hoping to add some efficiencies internally by with that position and thank you for making us a little bit more automated and looking at ways that we can do that to streamline our process thank you for all that work thanks alright seeing no additional questions again thank you very much for the presentation our last presentation of the day is from housing and community services good afternoon I'm Megan Bassenger director of housing and community services and with me is Kate Goldfine our administrative services officer so we're going to start with Kate walking through the first couple of slides and then I'll resume the presentation yes good afternoon mayor and council members the 2324 housing and community services budget is 80.4 million the vast majority of that is federal funding and we also have a state grant as Veronica noted earlier HCS has a very small general fund presence it's just two programs that Megan will discuss shortly mobile home rent stabilization fund increased up to $264,000 and that's due to more administrative funding for that program the homeless services operations fund was in the city manager's office last year and the 301 nearly 302,000 there represents the portion of outside agencies who fund a portion of Sam Jones Hall operations our homeless shelter operations we also have ARPA federal stimulus funding of 4.1 million that was also in the city manager's office last year and has moved to housing and community services there are three programs within that homeless programs our existing ongoing programs homeless services administration and the secure family fund youth immigration attorney administration for housing and community services is a little under 1.6 million it is nearly flat and is mostly comprised of citywide overhead and the tiny reduction you see there was just a tiny reduction in our overhead our rental assistance budget is at 41.4 million that is 100 percent federally funded for our housing voucher programs HUD has increased both our rental assistance allowance and our admin allowance due to expected expenditure increases and then finally the housing trust budget is at 32.6 million that is much higher than normal that is made up of 15 different funding sources that are federal, local and state the vast majority of that increase is the 20.7 million IIG grant infill infrastructure state grant that Veronica discussed earlier and that's offset by reduced funding in a few other areas okay many HCS programs correspond to the funds table so I'm going to discuss the differences here and then answer any questions in this slide community services programs is one program that is our tenant landlord services legal aid contract which is being partly funded by one time grant money which Megan will discuss in a moment the biggest difference between this slide and the first slide is the housing trust and CIP and O&M projects so that 20.7 million infill infrastructure grant is budgeted in an O&M project which is nearly the which is the reason for the giant increase there and then in the housing trust the second line the reduction there is because we have less funding available this year primarily from loan repayments and fiscal year 2223 was a particularly high year for loan repayments 2324 is more of a normal year and now I will turn it back over to Megan to discuss program we have the secure family funds grant 50,000 of this comes from the general fund and the remaining 60,000 comes from the CDBG CARES Act which is a COVID resource that was allocated to the city and this will be the final trancha funding that we are able to put towards I'm sorry I jumped to legal aid to the legal aid contract so there is the secure family fund at 50,000 and then legal aid which is a combination of CARES Act and then the general fund resource as Kate touched on we have an increase in the mobile home fund these are the fees that are collected as a result of the mobile home grant control ordinance so each space is charged a monthly fee this goes into a fund to assist with administration of the program as you may recall we have a fairly robust fund balance and that has been the result of staff vacancies and then a limited administrative needs with the changes to the ordinance and increased inquiries from the mobile home population we've had much more administrative demand for the program in the past nearly six months for the homeless services operation as Kate noted we have 301,000 this comes from the community foundation which has made annual contributions to the operation of Sam Jones hall homeless shelter since it opened in 2005 and this is also coupled with funding from the county of Sonoma as council member Rogers asked during the city manager's budget there was a $350,000 line item that was shown there and that was a result of funding that was put towards rehab needs at Sam Jones hall so we have a project that we are anticipating that we'll replace the roof and do additional work at the facility was open in 2005 and is in need of some rehabilitation and then finally on this slide we have the ARPA funds Veronica noted that we shifted our fiscal year our administrative and programmatic needs from the general fund and real property transfer tax to ARPA so we have our service contracts and then administration of the program coming out of this fund next as Kate noted we have a very minor reduction in housing administration and this is essentially the general clearing house for the various expenses of the department because we have so many funds that we are charging into at the federal state level we put them all into one location and then to be them to the appropriate programs we also have an increase in our rental assistance program we're anticipating $41.4 million in the upcoming fiscal year this is the funding that is used to provide housing assistance to over 2,000 households on a monthly basis so this is the rental assistance that's made directly to landlords in our community this is the administrative funding to support the staff that performs this program and then as was noted by Veronica's presentation and Kate the most noteworthy funding increase for housing and community services is in the housing trust earlier in the year we were we being the city were awarded $20.7 million in IIG which is infill infrastructure for six projects located within downtown Santa Rosa and then improvements to Martin Luther King Park so these funds will be applied to those projects when they begin construction and we've also had a decrease in our loan repayment we had one particular project that had a significant pay down but we've also seen the projects have reduced cash flow so our loan repayment this year is down about a million dollars and then finally the change to the housing trust is a reallocation of staff time rent control ordinance now to touch on some of the accomplishments in housing and community services in this current year our homeless services team implemented the citywide encampment team this is a proactive group of city staff from various departments that work to address the impacts of encampments throughout the city council adopted the homeless strategic plan back in November and we are working on the first year implementation plan this is a five year strategic plan to help the city guide our homeless services decisions in March we also completed the first year of service for the safe parking program this provides 50 spaces at a city facility on the west side of Santa Rosa year to date we've served over 148 people 87 have exited and we've had about a 23% housing rate so I think it's a fairly successful program that we are able to stand up for the community and then another noteworthy accomplishment that again touches on the coordination between city departments is in prior years we switched from a paper waiting list system for our housing choice voucher program to electronic so thanks to the IT department and their staffing and programming resources we were able to have over 7200 individuals apply for the housing choice voucher waiting list electronically and that's how we are pivoting the program in the future it's much more efficient for staff and then it's very useful for the potential participants the emergency housing voucher program which is again a program that came out of the COVID era provided the city with 131 vouchers specifically for homeless individuals since this slide was prepared we have leased up 85 individuals and that's currently subs over the course of the program we've served 90 households but for a variety of reasons some have left the program already we have individuals who are still searching for housing units and we continue to receive referrals from the Sonoma County continuum of care so the individuals for this program must be homeless and must be referred to us through a head designated continuum of care some of the most noteworthy efforts that the department and the city have had in the past few years have been the CDBG DR disaster recovery affordable housing projects we have the Linda Tunis senior apartments which were completed this winter this was the first statewide disaster recovery apartment complex it's 26 units in rink and valley and that is in service and serving senior households we have three projects that are currently under construction we have the Caritas homes which is located in downtown Santa Rosa former site of the journeys and mobile home park and that is two phases that will be completing soon we have 93 units and then another 37 I believe that are anticipating a summer completion and then we have the Canary at railroad square which is 129 units over in railroad square that's currently under construction and the fifth and final project is in the process of completing its financing so I'm hopeful that in the coming months we'll see that project begin construction and then the final development accomplishment I'd like to note is the former Bennett Valley senior center so this was a project started back in 2018 between housing and community services and the real estate division to surplus the city site we were able to enter into an ENA and sell it to the developer recently it has started construction as a 60 plus unit affordable housing complex and again this is a compilation of various departments resources and also funding from the renewal enterprise district to get this project moving forward now looking at some of our challenges going forward we continue to work with our housing choice voucher families to identify units and get them leased up right now it's currently about four months from the time of vouchers issued to a time that they're able to lease up I think as we have several hundred units under construction we might see reduced time between issuance and lease up for those households we as noted in the previous slide we have many projects that were able to access our affordable housing resources in the past couple years as we return to a normal funding rate we'll see our housing funds available between five and seven million going forward so we'll need to learn to work within our existing means and look for ways to address our affordable housing needs in advanced projects with fewer resources and then finally as I noted the homeless services division is currently funded by ARPA so when the ARPA funds are exhausted and we shift back to the general fund evaluating our programs and how we continue forward with the current level of service and that impact on the general fund and that concludes our presentation and we'd be happy to answer any questions looking at council to see if there are any questions vice mayor McDonald thank you Megan I just want to actually commend doing your team on the well done work that we've done in the city as far as all of the housing when we were back east and I know I mentioned it before in my comments really we do an exemplary job and so that goes to you and your entire team on everything we're able to do and secure funding from the federal government so I just want to thank you and hope that with that last visit we'll see an increase in funding apparently the grant part is difficult but thanks to Alan and all of you to be able to mitigate doing those grants and those funds I really just want to say thank you thank you very much any additional questions or comments seeing none thank you very much for your presentation and we will we will recess a study session we will recess this study session until tomorrow May 10th at which time we will reconvene at 9am the council will reconvene today for our regular session but see you guys tomorrow or see you guys at 4pm which is the time that we will reconvene thank you so much we will now start our regularly scheduled meeting seeing a quorum Madam City Clerk may you please take the roll thank you Mayor Councilmember Stapp Councilmember Rogers Councilmember Okrepke Councilmember Fleming here Councilmember Alvarez Vice Mayor McDonald Mayor Rogers present oh actually we will now move to item 5 report on a study session oh we will not have a report on this study session moving to item 6 proclamations we have 2 proclamations today we have 6.1 and 6.2 our first will be read by Councilmember Okrepke thank you very much Madam Mayor this is a very important proclamation because it is something that is very important to our community it is for May being affordable housing month so whereas affordable housing is good for business people and the quality of life in the City of Santa Rosa and whereas our community thrives when all families have a place to call home and whereas the City of Santa Rosa and Housing Authority of the City of Santa Rosa have made affordable housing an important goal to be achieved by providing barriers to the construction and rehabilitation process and whereas an adequate supply of housing types is necessary throughout the City in order to meet the needs of all economic segments of the City's population as well as all demographic segments of the City of Santa Rosa's residents and whereas the City of Santa Rosa is committed to stable and affordable housing for all its residents and whereas affordable housing month is a time to recommit to our mission and justice in housing and whereas our thriving community is encouraged to build local support and recognize affordable housing month which supports the sharing of best practices opportunities and solutions to provide affordable housing that is the right of all individuals now therefore be it resolved that I, Natalie Rogers, Mayor of the City of Santa Rosa on behalf of the entire City Council do hereby proclaim the month of May 2023 to be affordable housing month and City Council supports citywide efforts in developing and sustaining affordable housing for the residents of Santa Rosa Thank you Council Member Okrepke I would like to invite the representatives that are here to receive this proclamation to the podium to make a public comment if you would like Good afternoon Mayor Rogers and members of Council I'm Megan Bassinger the Director of Housing and Community Services and with me is Jeff Owen the Chair of the Housing Authority we would just like to thank the Council for acknowledging affordable housing month and recognize the efforts of our staff in the Home of Services Division our Rental Assistance Division and our Housing Trust for the efforts that they undergo on a daily basis to make sure that the citizens of Santa Rosa have adequate access to affordable housing and to follow up with Megan Jeff Owen the Chair of the Housing Authority the City of Santa Rosa, Madam Mayor and the rest of the Council thank you for the proclamation and how important this is and what Megan does in her department is to do an excellent job in trying to meet the needs of the community as well as meeting the city's reading numbers for the year and moving forward there's been a lot of progress as you drive around town and see a lot of construction going on right now and how many units are being provided more than any I've seen in 30 years I've lived in the city of Santa Rosa so thank you very much Thank you Madam City Clerk can you please facilitate a public comment on item 6.1 if you are in the chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card please make your way to the podium if you are participating via Zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have 3 minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period the first public comment will be from Dwayne DeWitt I'm from the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group I wanted to thank you folks and thank Mr. Ores and the staff for working on these efforts for more affordable housing in not just Santa Rosa but the greater community around it one of the things that's most important to keep in mind that for over 50 years since Santa Rosa's had a housing authority that residential rental housing has been the most important and strongest need it hasn't been met and I congratulate these folks because they're looking to get funding and doing the things they can to bring that funding in what's really important though is you elected leaders when you make these proclamations and you state to staff this is something that's important to you that you have some oversight on it you probably don't know the past history but the housing advocacy group came together over 25 years ago because the housing wasn't getting done even though the housing authority was getting funding one of the things that happens is when residential rental housing is planned along the way it gets switched over to being ownership and that doesn't help our rental stock this has happened on a number of projects including recently and one of the things that in the past was most problematic is there would not be a covenant put in place to keep the housing affordable that was built as a matter of fact at Bellevue Ranch those developers were able to put off their 62 units of affordable rental units that had been approved switch them over to be taken on by the city of Santa Rosa to provide them that was done with Burbank Housing and it was switched into ownership self-help build and then there weren't any long-term requirements put in there to keep it affordable so I applaud you the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group applauded you again but it really needs to come from you folks directing staff the city manager the director of the housing authority the homeless services people that residential rental is what's really going to solve your housing crisis which later in this meeting you're going to again say there's a homeless crisis so if you want to help those folks they got to have places to rent and please make that your primary goal especially when you give out proclamations and that'll be a wonderful thing thank you again for all your hard work and I think the term they use for it is covenants that you have to put those into writing shall and must those words must be used thank you thank you seeing no one else in the chamber wishing to provide public comment there are no hands being raised via zoom and there were no pre-recorded public comments mayor so we have no additional public comment Megan and Jeff would you like no can we invite you down to take a picture with the council I see some other staff that work really really hard and diligently with our unhoused population as well as getting people housed so if they can come down to this would be awesome thank you so much thank you we will now move to our second proclamation which will be read by councilmember rogers thank you mayor so our proclamation is for bike to work month and day whereas the bicycle is a healthy convenient financially and environmentally sound form of transportation and an excellent tool for recreation and enjoyment of santa rosa's scenic beauty local attractions and friendly neighborhoods and whereas santa rosa's streets and trails attract bicyclists each year providing economic health transportation tourism and scenic benefits and whereas creating a bicycling friendly community has been shown to improve citizens health well-being and quality of life grow the economy attract tourism improving safety supporting student learning reducing pollution congestion and wear and tear on our streets and roads and whereas since 2001 the sonoma county bicycle coalition has been promoting bicycling for transportation and recreation through education encouragement and advocacy and whereas the sonoma county bicycle coalition the league of American bicyclists the metropolitan transportation commission and jurisdictions throughout the bay area will be promoting bicycling during the month of may 2023 and whereas throughout the month of may the residents of santa rosa and its visitors can experience the joys of bicycling through free education programs challenges and events organized by these groups therefore be it resolved that natalie rogers mayor of the city of santa rosa on behalf of the entire city council do hereby proclaim may 2023 as bike to work month and day and recognize the sonoma county bicycle coalition and commends the institution for its contributions to the community thank you so much council member rogers i would like to invite the representatives that will be receiving this proclamation comment at the podium at this time after that comment or those comments are made madam city clerk can you please facilitate public comment thank you i'm eris weaver the executive director of the sonoma county bicycle coalition i think a very fitting that when i read the agenda for today's meeting that both housing and bicycling were on the same agenda because transportation and housing and our land use decisions are so inextricably twined there are so many ways so many things one can say about why bicycling is good for you for the planet but i think what we don't talk about often enough is the fact that bicycling just makes people happy the other day on my commute home i was cataloging all the moments of joy that i had experienced that day in my 20 mile round trip from startling a rabbit on the side of pedaloom a hell road just inside the city limits to riding the three blocks from crooks coffee to my office with a cup of coffee in my hand which makes me inexplicably happy for no good reason and my route at the end to i make sure that i end on one of the creek paths because the trees and the ducks and people walking their dogs reduce any stress i may have acquired from my work day or from bicycling on pedaloom a hell road i experienced the joy on my daily commute do you if not go to bikecinema.org and check out all the different activities that we are doing throughout the month to help encourage people to give it a try and we will help you find the joy thank you thank you we are now taking public comment on item 6.2 if you are in the chamber and would like to comment but i have not yet provided a speaker card please make your way to the podium waiting via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have 3 minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period may or i see no hands being raised via zoom and no one approaching the podium in the council chamber and we receive no advance public comments on this item thank you i would like to invite you down to take a picture with the council and i heard some cheering so if you are here for this proclamation you can come on down too thank you we will move to item 7 madam city manager thank you mayor item 7.1 is a community empowerment plan update good afternoon madam mayor, madam vice mayor and members of the council, i am daniel gardunio violence prevention program manager just a couple of quick updates for you regarding the community empowerment plan first one is synco de mayo so as you all have probably heard we hosted the synco de mayo event on friday may 5th in roseland it was a fantastic event very well attended despite the rain i am estimating at least 2,000 people throughout the course of the 4-5 hours that we were out there violence prevention was joined by several different departments including the city manager's office communications, recreation, water transportation and public works senator was the police department and fire and i also want to give a huge shout out to our finance team who helped us with last minute payments the day before the event making this event possible for us we were also joined by 13 community partners who were out there tabling with us and the mary lou lowrider patrol car we also had 3 bands and a parade with dancing horses it was a really beautiful event we have plenty of pictures that we are working on getting together so we will hopefully be able to show those to you and hopefully we can do the same next year with a little bit more time to plan next update is regarding the cruising ordinance i will be back here on May 23rd with the repeal of santa rosa's cruising ordinance and just to give you a bit of a background on this the state legislature just recently passed ab 436 which removes authorization from local jurisdictions to enact anti-cruising ordinances and also lifts the prohibition on lowrider vehicles and state law so that will help move that along when we bring it to council finally our community engagement coordinator position is now vacant but we are in the process of recruiting for that position applications can be found at srcity.org and the deadline to apply is May 25th and that is my update thank you Madam city clerk may you please public comment we are now taking public comment on item 7.1 if you are in the council chamber it would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have 3 minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period the first public comment will be provided by dwing-duit dwing-duit i'm from roseland mcgardenio a month ago i was here to talk about how there was difficulties with graffiti in our areas and she pointed me to the right person to be able to get paint and supplies so that we could have people in the community doing their own graffiti removal if you will as a matter of fact at a veterans meeting we were talking with some people and we came up with an acronym for it graffiti removal veterans in neighborhoods and these are the guys that used to be cruising back in the day before it got outlawed here in santa rosa so we'll be grooving we'll be picking up some graffiti type things and now we'll be cruising too with that in mind i think you should be able to put single to mile down here at courthouse square now it's big enough it's an event we should be right in the center of town it should be the kind of thing where everybody gets to share in this with plenty of planning and really making it a really wide and big event once it gets too big for courthouse square we go to the fairgrounds i want this thing to grow to be one of the biggest things happening and with that in mind it's really something you didn't know about back in the day about the cruising ordinance but i think we should relate it to you santa rosa was one of the first to prohibit cruising 50, well 45 years ago basically because young people would come downtown here and they would cruise on 4th street up and down it was called tulen in 4th street and they would cruise on mendicino avenue after they said no cruising on 4th street over to mendicino after it went bad there on mendicino and the ordinances are passed the signs are up guess where those folks came to roseland and we were ok with it because sabastopol road it brings business and you know you folks want to revitalize downtown you should be looking into this because now this weekend monster truck shows going on over at the fairgrounds lots of people like those things after that you got lots of things going on with car shows peggy sue first you got veterans vietnam veterans and am vets putting on a car show so i know you want to do a switch over and get people riding in the electric you know and do their thing and people on bicycles you got taco tuesday for bicycle cruisers so that's a good thing but keep in mind there's a lot of people that still like to drive their cars and there what would you call that historical now as a matter of fact it's an antique car and it's a car so it's a part of our heritage let's embrace it and enjoy it thank you again to mrs. for helping us with graffiti removal thank you mr. no hands raised via zoom there are no additional people making their way to the podiums and there was no advance public comment received mayor thank you eight city manager and city attorneys report thank you mayor have no updates this evening and thank you madam mayor i also have no updates this afternoon thank you thank you item nine statements of extension by council members vice mayor thank you mayor i'll be abstaining from item 16.1 please item 10 council members reports are there any council members that would like to report out council member stat oh hold on vice mayor mcdonnell may you please state why it is that you will be abstaining from 16.1 yes thank you for that this is new to me so item 16.1 that subdivision is going in near my mother's house and since i'm part owner in that house now due to her passing i need to abstain from that thank you council members stat just a few quick updates from committee meetings the last two weeks back on the 27th of april there was a meeting of the ag and open space advisory committee with the main item of business being the fuel management up on settle mountain then later that week there was excuse me monday the following week there was a meeting of the WACTAC the water advisory committee i sat in on behalf of the mayor with thanks to jennifer burr for her assistance and the main items from that the main news from that meeting was first of all a very positive report about water supply conditions in the county as everyone is aware our reservoirs are full and we're feeling good about our water conditions there was an update on the cinema county water local hazard mitigation plan update all the work that's being done especially in the riparian areas to make them more resilient to various kinds of ecological disasters that can occur drought earthquake et cetera and perhaps most pertinent to this committee our mayor rogers was nominated to be nominated to the planning forum for the planning committee for the russian river water forum i hope you're aware of that mayor that your name was up but it was unanimous that you're the vice chair of that new very important committee as it looks at the potter dam project and all the water issues up in the southern part of mendicino northern part of cinema county that's going to be an interesting committee to serve on thank you for doing that then on friday last week it was a busy day there was the generation housing summit where there was a large contingent from the city including many in this room who were there for the part two of that it was a four hour four hour conference focused on how we do more with housing in this area and again it was nice to see so many faces from the city and then after that or the day after that it was synco to mile and again as daniel gave the summary that was just a fantastic event it was a lot of fun to be there on that day also last friday it was the barrel auction for cinema county vintners and i mentioned that only because healdsburg mayor ariel kelly did a really nice job with her proclamation at that event and i was glad for her in healdsburg but i also want to make sure that santa rosa is at the table next time around with the cinema county vintners events so we can make that happen in the future and i think i think that's it for me so thank you thank you councilmember alvarez thank you madam mayor i attended posolenight and corazones de culturas the rosa university prep and the rosen creek elementary corazones de culturas hearts of cultures and cultures of hearts and the young adults there were doing were representing different cultures of this world through both cuisine and artifacts so it was very good to see like a worldly view that is being learned in our schools for posolenight it was a little bit more flavorful but i can tell you they had some of the best water that actually could have beat any one of our taco trucks on sabasa road i don't know who made it we did hold the open government task force on the fourth alongside my colleagues both the krepke and fleming and it's the first time that we met for this subcommittee we contemplated the purpose and the direction of the open government subcommittee we agreed that it was best if i met as chair with our mayor to discuss both goals and how we could support her to achieve them whatever she wishes the city center was moving forward the mayor and i have sat and we've agreed that we should be discussing this issue a bit further so we'll meet again once the budget talks have concluded at that point i will schedule an open government meeting hopefully we'll discuss again both the direction of the open government task force lastly, or almost lastly i have to say, was a single arrival event for many years we've been dealing with the fires the pandemic and roselin specifically has not had an opportunity to be itself and this was a reminder of normalcy as we try to figure out what the new norm is and i gotta thank the city of san rosa the countless departments the countless staff members who really produce an event that normally takes an entire year to be able to do this in such a short amount of time rain did not stop the people it's a representation of what single the mile is vibrancy the will to overcome unsurmountable obstacles it was represented that day and i have to thank each and every one of the people that made it possible from our police chief to our sister city manager to daniel who just left us a little bit ago and again the countless amount of staff i know people appreciate it and i'm still hearing about it was raining but it did not matter it was the day in the rain dancing in the rain we could have said right that's probably the song that was missing out of there the repertoire i know today's the ninth and we won't be here for mother's day but nonetheless i'll thank you to all the moms out there who make me not a voice so thank you thank you councilmember alberas councilmember rogersth thank you mayor and councilmember let's also talk because there were a number of things on the open government committee agenda that i think are worthwhile that we can move forward so how about you and i meet to talk about that as well now that i'm no longer on the committee a couple of things that came up over the last two weeks first we had our power meeting this last thursday like most of our regional entities it's budget season so we were able to go through the budget and talk about the programs that scp scp has been standing up the long and the short the spoiler of it is that when utility rates are high makes it a lot easier to budget it just makes it harder on our constituents so we really looked at how do we keep those rates as low as possible still below bundled PG&E service going forward and how do we reinvest in community programs that are going to help us to achieve some clean powers goals we had scpa yesterday again working on our budget which is usually a fairly quick conversation it's four separate budgets actually we mostly talked about a potential meeting that is coming up next week or not a potential meeting a meeting that is coming up next week to discuss the potential for tolling on highway 37 we haven't talked about it a lot around the dais but council members should pay attention to the impact that that conversation is going to have on our community particularly when you look at the commuter patterns that are going across it is both an interim project that's short term as well as a longer term project that we're trying to achieve with 37 to make sure that it doesn't sink as somebody put it pretty succinctly yesterday it's in a marsh the road is sinking while climate change is causing water to rise and so if 37 ends up under water that's a huge impact to our community obviously the initial project is about half of a billion dollars and that's not the long term project which I think is pegged at around ten billion dollars so a lot of work to happen around that they did announce that priority development areas are currently under reconsideration so if the city was interested in either applying for additional priority development areas or changing the lines for our existing ones we have two in the city limits roseland and downtown that now is the time for us to engage on that process and then finally we had the executive director susanne smith announced her retirement it's a huge loss for the organization she was the first employee that they ever hired at scta in 1997 she's been there for 26 years and when we talk about leaving big shoes to fill she literally stood up the agency created rcpa has done a lot for that organization last but not least we had a call for the national league of cities to talk through specific legislation that's working its way through congress most notably is this stalemate or this argument around the debt ceiling national league of cities is working to put together a blog that they should have launched by next week where they look at the current house proposal and the actual impact that it'll have on local communities on our housing priorities on our homelessness priorities I'll make sure that when that goes out we circulate that to council members and make it available to the public as well I think it's really illustrative and then finally just to piggyback on our resolution one of the things we discussed at length yesterday was the love to ride net program that scta has launched or is working with we also here at the city of santa rosa have that program available where folks can compete with one another during bike month to see who bikes most of their trips and encourage one another again it's love to ride net I would encourage council members to sign up the only department right now that signed up is the department of transportation and public works so I signed up as an employee of that so that I could compete with yuri and rachel and I look forward to working with them to make sure that the numbers do the same council member o'crapke thank you very much on April 27th I was able to attend the 2021 employee services awards it's one of the favorite events of mine so far in this capacities to be able to celebrate the milestones that our employees have reached in service to the city as well as celebrate the retirements of so many great people. On May 3rd at lafko sort of a small thing happened with big repercussions we authorized a contract to conduct a disadvantaged unincorporated community or duck inventory and mapping study which is important since other lafko have traditionally hewed closely to a definition of the territories having as few as even 12 registered voters and so with a granular approach we'll be able to have a better idea of what constitutes a duck what ducks are located next to areas of interest for municipalities and with the continuing conversations around annexation by multiple municipalities that are obviously affected by ducks it's important that we have this happen so that we have all of our ducks in a row that's for you other than that the last thing I was able to attend opening day for future leaders of American gridiron which is a youth flag football organization that they play out at SRJC it's children as young as 5 learning the skills of football and socialization and team sports in a flag football environment with little to no contact so it's a great organization for our youth councilmember Fleming thank you mayor one of the benefits of going last is that most of you have said a lot of the things that we've done together and and so I only have a couple of minor updates one is that yesterday the runal enterprise district met and hold on one second please can you turn the sound off of that thank you dear the runal enterprise district met yesterday and I would like to authorize the RFP for filling Michelle Whitman or our current but outgoing executive directors position and if anybody's interested the position can be found on renewalenterprisedistrict.org and I invite you to share that with your networks far and wide so that we have a robust candidate pool and the other thing is this morning the board of supervisors has made a full term as your representative and the representative of the Sonoma County cities to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and I endeavour to be of great service to all of you and your constituents that's all from me thank you councilmember Fleming vice mayor McDonald thank you just a couple of updates thank you mayor I also met with Michelle Whitman and she said she would like to share some fun so that as an alternate I would be updated on what that position entails and so I just want to thank her for all the work that they've been able to do and I know that she's also leaving and moving to a new position and so I appreciate councilmember Fleming actually announcing to us where that information could be found but it was very enlightening and I appreciate that it was called a place at the table it took place in runner park and there was two gentlemen that shared their stories one of them was an immigrant and he was able to get his citizenship and what Catholic Charities has done to support that in their immigration department as well as another gentleman who has been able to get housing through Catholic Charities where they came from being homeless on the street to finding housing at Caritas village and so I just want to say thank you to both of them for sharing their really heartfelt heartwarming stories about what we do and just to say thank you to Catholic Charities for all the work that they do for the community I was really honored to be able to go to that event and I would encourage all of our city council members to go so that you can see the impact of the way that we help fund these programs and how it affects people in our community and then last but not least I also was at the employee service awards dinner and was thrilled to be the Vanna for the night that handed out the certificates and took all the pictures with everyone and was able to speak on behalf of city council so thank you to all of our employees for their dedication to the city and because of all of you you make Santa Rosa a place we love to work and live and play in so thank you thank you I will just say that on 4 27 Corazon de Cultura Cultura that I was also able to attend that event and speak to Rosalind University High School students about success and what success looks like and how it is constantly developing for all of us and so they just have to find out what it looks like for them because I did not have the answer but I did give them a few pointers so that was a lot of fun to experience their booths I do want to point out that our community engagement is a wonderful job at taking the children to make sure that they had everything they needed for their booths and also providing lunch for them so thank you very much to that team later on that day I was able to attend the long term financial policy and audit subcommittee special meeting where we were provided with a presentation for the third quarter financial update and long range to what we were presented a little earlier in our study session and last but not least I actually saved the best for last April 3rd through May 6th 2023 will be or was the 54th annual professional municipal clerks week so I would just like to acknowledge Dina Manis here our permanent Madam City Clerk welcome her and thank her for everything that she does thank you Mayor so with that we will move on to item 11 and that will be oh we did not we didn't do public comment we didn't do public comment so Dina you made me so excited I almost tried to give you a break so you didn't have to do public comment Madam City Clerk may you please conduct public comment thank you Mayor we are now taking public comment on item 10 if you are in the council chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have 3 minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period I see no hands being raised via zoom no one making their way to the podiums alright thank you now we will move on to item 11 and we have one set of minutes for approval that would be two sets of minutes for approval that would be March 9th and 10th 2023 council are there any corrections seeing none Madam City Clerk can you please facilitate public comment on 11.1 thank you we are now taking public comments on item 11.1 if you are in council chamber would like to make a comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have 3 minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period Mayor I see no one moving towards the podium in council chamber and no hands being raised on this item additionally we had no advanced public comments thank you item 12 Madam City Clerk can you please read the consent items thank you Mayor item 12.1 resolution state of good repair program authorization to apply for the annual formula allocation and project approval item 12.2 resolution transportation development act article 4 in state transit assistance annual formula allocation claims submittal item 12.3 resolution split bid award issuance of blanket purchase orders for chemicals for city swimming pools to NOR systems international LLC and SCP distributors LLC DBA Lincoln aquatics item 12.4 resolution support for senate bill 55 umberg and item 12.5 resolution extension of proclamation of local homeless emergency thank you councilor are there any questions seeing none vice mayor mcdonald you can make the motion we'll take public comment thank you I move items 12.1 through 12.5 Madam City Clerk may you please conduct public comment can I get the second oh second thank you we are now taking public comments on item 12 the consent calendar in council chamber and would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star 9 you will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period the first public comment from council chamber will be dwayne dewitt please go ahead mr. dewitt thank you my name is dwayne dewitt I'm from the sonoma county housing advocacy group at discussions on sunday the local congregation it was discussed about how church parking lots could be something utilized in a positive manner not just for safe parking but for tiny homes one of the things that gets talked about often is how you need to have a spot to lay your head at night where you're dry and you're warm to be able to get out of the funk of being homeless right now tiny homes are actually available through national organizations such as amazon for under $5,000 and one of the dilemmas that we've faced here locally is the costs to get a small structure together for people who are in need you have a safe parking situation that the city is doing over by the city utility yard and that's working and the county has a spot a tent city over by the county services buildings and that's working these types of activities work making a proclamation and saying we have the emergency has been a positive thing because that at least keeps people aware that this problem is not being solved but I'm hoping that you folks will take on the faith based community there are a number of large churches that have really big parking lots and those parking lots only get used on Sunday or maybe another day of the week when they have an event the idea of safe parking should be embraced by a number of faiths I personally deal with Christianity and that's one of the Christian tenants is that you are going to reach out and help your neighbor so it was just mentioned earlier what a great job Catholic Charities is doing and Caritas is coming forward and that's with public money so we've got a public private partnership in a way going forward these models could go forward and help solve this homeless problem keep in mind there's a number of intractable situations where people still stay on the street so it's this dilemma if you will about those long term homeless that don't want to be in an institutionalized setting per se but they will take their own tent or their own tiny home someplace maybe to park a car also so this is something that you folks could have discussions with the faith based communities and solve some of these issues thank you for the proclamation thank you seeing no additional people in council chamber wishing to provide public comment on consent there are no hands being raised via zoom and there were no pre-recorded public comments mayor thank you we have a motion made by vice mayor mcdonnell in a second by councilmember okrepe madam city clerk can you please call the vote councilmember step councilmember rogers councilmember okrepe councilmember fleming councilmember alvarez vice mayor mcdonnell mayor rogers let the record show that the consent calendar passed unanimously being as though it is not five o'clock we will take a short break until five o'clock at which time we will have our first public comment on non-agenda matters thank you it is five o'clock and we will be resuming our meeting madam city clerk okay I'll call the roll the first let's see here councilmember step councilmember rogers councilmember okrepe councilmember fleming councilmember alvarez vice mayor mcdonnell mayor rogers let the record show all councilmembers are present thank you go to item 16 which is our written communications and then go back up to item 13 item 16 is a written communication on stone bridge subdivision phase one and the information is provided madam city clerk can you please conduct public comment we are now taking public comment on item 16.1 if you are in council chamber and would like to comment on 16.1 but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine you will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period may I am seeing no one approach the podium for 16.1 there are no hands being raised and no advance comments on this item thank you now we will proceed with item 13 our public comment on non-agenda matters this will be our sole opportunity for the public to give comment on non-agenda matters so madam city clerk can you please conduct public comment thank you mayor we are now taking public comments on item 13 non-agenda matters this is a 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 if you have not provided your speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium if you are participating via zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine again you will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period the first public comment will be from alexa forester followed by dwayne dwitt please go ahead alexa thanks good evening is this on can you hear me okay thank you city council I'm alexa forester mom jc instructor I'm alexa forester we have recognizes Santa Rosa tomorrow you will meet your budget proposals for the upcoming year including transportation and public works and as you do I hope you will keep in mind that a significant portion of Santa Rosa residents want protected and connected bike routes unfortunately not everyone who cares about this issue can be present at meetings like these so today I bring you some of their represented. It was hung in Bertolini Hall for two hours during our fifth annual climate action night a few weeks ago. Obviously I'm not going to read all of these post-it notes to you. I am going to email you a picture with transcribed notes on them so you can read them at your leisure later. But tonight I just want to share a handful of these comments so you can get a sense of what people are saying. Zeke Baker says quote I ride my bike with my three young kids ages seven seven and nine. We have had many close calls with motorists. For safety survival and a better future we need bike-friendly city a bike-friendly city now. A student Hannah says I would love to bike everywhere but a huge concern of mine is safety. Sustainable alternatives to driving a car are only possible if they are accessible and safe. We need better bike infrastructure. Another student Nima writes dear Santa Rosa City council members I want more bikeable paths so that kids and people who can't drive can have a sustainable mode of transportation. Thank you. D banger writes bikeable cities are healthier more attractive places to live and visit less congested with traffic and more community-oriented. Sylvia Langen wrote I like to have a safe I'd like to have a safe path to ride bikes with my son. And finally from an unsigned anonymous commenter one of my favorites. Come on Santa Rosa I'm trying a bike here. In short when you consider how to spend funds in the coming year and beyond I hope you will remember that thousands of Santa Rosans want to use bikes for transportation but they are waiting for you the city to provide the streetscape that will make traveling by bike less scary and more safe. Please prioritize investments in low stress bike infrastructure in the coming years and beyond. Thank you. Thank you the next public comment will be provided by Dwayne DeWitt followed by Micah Reyes. Hello my name is Dwayne DeWitt I'm from Roseland and I'm glad that you've taken on the new approach of having public comments at 5 p.m. there was a long time where they were at 4 and it precluded a lot of people being able to participate. I don't know if you've had the opportunity to look back in the records but in the 1990s the Sonoma County grand jury released a report it was basically pointing out that most public meetings of governmental agencies, jurisdictional agencies and other types of bodies were being held at times and places inconvenient to the public to be able to participate. For the longest time these situations were ignored until the shooting of Andy Lopez and then after that occurred there was a push to have an open government task force due to some situations that occurred here at City Hall. I'm very glad that it was mentioned earlier in reports that the open government task force will be staying alive and that there's a new approach. I'm hoping that one of the things you'll do is go back through and make sure and underline a lot of the recommendations that were made. As a participant at the meetings in the original hearings at that time one of the things discussed was that you folks elected officials would reach out more to the community to actually represent the community find out what community members wanted. Now I see a lot of young people here and I'm hoping they're going to stand up and talk about what they want so that us older folks now known as elders in some communities can actually help to do things that they would like for their future. The taxes that are being paid now need to make it better for them in the future. I stopped riding a bicycle because it got so unsafe here and that's not the way I'd like it to be. These folks need to be safe. I can see what they're talking about. Tomorrow during the public comment on the budget I'll put in comments about that. One of the things that I'm hoping through all of this that goes on here in these meetings is that you elected officials reach out not just to what you call your stakeholders. Those are people who got money in the game if you will and they're trying to get money from you but reach out to these young people and hear what it is that's going to make life better for them. What they would like to see in open government. I believe you're doing it with having these hybrid meetings. Please keep them going keep the zoom happening and in person for sure. Step on up folks. Thank you Mr. DeWitt. The next public comment will be from Micah followed by Isabella. And Isabella if you can go to the other podium so we'll just rotate. Thank you. My name is Micah Reyes. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here. I've never participated in a city council meeting before so this is certainly exciting. So I'm here as a SRJC student that is asking the city to invest in low stress bike infrastructure. I think it's important because I want people to be able to make decisions that are beneficial for our local environment as well as their personal health and I don't view this as something that is particularly financially or labor intensive so it doesn't seem like very high risk to me. Consistent exercise though in terms of our personal health is really important and can radically reduce the risk of heart disease high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes which I do have members of my immediate family who do suffer from. And I think it is pretty hard for people to make these kind of decisions about their personal health when they have to compromise their safety to be able to do so. So once again I think it's important for decisions regarding health to be promoted by our cities schools as well as importantly to this our infrastructure. Thank you. Thank you Micah. The next public comment will be from Isabella followed by Bernadette and when you do approach the mic and the podiums and it is your turn to speak please make sure you come pretty close to the microphone so we can hear you in council chamber and for the public record recording. Thank you. Please go ahead Isabella. Bella I am a student at the SRJC and I'm here today to show my support for the city investing and making the streets of Santa Rosa safe for bikers. This would result in less traffic and healthy residents. I have two younger siblings who love to ride their bike but they feel restrained to you know the park and they you know ask ask us if they can go on the streets and we just you know they're unable to. This would benefit our children and also the many bikers who already reside in Sonoma County. Thank you. Thank you Isabella. The next public comment will be provided by Bernadette followed by Nancy. Code enforcement is a joke. For 16 months the non-hosted STR next to me advertised it was six veterans and booked the hotel to the maximum capacity. According to the assessor's record it's a four-bever home. My neighbors and I went back and forth with the city's code enforcement during the same 16 months period that the city was assisting the applicant and despite numerous complaints by neighbors for noise disruption at all hours of the night over occupancy by overnight guests and building code violations this operator in good standing was allowed to do whatever they please with little to no penalty. They were coached to resubmit plans after 16 months even though they provided false and misleading statements on their application. They were awarded a non-hosted STR permit. It is absolute insanity to live next to a non-hosted short-term rental and call the hotline call the managers and basically manage the hotel. If we call the police they tell us to call the hotline. If we call the hotline we wait for a call back. If we call the manager they alert the guests that the neighbors are complaining and we get yelled at, cursed at, flipped off. Is any of that a violation? I can assure you it is not. The neighbors call for over occupancy. We call for cars racing up and down the street looking for the hotel for noise and disruptions but we are told that none of these things can be proven so they are not a violation. At the city planning meeting a host stated that he was has successfully hosted over 600 guests at his STR. How would any of you feel if this was a house next to you and your family with six absolute strangers coming and going? The city of Santa Rosa needs to eliminate non-hosted STRs from residential zoning. We are not NIMBs. We are residents that do not want non- conforming transient housing next to us. Why are we the members of the community that send our kids to school here, volunteer, donate and vote here, forced to live next to transient occupancy hotels? The only truth in tourism is investors of these STRs have many options to change their business models into full-time housing or to 1031 exchange into like properties in commercial zoning. When did the needs of a few override the needs of the many? Thank you for your time. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Nancy followed by Jose. Thank you. Mary Rogers and the council members. Thank you for opportunity to address this afternoon. My name is Nancy Wong. Me and my family living Santa Rosa for 46 years. I hope you won't consider me say that I'm speaking actually it's not my for myself for benefit of over 2,000 resident of Santa Rosa who respond to the two city survey on the short-term rentals. Speaking to my neighbors I'm drawing from our responsible for this survey. This overwhelming concern draw down our responsibility. Nobody I believe that including each of you nobody wants to live next to the non-hosting short-term rentals. The resident of Santa Rosa do not support the non-host short-term rental with our resident neighborhoods and more especially we ask when we short-term rentals allow the two-third of our answer we have close to 40% against the non-host only 15% they say it's okay. The one thing I really like to see is why our city council we allow the non-hosted short-term rental in the residential area. You made our residential toxic every weekend we are nervous because we don't know who's gonna show off this short-term rentals house party destroy the the peace the neighborhood we cannot go out anymore particularly for myself I work under the city council advisor for 12 years I had to go out to reach all this the neighbors we had to know each other now turn to our residential for the non-hosted short-term hotel I think it we should limit non-hosting short rentals please consider a I don't want our over thousand some residents in the Rosa to feel toxic to living in our own residential area please remove all the non-host short rental all the residential area move to the commercial area thank you thank you the next public comment will be from Jose thank you city council for allowing us to offer our information in our opinion which is in las gracias ayuntamiento por permitir nuestra información you have heard claims about how much of an economic benefit short-term rentals are for our local economy let's examine that claim surveys have shown that up to 98% of the visitors who utilize non-hosted short-term rentals will still visit the same area even if they were unable to stay in a short-term rental that is consistent with common sense which says most people decide where they wish to go and then decide on which accommodations they will use not the other way around other surveys have shown that the existence of short-term rentals do not in in none of themselves increase the amount of tourism in our area they only serve as an alternate form of transient accommodations they take business away from the more traditional lodging facilities such as hotels motels and resorts so even if we had a no short-term rentals the vast majority of visitors would still eat at our restaurants tour and tour and visit our wineries and shop in our retail stores in short they wouldn't do the same things they came here to do in the first place even if there's they were staying in one of our hotels motels or resorts so eliminating a short-term rental would not significantly impact the economic benefit of tourism on the other hand it would add another economic benefit eliminating a short-term rental would make that home available to house permanent residents either through a long-term lease or home ownership that family would come with its own set of economic benefits for our community they would work in our community attend our schools volunteer and contribute to our local charities vote in our local elections and utilize all those services used by permanent residents and not by visitors such as grocery stores dry cleaners hardware stores car washes gas stations CPAs and attorneys taking these factors into account we would argue that greater economic benefit to our community would come from allowing all our visitors to make use of those traditional accommodations that do not create a burden on our residential areas and allowing all short-term rentals to revert to their original purpose providing housing for permanent residents this can be accomplished by eliminating all non hosted short-term rentals from our residential neighborhoods we implore you to make this decision for the economic betterment of our community again thank you for listening muchísimas gracias thank you see no one else in council chamber wishing to provide public comment on non-agenda matters there are no hands being raised via zoom and there were no prerecorded public comments mayor thank you seeing no additional items on the agenda we will now adjourn the meeting see you all tomorrow for the completion of our study session thank you so much