Sausalito City Council Meeting

Meeting Transcript

Time	Speaker	Text
00:00:03.54	Heidi Scoble	Audio is up, video is up. all of our participants. Wait a second for them to come in. Good afternoon, Mayor Hoffman and council members. This meeting is being held pursuant to section three of executive order N-29-20 issued by Governor Newsom on March 17th, 2020. and the most recent executive order adopted on June 11th, 2021. And all members are joining this meeting telephonically through zoom. And this meeting is being broadcast live on the city's website.
00:00:28.58	Mike Lang	AND ALSO,
00:00:35.35	Jill Hoffman	Thank you, Madam Clerk. I will now call the meeting to order. And would you please take the roll? Thank you.
00:00:42.08	Heidi Scoble	Councilmember Sobieski?
00:00:43.47	Ian Sobieski	here.
00:00:44.50	Heidi Scoble	Councilmember Blaustein? here. Councilmember Cleveland Knowles. Thank you. Vice Mayor Kelman. near Hoffman. here.
00:00:53.52	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:00:54.08	Heidi Scoble	All members are present and we have a quorum.
00:00:56.81	Jill Hoffman	Thank you very much. We have one item on our agenda today. It is item 1A, fiscal year 2021-2022 budget review. and may I have a motion to approve you So moved. Second.
00:01:11.68	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
00:01:11.72	Heidi Scoble	Thank you.
00:01:11.82	Janelle Kellman	Yeah.
00:01:12.04	Heidi Scoble	Thank you.
00:01:13.91	Jill Hoffman	Madam Clerk, can you please call the roll?
00:01:16.02	Heidi Scoble	Thank you. Councilmember Sobieski.
00:01:18.18	Ian Sobieski	Yes.
00:01:19.60	Heidi Scoble	Council member Blaustein. Yes. Council member Cleveland Knowles. Vice Mayor Kellman? Yes. Mayor Hoffman. Thank you.
00:01:28.52	Jill Hoffman	Yeah.
00:01:28.59	Heidi Scoble	Yes.
00:01:28.96	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Thank you very much. I will now, we will now move on to item one and the one and only item on our agenda. the fiscal year 2021-2022 budget review and the presentation will be given by your interim finance director, Charlie Francis. Thank you.
00:01:45.57	Charlie Francis	Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, City Council for meeting today on this important Topics, city council direction to staff to prepare the fiscal year 21-22 budget. of. I'm just going to. Let's go to the calendar really quick and show that we're on item number 12, the special city council meeting on June 14th. with the remaining items left in adopting the budget being a city council meeting On June 22nd. along with the public hearing first to consider the budget. The expected outcome from today would be to give clear and final direction to staff to prepare that fiscal year 21-22 budget for for the city council to consider and adopt on June 22nd to stay in line with the budget calendar. Kind of the presentation that I have prepared today starts with just reviewing the revised budget, reviewing some of the budget options that has been before the city council and the city council finance committee in previous sessions, go through a review of each of the department budgets, review the CIP projects. And then at that point, Madam Mayor, if you want to open up for public comment, that would be a good time. And then to wrap it up with city council discussion and direction. And of course, along the way, I just encourage the whole city council to stop me at any point in the presentation and ask questions so that we, before we move on, we have clarity on each section.
00:03:17.74	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thank you, oh sorry, go ahead, Carly.
00:03:20.81	Charlie Francis	Does that sound like Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. So let's start with the first one, which is the revised proposed budget. So the revised proposed budget that's before you this afternoon is what I believe that I heard as a consensus from the city council at the first city council meeting where you reviewed the city manager proposed budget, there was city council discussion and kind of soft direction to staff to prepare a presentation that looked at returning, gradually returning the building department and the community development department to their levels of service, as well as the library and the recreation department to their pre-COVID levels of service. you along with a. what we're already experiencing and that's a gradual return of revenues and our economic condition in the community so when we In the past city council meeting, I also made the correction that was brought up of adjusting the salaries to be in line with the memorandums of understanding with the bargaining groups. And there were some other minor adjustments to some line items, not material in nature. And that results in a general fund, proposed deficit of $1.453 million. So we have a beginning fund balance of 7.6, budgeted revenues of 20.6 million budget expenses of little over 22 million. that change in fund balance is 1.453. which give us an ending fund balance of $6.2 million, which is almost 35% of our expenditures, which is a very healthy fund balance and far exceeds our current reserve policies of 10%, 5% respectively for emergency and stabilization, so a total of 15%. The other funds, our special revenue funds, are making the appropriate transfers into the capital projects fund and other types of expenditures. Our debt service funds are being budgeted to cover all of our general obligation and other debt service. requirements. Our enterprise funds are set, especially our sewer fund, based on their sewer rates and use of the revenue bonds for construction of capital. And then our internal services funds are being funded based on the policy of the City Council for OPEB and pension. trust contributions. kind of summarize that we along the way we considered three primary scenarios. And let me define those. The post-COVID scenario, this first one we're looking at in the three charts is, continuation of a level of service as the budget was adopted after the current budget was adopted after COVID had hit the economy. And the gradual return assumes that we're going to be gradually returning both levels of service as well as revenues to the conditions that existed before COVID hit, and that's the last level pre-COVID. Now when you have, three scenarios like that. you can actually end up with 27 different scenarios, right? Because you can, actually.
00:06:48.91	Charlie Francis	Come over here. We have under the for human resources, we have a post covid, a gradual turn and a pre covid scenario for operation and maintenance. We have those three and for revenue. We have those have those three. So in total, there's a total like twenty seven, three times, three times three. types of scenarios So three primary, which is post COVID gradual return or pre COVID and then secondary, those three scenarios applied to each. And I structured it that way to comply with the city council direction at a very, very early City Council meeting. that said that we would like to be able to mix and match departments to different scenarios. And that's how we came up with this with this chart. Well, Along with those scenarios then, there's some one-time budgeted expenses. Within the budget, there included a $325,000 proposed appropriation for the Economic Development Advisory Committee request for economic stimulus money. there's approximately one million and sixty thousand dollars for planning study including the housing element. And then there's a $750,000 six month contract for outsourced financial management with an additional 600,000 optional six month extension if the council so chooses. along with one-time budgeted revenues. We're budgeting revenues of $1,690,000 from the America Rescue Plan funds. As we covered in the previous Council meeting, Finance Committee meeting, we confirmed that amount of money with the State of California, and staff has submitted all the required forms and documents so that we'll make sure that we receive that money. That money comes in two tranches. We expect half of the money to be distributed to the city within the next couple of weeks. And then the second tranche will come before June of 2021 or 2022. There's a transfer of 750,000 from MLK to offset partially the Interfund advance between the two funds. And then Uh, whereas there's, every year there's an evaluation for measure O money of what is the economic need and how much should be distributed to the CIP fund. And this year that evaluation resulted in using all of the measure O money to accelerate the gradual return to pre COVID levels of service. So I'm gonna pause there and see if there's any questions from the city council
00:09:14.19	Mike Lang	Thank you.
00:09:19.69	Mike Lang	Thank you.
00:09:19.83	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I'm sorry.
00:09:20.03	Melissa Blaustein	So,
00:09:20.06	Susan Cleveland Knowles	No.
00:09:20.28	Mike Lang	Yeah.
00:09:20.50	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
00:09:20.69	Mike Lang	Buzz.
00:09:21.02	Melissa Blaustein	there and see if there's
00:09:24.43	Charlie Francis	the revised proposed to the world.
00:09:27.34	Melissa Blaustein	I had a quick question, Charlie, and thank you so much for your hard work on this. I really appreciate it, and thank you to the Finance Committee members for your hard work. as well. I noticed one thing that was brought up by Mayor Hoffman at the Finance Committee meeting that she and I have both been working on is the potential for a percentage of the American Rescue Funds to go towards the homelessness fund outreach and I don't see that in the one-time budgeted expenses. Is that something that is going to be potentially considered later or is it which is not part of this proposed budget.
00:09:56.38	Charlie Francis	So it is included in the budget. After the last meeting, I went in and it is included in this number right up here. I didn't mention it as a significant one-time expense because it's only $40,000, but it is in the budget, yes.
00:10:13.10	Melissa Blaustein	Okay, fantastic, thank you.
00:10:17.62	Jill Hoffman	I thought I heard maybe Council Member Sobieski had a question or maybe I misheard that.
00:10:22.57	Ian Sobieski	I was only pointing out to Charlie that Melissa's hand was up because I didn't know he could see it, but he paused to take questions. So sorry for the interruption.
00:10:28.74	Jill Hoffman	Yeah. I'll call on people that talk. I can see their hands. So anyway, but thank you for jumping in there. I was just waiting for Charlie to pause. So yes, I do see that Councilmember Cleveland Knowles has her hand up.
00:10:40.35	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I'm great. Thank you, Mayor. So Charlie, I... In the COVID recovery scenarios, and maybe you're going to get to this later, but under Um, library. Does that, that includes two library librarian position and is one of those, Children's Librarian. We've been getting a lot of correspondence on that topic.
00:11:06.26	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
00:11:06.27	Unknown	Okay.
00:11:08.75	Charlie Francis	Thank you. Here we go. Children's Librarian.
00:11:14.39	Susan Cleveland Knowles	So that is included in the COVID recovery number that you have.
00:11:19.05	Charlie Francis	It is. Yes, it is.
00:11:20.84	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Great, thanks. Maybe we can talk about this later. I know we had a lot of questions at our last council member of council meeting about what activities would be represented in the COVID recovery. recreation department.
00:11:35.63	Charlie Francis	Yes, we're going to be covering that in the department reviews.
00:11:38.57	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Okay, good. Thank you.
00:11:41.68	Jill Hoffman	OK, no further questions at this point. We'll just let Charlie resume. All right. I'm not seeing any hands, so go ahead, turn.
00:11:48.24	Charlie Francis	Thank you, Mayor. So some of the other options that the city council has been presented and talked about at both the council and the city council finance committee level were other activities that the city council could consider to balance the budget. One would be to direct staff to pursue the education process of of what could happen if we issued pension obligation bonds. The preliminary analysis shows that we could have an annual savings of $750,000. or the city could not do pension obligation bonds, but could use some of the Section 115 trust pension fund money to pay off what's called the police side fund, which is one of the amortization bases within our unfunded liability. And that would result in $400,000 annual savings. Now that side fund will be paid off in three years, and that's a 400,000 reduction in up. and UAL costs forever, but there's still three years left. And if we paid it off now, of approximately 1.2 million dollars that would leave about 1.31 million dollars still in the pension obligation trust the pension trust fund and it would immediately result in four hundred thousand dollars savings towards the budget Another, so those two are one or the other. because if you do number one, number two automatically happens. But if we didn't do pension obligation bonds, number two is another option to reduce our pension costs. The third option here, and in fact, I probably should just number them to make it easier. would be to Just like you can take money and put it into a Section 115 trust fund, and then that Section 115 trust buys securities, equities, bonds, et cetera, it could also buy real estate. But the other option is rather than put money into the Section 115 trust, we could actually put an income-producing asset into the Section 115 trust. And when you do that, the unfunded liability would dissipate and that would obviate the need for a $300,000 annual contribution into the OPEB trust fund, section 115 trust fund. So that would be another option that the city could pursue to reduce its annual costs. And finally, the police will have had a vacant position for the past year and have not filled it. And they, as part of the COVID reduction strategy, and they have an upcoming vacancy that they could also freeze for the year. And those two vacant positions could save the city about $250,000 in the proposed budget that I presented earlier. And then, of course, there's always the opportunity to monetize assets that we have, for example, city owned right away, city owned buildings, city owned properties. So, But those are other options you can consider.
00:14:52.79	Jill Hoffman	Those are other. Sorry, Director Francis. Council member Blaustein has her hand up, I guess,
00:15:00.04	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:15:00.11	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:15:00.16	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:15:00.21	Jill Hoffman	Amen.
00:15:00.90	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:15:00.95	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:15:01.00	Melissa Blaustein	I just on these options at the finance committee meeting, Vice Mayor Kalman had mentioned potentially having a, longer follow-up conversations specifically on the pension obligations and our options there and pursuing the budget as adopted now but still being able to move forward with that, that plan would be reflected here. We could have further conversation about this and potentially take action. later. I just want to confirm that that was
00:15:24.98	Charlie Francis	We did and I actually set aside a small amount of money for a professional services firm to come in and walk through a series of four workshops with the city council to get educate us on how pension obligation bonds work and what savings we might be able to achieve.
00:15:43.17	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:15:43.19	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:15:43.26	Melissa Blaustein	MS.
00:15:43.97	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:15:44.03	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you so much.
00:15:45.12	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, thanks, Charlie. So let me follow up on that real quick, because I think it was either the vice mayor or myself that were talking about a separate meeting just for pensions and to discuss that. Would we also have John Bartell come in, our actuary that's given us presentations in the past and give us a position on the past past, present, and future of our pension
00:16:08.72	Charlie Francis	I did set aside money in the budget for Bartell or an actuary to come in and give us presentations on past, present, future.
00:16:18.02	Jill Hoffman	Okay. Great, thanks. Okay, and then we could... once we get that picture we could make those decisions going forward that would also potentially positively affect our budget.
00:16:30.22	Charlie Francis	Absolutely, yes.
00:16:31.18	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks for that. Um,
00:16:35.28	Charlie Francis	Curly.
00:16:35.81	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, I appreciate that.
00:16:35.83	Chris Zapata	Thank you. Thank you.
00:16:38.27	Jill Hoffman	Okay, go ahead. I think Council Member Blassing. Nope, never mind. Go ahead. Go ahead, Charlie.
00:16:45.00	Charlie Francis	Okay, if no further questions, let's start reviewing each department budget and we'll start with the administration and finance budget. This is being proposed as with the gradual return, which includes the. outsource financial management contract. So there are some minor reorganizations going on where we would, you know, take the um, finance manager position and the assistant city manager position would go away under the gradual return and the outsourced financial management contract comes in. The accounting technician would not be included, but there would be two senior accounting technicians down here along with one senior accountant. There's also a management analyst within the finance department as well as a half-time retired annuitant, which will go away soon when CalPERS lifts its easing of how annuitants can work. And then... And I wanted to mention that in our last presentation, the city manager asked me about number of positions just for finance. And I was very neglected saying that about the management analyst who is one of the most important members of the finance department team. She is the longest tenured and works side by side with me on preparing the budget. So I apologize to her publicly for admitting that. for commuting her from that, answering the city manager's question.
00:18:24.41	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:18:27.96	Jill Hoffman	Would you like to say her name?
00:18:29.85	Charlie Francis	Oh, it's Heather Laporte. She's the one who is. Thank you.
00:18:33.70	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:18:34.52	Charlie Francis	So there's some minor restructuring of positions, but basically the level of service stays the same through all three scenarios, except for the in-house versus outsource financial management. And the Finance Committee asked me to kind of quickly review some history and some current conditions of why this contract with an outsourced financial management firm is necessary. So I wanted to point out some history. Um, I was here as the Administrative Services Director from January 1st of 2009.
00:19:08.88	Unknown	Thank you.
00:19:10.54	Charlie Francis	and all the way through 731 of 2015. up. When I retired then, interim Brian Mora came along and he worked for about four or five months When Melanie came on in January 2016, it was here from August of 2018. up. Brian Moore came back for interim period for a couple of months when then Yulia Carter came in since November 2018. I just want to say with each change in leadership, after I left. there was a loss of institutional knowledge. And that loss of institutional knowledge Oh. manifested in some strategic activities, some tactical activities, some actions that were, had been planned by the city council. They were dropped or just completely missed, uh, or delayed for a significant amount of time. And I'll just give you one example. And that was the missed pension, uh, trust fund payment that was first talked about. towards the end of Melanie's tenure, and wasn't really implemented until sometime after Yulia Carter came on board. This transition in leadership without passing on the baton, if you will, has caused some loss in activities that have been previously planned.
00:20:22.22	Unknown	position.
00:20:31.97	Charlie Francis	We concede that, that that happened. THE PROCESS NOW IS you know, what do we do going forward? What we're doing going forward is proposing this THIS CONTRACT TO to fix some of the activities that are broken Right now, the staffing is very fragile. Other than Heather, who's been here five years, There's no full time positions that have been here longer than a few months. We have we do have Julie. She's a full time accounting technician, but she's on loan. from the Recreation Department to the Finance Department. is adopted with a return to gradual return to recreation activities, Julie goes back. And that leaves us with, a recently hired senior accountant, a part-time contract accounting technician, and our retired annuitant. So, uh, Right now, we have a recruitment going on, anticipating that the city council will adopt the budget as proposed where we will bring on two full-time senior accounting technicians, in as close to July 1st as we can so that we don't have a gap in our staffing and we can quickly get people trained. up. As I mentioned earlier, little institutional knowledge with the kind of turnover that we experienced in the past year. THIS IS NOT A QUESTION OF of what do I do with this? And accountants typically say, well, how did we do it last year? You know... Last year. without institutional knowledge. In many cases, it was done wrong or incorrectly or batch processings were made. So we have a broken system of record within our enterprise resource planning tool, our accounting system, where entries were being batched months after transactions occurred. Transactions were occurring in the bank that weren't being recorded in the system of record, or transactions were system of record but not being recorded in the bank. the, um, transactions were being posted to accounts and not spread to the appropriate accounts. So not only are we working to get staffing up to level, to stop that kind of and we're not going to have bad accounting practices, a process of reconciling all of those accounts. and our retired annuitant and our consultants are, I've got our bank accounts finally reconciled up through May of 2021. So we'll be ready for the interim audit, which begins the first week of July. I mean, these activities, the day-to-day activities are continuing to happen. So we're improving on our ability to provide timely and accurate financial reports. And as we're going to be talking about the budget, we want to, uh, put back in place the strategic financial management planning process. And let me just kind of talk about that real quick. I'm going to put this in. PRESENTATION MODE. this is kind of a history of the city of Sausalito going back to 2002. And in 2009, you notice that Thank you. We're approaching an inflection point. I call these points where expenses are exceeding revenues and inflection point. And we recognize that by doing long-term forecasting, So the city mobilized and analyzed for a strategic financial management process. That led to decisions being made. Some of those decisions then ended up in structural reform. Part of it was having the neighboring fire district annex the city for fire services. That immediately created a million-dollar surplus in the city, as well as our labor cost and reform package, where we put two lower additional steps on our pay scale so that when new people were replaced retiring or resigning people they came in two steps lower than they would have under the old pay structure we closed two of our pension pools for new entrance we closed our open pool and the result of all that not only was financial resiliency It was financial prosperity. This is a period when we could have been if we would have been considering continuing our long term financial planning, we would have seen this inflection point where we were at when COVID hit. So. Um, you know, basically this contract is going to continue this long-term financial planning that had ceased. Thank you. We're going to... provide specific services of restoring the fiscal integrity and trust of the finance department. We will be building timely and accurate financial reports, have compliance with our reporting. long term financial planning and ERP, this is our accounting system, Cloud Migration Works, operating on a system that that I updated in 2012. I kept current through 2015, and it hasn't been kept current since then. We have an old antiquated accounting system that will soon be out of service life, so we need to replace it. So why I initially proposed a one-year contract and we have a six-month with a six-month essential as we're looking for continuity of senior staff. We've got a lot of new staff onboarding and transitioning. Uh, You know? We have processes and plans in place that you noticed in the proposal. We have a timeline for ERP cloud migration And then we have this long-term financial planning process to restore our structural balance. So, and I look at that process of going from July all the way through, you know, June of next year when the city council adopts its next budget. So that's kind of a brief history of why uh, I'm recommending in this budget that the city outsources financial management.
00:26:31.92	Jill Hoffman	Oh, thanks, Charlie. I have, oops, I have a question, but I see council member Cleveland has a question. So go ahead. Councilman.
00:26:37.76	Susan Cleveland Knowles	We've,
00:26:38.19	Jill Hoffman	Go ahead, Mayor. I'll go after you. Thank you.
00:26:40.24	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Mine was...
00:26:40.27	Jill Hoffman	Mine was.
00:26:42.52	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
00:26:42.53	Jill Hoffman	What's that? Oh, go ahead. Okay, sorry, I was talking on you. Well, thanks, Charlie, for that explanation. Yeah. I mean, the dollar amount of the contract obviously is of a concern when we're looking at deficit spending, but... Thank you for that explanation of where we are and why we would be considering something of this magnitude for our financial services. Thank you two for allowing us the flexibility to do it six months and six months. that also gives us additional flexibility with your new process coming in Yep. As we move forward, we'll be able to look at our budget and our position much more readily, I think. And we'll be able to assess at the six-month point where we're at, do I have that right?
00:27:33.04	Charlie Francis	You do have that right. Yes, ma'am.
00:27:34.78	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thanks so much. All right, okay, so Council Member Cleveland Knowles, Thank you.
00:27:40.06	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
00:27:40.09	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:27:40.14	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, just added thanks to those of the Mayor, to both Charlie Francis and Chris Zapata for... coming up with the six month plan. I think this makes a lot of sense and also helps with our immediate budget issues. So thank you for that. And then, Charlie, I just wanted to ask, your presentation is not the same as the one that I downloaded from our agenda. So just as a procedural matter, Could we make sure that this gets uploaded I think this is really helpful background and information for the public. So great presentation, but it's I don't have a lot of these slides, but you're showing us now.
00:28:19.80	Charlie Francis	Thank you, yeah, we'll definitely upload it to the website. And you'll notice I also put page numbers up.
00:28:26.13	Jill Hoffman	it. Thank you. Good luck. Okay, Councilmember Sobieski, go ahead.
00:28:33.54	Ian Sobieski	So thank you, Charlie. Your presentations are always immaculate and thorough. I had a question about the possibility if we don't renew your contract after six months, and whether what we're looking at right now in this slide comprehends ramping up the staff that would be necessary if we don't. um, does it?
00:28:57.72	Charlie Francis	Okay. So, you know, I believe what over the first six months, the city will be saying, are we delivering the services that we want and are we on the right track and do we want to continue? And at that point, if the city does not want to renew the or exercise its option to renew or to continue, then, you know, you would begin the process to recruit for finance director or finance manager.
00:29:23.03	Ian Sobieski	Okay, well, I guess that is an important detail that I think is maybe a point of discussion If we're really to have the option of not renewing your contract, it means building our own internal finance department, which of course would have to have some overlap with your efforts. personally, obviously, could afford the Ferrari, we should buy the Ferrari. But if we choose not to go in this direction, then Chris Zapata is going to have to build and improve his own finance team, finance manager, maybe a director of finance, or some other kind of organization, And that's going to be done within the next six months. And it ought to really be comprehended in this budget so you don't have an upside budget surprise when we're hiring those people overlapping with your efforts. THE END OF Personally, that's a policy decision that kind of needs to be made. soon. and ought to be I think factored into this budget, we can always of course amend our procedure if for example, we don't find anyone we like. or if we shift our thinking about outsourcing our department to use But if we're going to be serious about having Chris about to build his own internal team, then we've got to be serious about budgeting the expenses for those people in this period.
00:30:42.43	Charlie Francis	Thank you. So the Excellent observation and yes, it's something that Chris and I considered when we were putting this together. It's the reason why we budgeted for the full amount of the contract, even though there's only six months in a six months renewal option. And that's because the six month renewal option would cover the cost of putting in the finance director finance manager and some overlap to make sure there's a smooth transition.
00:31:10.24	Ian Sobieski	I guess I'm still confused about the role of budgeting, to be honest, which is, we're going to be doing that we're going to be making a decision not in december about outsourcing, but they're going to be making that decision now or in September or October at the latest if you're going to recruit someone and bring them on board. probably not even October, we're talking September. It's a decision to be made sooner rather than later. And to my mind, the budget is giving authorization to hire such a person. So when are we gonna make that decision? And how is it going to be? How does the budget interact? the possibility of having that. After all, we're budgeting for whatever. the chili cook off ahead of time and the Easter egg hunt is until next year, but it's going to be in our budget. So similarly the, the director of finance or the finance manager that we have to hire should be in our budget now. if we're comprehending the possibility I'm pushing it out.
00:32:06.87	Jill Hoffman	Oh. Let me, I can respond to that a little bit, I think. and then, or Council Member Sylvia, Our city manager, Chris Sapata, if you want to jump in, that's fine too. I think that the thought process from our side was, that the two things would be not going on simultaneously, but the thought is that we're rebuilding our finance department. And the goal is that by the end of this year, that we'll have an independent finance department perhaps calling on Charlie for some services, additional services, but not at the level that this contract anticipates. And if we're at that point at the six month mark, then we at least have that option to consider that in hiring a finance director. And as our interim director said, there was anticipated some overlap and that was budgeted. The savings on the back end of the 600,000 would of course then shipped over to an employee.
00:33:07.06	Ian Sobieski	Okay. I never mind if you call me in, it's just fine. The budget I think we're agreeing on among these three here in the departmental drill down is number two, or number three, I forgot which, but one of those two. And neither one of them has a finance manager, for example. But you just said, I think that the nominal goal is to rebuild our finance department and outsource the occasional finance director role perhaps or some high-level strategic stuff to Charlie. in which case presumably we'd need a finance manager, and yet we don't have one budget So, I'm confused about what we're deciding to do with our finance department.
00:33:46.09	Jill Hoffman	So I think, and again, um, you know, city managers, if you wanna jump in. The goal for this, for the next year, is to get our finance department, rebuild our finance department. And because Charlie's been here for six months and was here before, He had the requisite experience and ability to do that. the count calling on some of the, contractors that we've used in the past. And so it's not a complete new team, It's certainly one of rebuilding our internal team. Charlie understands that that's one of the goals of why he's being retained. I suspect that as we move forward in the next six months, we will be coming back to the city council with reports, recruiting and hiring a finance manager is the job of the city manager and building a new finance department is the job of the new city manager. And one of his many jobs, I have to say. So, We're just going to see how we move through this process, but I certainly take take your comments as valid comments. And thank you for letting me sort of provide some additional information.
00:34:52.97	Ian Sobieski	So one last question and I see Cleveland, Council Member, Cleveland knows how's hers, but my follow-up would only be, am I to understand then that even though it's not gonna be in our budget for a finance manager explicitly, we are allowing Chris Zapata to recruit one in the next six months. if he so chooses.
00:35:14.30	Jill Hoffman	I think that that's certainly certainly something that was anticipated by this budget and something that we've discussed. Go ahead, Council Member Flavio Knowles, do you have a question?
00:35:26.69	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, just to add on, I mean, as I understand the current, budget in front of us and the current structure. It provides maximum flexibility. TO OUR CITY MANAGER TO WEIGH THE OPTIONS BETWEEN NOW AND THE END OF THE SIX MONTH PERIOD so that we can renew our contract with Charlie at the six month period for the $600,000 of the second half of his contract, if that's the best option. OR THE CITY MANAGER CAN RAMP UP working with Charlie and get a new finance team in place, and then we would not be beholden to continue the six month contract with Charlie and his farm so that we are giving the city manager the maximum. or he has negotiated with Charlie the maximum flexibility to evaluate over the next couple months. and figure out the direction that works best. for the rest of the year. Is that, I mean, that's my understanding of these numbers and the proposal. that.
00:36:23.50	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. That was the goal. That's the goal. And I would suspect that, I would suspect that We will be discussing this ongoing at the Finance Committee. And when it comes to the point where we need to start making, you know, some additional updates to the council, that will come back to the council, either via... the city manager update or another finance committee. update or a special meeting or something. Something along those lines. But the idea is, yeah, to keep messaging this with the council and the residents as we move forward. It's not going to be easy, but this is the path we chose, or we developed as the best path forward. Thank you.
00:37:05.91	Ian Sobieski	Thank you. I just think it's really important to underline what Susan Cleveland-Noll said, and just to reiterate to make sure I heard it right, and also to make sure that consensus is underlined, What we're agreeing to then is really the bottom line spend, for example, for this department of 1.44 $5 million and giving our city manager latitude about how to spend it within the personnel lines that we see. uh, And that could involve potentially extending Charlie's contract, hiring people that are, even if they aren't budgeted per se as a line item. in this, and that's an important flexibility to underline that we're not Pigeon-hole that line items specifying how this spend is going to be spent
00:37:52.06	Jill Hoffman	Yes, I think that's a good summary. I don't know. Chris, I see you're on the line. or your
00:37:58.46	Chris Zapata	Yeah, Mayor, Council, I just wanted to kind of close the loop on Council member Sobieski's question. The idea of not having position budgeted is noted, but the important thing is to have the funding to pay for a position and if you get the right person to come in and create this in-house team that you need, because as I see it, and as Charlie and I have discussed, You know, there's a lot of front end work that needs to be done. Year-end closeout and audit start, mid-year kind of stuff. And so we're going to need some time to ramp up. and we're gonna need the flexibility in the following six months to, if we have our team in place, come back to the council, you have budgeted the appropriation in terms of the entire contract that is for Virtual Gov, which is about 1.35 million. So as the mayor mentioned, if $600,000 is spent in the second part of the fiscal year, that's what you would draw from to hire these positions or this position. And my anticipation would be that it would be something that we would shoot for a transition period in November, December and start anew in in January and you know there wouldn't be a full savings of $600,000 but there would be some savings that would be significant in my mind. As was mentioned earlier, you have a patchwork team in place right now that's a consultant a retired annuitant, a part-time, and a transfer from another department, and a new person, so it's really important to keep virtual gov in place for six months and allow for the building recruiting and vetting of a group that will meet the needs of the organization, the council, and the community. And if we don't do it by November, shame on us.
00:39:48.10	Jill Hoffman	Okay, any other questions on this subject or the presentation or? ANYTHING. I think, I'm sorry. So any other issues with the budget that anybody wants to discuss? I think Charlie's finished with this presentation.
00:40:02.15	Melissa Blaustein	We're not gonna go department by department,
00:40:04.26	Jill Hoffman	I think so, sorry. Okay.
00:40:06.12	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:40:06.25	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:40:08.74	Charlie Francis	Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council.
00:40:09.75	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
00:40:10.74	Charlie Francis	The next department we're viewing is the technology department, and this department is little change across all three scenarios. It's approximately $825,000 to deliver the outsourced IT capabilities that we're doing now. So no additional staff, everything being outsourced.
00:40:37.39	Janelle Kellman	Charlie, who's managing, or maybe Chris, you can just say who's going to be managing that department or these contracts for us in Houston?
00:40:45.78	Chris Zapata	Well, what I've seen is that Heidi Scoble has been managing IT work. She also is managing her clerk responsibilities and risk management and assistant too. So I'm really concerned that we have a need for a real review of this because IT, as you know, is the world we live in. but I'm not sure that I see the granularity that I would like into themselves. Um, where all of these $824,000 are going to. So I am you know. understand that we're trying to adopt the budget we're you know pretty close to where we need when we need to adopt it in But I have some concerns about IT. There are some things I think we could do to create some efficiencies in our operations in the community in the city with some IT assisting on that what the capacity is to do that, but I also know that you don't have an IT person in play, you have a consultant, and that consultant, I haven't been able to really and then we'll drill down into what is the value that they're bringing to the city for this amount of a contract.
00:41:55.54	Janelle Kellman	Right, and I think that gets me to my follow-up um, Chris or Charlie, feel free to tell me this is addressed later, you know, when I look at this, I think to myself first, is this professional services or is this consultant monies? How is it being classified? And then the second thing that comes to mind is do we have a list of all of the consultants? I think we determined that last year we spent $4.1 million in consultants. What are we budgeting for this year?
00:42:28.11	Charlie Francis	So, We can come back to that question, but the Right now what we're looking at, we have $10,000 in computer maintenance contracts, 10,000 in supplies, 254,000 and Uh, computer software licensing and and we have a lot of professional services of anywhere from 12 to 20 hours per I can't remember if it's a month or a week. And then there's another 200. There's where the 200,000 is for their activities. And then we have. Let's go about here. Capital outlay of $250,000 in here for different kinds of computer requests. So we have all the detail all the way down to the itemization. You know, it's kind of what we're asking ourselves is, What are we buying versus where do we want to go with our IT department? And that's all going to be part of structurally balancing our budget as we go through the strategic financial management of next year. At the end of the day, if we want to be able to of. re-imagine our services that we're providing, then we have to have data and we have to have performance measures in place in order to look at what we've been doing and whether or not we're accomplishing what we say we're gonna do. So evidence to support our policy decisions. So again, this is one of those departments that as city manager mentioned, that we'll be looking into a lot of detail as we go into next year.
00:43:51.25	Mike Lang	looking at the
00:44:09.47	Jill Hoffman	Oh, council member, so be asking, I see your hand up, but I see our city manager also has his hand up so.
00:44:14.13	Chris Zapata	I'll defer it. I'll defer to the council member.
00:44:17.57	Jill Hoffman	Go ahead. Okay.
00:44:18.97	Unknown	I agree.
00:44:18.97	Ian Sobieski	Great. Well... I would like to defer to Chris, but I'll ask my question anyway. It's more because it would apply to probably all the departments we're going to see. When I imagined the budgeting process, what I imagined there would be a step of is is a presentation from each department head about their department. going from the bottoms up, basically showing what they're currently doing with the money in their department what they would like to do if they had more money. and what they would like to do if they had more money. maybe with also some ideas that some asks from the council about what they would like us to appropriate so that basically their ambition. for the department. So at least this slide, I saw where you just had Charlie, had a lot of drill down it. We wanted to see how much we spent on software licenses I know all that's available if we click and We could probably drown in those numbers ourselves. they're not going to mean as much to us as to the person in charge. This is, Vice Mayor Kellman often has been pounding the table about who's in charge of to spend. I echo that. It would be nice, I still think we have enough time to hear from our department heads about their ambitions. I don't know how to do that, but it would be great. Well, I do know that. It'd be great to hear from our department heads about their ambitions and also to see if there are any policy choices that need to be made among current spend, not even talking about increasing the budget, with the idea, we've all been talking about it, of doing more with less. And if we're going to be doing we're going to be spending more, doing more with more. So it's not just going back to the good old days, but being better than the good old days and about how city council can help. to do that. Maybe with more spend in some places, less in others, or swapping it out. It's very difficult at this high level to have any intelligent engagement with our spending. particularly, Well, just because of what we're seeing, but also, Charlie, because you're not in charge of the department. You're reporting on the numbers. and you're an immaculate numbers guy, across all these departments we're not apparently today going to be talking to the department heads so To me, that's a, That's something I'm missing in being able to engage with this budget exercise.
00:46:31.44	Jill Hoffman	So Ian, if I could just respond to that real quick. In the past, Thank you. different years and we're doing two year budgets. We have had each of their departments in sort of that more aspirational and also accountability for each department. This is a mid-year budget and this is a post-COVID budget. And we were really far behind because of the reconciliation that had to be made by Charlie and Marcia before we could even get the numbers to us. before the June 30th deadline. So I don't disagree with anything that you just said. But I have been part of those processes in the past, and I will tell you that they take a lot of time to go through every department and give the feedback. One year it was when I was on the finance department and we gave the summaries to the City Council another year we did videos of each of the departments. So there's different methods to do it. We were just under a time crunch. and a process crunch this year because of the work that needed to be done to get our finances in the state where we could actually know where our position was so that we can bring a budget forward by June 30th. that's a long explanation to, your very good comments on, um, going forward and doing a review of the departments. Again, city manager can weigh in, I don't know if You discussed it with him, but he and I have discussed doing audits of the departments you know, in the first, maybe hopefully six months that have not been done in the past. And so each department in the city audited and then the results of that driving forward the review of the departments and how they're functioning. Just more information for you guys.
00:48:18.84	Unknown	Thank you.
00:48:18.89	Jill Hoffman	Okay, any other questions with regard to this? Yes, our city manager has a sign up. Thank you.
00:48:23.32	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:48:23.44	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:48:23.46	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:48:23.49	Jill Hoffman	THE FAMILY.
00:48:23.51	Chris Zapata	I've been here. It's okay. Mayor, I just want to say that, you know, I understand the constraints,
00:48:25.11	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Thank you.
00:48:29.16	Chris Zapata	city has been operating under in this pandemic environment and with all of the turnover but it would be you know, part of the next budget calendar that the departments actually do what was suggested by council member Sobieski that they get up and talk about what they do what they need you all ask questions and you go through that and that's been a norm in every city i've worked in for the last 30 years so i think you'd want to resume that I think it gives you a little more time at the front end to kind of figure all these things out. rather than at the 11th hour because we are at the 11th hour so I would believe that to try to do that before December 30th . Might be a heavy lift. But again, You know, it's something that you should do. And I will for sure put it in the budget calendar in the next cycle.
00:49:25.34	Unknown	I agree.
00:49:26.12	Ian Sobieski	Well, my early
00:49:27.20	Unknown	Mm-hmm.
00:49:27.77	Ian Sobieski	observation is that we are considering are there two big things changing over the next six months is we're going to have clarity on revenue snapback in Q4 and Q1, and we're also going to be making this big decision about financial management, which affects the budget. Amen. the June 30 date is legally enshrined, at least from my impression, there'd be no reason why we couldn't engage in this lengthy exercise over the coming months. the private private.
00:49:55.70	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:49:55.72	Ian Sobieski	Absolutely. Actually, the revision in
00:49:56.15	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:49:59.41	Ian Sobieski	revision at the end of this calendar year. that would be comprehending the change in revenue, but also giving us the time to engage department by department with the, again, the mantra of doing more with less If we're going to spend more, do a lot more. So leveling up We're talking about returning to level of spending. as if it's the same thing as level of service. And those really are separate things, right? Ideally, we'd have higher levels of service with the same level of spend. That's organizational improvements. and motivating and hearing from staff about how our organization can get better. And then there's spending more money to do more, which of course you always get what you pay for in life. So you gotta do both, but you do have to do both.
00:50:45.68	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, I don't agree with any of that. And the point of this budget and the point of bringing Charlie in is so that we can be nimble as we go forward and adjust as we go forward. Anyway, Councilmember Cleveland, also go ahead.
00:51:00.19	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, just sort of echoing your comments, Jill, you know, that this was the norm. This was how we did business by having all of our department heads kind of come up with their budget, do a presentation, And we did that at the beginning of the two year budget. So for COVID, we had to do a one year budget last year. We have to do a one year budget this year. We'll be back on our two year budget cycle. next year and I think that would be the perfect time to get. the department heads back engaged and kind of go through that process. The only thing Ian and I worry a little bit about what you just suggested is that as the mayor indicated, these are really time intensive processes for the department heads, and we've got a lot of actual kind of work on their plate. So I would prefer to do that deep dive as we approach our two-year budget next year. um, and I'd like to have the council have done our strategic planning ahead of that. So we have our priorities. We provide, in concert with the city manager, we provide that to the department heads, and then we can kind of build back to where we were with our normal process starting at our next budget cycle. So I'm just throwing that out there since we're talking about it now.
00:52:17.58	Jill Hoffman	Vice Mayor Kilman?
00:52:19.29	Janelle Kellman	Yeah, great. Thank you. And I tend to agree with Ian, but I understand the time restrictions around being able to do this in an in-depth manner. So what I want to propose, and we can talk about it in the comment period for the council, is just that the thing about it as a phased approach. I mean, I think what Councilor Sobieski is probably getting at, at least I'm going to be getting at, is accountability and understanding, you know, why department heads need the money, what they're going to use it for. Now we can track success long term and then also be in touch with our staff so we can understand what they need to be able to do their jobs better um so so maybe what we do in the interim is we you know entrust our city manager with that opportunity to ensure that level of communication but with the expectation that long term there'll be accountability and operational efficiency um in a more in-depth manner. And I think that's probably gonna be a theme when we have our discussion moment about making sure when we have budgets per department, there's somebody who is accountable for those budgets. So I just wanna voice that out. I think it's a good long-term goal. I understand the time constraints, and I think there's probably some interim steps.
00:53:19.45	Jill Hoffman	Okay.
00:53:19.75	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
00:53:19.77	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:53:20.29	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
00:53:20.31	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, go ahead.
00:53:20.97	Janelle Kellman	you
00:53:21.03	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:53:21.13	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
00:53:21.20	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
00:53:21.47	Ian Sobieski	Well, just since we're not talking about it, I would just say, I mean, I really respect what Susan Cleveland-Knowell said. really mindful of not knowing how much work it might be to do this. And she and you, Mayor Hoffman, have been through this before, so I want to be deferential to that and look good-minded about it. That being said, I always hate to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or the helpful, There are several months between now and December and to Vice Mayor Komen's point, perhaps some sort of less intensive look. Certainly would help bring at least me as a new council member up to speed about the knit and greet of what some of these departments spend money on and how they interact. and hearing from the department head could have interim help. and getting going on doing more with less, but also if nothing else would lay the groundwork for a more productive session next spring. when we're doing the deep dive that's part of the normal process so i'm put that plug in there for not just kicking the whole thing into next year.
00:54:24.16	Jill Hoffman	I think, yeah, but I think the theme, right, the theme of, efficiency and how are we doing things and how can we do things better? I mean, that you can work. is maybe can be start, you know, we can start messaging that now. Right. questioning different things. I see no problem with that. Councilman Cleveland holds your hands up and so is Vice Mayor Kelman, but is that a- Sorry, no, that was just residual to the bank side. I'm not worried. Vice Mayor Kellen, did you have another comment or question? I don't think so because I don't hear you. So Okay. Moving along. So now we're done now, right?
00:55:04.86	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:55:04.88	Ian Sobieski	city manager is this year.
00:55:06.03	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
00:55:06.82	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Um, Yeah.
00:55:09.52	Chris Zapata	I'll be quick. So based on what I'm hearing, there's an appetite to look closer at the departments. And I think that it's right to do something sooner than later.
00:55:10.43	Jill Hoffman	So based
00:55:18.43	Chris Zapata	So to me it's pretty easy to schedule a department a month in July, August, September, October, November, December and let them tell you what they do, how they do, get the questions answered. and do it to the full council in a little 30 minute Thank you. Thank you. once a month, you have two meetings a month. do it at a council meeting give them 30 minutes to do their thing and 30 minutes for questions you got one hour invested in a department that ought to be enough to ground you before we get to the mid-year
00:55:47.47	Jill Hoffman	Yeah. I think that's. I think that's a reasonable half. So. Okay, overall. All right. So Charlie returning now to your presentation.
00:55:57.24	Charlie Francis	Okay, great. Thank you, Mayor. Members of the council, the next department is the police department. There's no change in staff or level of service across all three scenarios, but there are the $250,000 savings that the council could direct staff right now to realize that $250,000 in the budget. There will be some savings even if you don't authorize it because it takes some time to recruit and train and deploy a police officer. So there will automatically be built into the budget some level of savings based on these two vacant positions.
00:56:36.41	Jill Hoffman	Okay, I see Council Member Sobieski and Council Member Blasdine have your hands up. So go ahead, Council Member Sobieski and then. as
00:56:42.18	Ian Sobieski	I have two questions. One is Vice Mayor Kelman during the finance committee meeting asked about what sounded like an astonishing expenditure for police vehicles of something like $600,000. Did that? Was that accurate? And we're not.
00:56:58.18	Charlie Francis	I don't know where the question came. I mean, I heard the question, but I don't know where the data was that precipitated the question. So, I mean, I haven't looked into it, and there wasn't a follow-up today either. Thank you.
00:57:10.48	Ian Sobieski	Okay, all right. One more question?
00:57:12.12	Charlie Francis	I can guarantee you they did not spend $650,000 on vehicles.
00:57:17.03	Ian Sobieski	Okay, all right, then that was just a question from watching Finance Committee I had. So if there's anything to that, I would love to hear about it. So maybe you could just ask if there's anything. Maybe we could ask how much the police department spent on vehicles in the last year. That'd be just good enough to put that question. Since that question was asked and is out there, Love it.
00:57:35.76	Charlie Francis	I'll have that ready for you for your Tuesday meeting.
00:57:38.53	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
00:57:38.56	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
00:57:38.60	Ian Sobieski	Then I remember when I met the chief and talked about our police staffing six months ago, there was a relationship between the number of officers and the number of beats in it. two officers on staff at any time, one person at headquarters. That was the, my recollection was that that's the staffing level. And that comprehended how many officers we needed given time off and vacations. And that we were actually at that time. at the bare minimum to maintain that level of service. And I'm wondering without the two officers whether that changes or not. the ability to have two officers on the beach, and one of the headquarters at all times, or if we're gonna decrease if there's some way to keep that going, even though we're two people down from the or if we're gonna actually change the number feet on the street. Um, in some way.
00:58:29.66	Charlie Francis	That'd be a good question for the police chief, and I believe he's on the call.
00:58:37.22	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Thank you.
00:58:40.70	John Rohrbacher	So is that an invitation to answer Councilmember Sobiesti's question? Yes. Okay.
00:58:45.27	Unknown	Okay.
00:58:46.45	John Rohrbacher	If, in fact, We leave these two positions vacant temporarily because as Charlie pointed out, even if they were continuing to be authorized, it will take about six months. to recruit and select and then train and deploy two new officers. So no matter what you decide, I'm not gonna have those two spots for the first half of this fiscal year And then the answer is, of course, yes. If there is two less officers, that is, two out of 20 authorized sworn positions, so that's a 10% reduction in sworn stopping. And so what would happen is then we would, in order to fill our minimum staffing requirements for the beets, is probably end up having to spend a little bit more overtime. THE FAMILY. but I just want to say that the last year, being the year of the pandemic, and we're all grateful it's an anomaly. We... found that there were times when we chose not to fill using overtime, because we had that one vacancy already for a year, and had agreed not to fill it in the last fiscal year. that we may do with a little bit less because in the beginning time of the pandemic during the summer, it was extraordinarily quiet. And rather than spend Over time, which is extremely expensive to do to backfill positions, we would run one position short It was a bit of a gamble, a little bit outside of our comfort zone, but we were trying to also accommodate that the consideration that we had one less position and not burn down over time unless we needed it. So as the, hopefully the states and the rest of the world goes back to normal, we'll be back to our typical high level of activity. And so at some point it would be felt
01:00:51.11	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thank you. Councilman Sobieski, does that answer your question?
01:00:56.62	Ian Sobieski	Well, honestly, I'm still, no, I guess I still, Chief, I don't, sorry. My narrow question is just, and I don't understand maybe the nuances of your staffing levels, but my simple understanding was you had two officers on the street and one at headquarters at all time, and is that going to be maintained? Is that, maybe I'm wrong about that, but if that is the standard of service, is not going to be maintained with the two vacancies.
01:01:19.89	John Rohrbacher	So the short answer is no, I won't be able to maintain that without using overtime.
01:01:25.28	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thank you. Councilmember Blaustein and then I have a question.
01:01:30.73	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you, Mayor Hoffman. So I'm just trying to understand because again, I obviously I'm really grateful for the amazing work that our police department does, but in looking at our budget and department by department, it seems like each, almost every other department experienced staff furloughs or staffing changes in the last fiscal year budget and the police department did not. And I just would like to get And I think that's a good question. an understanding of how there's an increase in budget when we're from a from a thinking about how our budget is a representation of our values and all the letters that we've received from her support of the library and other departments as well. You know, what is, is it accurate that there were no furloughs from the police department in the last fiscal year budget?
01:02:13.86	Charlie Francis	And the negotiations with the police association resulted in, they deferred their, uh,
01:02:13.91	Melissa Blaustein	need that.
01:02:22.67	Charlie Francis	20, 21, 2.5% pay increase in equity adjustment. So they did do that. And then the chief, as you just mentioned, did not fill a vacant position. And then the management staff of the police department also had their deferred of their pay increases, the negotiated pay increase as well. So they did take some. The other major driver of costs in the, Police Department. are the unfunded liability costs for pensions.
01:02:58.95	Melissa Blaustein	Right, but we looked at the unfunded liability costs and when we factored them in, there's still a budget increase this year from fiscal year prior. So it's even without those on just staffing and even without workers comp, it's the same, right? We had looked at that.
01:03:10.56	Charlie Francis	Because the MOUs restored the deferred pay increase and gave another pay increase for 21-22.
01:03:20.18	Jill Hoffman	or
01:03:20.23	Charlie Francis	Yeah.
01:03:20.96	Jill Hoffman	So we have two MOUs. We have a separate MOU for the staff and a separate MOU for the police. Right. Is this a difference, Charlie?
01:03:30.71	Charlie Francis	Yeah, we have the MOU for the police. There's an MOU for SEIU and MOU for police confidential and management usually followed the SEIU contract. And so the MOU for police did not have a furlough, that did defer the to their pay increase that they were scheduled to receive. The MOU for SEIU did not defer the pay increase, but did impose a furlough so there were two different negotiated agreements for covid for the two different unions.
01:04:06.79	Jill Hoffman	And so Council Member Bloustine, if I could just maybe ask a clarifying question. Your question is why was the, why were the de police, why was the police department not asked to do the same type of furlough that the SEIU staff was asked to do.
01:04:23.04	Melissa Blaustein	why I mean I it seems like and this is not out of lack of respect for the police department by any means it just seems that all of our SEIU departments have taken more significant cuts or more furloughs and I'd like to understand why that might be given especially given the the future of public safety in the last year in our community and beyond. I just would like to have a better understanding Thank you.
01:04:46.09	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
01:04:46.18	Melissa Blaustein	So, um,
01:04:46.97	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. You know, that would have been a good question for the old city manager who's no longer here. I see that council member, I was deployed at that time, but I see council member Cleve and Knowles has her hand up. So vice mayor, I'm gonna skip over you. I see that your hands up and I'm gonna, if council member Cleve and Knowles has some insight on this, that's fine. I might be able to provide some insight. So go ahead, Councilmember Cleuson also.
01:05:09.33	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, I mean, just for context last year, there were a couple of different moving parts that we're looking at from a policy perspective. And one of the reasons that library. and recreation, for example, Um, had bigger cuts than the other, you know, than police was that they, we could not provide under COVID the services, under the shelter in place orders. So for example, the library could not be opened and our recreation activities could not Continue. So that was kind of a reality of, THE END OF THE END OF THE our situation. So that was one policy consideration that went into it. The other was that we were expecting as I think we mentioned in an earlier meeting, that we would be having a successful negotiation for shared services. and that we would be recognizing significant savings in the police department in subsequent budget years. So those two considerations, I think, were part of of what happened. at that time. It's not the whole, I think there are other things at play too, and perhaps the mayor or the chief have other observations, but those are my two main memories from our difficult budget discussions. Yeah.
01:06:23.53	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you. Yeah, there meeting we had asked for at least some sort of report back on the considerations around consolidation and why maybe that didn't move forward. I'm just from a standpoint of if we're going to cut from all of the budgets, it should be an equitable approach across the board and you know, just, just, I would like to get an understate, maybe even American providing more context. Sorry, just.
01:06:24.10	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah.
01:06:42.34	Janelle Kellman	maybe even American. I, yeah. Hey, can I maybe jump in? There's a little context. So my understanding was that the former city manager did ask the police department to look at a $1 million budget cut And it was sort of being looked at the same time and in the context of the shared services opportunity, you know, maybe one of the other council members can give an explanation of why that didn't move forward at the time, but my understanding was that the police department took in permanent enforcement as a way of sort of offsetting some of that requested cut, because I know that that is part of their duties now. And so maybe part of this conversation that we just pull out a little bit, is to ask what is the level of service we have right now councilmember sobieski said um could you achieve uh two on the street and one in the in the department uh without overtime and the chief said no we need overtime but i'd like the chief to confirm that is the level of service two on the street one in the one in the building right um another part of the the conversation here is uh and charlie if you could if you could make sure that past council meetings have your link to your prior presentations would be helpful because a prior presentation from June 20th, from our last meeting, did show a 27% increase in police from fiscal year 19. And I'm trying to track that down. I can't find it cause it's not on the agenda anymore, but I think that all contributes probably to councilman Blossian's question, which is why did it go up when we were asked for it to go down and where are we now? There's a big picture I think that needs to get put together.
01:08:18.88	Melissa Blaustein	And why do we spend the most per capita of pretty much any community in Marin? I'd really like a better understanding of that. I just, as we're making really difficult decisions about every part of our budget, it's just from a transparency standpoint, it would be helpful to understand.
01:08:34.29	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, that's, I mean, we, one thing is different that's unique to us is that we're, our police department you know, experiences and manage as a plus up during, I don't know, a seven month period during our high tour season, of quadrupling the number of people in town. That's something that some of our other similarly situated in size and population, communities don't have to deal with. We also have our own waterfront patrol that we had to stand up. So we also manage that. So these are things as to why our police department has a little bit more. in our budget against the benchmarking exercise that we did, which was super helpful in so many ways. So I think, I mean, two people on patrol, two officers on patrol, don't sound like over policing to me. And I think if you ask the people up at the top of Spencer or people who are experiencing some you know, stress on their neighborhoods WOULD AGREE. that that's at least sufficient. Maybe they would agree that wasn't even sufficient. I don't know. you know, that level of staff It's just the reality of the type of town that we live in. in my mind, but open to further discussion, of course. So. I see that all the other four council members have their hands up. So. I will. cycle through you guys as I can I see council member Sobieski and then council member Blousey
01:10:00.45	Ian Sobieski	I think it's actually, I think it's Susan was first.
01:10:03.86	Jill Hoffman	Oh, she put her hand down.
01:10:04.03	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
01:10:05.16	Jill Hoffman	Oh, go ahead.
01:10:06.01	Ian Sobieski	Yeah, that recall. But then I'll just say I wanted to both back you up Mayor Hoppe and back up Councilmember Blaustein and say that this is exactly I imagine the discussion around the department should be and I get we may not do that. I guess the plan is to do that, Nick. Well, we'll do a preliminary one. As City Manager Sabato said, sometime in the next few months, one department a month, and then we're gonna do a deeper dive in the spring. but this is exactly I think what city council is here for is to make the policy choice about the balances that we just that are coming up in this discussion. It's just part and part. That's policy. And it can't be. It doesn't feel satisfying to do it, kind of shooting from the hip or briefly. It feels satisfying to turn it over at length and in some detail and perhaps iteratively. So I just want to put a plug in. Both those perspectives are super valuable and informed the ultimate decision. the lion's share of the discussion ought to come from our experienced chief who can educate us about all the trade-offs here and so us None of us police officers know about policing. And I would love to learn a lot from the chief about the trade-offs to be made. So when I put in that plug and And so since I've got the floor, I asked the chief to confirm what Vice Mayor Kelman said, which is the level of service is going to be two plus one. Um, And if that has to be done with overtime, is it true what's in the middle of this chart? It says in big red letters, 250K savings by not filling the two vacant positions. Is that true? if we're using overtime to quasi-fill the two vacant positions to maintain that level of service, or are we going to find out? that because overtime is expensive. The $250K savings actually isn't there. That's my question for you, sir.
01:12:03.32	Jill Hoffman	Go ahead, Chief.
01:12:05.68	John Rohrbacher	I don't want to jump in front of Council Member Volancier.
01:12:08.96	Jill Hoffman	Um, I... Well, either way. I was just going to answer them
01:12:15.03	Melissa Blaustein	but go ahead. Yeah, Council Member Blas, go ahead. Go ahead, respond to Council Member Sobieski's question. I think it's important to hear. to get in the context of whatever I'm going to say.
01:12:25.82	John Rohrbacher	OK. Thank you, and I agree. that a much better conversation, deeper dive I hear numbers being tossed around that are unbelievable. There's no way we ever spent Anywhere near? $650,000 in cars or vehicle equipment. I don't know anything about a 27% increase in our budget. Because that's not Nothing like that had ever occurred. And so we have done our best to work with everybody else in the city team. We agreed to have our one vacant position frozen. last year and have that savings go back. knowing that we could make that happen because it was a very unusual year with the pandemic. We're faced with a situation where there's another Officer leaving shortly and we will then be two people down. That again is 10% of the. of the sworn officer force. the, uh, The two-in-one kind of thing you hear us talk about, there's two beats, the third person, it was something I hear you say is, being in the station is not exactly right. The third person is the supervisor of that team. So it's two officers and one supervisor. has some duties that require being in the station, but supervisors will respond as either primary or cover or supervisor to many calls for service. So they're oftentimes out of the station. So just to clear that up. But just to repeat though, if we go forward, for the first six months at a minimum of not having these two positions filled then there is some chance, a very likely chance, that I will have to backfill some of those vacant spots by using overtime. whether it's gonna be anywhere near the $250,000 saved by the day conditions is Not likely. I don't even have that much in overtime budget. So, Remember, some of the overtime It's not just staffing, it also pays for court appearances and like that, so there's quite a bit of that. So there's quite a bit that goes into our overtime budget, not just filling the vacant positions or when people are gone on vacation or plan leave. So that's what our typical overtime budget covers. So in this case, we'll have a little bit more of that. with having unfilled spots. So I would look forward to the opportunity to having that conversation When the time comes, I think I could talk all day about the police department. Very proud of the work that all the men and women do. here for the community and what it takes to make that happen. Is that close enough for a reply, Council Member Sobieski? Or do you want more details?
01:15:17.32	Ian Sobieski	You guys. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I think the bottom line is unless Charlie says it's different, the $250k savings is the most optimistic case, the savings from these two officers. And it will probably be less by some degree due to overtime, but how much we don't know. And it won't be the whole month. We'll get some savings.
01:15:35.00	Jill Hoffman	Okay.
01:15:35.41	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
01:15:35.63	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
01:15:35.80	Melissa Blaustein	Councilmember Blasting, go ahead. Yeah, thank you for those comments, Chief. And obviously, and I just want to reiterate, we're incredibly proud of the work that you do. And I'm looking at this from a perspective of that all of our departments are, you know, taking a serious look at their budgets and receiving cuts. And so I'd like to be able to understand why one department over another may or may not. And it seems like because last fiscal year, there was a 3% budget cut essentially from the non-hiring of any position. And now from what I'm hearing, it's going to be a 10% budget cut if we lose another officer, which it sounds like will be happening or if someone is moving on. And so given that, is there a way to reflect that in the budget so that our community understands that in fact, it might seem like there are no cuts here, but that's not actually the reality of the fiscal situation, which is sort of what I'm hearing from you. And then I also wanted to understand You and I had some conversations last summer of when we, when Active Allies of Sausalito was working on a body-worn camera policy, around things like trainings and for the department and otherwise, is that reflected in the operations and maintenance aspect of the budget? Is that not included in the budget?
01:16:44.14	John Rohrbacher	Two answers for you. First of all, when I said 10%, it's not 10% of the entire department budget. That wouldn't be accurate. It's only 10% of the of the 20 sworn officer part of the budget. It's a big part of our budget, but it's not 10% of the entire budget. So it's less than the entire part. And then the costs of what you just described about more cameras that that's built into what's left of our budget which is supplies and services or the one-time monies that were first authorized to make those purchases, which has already been done.
01:17:21.06	Melissa Blaustein	Okay. Great, thanks, I appreciate that. And then the last question that I had was just, I understand that the previous, that our interim city manager had requested department heads to prepare three different scenarios for respective budget outcomes. Is this one of those, is, Is this like the most Um... I don't know, beneficial scenario for the department, or is this the preferred scenario from the department, and were there others that suggested less of a budgetary implication?
01:17:43.59	Mike Lang	OR THE OTHER THING.
01:17:50.63	John Rohrbacher	So it is true. Adam asked us to prepare a 5% 10%, 15%, and 20% overall budget. reduction, not just in staffing, but overall budget reductions. And I did prepare those scenarios, which I did not share. I have them. When needed, I'll produce them to the city manager if he requests that. the fact that I currently have one vacancy and now a second one coming up. would have been part of any one of those four budget reduction scenarios. not entirely, it wouldn't have been enough to cover clearly a 5, 10, 15, or 20, but it would have been included. You know, clearly if we'd had it down to 20%,
01:18:37.02	Mike Lang	if we'd had
01:18:39.66	John Rohrbacher	entire department budget reduction, we probably would have had to fold our tent. because we wouldn't be able to do you know, the supply to services. So it's pretty dramatic, but he was trying to make a point about the money and we did prepare that to, if we thought we were going to have one of those in detail department by department meetings with finance. then we were prepared for that when that time came. It didn't happen, so we just parked them.
01:19:08.93	Melissa Blaustein	So then to reinforce the council member Sobieski has said that's why there's so important to have those for us to have an understanding of what each budget, what each department's budget is for and what the best possible outcome is. But that's helpful to know. And then I just thought of one last question. Does the 15, 20, 10 and 5% scenarios include consolidation? Is that something that was looked at in all of those or no?
01:19:31.03	John Rohrbacher	No, the consolidation question has come up again. I believe Councilmember Cleveland Knowles brought it up most recently. We did spend a lot of time exploring that. And I, I tried to find where it was that Adam had reported back to council because that was a question that Councilman McLeod-Knowles had. saying that we had done our due diligence and way beyond and determined that it wasn't I WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE it wasn't feasible for us to do, there was not any near short-term savings. It would have taken about five or six years to get to the point where we had some kind of share, you know, serious savings by consulting or doing, you know, any type of, you know, of the sharing. Of course, you know, we already do some kind of sharing. We already share a property of this technician with Mill Valley. So we buy half, they have the other half on our outside communications. Dispatch services are all under shared services in a larger pool so that we save probably in the millions of dollars in that. That's been going on for a long time. That's not brand new. And so it's not that we are against in principle about doing sharing or consolidation of different components. And so, but after our exhaustive look at it by the sometime towards the end of last year, October or so maybe, I forget exactly, we came to the conclusion that we were done with all the different meetings with Mill Valley and their staff and our staff city manager and the chiefs and so forth. But again, if we end up with opportunity for a more in-depth conversation than we could Review all that in more detail.
01:21:22.88	Melissa Blaustein	I would probably like to have a more in-depth conversation, but I think we've all shared that we would like to do that. I really, again, appreciate your time answering our questions and being here to Korparker and the great work that you do.
01:21:36.65	Jill Hoffman	Okay, any other questions on this department?
01:21:42.39	Jill Hoffman	Okay, then Charlie, why don't you go on to your next department? Councilman Blaston, you still have your hand up. I'm assuming that you don't have any more questions. Sorry.
01:21:51.30	Charlie Francis	So thank you, Mayor. The next department is the building department. The building department is a revenue generating department. And we've put down here under this scenario that the they would generate more revenues than expenses. So we're anticipating pretty good, healthy there. But they are adding a position called a permit services coordinator to their gradual return scenario, which we're recommending that we move forward with.
01:22:30.41	Jill Hoffman	I see.
01:22:30.55	Charlie Francis	See. our community development directors on vacation this week. So we won't be able to answer any questions.
01:22:39.93	Jill Hoffman	Okay, I see council member Cleveland Knowles and vice mayor Kilman. Councilmember Sobieski.
01:22:45.20	Susan Cleveland Knowles	AND I THINK IT'S A I just have a process question. Charlie, are these BUDGETS. when you click on the things and get more information and you can kind of go down various levels. Is that information available? I think you said in a prior presentation that it's not available. to us or the public. Is that correct at this point?
01:23:06.88	Unknown	That's correct, yes.
01:23:08.38	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Okay. And yeah, this slide here,
01:23:11.91	Charlie Francis	I mean, there's the, I have the capability. This is all built within my virtual gov company. And that's what, before the meeting, you might've heard, I've asked Heidi to expand our Microsoft online contract to put Power BI as one of our suite of apps in the Microsoft 365 online. And then that way, city council would have the ability to go in there and drill down further. and all of these visualizations. The I do have the capability, though, of make putting it up as a public website where anyone could go and drill down in there. And if the council, it doesn't have the same polish to look and feel, but it has the same functionality. So if the city council would like to direct me to do that, I could do that as well. I'd have to scrub it, though, for some personal for some. what's it called? PPI information, you know, on our staff that's up in the site now.
01:24:13.11	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, I think maybe going forward, maybe not within the next couple days, because I think rushing that could lead to some inadvertent disclosure of personal information, you know, personnel information. But yeah, I think it would be helpful going forward. But this slide that you prepared that shows Thank you. just kind of the basic difference. you know, in the COVID recovery,
01:24:35.54	Unknown	Thank you.
01:24:35.85	Susan Cleveland Knowles	COVID recovery scenario, the next one that wasn't in our packet. for Tuesday, I think it would be really helpful for members of the public and for us to understand in each department what the main changes or I'm not sure. you know, in the scenario that we're gonna come out of today. So if we're doing a COVID recovery scenario, the addition of two library positions, but then very specifically that it's the children's librarian and et cetera. Thank you.
01:25:06.31	Charlie Francis	So if the city council directs a scenario that they want to be direct staff to prepare an adopted budget for next Tuesday night, we could upload that to the open gov site where people would be able to drill down to the same degree of granularity that they can already in the open gov site.
01:25:31.94	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thank you.
01:25:33.37	Charlie Francis	Okay. Any other questions?
01:25:35.90	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, no, no, we have council member Sobieski and vice mayor Kalman have questions.
01:25:36.24	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
01:25:40.06	Ian Sobieski	I think Vice Mayor was first.
01:25:42.92	Janelle Kellman	Thanks, Ian. So just a quick build on two questions. So Charlie, using Microsoft BI, the community uses OpenGov. All I'll ask is a follow on is that OpenGov contain any and all of this information is not PII. Thank you. So I just want to make sure that We're not using something internally, spending money on that internal system and then the folks who are watching this try to get OpenGov and they can't track the same conversation. So I don't know if you want to respond to that, but can you assure us that OpenGov will have that same information?
01:26:15.02	Charlie Francis	It'll have the adapted budget information. The OpenGov does not have the functionality that Power BI has to Pivot. and click through all the different types of scenarios that I was just going through.
01:26:30.09	Janelle Kellman	Okay, maybe we can circle back on those things.
01:26:31.17	Charlie Francis	I'll go back.
01:26:32.91	Janelle Kellman	And then on that-
01:26:33.16	Charlie Francis	And then at some point, we may just transition the whole transparency site over to um, power BI because it's, uh, gives the city a lot more intelligence than the open go. So that's.
01:26:46.14	Janelle Kellman	Yeah, it seems great, right? And then we're interested in transparency. Someone goes to OpenGov and they can't find the info they just saw at the meeting. Okay, and then the other question is the permit services coordinator. Is that an employee or a consultant? or contracting.
01:27:00.65	Unknown	Which position?
01:27:01.98	Janelle Kellman	the permit services coordinator.
01:27:03.32	Unknown	The employee, yes.
01:27:05.17	Janelle Kellman	Okay, and then as you do this presentation throughout, if somebody is not employee, do you call out that it's a contractor?
01:27:14.35	Charlie Francis	All of these where I'm showing this kind of visualization, they're all employees. Thank you.
01:27:19.85	Janelle Kellman	OK, great. Thank you so much.
01:27:19.90	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
01:27:22.44	Ian Sobieski	Charlie, in the pre-COVID the permit service coordinator is listed as one paid $99,000 and in the gradual return, It's listed as one paid $55,000. half a person or did we just get a better deal but not on that person?
01:27:37.30	Charlie Francis	The gradual return assumed bringing the person on midway.
01:27:42.41	Ian Sobieski	midway through the year with both. Yes. Okay, and then midway through the fiscal year, so you're talking about January? or Yes. And then is this role one of the recommended EDAC roles? one of the rules that was recommended to be added due to I'm not sure. Okay. Does anyone know? I should know because I'm.
01:28:02.99	Janelle Kellman	I'm going to say not quite. I think it's probably better under planning department, which is why I didn't, Go online. my comments.
01:28:11.74	Ian Sobieski	Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
01:28:17.08	Jill Hoffman	So one of the things I think Charlie I think we talked briefly about this in one of our prior meetings, but Um, if we could somehow drop a footnote or something as we move through these, if you're able to tie the EDAC request to different departments, right? In other words, one of the E-DAC requests was for funding to partner for events. So, I mean, that might be something that, might also be called out under Parks and Rec. And then this question just now from Council Member Sobieski so that we can tell how these are tied to the EDAC 325,000.
01:28:54.49	Charlie Francis	Yeah. What would happen is I would pull it out of the non-departmental account and
01:28:55.64	Jill Hoffman	It was.
01:29:00.51	Charlie Francis	increase the professional services account here.
01:29:03.03	Jill Hoffman	Okay. Okay, well maybe then, Maybe then the notation goes on the non-departmental line, right, where in parentheses. you know, something, somehow explaining. Anyway, sorry. Okay.
01:29:14.81	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
01:29:15.02	Jill Hoffman	with you.
01:29:15.95	Charlie Francis	though said they were planning and zoning planning and zoning is also a a revenue producing department, but not to the same tune as their expenses they're incurring included within the operation maintenance. You see a large increase here for Uh... planning and zoning activities but those are fee generated some of them are fee generated and we have a offset of the same amount in the revenues. So they would zero out. And, um, The number of positions is proposed to increase from five positions to six positions. the concept being is to recruit a planning manager. Again, halfway through the year, and Thank you. not have a senior planner, but have three assistant planners instead of two system planners. And then the administrative aid, the community development director stay the same. So it's a net increase of one position. Within here, there's also budgeted, in addition to those fee generating services, an additional little over a million dollars for all of these planning activities. And in fact, in the pre-COVID, there's an extra 200,000 for the historic survey. But that's not the gradual return scenario. So you can see all of the scenarios that are all of the activities that are in the planning budget for next year.
01:30:52.56	Jill Hoffman	Okay, I see hands raised from Vice Mayor Kellan and Council Member Blousey. And keep in mind, I can't see how fast people raise their hands, so I'm just calling across my screen as I see them.
01:31:02.96	Janelle Kellman	Anyway. No worries. So two questions here, Kelly. Again, I'm trying to get clarity and transparency around the different consultants or contractors. Let's just call them consultants. I mean the same thing that we're deploying for department. I'm aware of at least one that planning uses. I think Bob Brown, I don't see a consultant listed here. How are we tracking that is my first of two questions.
01:31:28.07	Charlie Francis	They're accounted for in this operation of maintenance linebacker.
01:31:32.91	Janelle Kellman	Okay, can you drill down for us to see that?
01:31:35.44	Charlie Francis	Oh my God.
01:31:48.37	Charlie Francis	Here we go. Contract labor.
01:31:51.66	Janelle Kellman	Okay, so am I seeing 850? THE FAMILY.
01:31:56.81	Charlie Francis	I think... I think I believe that that may be the planning studies. for where we're going. that you know We retain someone to do the plan check, and then we collect revenues to offset that. Let's see what else we got. and professional services. Yeah, and this is the accumulation of all those studies that I mentioned before. So we would really need Billy here to be able to answer down those questions about Bob Brown, where he's at.
01:32:31.35	Janelle Kellman	okay so when i think when we do our deep dive just for the council we outsource lots of mig which is a third-party consultant for plan check i think we should get a handle on some of those costs um i also suggest i saw there was a line item for uh city attorney but no cost associated with it it might be interesting to start considering uh allocating some of that time within this budget so um just something to consider nothing charlie for for you to do it's for my fellow council members and then I'll just echo Mayor Hoffman's comment I think whatever this bottom line here for planning and zoning should include that $180,000 requested by the EDAC that should it has to be it has to be in a department It cannot be a non-departmental line item. It must be in a department so that we can measure the efficiency and accountability long-term So, I would like to see that reflected when we see you again on Tuesday.
01:33:27.31	Charlie Francis	that rest of the council Dr. Bluffett?
01:33:31.91	Jill Hoffman	I think I agree with that. I think it's, I know how you have your budget structured and I don't want you to have to redo your, so the vice mayor, it's for the vice mayor's
01:33:36.79	Janelle Kellman	your budget.
01:33:43.44	Jill Hoffman	what she's getting at. Um, I don't want you to have to redo your budget or redo all
01:33:48.11	Unknown	Thank you.
01:33:48.16	Janelle Kellman	I'm here.
01:33:48.37	Unknown	Thank you.
01:33:48.47	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
01:33:48.67	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
01:33:48.72	Janelle Kellman	Mayor Hoffman, we talked about this one as being something, you know, the cars, historic society, they have other line items that- Yeah, that's right. Right? But this one is a new request. It's a really big request. There's no historic budgeting analysis around it. It's an opportunity.
01:33:54.58	Jill Hoffman	is a
01:34:04.75	Janelle Kellman	to record it properly.
01:34:06.15	Jill Hoffman	And it relates directly to planning and zoning. So I don't know, Charlie, can you do that? Is it?
01:34:11.76	Unknown	I can, yeah.
01:34:12.90	Jill Hoffman	Is it going to be like, okay. If you can do that, I think that would be helpful and present an accurate picture of
01:34:19.48	Charlie Francis	And just to be
01:34:19.57	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
01:34:21.15	Charlie Francis	clear, um, There's another $50,000 that you want moved from EDAC to the recreation department.
01:34:29.37	Jill Hoffman	Well, I think that's what it was. It was, you know, it was an item for, you know, some kind of like a shared special events kind of budget width. with parks and rec. So yeah, to me, that makes sense. You move with parks and rec with a, with a footnote or with a notation there you know. if we're presented with, like we always do with these kinds of requests, if we're presented with a request,
01:34:54.99	Ian Sobieski	I mean, Vice Mayor Kelman's point is that, you know, there has to be accountability and a line of reporting
01:34:55.34	Jill Hoffman	All right.
01:34:55.61	Unknown	Me too.
01:35:02.26	Ian Sobieski	So the event's an event. Um, you know, the idea of putting the 50K in parks and rec would be more like an earmark because it's dedicated to something that comes out of a collaboration between the EDAC and the parks and rec commission, which by the way, the head is gonna be attending the next EDAC meeting to collaborate on. So it's not general funds to be spent at discretion. but rather earmarked for a particular work product that we as the city council are implicitly charging our commissions with development. But at the end of the day, the line of accountability is through the director of Parks and Rec for that 50K. And the line of accountability for the 180K is through Lily Whaley, NCB2.
01:35:47.64	Charlie Francis	Thank you. All right. I'll put it into the final adaptive budget presentation.
01:35:54.69	Jill Hoffman	Okay, Vice Mayor Kellman, anything else? You still have your hand out? Okay, thanks.
01:36:01.04	Melissa Blaustein	Councilman Blasting. We have to physically remember to go back in, click on the mouse, put lower hands. I could just give you a sign lower now. Put it down. Okay, so can you go back to the slide that shows the significant budgets within our expenditures within planning and zoning? Because I know Lilly is not with us, but I think it's really important to note, and perhaps this again speaks to why it's so helpful to have department heads give presentations for their budget, but there's some things in here, for instance, the $10,000 for an intern program that we've never explored before, as far as I know, and could be really exciting in terms of opportunities for growth within our department.
01:36:39.24	Unknown	it.
01:36:39.82	Melissa Blaustein	And I would like to know that that's included in the scenario that we're adopting in this expected budget, correct, and gradual returns?
01:36:47.49	Unknown	That's correct.
01:36:48.47	Melissa Blaustein	Okay. Okay, fantastic. And then, so the only thing that actually we're not seeing adopted from the initial recommendations of the pre-COVID scenario would be the historic survey at this point, essentially.
01:36:58.89	Charlie Francis	And the additional 10,000 for So it was 10.
01:37:02.80	Melissa Blaustein	So that we had asked for 20 and we're going to get 10 is what the, or the department had asked for 20 and there will be 10. What's the,
01:37:10.43	Charlie Francis	The department put in zero for post COVID 10 for gradual return and 20 for free COVID.
01:37:17.47	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Okay. Okay.
01:37:20.13	Charlie Francis	I mean, the council by consensus could say, put all 20 in the grant program.
01:37:25.78	Melissa Blaustein	Okay. Okay, that's great. That makes sense. And then I would just echo the comments that Councilmember Sobieski and Vice Merkelman made about the EDAC living somewhere. So it's helpful if you can move that before Tuesday.
01:37:37.55	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
01:37:37.58	Melissa Blaustein	but thank you.
01:37:37.85	Charlie Francis	Thank you. Thank you. I'll do that.
01:37:43.99	Charlie Francis	which brings us to the non-department. And it's the same over all three scenarios. It includes our contribution for the unfunded liability for the fire, FIERS THAT WERE TRANSFERRED OVER TO THE DISTRICT It has a one time, I mean, the policy direction contribution of 300,000 to the section 115 OPEB, 215,000 to the pension trust fund and the retiree health. This is the pay go portion of OPEB. That's all budgeted within this department. So you can see the 1.4 million is the 1.4 million over here. And the operations and maintenance is where we budget for the city attorney. our debt service payments and transfers out for different activities. We can drill in and see what those are.
01:38:48.57	Jill Hoffman	Okay, Vice Mayor Kelman has your hand up.
01:38:50.97	Janelle Kellman	I think Councilman Blossom had up first.
01:38:53.97	Jill Hoffman	Oh, I don't, her hand's not up at all.
01:38:55.24	Janelle Kellman	Okay, two questions. Charlie, can you drill down, so we're on the same page, about legal budget? who was city attorney Uh, like, mind a budget?
01:39:10.97	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
01:39:14.12	Charlie Francis	There you go.
01:39:16.50	Janelle Kellman	300 and 19... Okay.
01:39:20.40	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
01:39:20.42	Unknown	Three or two.
01:39:21.40	Janelle Kellman	Fear to sorry. And then I'll just point out, since it's on the screen, this is where, and I know this because you told me this already, but the CARS funding, some of the other requests are located. But Sausalito Beautiful's request, and correct me if I got this wrong, is not in this because Kevin McGowan decided to fold it into DPW. Did I get that?
01:39:43.31	Unknown	this good. Yes.
01:39:45.29	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
01:39:50.13	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Mayor, could we just do a time check? One of the things that we haven't had the chance to talk about at all is our CIP program. And I, I was really interested in at least hearing Charlie Francis' recap of where we've gotten on that, and I know it's 340 We haven't heard from the public yet either So I just, I don't know, is it worth thinking about the rest of our time this afternoon?
01:40:17.59	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. No, that's a good point. So after this slide, how many slides do you have left on just departments, Charlie?
01:40:23.41	Charlie Francis	Oh, let's see. We've got recreation. landscape maintenance, library, engineering, and public works, and then of it.
01:40:40.47	Jill Hoffman	Okay, so that's a good point. So why don't we as quickly, I would assume perhaps we might wanna move as quickly as we can through these last, how many slides? Five slides?
01:40:54.90	Charlie Francis	Yep. We can go pretty quick because the department heads did a good job of outlining the services to the recreation budget. And this assumes the gradual return scenario where the one recreation supervisor comes out of finance and goes back to the recreation department. Here are an explanation of all of the events that could be put on in the post COVID scenario. There's zero in the gradual return scenario. He's got like three events and some of the Well, I'm going to let Mike explain this.
01:41:36.24	Mike Lang	Well, hello. Good afternoon, City Council. Can you hear me?
01:41:39.64	Jill Hoffman	Yes, go ahead.
01:41:40.53	Mike Lang	Yes, okay. So yeah, what you see there are the three different levels of the budget that we were asked to do post COVID, gradual return and then going back to pre-COVID levels You see the post COVID, if we went with that budget, we wouldn't, there was, no money for special events there, so they were all completely gone. Gradual return, when I did the gradual return, I did it based on the season. when would we be able to to do these, so again you see one yard sale we would do that in the in the spring. did cut a few events. You can see what the cost is. and then pre-COVID basically going back to every event as far as the Fourth of July fireworks, I know we still need to talk about that, but I didn't put that in. But again, that's a Thank you. a neutral revenue position. One thing I would like to point out is, We go to THEIR OWNERS. the different scenarios if we go to the FULL EVENT. pre-COVID level. THEIR OWNERS. get the most bang for our buck out of our staff positions because they will have every, event going. and you can see the yard sales, we spend 1,320 we make $4,500. I'm not sure. you know, the, uh, breakfast with Santa we make $2,000, we make $4,000. our largest single cost for any of these events is our staff. And the more events we do, the more cost recovery we have and the more we cover our staff costs.
01:43:31.16	Jill Hoffman	Okay. Council member Sobieski has his hand up.
01:43:34.23	Ian Sobieski	I appreciate your being here, Mike. Thanks so much. I mean, it's nice to have the actual department head to engage with. So I'm sorry to put you on the spot.
01:43:38.79	Jill Hoffman	Yeah.
01:43:40.97	Ian Sobieski	Okay. The consequence of actually being here, so thank you. being here, but But I have to ask just, you know, we are even in the pre post COVID scenario, the one where with no events, we're still spending a lot on parks and rec. And I mean, the obvious question is, since it's a small amount of actual dollars, isn't there a way to squeeze some of these events out even without increasing the nominal budget? And if we do increase the nominal budget, Shouldn't our expectation be to have a lot more events And if not, why not?
01:44:11.02	Mike Lang	Also, first, when you look at the current Parks and Rec budget. the bulk of it. is both salaries AND FOR THE again, looking at the post-COVID budget, the salaries for the director position, as well as the supervisor position. and then the expenditures for our contract instructors. So when we have a contract class. that. We collect all the money And depending on the class and our agreement with the instructor, we only pay them 70% or 80%. to use that money would not be to our advantage because we are making money off that money. The rest of the lines in our budget are for fuel, telephone copy machine rental. you know, The only one that I could really think of that we could eliminate would be dues and memberships and trainings. And I think that comes up to a total of $3,000.
01:45:18.22	Ian Sobieski	I mean, I'm not in a position to drill down on it, but I was just wondering about, I heard Mayor Hoffman on the Finance Committee make mention of the idea of reimagining an event like jazz and blue by the bay. Currently there's an expense associated with it because of the way it's structured, laying out tables, is time consuming, labor intensive, Um, But you could imagine an event that's simply paying a band
01:45:35.40	Unknown	up there.
01:45:38.97	Ian Sobieski	and renting and setting up a stage and letting people lay their blankets out on the grass. and that the cost of that both for the band might be cheaper if that was a criteria for who we look for. you could probably get a decent band for a couple grand and the set of costs and labor costs is associated with it would be a lot lower So I'm really just asking about reimagining these events. to be with a different cost structure and a different way of implementing them MR PRICE.
01:46:09.35	Mike Lang	But if you look at the pre-COVID Jazz and Blues by the Bay, which is the bottom line there. THEIR OWNERS. our cost would be $32,000, our revenue would be $60,000. We make that revenue mostly off the tables that we set up. We do charge the food booths, $500. but that does take staff to help them set up the food booth and all of that good stuff. So, um, The tables are our sponsorship, and the sponsorship, what they get is the table. And I know the tables are very well THE FAMILY IS received by our residents. I've been talking to some residents as we talked about bringing Jazz back. the idea to some of them and said, yeah, you know, to make it simple, we might not do tables this year. and they said, Well, that means I have to get there three hours early to put my blanket down, and then I have to sit on the ground and, Be honest with you, Mike. i can't get up when i'm sitting on the ground with what are the answers from a resident. So they do like the tables And the tables do bring in the revenue that not only pays for jazz, but pays for a lot of the other events. again. If you look at the events, with the exception of just a few, they all bring in revenue to cover all of their hard costs and often additional costs. do it. So chili cook off costs $4,750. We bring in $12,000.
01:47:44.99	Janelle Kellman	Mayor Hoffman, can I jump in here?
01:47:46.80	Jill Hoffman	Sure. Sorry, go ahead.
01:47:48.62	Janelle Kellman	Yeah, so just to build on what Council Member Sobieski is mentioning, let me turn it slightly So not all events require equal amount of staff time. So Jazzbiz by the Bay, we're saying that we have revenue of 60K, but maybe it takes three times the amount of staff time. Are you able to kind of prioritize for us from a staff time perspective? So we have an understanding of just what event, I guess, is worth the most? Perfect.
01:48:16.64	Mike Lang	So...
01:48:17.35	Janelle Kellman	Yeah.
01:48:17.82	Mike Lang	So what you see there where it says cost, That includes everything that we purchased, whether it's a a T-shirt or sodas that we sell, whatever it is That also includes all of our part-time staff.
01:48:35.42	Unknown	Okay.
01:48:35.47	Mike Lang	Where it says cost, what that does not include is full-time staff.
01:48:42.03	Janelle Kellman	Okay, but that doesn't tell us the hours per se. I'm just trying to get a sense of which events are most efficient operationally. But let me pause and move on to the classes, services, and programs. Have you had the opportunity to benchmark our classes in terms of the offerings and the price points against other communities to see how we compare.
01:49:02.82	Mike Lang	Yes, we do that routinely. And again, since most of our classes are on a contract base, we don't actually set the fees. WE HAVE A LOT OF PEOPLE If we hear that there's a need for a class, we search for a contractor to do it, often contacting our local agencies that are around us, or sometimes contractors come to us but they set the fee and then we collect the percentage of that fee.
01:49:28.25	Janelle Kellman	What opportunities do you see there for increased efficiency?
01:49:32.61	Mike Lang	um, Our new recreation supervisor, Brian, been with us just over a year. THE CITY IS A He was here one week before we closed for COVID. but during COVID, he has done an incredible job of continuing to run again, everything following COVID protocols, camp. rentals, all that of the like that are revenues are for adult and youth classes are gonna be over 300,000 this year. So he brought in $300,000. 70 to 80% of that went back to the contractors, but the rest we keep to cover our costs. Again, it's one of those things the more he does, the more he pays for himself. And the same thing with events. The more events we have, the more the person that's putting all those together pays for themselves.
01:50:29.59	Janelle Kellman	Okay, I'm sure other counselors have follow up on that, but I wanna just ask one more question, which is we've noted that Landscape maintenance is in your parks and rec budget. I understand that there was an issue as an example,
01:50:40.38	Unknown	Thank you.
01:50:43.95	Janelle Kellman	with the asphalt on pickleball course, right? Spending $1,000 and started to crack. that falls under your purview as well. Do you find that to be operationally efficient to have that type of work? I mean, it's not even covered on this screen, that type of work in your house as well?
01:50:59.83	Mike Lang	Actually, the pickleball course, that covered under Public Works Department.
01:51:06.75	Janelle Kellman	Okay, but what about landscape maintenance?
01:51:08.69	Mike Lang	I know Charlie, do you want to go to the Do you guys, we have another slide for landscape maintenance? that we can go to or we can finish up the park and rec side.
01:51:15.16	Janelle Kellman	I don't know. Yeah, let's finish up the parking right slide. Can we finish up the park and rec slide just to see if any council members have follow-ups?
01:51:27.00	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I don't have any follow-ups, and I would definitely like to move on to the Capitol. discussion at some point.
01:51:33.85	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
01:51:33.87	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
01:51:33.97	Janelle Kellman	you Maybe Council Member Sobieski can finish this off here.
01:51:37.60	Ian Sobieski	Yeah, gosh, I'm sorry, Susan, that stymied that with a question. And I don't know how to regulate the time, but I will just ask since it's on everyone's mind, what's the current expectation of the soonest we can do Jazz by the Bay? And if it's not next Friday, Why can't we just get a ban? I guess my simple question is, Why can't we run a stage and invite a band for $5,000 to play a week from today. at Degroson Park with no tables, and just how
01:52:03.67	Mike Lang	Well, We are- THEIR HANDS OF THEIR HANDS OF We are ready to go. Our first group would be on, I believe it's July 16th. And we could possibly, I've been even thinking about possibly doing just a simple pop-up the week before. looking at the way the council was going and thinking that you may approve our events. We are ready to go with Jazz and Blues by the Bay on July 16th. as of now, and we can even push that forward a week if we if we'd like to.
01:52:35.85	Ian Sobieski	I'll let us move forward for a bunch of reasons, obviously. But I'm just going to put a personal plug that it is a pop-up I mean, buskers play on the street corners all the time. I don't know why we can't have a band next
01:52:46.69	Mike Lang	Thank you.
01:52:46.70	Ian Sobieski	All right.
01:52:47.19	Mike Lang	And we don't pay $5,000 for a band.
01:52:47.38	Ian Sobieski	And I would personally donate $3,000 to have a band next Friday.
01:52:54.92	Mike Lang	We can. then we can get a bunch of vans because we usually pay between $800 and $1,500 for the vans. Thank you.
01:53:01.47	Ian Sobieski	And then we have
01:53:01.72	Mike Lang	And then we have $500 for the sound guy.
01:53:03.90	Ian Sobieski	personally donate $3,000 if we can get a stage
01:53:05.79	Mike Lang	Great.
01:53:06.82	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
01:53:06.84	Mike Lang	Thank you.
01:53:06.90	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
01:53:06.97	Mike Lang	Thank you.
01:53:09.06	Jill Hoffman	Okay, so I have a, I'm sorry, but I have a follow-up on this, but I see councilman Blaustein had her hand up, but now her hands down. Rien d'av. It is up.
01:53:18.83	Melissa Blaustein	Just quick, just really quickly on the it's just that in the both of the scenarios under pre COVID gradual and post COVID it shows for gradual that we wouldn't have it until June of 2022 is that not correct because it looks like in our proposed budget we have a gradual. return for parks and rec but if you will
01:53:35.37	Unknown	Thank you.
01:53:35.40	Mike Lang	Right.
01:53:35.88	Unknown	Thank you.
01:53:36.18	Melissa Blaustein	Gradual is June 2022 only. Why is that?
01:53:36.25	Mike Lang	gradualism.
01:53:40.48	Mike Lang	uh... that would be next year uh... but simply the level of funding if you look at the amount of funding for June 2020 only is $11,000. If we were to get the full $32,000, we would go July, August, and then June. So basically going back to right back to full jazz.
01:53:58.27	Melissa Blaustein	But we're in 2021, so if we go to gradual, we would only have June of 2022. We still wouldn't have this summer.
01:54:05.41	Mike Lang	Well, because it's paid for. at it. Jazz covers two fiscal years. So again, if we, If we do a gradual return and the city council only decides to allocate $11,000, That's enough to get us started in June 2022. So next season we would have a full season starting in June, and then the following fiscal year we'd cover the rest.
01:54:29.73	Melissa Blaustein	But we would still have it this year. We would still have it this year, even though-
01:54:29.74	Mike Lang	should the council... you did at the pre-COVID level of $32,000 there.
01:54:33.08	Melissa Blaustein	Thank you.
01:54:33.29	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
01:54:37.94	Susan Cleveland Knowles	It's not what's in front of us that came out of our last meeting we would have to do pre-COVID
01:54:45.77	Unknown	Yeah.
01:54:45.77	Susan Cleveland Knowles	in that portion, we would have to change the budget that's in front of us today. for this line item if we want as by the bay
01:54:52.19	Mike Lang	Thank you.
01:54:53.98	Susan Cleveland Knowles	this summer. Is that correct, Mike? Yes.
01:54:56.68	Mike Lang	Yes, it does. I would confirm with Charlie as far as the numbers that he used. to put in there because just like Charlie's been doing, I've been fine-tuning as we've moved along as well.
01:55:08.00	Charlie Francis	Thank you. It's not a problem to take this 32,000, put it over here, and move the revenues over as well.
01:55:17.26	Mike Lang	and again it's uh... We will collect revenues. If we do jazz, the summer and the revenues will more than cover our direct expenditures for the band, the sound guy, all of that good stuff.
01:55:29.97	Melissa Blaustein	Okay, but for the public, just because in looking at our fiscal year budget, no department. is receiving a pre-COVID level of service or budget. And again, I'm really focused on making sure we're equitable across departments as we're making changes here. So it would still be within the gradual return scenario and we could have jazz, but we'd have to move things around. Correct. OK.
01:55:51.74	Susan Cleveland Knowles	It seems generally like we'd want to put any revenue generating activity that's no cost or cost positive into the gradual return scenario as long as because that does add the recreation I can't remember what the title is, Supervisor. Is that a problem Mike? Is that give you enough staffing?
01:56:14.99	Mike Lang	uh... yeah we could do it so again another great example of the first line where it says yard sales we normally do too I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE and we will be able to I just did one. but you see the costs are $660. I THINK IT'S A LOT OF for one, 1,320 for two. But if we do two, our event revenue is $4,500. Again, every event, the more events we do, the more cost recovery we have.
01:56:45.20	Jill Hoffman	before, but let me just follow up one about jazz and blues by DeVey. That's usually, you know, you start your sales, whatever, February, March. And the tables are sold and the sponsorships are sold and that pays, that at least gives you starting money. And then you rent tables on a nightly basis as well. If you have tables left over, So, But at this point, Is it correct that you don't have any tables sold and you have no sponsors at this point? So it's a little bit speculative? Ma'am, not criticized.
01:57:16.50	Mike Lang	We have not sold any tables yet, you know, since we, it hasn't been funded yet. But we have been in touch with our various sponsors and table holders, and everybody's ready to go. What we've done is it's basically half the season. made the tables half cost. We have a very accelerated registration schedule for it. and we have reduced the amount of tables slightly Some people are still concerned about COVID.
01:57:43.45	Jill Hoffman	Okay, and is that reduction in tables reflected in the Revenue?
01:57:47.70	Mike Lang	Yeah.
01:57:48.19	Unknown	Yeah.
01:57:49.14	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thanks. Okay. All right, looks like we're moving on. Thanks.
01:57:57.00	Charlie Francis	Very good. Okay, so we finished recreation, landscape maintenance. engineering.
01:58:04.39	Mike Lang	I think, Charlie, I believe they wanted to talk about landscape maintenance a bit.
01:58:13.64	Unknown	Thank you.
01:58:14.25	Janelle Kellman	That was my request. I'm comfortable moving on to the CIP and then circling back on this since it will have an impact.
01:58:22.21	Susan Cleveland Knowles	The only question I had on this is whether the Sausalito Beautiful request is baked into this landscape maintenance budget. recommendation that we're looking at today is not to have the landscape maintenance. It's at the post COVID
01:58:44.05	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Mike, can you answer that?
01:58:45.64	Mike Lang	Yeah, so again, need to confirm with Charlie, but the Actually, here we go. Here's a slide. Um, there's the post COVID the gradual turn and the pre COVID and it's my understanding that Charlie you put in the gradual return level So, THEIR HIGHER. At the gradual return level, we just don't do as much. THE THEIR OWNERS. locations are not maintained month if we went to gradual return. it would be six times a year instead of 12 times a year. The mowing would continue to be done IN-HOUSE. But what that does is that takes our staff away from other projects. We wouldn't be able to trim as many trees. I'm not sure. Some places we would just do fertilizer and no trimming.
01:59:36.72	Susan Cleveland Knowles	The recommendation in front of us is not gradual return. It's the lowest level. So was that?
01:59:46.87	Unknown	Correct, yeah.
01:59:50.08	Mike Lang	So then in that case, I can guarantee you that the South City Beautiful request. is not included.
01:59:59.45	Janelle Kellman	But Charlie, you said it was included in the Department of Public Works.
02:00:04.24	Charlie Francis	Well, yeah, that's when I asked, I thought, I heard an answer that Kevin said there's enough in public works because it's so small. But let's just take a look at what that is. what that would do to us.
02:00:19.60	Unknown	We.
02:00:26.99	Unknown	So...
02:00:28.51	Mike Lang	So for the city council's knowledge, when Sussehlea the Beautiful was formed. they were looking for beautification and increased maintenance throughout the city of Sausalito. They were advocating for an additional position in the landscape department. But council, rather than having an additional position which would come with the other costs that go with the position, the professional services budget was increased. to allow for outside help, outside contract services to do things like, mow the lawn so that our staff could then do other work. take care of a few of the locations here within town, again, so our staff could do other work. So that was the idea, let's not bring in another person Let's bring in some contractors to help us out. And at the same time, we've also decided to move the landscape maintenance from the Public Works Department as far as supervision over to the Parks and Recreation Department I'm not sure. and you can check with Lauren, and I know Kevin wasn't here for that, but Some of that was just to kind of freshen things up, and then I know that I've spent quite a bit of time out there out in the park in the fields using my background. And it's been a good match. they still share the same courtyard. I'm in touch with Lauren and Kevin constantly throughout the week. We work on a variety of projects together. In fact, just yesterday, when they set up the bike racks at Tracy Way while it was a public works activity. All of the Parks guys were there to help. We're also collaborating quite heavily at Marinship Park in preparation for the homeless. But so. While there's two different supervisors, we're still all on the same team.
02:02:25.50	Jill Hoffman	OK, thank you. Does that answer, do we have any other questions for Mike or shall we move on?
02:02:34.60	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Well, I think Charlie was calculating what the impact to our budget was by going to the COVID gradual return
02:02:42.43	Ian Sobieski	Yeah, I did that. My only comment while he's doing that is, this is the kind of policy decision that this. I feel it's kind of important. A lot of people are invested in some of these details and, And I feel like Thank you. I'm gonna say yes to something that I don't fully understand the implications of, I don't know how to do that in the structure we have here. given that we have to approve this budget on Tuesday.
02:03:06.74	Charlie Francis	Let me ask a simple question. What was the Sausalito beautiful request total dollars?
02:03:13.95	Mike Lang	It was restoring the professional services $70,000, so roughly $80,000.
02:03:22.40	Susan Cleveland Knowles	but weren't they going to add they were going to cover some small portion of that. from, didn't they offer that in one of their letters?
02:03:31.18	Charlie Francis	They did, yeah, and I think I don't have it right in front of me, but they did offer to cover part of it. So it's pretty easy. I could just... I'm not sure.
02:03:42.33	Jill Hoffman	Hold on, Charlie. Why don't we So I'll save that as a question to the finance manager you know, adjusting the numbers. How about if we check with Kevin? director of public works and see how that's accounted for and then and then you can call that out at the next city council meeting
02:03:56.10	Unknown	All right.
02:04:04.12	Jill Hoffman	Okay.
02:04:04.15	Unknown	Okay.
02:04:04.64	Jill Hoffman	How about if we call it that way? And, Council Member Sobieski, these questions that you have, Um, And if you... If you need more time or more specific information, I would. I would urge you to talk to our finance director directly or the city manager for additional information from the department.
02:04:25.53	Ian Sobieski	I'm looking for a little guidance because Susan Cleveland-Knowles provided me with some earlier and you can too, Mayor, since you've been around this, process before it's just that not doing some of these things might have important implications to the trees and the landscape where we actually pay more later or do some harm and we're speaking with charlie you know and i i just don't know There are three scenarios or three different costs, but not real, and a statement of what's done. but not really a sort of recommendation or like,
02:04:54.57	Unknown	Sure.
02:04:54.62	Ian Sobieski	the experts assessment about the actual trade-off between these things and making other expenses. Like should we not be spending money on something else because we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot by not taking care of some trees. And I can't make that trade off. We're not being asked to make it, except in some
02:05:11.16	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, I think we just learned though from our recreation and park director that if we go with the scenario that is in our proposed budget right now, we will not have the professional services to maintain our landscapes at the level recommended by Vesilito Beautiful unless it's somewhere else in the budget. it's about eighty thousand dollars and so we need to recommend if you want to make sure that maintenance happens which i am supportive but others may not be we need to add that back in on tuesday
02:05:38.63	Janelle Kellman	So can I make a suggestion? So I pulled it up. It's $30,000 from the city's budget to be matched by Saucelito Beautiful with $10,000. So I'm gonna make a request that our city manager do two things, that he maybe make an outreach to Saucelito Beautiful and circle back with our Interim's finance director on this, just to close this loop. And then the second thing is, I'll ask the city manager to give us his opinion on improving some operational efficiencies, in terms of where that landscape maintenance should live. and if, It could be it should move to DPW. It could be it can stay. It could be don't want to deal with it now. But I would like to have Chris look at that and make some suggestions because I think the questions that Councilman Sobieski is asking are excellent and they do, I think, have long-term consequences. But I did find I think it's 30K with a 10K match.
02:06:33.61	Janelle Kellman	Okay.
02:06:34.30	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Well, and so, but our rec park director thinks that it's 70 or 80 to get the full amount of professional services.
02:06:37.10	Janelle Kellman	Yeah.
02:06:42.32	Susan Cleveland Knowles	So, you know, let's.
02:06:44.09	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, good distinction, yeah, good distinction.
02:06:46.93	Unknown	I was focused.
02:06:48.19	Jill Hoffman	that between the departments that we run this down prior to the next city council meeting, If we can get it soon enough on Monday, then we can send a one-way communication out to all the city council members that this was the reconciliation, this question that was raised our special city council meeting on a Friday.
02:07:04.22	Charlie Francis	So I can answer the confusion with DPW came from me. There was a question about a particular trees project and it's been completed. So there is no line item for the expenditure on Sausalito Beautiful in the budget. And, But there is the revenue that I think that they requested in there that they said they would give. So I will offset the revenue and put it into the landscape maintenance budget.
02:07:34.43	Janelle Kellman	And you know, Charlie, it may be that the 30 and the 10k are for trees specifically. There may have been another request for reinstatement of the budget for maintaining some of the parks.
02:07:44.94	Charlie Francis	All right, I'll follow up on both of them.
02:07:46.97	Janelle Kellman	Okay.
02:07:50.98	Charlie Francis	All right. Library.
02:07:57.41	Charlie Francis	This is a Abbott brought up what would be what would happen on the gradual return and pre-COVID scenarios. Basically, the full return of the children's librarian once it's hired. Outreach and collaboration with schools would go on. You can take a moment and read this.
02:08:27.06	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I would just ask Charlie, as soon as you can get this up on the website, that would be great. This is really helpful information. Each of the slides are, but we don't have any of this.
02:08:36.06	Charlie Francis	Yeah, okay.
02:08:42.88	Ian Sobieski	I just want to say this is great. love this table.
02:09:08.98	Unknown	Okay.
02:09:38.77	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I don't have any questions. Thanks for this. OK.
02:09:44.00	Jill Hoffman	All right, moving on.
02:09:45.55	Charlie Francis	Move on or other questions?
02:09:46.71	Jill Hoffman	I don't see any answer.
02:09:48.77	Charlie Francis	Okay. So basically, engineering, as brings back the assistant engineer position and all three scenarios and the pretty much this library, sorry. pretty much stays the same in all three scenarios. The public works include this also on the citywide includes some capital projects, but basically Kevin wrote this up on what the DPW general duties would be.
02:10:36.43	Melissa Blaustein	Will the department heads be available? I mean, this is great information, and I think I agree with Council Member Cleveland Knowles as soon as we can get this online to have time to review it and ask further questions on Tuesday. I'm assuming the department heads will be to respond to specific questions we might have.
02:10:55.11	Charlie Francis	Thank you. Yeah. So that's good.
02:10:57.45	Janelle Kellman	It's good to see you.
02:10:58.25	Charlie Francis	Over.
02:10:59.12	Janelle Kellman	Can I ask a quick question back on that other slide? Is there a line item under general duties for, and maybe it's not a general duty, but emergency stuff? Because I didn't see anything around the landslide task force recommendations, the Assasado Boulevard slide. I'm just wondering, maybe I missed it, but is that, did that get included in the budget?
02:11:21.36	Unknown	Kevin, are you in? I'm here.
02:11:26.04	Kevin McGowan	to give me video. Thank you. I consider that, Vice Mayor, I consider that an actual project. And so when we assigned time to it, I look at that as assigning our management time to a specific project. So I didn't want to get that much detail into what Charlie is requesting, because we still have our present staff assigned to this. And it all depends on how we distribute that time amongst our CIP projects.
02:11:57.83	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Kevin, didn't we have in our, when we did our strategic plan, I think we had agreed that the initial kind of LIDAR and analysis that kind of was the precursor to other things was somewhere in the $100,000 range, like $90,000 to $120,000.
02:12:14.84	Kevin McGowan	Yeah. That sounds correct, that is correct. But remember that when we go back to the CIP, We're looking at that specific project and whether that rates with all the other ones. So at this point, it's my understanding that we have higher priorities in our CIP projects. and it hasn't made the cut yet.
02:12:36.66	Susan Cleveland Knowles	OK, so that initial study recommended by the Landslide Task Force would be in our CIP budget if it were anywhere.
02:12:43.68	Kevin McGowan	That's correct.
02:12:45.37	Susan Cleveland Knowles	which we haven't seen yet.
02:12:48.62	Kevin McGowan	Yeah, we're getting there.
02:12:49.37	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you. Yep, thank you.
02:12:56.93	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Thank you.
02:12:58.89	Charlie Francis	All right.
02:12:59.65	Jill Hoffman	Yeah.
02:13:00.71	Charlie Francis	capital projects. So we were. Kevin and I and Heather worked together to put together what projects had grants and what projects had Thank you. and when we're in the next phase, End of the day, here's the revenues we'll be bringing into the capital project fund. And then here are the capital projects that are being recommended. We still have $1 million left over in fund balance, so the council could choose one or two projects from Kevin's CIP list to bring this ending fund balance down to zero, as long as there's nexus to one of these revenue sources.
02:13:46.25	Susan Cleveland Knowles	What is in the capital plan right now?
02:13:49.24	Charlie Francis	These capital projects right here on the right the Bridgeway Bike Lane Pilot Project for 45, the Bridgeway Woodward Slide Repair for 540, et cetera.
02:14:03.92	Susan Cleveland Knowles	So when you're saying we have another million dollars, we could either add money to an existing project or we could add like, some of the landslide work or something else.
02:14:13.44	Unknown	That's correct.
02:14:18.86	Susan Cleveland Knowles	And Kevin, do you have a recommendation of what to add?
02:14:22.85	Kevin McGowan	Yeah, I do. And again, I'm sorry my video doesn't seem to be working. But if we go back to the CIP presentation on May 11th and you take a look at the active projects, it's got a whole list there. And we're working forward with a couple of key projects. One of them has to do with Nevada Street. which is basically doing a micro seal on Nevada Street and doing some striping improvements. That might be an important
02:14:48.30	Unknown	Roger.
02:14:49.33	Kevin McGowan	The EV charging stations is also coming up as well. So we're gonna need some city funding to support the EV charging stations. and those ones are are pretty important for council as far as as i recall Keep in mind that this list in front of you does not include the sewer projects, which is a separate fund altogether. So we do have quite a few other projects that we're moving forward on the original CIP list that aren't shown here just because there are different
02:15:25.04	Ian Sobieski	I just have a policy question about reserving for emergency capital repairs of one kind or another. Is that done or is that comprehended in the general policy of the city?
02:15:41.48	Jill Hoffman	I think that was, okay. Our city manager, Zapata, do you want to answer that or Kevin McCaffrey?
02:15:47.65	Chris Zapata	No, Kevin should answer. I have a question.
02:15:51.21	Jill Hoffman	Oh, okay. Kevin, if you have an answer to that question, go ahead and type in about reserves for um, Emergency work.
02:15:59.62	Kevin McGowan	So in the CIP itself, we haven't set aside specifically for emergency reserves. I don't have a specific project for that. What we generally have done in the CIP is set aside a certain amount of money for specialty maintenance. So in other words, if we have
02:16:14.96	Mike Lang	So in other words,
02:16:16.80	Kevin McGowan	We set aside money for the storm drain, which you see on the bottom of your screen there, about $35,000. I don't have a specific project for that. That's just in case something comes up about storm damage or storm drain repairs throughout the year. And in the original CIP from May 11, I had set aside Sorry, basically the same type of thing you're requesting for street repairs as well as sanitary repairs and like you see here, storm drain repairs.
02:16:49.23	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
02:16:49.28	Kevin McGowan	So,
02:16:49.30	Ian Sobieski	So,
02:16:49.85	Kevin McGowan	Thank you.
02:16:49.87	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
02:16:49.89	Kevin McGowan	Thank you.
02:16:49.90	Ian Sobieski	Thank you. or street repairs in one of these line items as a general? Yeah.
02:16:54.29	Kevin McGowan	What is he in front of you right now?
02:16:57.87	Ian Sobieski	It's not. But there is some amount of money for general street maintenance
02:17:03.18	Susan Cleveland Knowles	That's not our consent. It comes from the SB1 and what Kevin can answer, but the SB1 funds. Thank you.
02:17:10.98	Jill Hoffman	And it's part of a multi-year
02:17:11.05	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you.
02:17:14.12	Jill Hoffman	plan.
02:17:15.96	Ian Sobieski	But that is not part of the CIP, is what you're saying. So that answers my question.
02:17:21.17	Chris Zapata	Thank you. Mayor, so Charlie, when you talk about the risk in the 37% you have in the contingency reserve You mentioned 5 and 10%. And I thought I heard you say 5% was for like construction emergencies or something. of that, Nope, is that correct or is that my off?
02:17:43.19	Charlie Francis	There was no Yeah, there's an emergency reserve and a stabilization reserve, yeah.
02:17:48.73	Chris Zapata	So what's the emergency reserve? That's the 5%.
02:17:51.97	Charlie Francis	Yeah, I don't remember which Which one got which percentage?
02:17:54.22	Chris Zapata	I want. Thank you. But if you had a Typically what my experience has been, when you have a construction project, you build contingency into that budget. But if you have that,
02:18:02.89	Unknown	Thank you.
02:18:04.15	Chris Zapata	If you haven't, you have a... it. I'm guessing this emergency fund, which is 5% or 10%. And my question is, is that what that's intended for? Some type of infrastructure failure Yes.
02:18:21.20	Unknown	Thank you.
02:18:21.22	Chris Zapata	Yeah. So to Councilmember Sobieski's question, are we accounting for contingencies? I would want to know more about those funds our process for building continues project budgets. That's one question or that's one thought. The other one, Mayor and Council, is I'm asking Charlie and Kevin this. Are there any measure O funds in this budget?
02:18:46.44	Unknown	Go.
02:18:47.74	Chris Zapata	In prior years, were there measure O funds in the budget?
02:18:50.85	Unknown	Yes.
02:18:52.05	Chris Zapata	Okay. If you can give me an accounting of how much of that in prior years was used for infrastructure and capital improvements, I would really like that.
02:19:01.61	Unknown	All right.
02:19:04.33	Chris Zapata	Thank you.
02:19:04.48	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you. Thank you.
02:19:04.94	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
02:19:04.95	Unknown	you
02:19:05.04	Jill Hoffman	you
02:19:05.19	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Thank you. Can I ask a question?
02:19:07.18	Janelle Kellman	Yes.
02:19:07.54	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
02:19:07.69	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
02:19:08.78	Susan Cleveland Knowles	So if I'm understanding, if you can go back to the capital improvement slide, Charlie. So we have a decision, we have a recommended budget, which is five, Marianne. 700 with these projects enumerated if we think that we want to also add that ending fund balance into our capital improvement plan. then we should go back to your May 11th presentation. and Look. to determine what might be our priority from that and have that discussion on Tuesday night. Is that correct?
02:19:51.87	Unknown	That's great.
02:19:53.18	Susan Cleveland Knowles	And can I just ask Kevin, Kevin, one of the issues that I've seen over time, and we talked about it at one of our budget workshops, even if it's allocated funds. there's a constraint with staff time. So, IF WE DID want to allocate an additional million dollars to our capital improvement plan. Would we also need to add that, I think there was a $200,000 number that Charlie provided at one of our workshops that said, that that would be kind of additional project management funding, would we want to allocate some of this million to additional project management staffing.
02:20:34.02	Kevin McGowan	Thank you. That's a very good catch, and I would definitely recommend that as well. that if we find we do have additional funding for projects, that we would want to add some money for project management. Whether it's 200,000 or less would depend upon how many projects we add.
02:20:53.00	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Okay, so if we're taking this whole million and we're just kind of augmenting something else, maybe less project management, but if we're taking the million and putting it to two new projects. they might have more project management. fair.
02:21:07.45	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
02:21:07.48	Kevin McGowan	Thank you.
02:21:07.52	Ian Sobieski	That's correct. I guess I had a related question, if I might, which is we talked about doing prep design work for getting projects ready for, to be shovel ready for, to be potential candidates for grant funding or other. kinds of infrastructure spend from the federal government or elsewhere. is that something that this might make this particular fund can be used for, or will that have to come from somewhere else?
02:21:39.19	Charlie Francis	So I can help answer that. If the... If the money could have a nexus, I mean, if the shelf design has a nexus to a road project, which is gas tax for our construction impact fee, of 275 or to measure A funding then shelf design can be used for those brevenous sources. Thank you.
02:22:04.45	Janelle Kellman	I guess Kevin, can you tell us what the 464 840 for Dumpy Park is earmarked for?
02:22:11.61	Kevin McGowan	Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not surprised you caught it. Yeah. I, my numbers don't necessarily match Charlie's about the amount of money we need to pay out for the remaining part of Dunphy Park, the phase one work. But I think Charlie's numbers are fairly conservative.
02:22:29.16	Unknown	Thank you.
02:22:29.26	Mike Lang	Thank you.
02:22:32.50	Kevin McGowan	And Charlie, if you want to add in a little bit on that too, but the idea is that we haven't finalized the phase one construction, and I think our contractor is moving towards a claim process at this point. So the number represents how much we have left in the budget for Dumpy Park Phase I.
02:22:52.14	Janelle Kellman	Okay. And then I guess sort of relatedly, Southview Park walls, $200,000. Is this an additional amount of a previous budgeted amount?
02:23:00.12	Kevin McGowan	No, it's not. It's just the amount that's remaining on the current contract. The thing isn't finished yet. They've got some problems on the park, so we hold the retention until they're actually done.
02:23:10.39	Janelle Kellman	Okay. Um, I guess at some point I'll just put a plug in for Measure F pro forma so we can understand whatever, where the monies went on that, but that's for another day. Kevin, there's been some talk about increasing our... making products shovel-ready so we increase our opportunity for grants Is this where we should look to see all of the grant monies that we've been able to qualify for? And do you have sort of a grant strategy in place for the next school year?
02:23:36.22	Kevin McGowan	That's a difficult question because A grant strategy would depend upon which grants are coming available for the next fiscal year, and we don't always know what comes forward. Sometimes we might have highway safety improvement grants, which we want to go after, but those are federal as well. So it's a difficult question to answer, We're always working with TAM and trying to identify additional funding sources and see if they align with the type of projects we have. I think, as you recall, we were working with trying to identify grants for a bicycle project that goes from Princess to Richardson, and we applied for a grant and we just didn't get it. So we still want to continue in that fashion to apply for grants. and do our best to achieve them. But as far as the strategy, we're going to work with TAM as best we can.
02:24:29.24	Janelle Kellman	That's a very helpful answer. I think it speaks to Councilor Sobieski's question. how do we think longterm to say we're allocating funds so we can be shovel ready so that we can qualify for the grants. Um, so I'll just maybe also say I welcome the city manager's future thoughts on that. Not for today. I don't think.
02:24:50.50	Jill Hoffman	Kevin, can we use CIP money to pay for a grant writer.
02:24:58.98	Kevin McGowan	I think you can use general fund money to pay for whatever you would like to pay for. You cannot use, you can't use SB1 funds or, federal funds on something that's not already identified. In other words, on Tuesday, you have a consent item to identify where we're going to use the SB1 funds for next year. And the idea is that You've got to use those funds where we're going to tell them. But as far as the general funds or capital funds, I think you could use them any place.
02:25:34.89	Charlie Francis	So I'm going to qualify that. unless you can make a nexus to construction impact gas tax, or measure A. These monies here. which are... all the revenues here. cannot be used for a grant writer. Only a general fund appropriation can be used. could do that.
02:25:55.57	Jill Hoffman	OK, thank you. Okay.
02:26:00.05	Charlie Francis	For example, Measure O, if we were transferring money from the general fund, Measure O, to the capital project fund, that money could either not be transferred or could be used for a grant writer.
02:26:12.80	Jill Hoffman	I got it. Okay, well. Okay. I mean, If we're looking for shovel-ray projects to be ready to, you know, avail ourselves of grant money, Okay, that's a good discussion point for us. Okay, any other questions or discussions? Yes, Council Member Cleveland has her hand up.
02:26:30.02	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, so just I think it's really important to get the May 11th staff report also loaded to our Tuesday budget. presentation so that the public can to see that. And then I think if there's any staff recommendation, either from city manager, Kevin is the head of public works or Mr. Francis, about the use of this additional 1 million towards the projects in the May 11th report, that would be really helpful, including whether we would need to also increase the allocation of project management. um, resources to make sure that they get implemented. you know, 800, plus 200 of project management or something else. So if there's a staff recommendation, even if it comes on Monday, for Tuesday morning, I think that would be very helpful or just not to spend that million this year.
02:27:34.60	Unknown	Thank you.
02:27:35.93	Jill Hoffman	Okay. Councilmember Sobieski.
02:27:38.11	Ian Sobieski	I had a question for my colleague, Susan. I'm just wondering if given If we have to do this on Tuesday, or given that we have so much on our plate, this question of how to do this, the CIP spending couldn't just be taken up I don't know. Thank you. the next evening, the subsequent or the one after. Amen. Maybe I'm wrong. Does it have to be or can you just a minute?
02:27:57.87	Jill Hoffman	I think. No, I can answer that too. We talked about this during one of our prior meetings that we would that we would revisit or visit capital improvements at a later meeting. There's nothing in this process that we're doing right now with our budget that will prevent us from looking at improvements later in the year. So, or even the next city council meeting in July, we don't have to allocate all the funds. That's my understanding by June 30th. with regard to our CIP budget. Yeah. We can adjust as we go forward.
02:28:38.05	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Is that correct? I have not heard that before, but that's We've always done them together.
02:28:43.95	Jill Hoffman	We have and we had time to do it, but we didn't have time to do it this year. that's something specifically we talked about with our city manager, our interim city manager, Marcia,
02:28:54.84	Charlie Francis	Yeah. Yes, we could adapt a budget now and amend it in July. It's not a problem. The logistically, because there's still so many decisions to be made within just the operating part of the budget. uh, we won't be able to have a budget resolution GAN limit and salary schedule prepared for Tuesday night. So one recommendation might be to just pass the budget as it is and then come back and amend it either before June 30 or in July, or just have a special meeting between now and June 30 to pass the budget that's directed at June 22nd.
02:29:38.80	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Well, I don't think we've gotten to our discussion part. I think I'm pretty clear on where, what, I don't know where other people are, but what I'd like to see in our budget on Tuesday. But if we can postpone a discussion of capital projects, that would certainly make things past this proposed capital budget and then discuss the additional million dollars in July. That would be great.
02:29:58.62	Charlie Francis	Yep. There's no legal requirement to pass a capital improvement budget. by June 30.
02:30:04.48	Susan Cleveland Knowles	OK. Great.
02:30:06.24	Charlie Francis	Thank you.
02:30:06.25	Ian Sobieski	Just as we're being a greenhorn help, sometimes ask questions like that. Glad it worked out.
02:30:12.31	Jill Hoffman	Okay, so... Thank you. All right, is this your last slide, Charlie?
02:30:17.29	Charlie Francis	Well, Yes.
02:30:20.75	Jill Hoffman	Okay, so I think we've asked our, unless there's any follow-up questions on the slides and I'll, we'll move on to open. to public comment. And so I will now open public comment on the budget. and then I'll let our Madam Court call the call the names.
02:30:41.84	Heidi Scoble	Thank you, Madam Mayor. As you have indicated, this is the time for public comment. While we're waiting for hands to be raised, I'll just read our public comment information that video or audio public comment participation is limited to three minutes per speaker unless the mayor would like to reduce it to two minutes. If you'd like to make a comment, please raise your hand in the Zoom application and you'll be called upon when it's your time to speak. To raise your hand from a phone, press star nine, and each speaker will be notified when the time has elapsed. Thank you.
02:31:12.03	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, let's reduce it to two. If someone feels strongly and they need three minutes, then let me know. you know, we'll reduce it to Q. People are also listening to the written conference.
02:31:20.54	Heidi Scoble	We're also going to
02:31:20.99	Unknown	Bye.
02:31:21.02	Heidi Scoble	Thank you.
02:31:21.04	Unknown	Thank you.
02:31:23.94	Jill Hoffman	Sure.
02:31:24.00	Heidi Scoble	Madam Mayor, there are no hands raised at this time. There have been two additional public comment letters that have been posted to the agenda and you can access them
02:31:24.82	Jill Hoffman	.
02:31:34.07	Heidi Scoble	The grant the kiss application on your iPad.
02:31:38.27	Jill Hoffman	Okay, thank you. Okay, then let's just open it up to, then I'm gonna close public comment and bring it back to the city council for, further direction to the staff and comments generally about the budget. So who would like to start?
02:31:54.47	Susan Cleveland Knowles	I can start if nobody else wants to. So I think I'm generally where I was at our last city council meeting on So there's no page number on my slide presentation, but the proposed budget that was in our packet for today all. right after the slide revised proposed budget. with the following adjustments. Um, I would So it shows gradual return in a number of different scenarios. I am in favor of all of those. with the addition of augmenting the landscape maintenance budget. per our earlier conversation to make sure that we are maintaining our landscape in a way that Um, preserves those assets. Um, and the trees that we discussed as well. whether that's all the way back to gradual return or some middle ground. I don't understand at this point, but hopefully staff can clarify that. The second thing is the recreation and parking department budget. which is shown a gradual return would be augmented to add from the pre-COVID scenario, all the net revenue positive events such as Jazz and Blues by the Bay and the you yard sale events. that the recreation and park director believes we can bring back with the current staff that don't have any impact to the budget. and I am a police. I understand that our current library gradual return includes the children's librarians, so leave that at that.
02:33:46.40	Unknown	Thank you.
02:33:47.13	Susan Cleveland Knowles	amount.
02:33:47.25	Unknown	you Amen.
02:33:49.34	Susan Cleveland Knowles	And I would recommend that we leave one police position vacant, not to, and reevaluate that. uh, in four to six months. In terms of the options presented by Mr. Francis, I'm still in favor of the immediate section 115, police, side friends the in-kind contribution to the Section 115 Trust, TO STUDY THE PENSION OBLIGATION BONDS, And on the monetizing of the assets, I am not comfortable moving forward immediately with that, but open to suggestions later in the year. Yeah. as warranted. I think that covers everything. I may have missed something, but so open to what others have to say.
02:34:50.55	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
02:34:52.06	Melissa Blaustein	Who would like to go next? I'll go. I'm happy to go. I really want to acknowledge the hard work of the Finance Committee and of Charlie Francis on this budget and the many, many hours. great to be able to participate in real time in the finance committee. Well, not participate because of Brown Act, but be able to watch. It's different to watch live the Finance Committee meeting, and I appreciated the efforts that were put into that. So as opposed to watching the recording, I think again, you know, the budget is really a representation of our values. And so I really would like to see equitable consideration for cuts. And I'm, you know, I'm naturally disappointed to see that some departments had more furloughs than others. And I would like to be able to have a chance to look at what the 5% scenario might have looked like for police. I disagree with council member Cleveland Knowles suggestion of only having one just given the cuts for other budgets and other serious fiscal situation and what we're going to be dealing with going forward. But I am really happy to see that the children's librarian will be returning I would agree with the suggested budget as presented on this slide here around the gradual return for admin, building, library, recreation and revenue. I'm really hopeful that we can figure out a way forward with the $32,000 from recreation to have a return to our events because we again heard from the community about that. And also supporting the Sausalito Beautiful proposal as well within the budget. I think it's really important to have an ongoing conversation around pensions. And so I'm really happy to see the mayor and vice mayor championing that. And I'm looking forward to the workshops that we will have. around those um, conversations, but I'm also you know, really mindful of that we're going to need some serious structural changes to our budget after this period and we're going to have to look really hard at what those are and where we need to be. I'm not sure. make those changes and I'm a little bit I'm closely watching what's happening from a national level in terms of our economic trends, and now inflation is at 5%, and so I think we need to be really careful about where we're spending. And so if we are going to make cuts across the board in each respective department, then that's why I would... even if maybe we don't necessarily have to, might consider it for, all the departments so that it's equitable but i appreciate everyone's hard work on the budget i think we've come a really long way and it's going to be a continued process and i really appreciate that we have the opportunity for a six-month review of the outsourcing of the finance department so that we can set ourselves up for success going forward so thanks everybody for your hard work
02:37:25.49	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Councilmember Sobieski or Vice Mayor Killen? One. Not. Right.
02:37:33.47	Janelle Kellman	Thank you.
02:37:37.30	Ian Sobieski	Okay, I was still gathering my thoughts, but I hope I'll try to extimitize.
02:37:45.40	Ian Sobieski	I mean, as I said, I get that there's a reason we are doing this process in this way, I'll just say that I still feel like it would have been beneficial to go department by department with the department head to talk about their ideas on what kind of budget they wanted and why and where they could see savings and how. and what kind of approval they needed from us to implement those things. That's not gonna happen in the next two weeks, but if we proceed as our new city manager outlines, to have these presentations one a month. I would hope that the presentation isn't simply a primer on what the department does. that is, I would think, report the charge, and if others agree, would likely department had to be charged with how to level up their department. how to provide more service, with the same dollar spent. We're going to increase the dollar spend to increase the level of service. I think that would be a cultural shift. Every organization can benefit from that kind of exercise. Uh, And why not start now? So I really... ask that of water department heads when they do their presentations over the coming months. Tied to all that, of course, is that we have a new city manager and We talked about doing more with less many times, we've used that phrase. and we all believe that that's possible inside of our account. And I would love to put that charge to our city manager, would be approving a budget that is deficit spending. that what we would love and would love to reward is actually coming up over the coming months with innovations and improvements to come in under our budget as we're putting forward. So sometime in the next 40 days, we're supposed to as a council delineate a set of benchmarks against which, that we promised in Kerstapata's employment thing And I would propose that one of those benchmarks be performance coming in under budget. not built on Squeezing. our employees. I would love to see us hire more people and pay them even better than they expect. I would love to figure out ways to get operational efficiencies and to, um, Again, increased levels of service per dollar spending. I'm not sure. So that's my main point that I don't want to take away from. Coming out the other way, I think of just you're spending so much money, you should be able to do things like have a better permitting system like how the having the events, having the librarian that we expect. So I'm going to vote in favor of those expenditures if these are the only choices we're presented with. But ideally, I would have loved to have been presented with some innovative choices about how we could have
02:40:46.59	Unknown	in a business.
02:40:48.95	Ian Sobieski	for instance, will serve some of our goals. THE END OF THE END OF THE in ways that we haven't in the past. And so I hope we'll do that in the future. And that's what we're looking for.
02:41:02.25	Jill Hoffman	Thank you. Vice Mayor Kellen.
02:41:04.56	Janelle Kellman	Yeah, so thank you and thanks to my fellow council members. This was a really, I think, healthy and useful dialogue. And Charlie, thank you so much for all of your time and Heather's time, of course, who I don't want to forget. I want to make some policy comments and then move on to what we're going to prove or what we're leaning towards. So from a policy perspective, all three scenarios were originally provided were deficit spending. We've been deficit spending for the last two years. and we've been overly relying on transfers in from the parking fund to the general fund. And so what I think that's telling us is that big shifts are coming, and we need to be aware of them. I think we are. I thought the conversation tonight really helped us tease out some of those. But something needs to change based on what we've been doing in the past. There's a couple of policy things, like we're showing $7 million. We're just over in cash reserves. I think it's important to understand the decisions that led us to that. And could we have had more? Could we have had less? But I'd like us to kind of be thinking about how those decisions play out in two or three years. I also think things like Measure F pro forma would be extremely useful as an exercise to help show where we have done well and where maybe we have fallen down so that we can just have lessons learned for future projects like that. In terms of the budget, I think Charlie did a really nice job with his 27 scenarios of coming up with something that helped us weigh a lot of the community concerns. And I really wanted to focus on residents serving focused things like the library and the parks. I really like Councilmember Cleveland-Knowell's statement around the Parks and Rec budget for revenue producing and net positive events. I think that's really a cornerstone of this. I like council member Sobieski's suggestion that maybe we can do more with less. So where can we have some of those efficiencies for parks and rec? THE FEDERAL OF I agree with Councilmember Blaustein about keeping the two police openings. I think that just gives us a little bit of flexibility. Maybe we can do a little drill down with the chief around patrol hours so we actually understand when we say we're going to pay hourly on overtime, what are we really talking about? Because I don't think we had that level of granularity. I was pleased to have the conversation tonight around the community requests. I'll echo Councilmember Figueroa Knowles on Sausalito Beautiful. I want to make sure that when we have really good community and really strong community partners that we're responding to them and they understand the process. I was happy to hear support for reallocating EDAC away from just a line item into accountable departments. um, On the CIP, which we'll come to later, I just want to flag for Kevin and Charlie that I think we need to circle back on the Landsci task force, the LIDAR study. Not sure where that 90K came from, but I have to look at that again. One thing still missing for me is a list of consultants. and their costs. So I want to see how that compares to the 4.1 million from last year. I think the IT department is a really great case study for what happens when you outsource everything. So if we can get that list of consultants and associated costs, that would be, I think, really helpful operationally. I also would love to work with my fellow council members and staff on a grant program and that long-term thinking, how do we get something shovel ready so that we can apply for the grants? That's going to take a little bit of mental Jenga to make sure we're thinking ahead, but I would love to engage if others would like to do that. And then I'll just end with Council Member Sobieski's point around efficiencies. I would love to hear from the city manager at our meeting about some ideas for those efficiencies as we move forward, whether it's sharing resources, combining resources, moving some things that are in one department into another. I think we're open and we have to be open because we can't keep deficit spending. So that would be my comment.
02:44:53.83	Jill Hoffman	I'm sorry, thanks. So my comments are short. Thanks to the council for getting together for this special council meeting. I think it was very helpful for, us and also for the staff to hear our feedback and our questions so that they can adjust prior to Tuesday. I wanna thank Charlie and Heather, especially for getting this budget together and our prior, our interim city manager, Marsha Raines, for helping to get this together. under really incredibly challenging circumstances to get us where the point to the point where we are now. but also keeping in mind that we're coming off of a very challenging circumstance from last year. in the budget adjustments and assumptions that were made last year. thanks to the hard work of that council and council member Cleveland Knowles during that time to get us a budget that kept us stable, right? Was really an incredible lift. So thank you for getting us to this point. As painful as it has been to this point, Keep in mind, this is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to budget and the Hard, hard work. We're gonna have one the next year. to get us to the point where we are not deficit spending. And that means the trade-offs of Staff. It means a trade-off of what we can do in our you know, our infrastructure, hopefully not too much because those are different fun but but this is just a preview of what the hard work is going to be over the next year And so we have to understand that, especially when we start talking about our pension and how the stress that that's putting on our our budget and eating up or general fund to pay those pension payments. Thanks to everybody for your hard work. I look forward to another... enlightening meeting on the 22nd when we revisit this. And Charlie, do you need anything further from us? at this point.
02:46:57.42	Charlie Francis	to summarize the budget that I'll be presenting on Tuesday night. We'll have, um, uh, we're going to include Sausalito Beautiful. We're going to include a pre COVID events that are, um, revenue generating. We're going to, uh, uh, include the Thank you. paying down the police side fund. And then we're going to take advantage of the police department's Is it one or two vacancies?
02:47:27.81	Jill Hoffman	two vacancies and let me So thank you for coming back with that and paying down the police side fund with us. out of the pension trust fund.
02:47:38.93	Unknown	Thank you.
02:47:39.24	Jill Hoffman	So my position on that would be that I would prefer to wait for that until we have our pension our pension workshops and look at the prior strategy that we had with the pension trust fund. because The whole strategy before was that we created this pension trust fund. populated to a certain amount. And that was to smooth our ballooning payments that are you know, in 2028, I think, 28, like substantially almost eclipsing half of our half of our revenue source. So That's my only caution. We have not done that calculation, I don't believe, if we use 1.2 million from the the trust fund now to pay off the side fund. I'm not against it, I'm just saying we need to have a clear picture of the consequences of that. from the prior calculations that were made. So. and it's
02:48:35.93	Charlie Francis	That's either, I mean, we can pay it down at any point in time, but typically we won't realize the savings in the first year if we don't pay it down before July 1st.
02:48:36.56	Jill Hoffman	Yes.
02:48:48.19	Jill Hoffman	Well, but the long-term consequences taken 1.2 million out of the trust, has substantial long-term consequences. When you're talking about compound interest and what the projections were for that trust fund in year, five or six or 10, right? substantial, especially when you're talking about what percentage that is of the pension trust fund and what we were counting on. I mean, I'm not saying not, I'm not saying it's not a bad, a good idea. I'm just saying, I want to see that calculation first before we make that decision. but, Councilmember Cleveland-Nullis has her hand up and then Councilmember Sobieski.
02:49:23.81	Susan Cleveland Knowles	Yeah, I just wanted to say I'm fine with the two police vacancies given the comments made by other council members and i really would like to take advantage of this 115 trust fund issue if um in time to realize that i don't really think that that's going to limit our options moving forward and if we need to hear more from charlie on that on tuesday to to understand it better maybe that's worthwhile But from our workshop, I didn't understand that there was any downside to doing that at this point.
02:49:55.69	Jill Hoffman	So, okay, so the direction, sorry. Oh, Ian, do you want to go ahead?
02:49:59.67	Ian Sobieski	who's just gonna say, I agreed with you, Jill, until I heard what Charlie said about there being a deadline, and now, because I didn't, I still don't understand. whether there's any downside or not, and I'm worried about The previous councils put a lot of effort into creating this side fund. thought about it and my rough idea of of understanding it is that it's money that grows at a different rate and that we might have some advantage for waiting, but I see also the argument for spending it right away. It actually seems like a technical issue that at least I'm ignorant of it, ignorant of enough, that I would love to be educated in by Charlie. July's season improvement in all states We would say we've gone over the budget at great length. There seems to actually be less controversy about a direction on the budget, and that part of Tuesday's meeting might be shorter than we anticipated. if we're going to have a deadline on this 115 thing, than we should. have it be a a definitive conversation. before the deadline to make an affirmative decision.
02:51:03.07	Jill Hoffman	There's no...
02:51:03.31	Charlie Francis	So,
02:51:03.52	Jill Hoffman	Thank you.
02:51:03.81	Charlie Francis	So real quick, I can explain how this works. liability.
02:51:07.96	Jill Hoffman	but,
02:51:08.20	Ian Sobieski	Thank you. the end.
02:51:08.60	Jill Hoffman	in the auto.
02:51:09.40	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
02:51:09.58	Jill Hoffman	Yeah.
02:51:10.14	Ian Sobieski	Thank you.
02:51:10.17	Charlie Francis	Yeah.
02:51:11.03	Ian Sobieski	I know that I don't know that we can shoot from the hip on it. I'm just saying.
02:51:14.05	Jill Hoffman	Right. So I think I...
02:51:15.15	Ian Sobieski	Is there a deadline or not for one thing? Is there a deadline on July 1st? You get one chance and you have to wait a year to realize any savings?
02:51:23.96	Charlie Francis	So there's two things going on. One is if you make your unfunded liability contribution payment within the first month of July, it might even be the first two weeks, I'm not sure, you get a 3% discount. Historically, the city has typically done that. I don't know if they've done it in the past recent years, but we used to do that. I'm not sure. You can pay. monthly, but you don't get that 3% upfront discount for paying it off. If we paid it off on July 1st, then we get two hits. First we get the $400,000 reduction, and then we get another 3% on the remaining amortized less. So I can prepare all of that in Tuesday night's presentation, and it would be easy to either include or exclude from our final budget focus.
02:52:12.58	Jill Hoffman	Yeah, that's fine for me, Charlie. And if you could, but I also want, You know, I want it... against the prior calculations that were made for the smoothing of the overall pension payments in years, you know, 10, 11, 12, That was the whole point of the pension trust fund and funding the pension trust fund. So if you defund it, then you don't have that protection a smoothing later. That's what I'm most concerned about. I mean, I get the whole we're saving the side fund. In fact, I wish we would have paid the side fund off back in 2016, but we didn't. We chose not to. Um, so I'd like to see the, um, that calculation that we were given in 2018 when the pension side fund was created, and it was to be funded. I mean, whatever the numbers come out to be, they come out to be, but I just, I haven't seen that yet. And I think that's important for us before we make our decision.
02:53:05.14	Charlie Francis	Yeah, you know, the 2018 plan was never implemented.
02:53:10.98	Jill Hoffman	That's okay, then tell us that. Or, I mean, don't tell us now, but I know it was implemented in some way because I know there's money in the pension trust fund. I understand that in the subsequent years it was not funded as it should have been.
02:53:18.27	Unknown	It was not.
02:53:23.23	Jill Hoffman	And we also have discussions about that at several city council meetings as we went through. So back in those years.
02:53:28.16	Janelle Kellman	So,
02:53:30.94	Jill Hoffman	So yeah, that's it. I just want a simple calculation. This is what we were told in 2018 when we created the thing. This is the way we were supposed to fund it. This is our risk. So the risk is there, right? Either we leave it there and and maybe continued Fund it up. because we didn't fund it and we need to fund it more because we had this looming tsunami of pension debt coming or we pay off one of the side funds, and that's just a math calculation, right?
02:53:57.64	Unknown	Right.
02:53:58.30	Jill Hoffman	Okay, that's all I'm asking for. Okay, so we're clear on that. Anything else? The LV University.
02:54:06.23	Charlie Francis	Nothing for me.
02:54:08.25	Jill Hoffman	Okay, I didn't say this, but yeah, I support the budget as we presented it today with the adjustments. and the Saucyote Beautiful. If we can figure out if that's coming out of some other fund, then call that out. If that's coming out of public works. then call that out to you.
02:54:30.41	Charlie Francis	It'll come out of landscape fitness.
02:54:33.42	Jill Hoffman	Okay. Okay. All right, any other questions? No, I'm seeing nothing. Shaking heads. Great. Thanks, you guys. That's it. I'm going to adjourn.
02:54:43.73	Melissa Blaustein	you Thank you.
02:54:43.93	Jill Hoffman	Thanks, everybody.
02:54:45.02	Melissa Blaustein	Have a nice weekend, everyone.
02:54:46.56	Unknown	Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.

City Council Meeting - June 18, 2021

Meeting Summary

Meeting Transcript