| Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00:08.84 | Serge Avila | Madam Mayor, we're admitting all public now. |
| 00:00:20.52 | Serge Avila | Yeah. And good morning, Mayor Kellman and council members. It's been held pursuant to government code section 54953E. And in light of the declared state of emergency, the adjourned Meeting of the city council of June 14, 2022 will be conducted telephonically through Zoom and broadcast live on the city's website and cable TV channel 27. Good morning. |
| 00:00:48.24 | Unknown | Good morning, thank you, Serge. Good morning, everybody. This is the continuation of the June 14th meeting. which we were very diligent but did not get to item 4B, the public hearing items, and this is the continuation of the budget hearing for the proposed fiscal year 2022-23. presentation from our city manager. I just wanna confirm with our city attorney, we don't have to, approve the agenda or do anything like that since this is a continuation? Correct. Okay, great. So then with that said, we will move directly into the presentation from our finance director and our city manager. Good morning. |
| 00:01:24.29 | Chris Zapata | Thank you, Mayor, members of the public, council, and certainly our staff for continuing this important item from Tuesday night. I want to also say we have about a 15 minute presentation on staff side. And then at that point, I think we'd be happy to answer questions. provide information that you and the public may want to see. Let me begin at the beginning. A budget is a It reflects where your priorities are. Some say it may reflect your values, but it certainly reflects where your priorities are. And certainly what I really want to point out is that a budget is an estimate to projection And typically in normal cycles, we're able to project 5% of the good or 5% of the bad, something in between. in this period with all of this uncertainty and on, you know, you know, hopefully at the tail end of the pandemic, it's been a little more difficult. Our crystal ball has been a little cloudier. So, you know, some of the things that you may have seen in the past that look, you know, normal swings are not normal in this day and age right now. So I wanna talk about the budget you adopted last year. To begin, it was about $40 million in change. The budget you're gonna adopt this year in the overall sense that we're recommending is about 35 million. So there's a big swing there, and that's to the point that I'm trying to make, that some years you don't see much change at all. But in pandemic times, in economic uncertainty times, you tend to see bigger swings. So last year we started with about a $4.5 million gap. Uh, We looked at that budget as it was adopted. There were some fixes that you balanced it with, with one-time money and one-time money is that. |
| 00:03:25.26 | Unknown | Oh, Serge, it looks like Chris keeps getting muted here. |
| 00:03:29.65 | Serge Avila | Thank you. |
| 00:03:29.69 | Chris Zapata | the KTEC co-host Madam Mayor should be able to unmute. So did you already know that's bill I just made? |
| 00:03:35.63 | Unknown | Most of it, the last 30 seconds maybe you went up. |
| 00:03:38.56 | Chris Zapata | Okay, great. Great. Okay. So last year, you know, we were looking at unnatural times with the pandemic and some rising costs. And so the budget that you balanced, which was about $40 million, this year's budget is again about $35 million in total. And, you know, I want to focus predominantly on the general fund. We will have some time for the capital improvement program, but the general fund is where you provide your services and things that the public sees, our visitors see, our businesses see. So last year, again, one-time monies, which are one-time monies were used to balance our general fund budget. Those monies don't exist anymore. Uh-huh. the American Rescue Plan Act Fund, which is about Almost $1.7 million is no longer there. You used about $1.2 million for measure O to use for operating expenses to balance the budget. There was about $930,000 in the reserve funds that you used to balance the budget. And there was a larger allotment from the parking fund, which covered that about $4.5 million total. I want to really state clearly that you actually then went back this past fiscal year in February and restored that $1.2 million for infrastructure and maintenance out of your reserve funds. So, you know, even though you used it, you used it twice last year, and that $2.4 million was to build your, fill your budget gap, but you also restored that from the reserve fund. So that $1.2 million total is about $2.4 million that you used to do the right thing, I believe, which is make sure that we continue maintenance and infrastructure using Measure O money. So go to the next slide, Serge, please. |
| 00:05:29.18 | Chris Zapata | So in recognition of this gap, it was apparent that there needed to be some greater efficiencies and we needed to do some things differently to capture revenue. So the city council wanted to make sure that we did that so that the gap didn't grow and we could start to address what we term a structural deficit. So one of the things is, you know, making sure that we collect the money that's out there. And so you directed hiring a professional property manager, which we've done to manage our pretty extensive portfolio for a small town of leases, properties. You also wanted to see us be more successful garnering other people's money, whether it's a state, the county, or a foundation or other sources. So you authorized the retention and directed the hiring of some grant writing resources done that. And then with respect to the existing budget that is closing this year, we had about a $1.3 million expense for VirtualGov that was untenable. So we recommended and you supported the idea of rebuilding our finance department to the way it used to be, what I call a traditional finance department. And so that contract was ended in November of 2015. 21 and relies some savings for us but we also we built the finance department to what it is now and it's being led by a finance director that is in-house next slide search for So why do we do these things? Well, one of the things that cities don't like to hear is that you have a structural deficit and, you know, In simple terms, that means that you're spending more money than it's coming in. And in the city's case, it's not insignificant. And so these moves that we talked about to kind of recalibrate with respect to our staffing, our contracts to try to find money are necessary because if we don't do that, the structural deficit continues. And I think that's one thing that I wanted to make clear to. the public, to the council, and to the organization in April I presented a financial health assessment of the city. And structural deficits don't happen overnight. They happen over time. you |
| 00:07:41.46 | Unknown | Uh-huh. |
| 00:07:42.17 | Chris Zapata | They are things that are like, slow moving storms but you can see them coming well we're in one and so I thought it important to understand how we got here. hopefully how we get out of here. Next slide, sir. So going into the general fund budget, this is a simple pie chart. of where you're putting your money, what your priorities are, as again some would say what your values are. And you can see the biggest pot of money that goes out of the general fund is for our police department at about 29%. The other departments, which are pretty standard in my view in terms of how cities allocate their resources, got about 10% for quality of life, which is parks and buildings, for libraries and recreation you have another 10% for parks and park maintenance You have about 11% for your public works out of the general fund and you have another 13% that goes into our development and planning and permitting and economic strengthening engine, which is community development department. And then you have about 18% in just general administrative, non-departmental, what we call non-departmental, things like your insurance that costs you money and are rising. So let's go into a little detail on these. Sir, can you go to the next slide, please? |
| 00:09:12.23 | Chris Zapata | So what we try to do is give you a snapshot of all the departments in the general fund with what the budget was last year, what we're proposing this year, and what those changes are. And some of those, we want to explain some of those changes because, again, they're big swings. They're not 5% swings or to the good or to the bad. They're major swings. And we need to explain those to you and to the public and so that we're all on the same page. |
| 00:09:22.49 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:09:37.07 | Chris Zapata | So there's been some curtailment in the admin finance department is significant. There's been some increase in non-departmental which is significant. Community development there's been some reduction which is explainable public works there's a big delta between what was and what is and that's attributable to the last meeting when we talked about the homeless expense that we may incur which we estimated at about five hundred thousand dollars you asked that we put that in the budget we have but we also were asked to footnote the idea that you know marine county has put into their budget a five hundred thousand dollar amount for the city of Sausalito so So even though that's a big swing, the thought is that we're going to see revenue that will come in the coming year from the county and may see more from the state. On the IT side, there's an increase there. We're trying to rebuild and replace and manage critical infrastructure. And in this day and age, when you talk about IT, 30 years ago, what was that? Well, nowadays the world stops if your phones stop, if your computers stop, your internet feed stops and so the cities are no different And so some of the things that the city has invested in are way past their useful life, how we manage those assets to make sure that we can continue doing what we need to do in the digital age. That's part and parcel to that. with library you know we are continuing on we call a status quo budget where you know we're going to continue to buy the books and hire the people that we need to hire to maintain the library service because that is a beloved service in our community parks there's some increases there because we have some fleet needs we have some things that we have to do to upgrade and maintain our parks and then you see a decrease in recreation and that's a result of us phasing out the parks and recreation director position but what I don't want to lose on this is the police department the police department has a seven percent swing in terms of increase but it's 6.7 million dollars so if you have a swing in i.t which is you know a million dollars uh yeah it looks big but if you have a big swing in the bigger departments then that's what i would pay attention to if i was a member of the public and i was a member of the organization because the bigger departments with with increased costs, you know, it reflects smaller on the percentage increase, but it actually could be quite a bit larger on the number side. Next slide, Serge. |
| 00:12:22.62 | Chris Zapata | So in this particular budget, which is our expenditures, it does what we recommended, we heard and you said on June the 3rd, that we maintain our current service levels. That means we have a 4th of July. That means we have Jazz by the Bay. That means we have things that, you know, people in our public, people that live here, people that have business here, expect in terms of the workforce. And the workforce is what drives services. They can't be separated. If you don't have a workforce, you can't have services. And so our service levels and the budget that we're proposing reflects that, you know, we would maintain a status quo budget and let me just say what i heard last meeting in order to do that and maintain our capital improvement program not dipping into measure o for operating costs it's a significant ask and and that ask we'll talk about a little later in the budget but but the one thing that i i know is clear is that we cannot continue to dip into our reserves for operating expenses so um noted uh clearly noted and we'll get to that a little later And the reason that we have a bigger gap or a continuing gap is, you know, we used our American Rescue Plan Act funds last year at 1.6 million, 900 or 90,000, almost $1.7 million to balance our budget last year. That's gone. So we're not, we can't and we don't include any new federal money, so that exacerbates the problem. The Measure O funds that we apportioned last year to supplement the operating budget, we didn't do that this year. So that's important to note. That by itself is about $3 million. 1.2 plus 1.6, almost 1.7. So that's a significant number that we've got to overcome and we're trying to do that. So let's go to the revenue side. Can I go to the next slide, sir? |
| 00:14:22.55 | Chris Zapata | So general fund revenues, again, I want to, Hikayedir. times aren't normal, but you know, uh, we are getting back to a, a better picture. We're just not all the way recovered. If you look at some of our estimates and property tax, You can see that we're almost back to where we were, even though it's slightly less. If you look at our business license tax, that's increased. significant way. I hear that we need to do more in our collections and you know there may be a need to ramp up with our consultant how we do that so that it is actually the revenue that's supposed to be brought in and that is received by our team through our work with HDL because I keep hearing that maybe we're not doing such a good job on that so we'll take a hard look on that but that revenue is up. The one thing that you would expect to see growth in, you've seen moderate growth in sales tax, moderate growth in TOT, and that's good. Prior couple of years you saw reductions because you saw reductions based on the pandemic and the concerns about that. um, Interfund transfers, that's where you reflect the big parking fund transfer we did last year. To balance that $4.5 million budget deficit, you took the $1.6.7 million in ARPA funds. You took the $1.2 million in Measure O. You took an additional $1 million from the parking fund. And then you took the $980,000 from your reserve to create that balancing act. |
| 00:16:13.94 | Chris Zapata | I knew it. YOU ARE AMMUNED. Thank you. So our revenues are picking up, but the bottom line is, next slide, Serge. So is our expense, our expenses. So to work on that, obviously you have to have a process and a budget process and working through the last couple of months starting with the mid-year review that we did a few months back and you know some of the background information that you needed to figure out how we got where we are and what the plan was so last meeting it all came to a head And we said we needed $2.7 million from your reserve fund if we wanted to maintain the service levels we had. You suggested that the homeless costs weren't in there. We need to put that in there. So that created a $3.2 million ask, which is one of the things that we're uneasy about. But if we're going to maintain service levels, we got to make that ask. On the other side, before you make that ask, I thought it was important for us to talk about what we did to reduce the structural issues or the budget gap that we have. And we've done that, you know. We've done things that I mentioned earlier in the presentation that involve cuts and freezes and negotiation contracts, etc. So, One other thing that was really clear to me is, you know, there's a concern by the council that we not go too far into our reserves, given the size of Sausalito, given the potential impacts of Sausalito, whether they're natural or other, we have some real threats. The idea that we don't go below two months worth of reserves for an emergency was seen, I heard, as too low. And so we acknowledge that. And then I think the most important thing was if you come to us next year with this idea that we need some one-time money, to balance the budget again that's not that's not that's probably not gonna happen. So give us a plan. And what I committed to last Friday was some kind of plan that would be done by mid-year, that would start to speak to how we replenish our general fund reserve, how we do things to balance our budget structurally. That's a combination of a lot of things. It's efficiency. It's recovering the revenue due us. It's looking at our revenue streams and making sure that we try to diversify and strengthen them. and so in your packet as an attachment i believe it's number five there's a draft plan and let me say this again there's a draft plan it's a proposed plan it begins that discussion it's not the end of the discussion it begins that discussion and i've already heard from some of you that you like it i've also heard from some of you that there's some things in there that you know you don't think are things that you could support and And that's okay. But we need to start the discussion now so we can get to something that everybody can understand and the public can see that is by major. Because again, we don't want to come back and ask for more funds from your reserves in the future. We want to make sure that we look at ways to actually strengthen our reserves and eliminate the structural deficit. But that's going to take a lot of work. is going to take cooperation, not just from The city council is gonna take cooperation from the organization. It's also gonna take some cooperation from the community because Sausalito does have a gap there are some opportunities to deal with that so let's go to the next slide search |
| 00:19:57.40 | Chris Zapata | So going back to the gap that we have and how we bridge that this year, the obvious answer is city councils in the past and, you know, administrations in the past have done a great job of saving money, putting money aside. And you've created, you know, three different funds in the general fund that could be used in an emergency. They have names, you know, I understand them. You have a 5% budget stabilization fund. You have a 10% emergency shortfall fund. They're all general fund related and they're absolutely able to be used by the city in a scenario like we have today. You also have unassigned reserve funds beyond that 5% and that 10%. So that 5% and 10% reserve funds are supplemented, buttressed by unassigned reserve funds. And so the total available general fund reserves that you have were $7,990,815 as of last month. So that's $8 million roughly. So, and having the conversation, you know, the real key is to not go below, you know, a number of the council's comfortable with. So the 5%, 10% should stay as they are. The 22% is where we're recommending you take $3.2 million from. That would leave about 1.5, almost $1.6 million in this account. And that's in addition to the $1,070,000 you have in the 5% stabilization and the $2,140,000 you have in the 10% shortfall fund. So your total general fund reserve would be about four, I can't see mine. lives. would be about $4,790,815, or would leave you at a 23% of your general fund budget for emergencies. So that's above the 16.7 that I recommended. It's lower than what you started the year with, which is closer to 30%. But there have been some takes, and this obviously would be a big take from that on the signed reserve. So that would leave you with what I call 23% of your general fund to use for any emergency in the future if you adopt this year's budget. Next slide, Serge. |
| 00:22:17.39 | Chris Zapata | So as we look at our budgets, you obviously had the special meeting on the 3rd. We scheduled the public hearing on the 14th, which got continued to today. Very helpful for us to have the ability to schedule this Friday meeting because this is what is important in the city without a budget, without people, then services and what the community expects can't be done. So this is an extremely important meeting. And this would segue into after questions and directions and comment to a formal meeting on the 28th again, which is a regular council meeting. to adopt a budget that is proposed So I will conclude my comments and turn this over to Kevin McGowan to talk about the capital improvement program, and then we'll answer questions that you may have. |
| 00:23:03.39 | Unknown | Thank you, Senator. |
| 00:23:10.38 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:23:15.02 | Unknown | Kevin, welcome. |
| 00:23:16.52 | Kevin McGowan | There we go. I think the host had to give me some privileges to go ahead and be audible at this point. So good morning, Mayor, City Council members. Great to see everybody on a Friday morning. I was a couple minutes late, my apologies. So I have a couple slides for us to review today concerning the capital improvement program. Next slide, Serge, please. Thank you. As you may recall, we presented the draft capital improvement program to the council on April 12th, 2022. At that time, staff reviewed the methods for developing and selecting projects for next year's CIP or capital improvement program. Many of our projects cannot be completed in one fiscal year, such that they appear in multiple capital improvement programs and budgets. Since that meeting staff has worked with the finance department and have been working to identify the available funding in order to develop recommendations for the council to be included in this year's budget. There are many unknown related factors to capital improvement projects. And keep in mind that the capital improvement program is a planning document. And other factors that can influence the numbers that we present include inflation rates, the cost of construction, the cost of materials. All of these are pretty much in flux as we can all tell with rising gas prices and inflation these days. So my next slide, Sergio. Thank you. Since the April meeting with the council, staff has reviewed the 36 active projects and the eight proposed new projects for fiscal year 22-23. Specifically, staff reviewed all the fund sources that support each project with the intent of identifying the amount of general fund expenditures that are estimated to support the projects for next fiscal year. In previous meetings with council, there has been an emphasis to address resurfacing of roadways and there was a commitment of 1.2 million in reserve funds to support this specific type of project. That's why I've kind of highlighted it here. Next slide, Serge. |
| 00:25:53.68 | Kevin McGowan | Presently there, we are managing 36 active projects with an estimated value of $15 million. Some of these projects, such as sanitary projects, are funded by the enterprise funds, while others are supported by grants. In addition, some funding sources such as gas tax and construction impact funds may only be used for specific types of projects such as roadway projects. Several of our projects are included in these total costs, which are almost complete. For example, we have the gate six project and some others that are listed here on this slide. They are basically completed in construction, but our staff continues to work on them, either because we have claims or because we have to interact by submitting the grant paperwork to finalize the project. All right, next slide, Serge, thank you. For next fiscal year, there is a limited amount of funding for both active and proposed projects. Several funding sources, like I mentioned, such as gas tax and construction impact fees, can only be used for roadway projects and can't be used for building projects. This year, a very limited amount of funding from Measure O is available for both the active and the proposed projects. So keep an eye on that 1.2. Our next slide, Serge. The staff reviewed the active and the new projects and based on this review found a total of 1.8 million is available to support the capital program. Like I said, unfortunately, there is only 1.2 million in measure of funds to support all these projects. Next slide, please. All right, staff analyze the estimated costs for these projects and develop several alternatives. Allocation of additional funding to address the total amount needed is a possibility. an estimated amount of about 600 000 is needed to balance uh to be a balanced amount in order to continue with all of these projects we do not recommend this alternative at this point in time based off of the budget shortfalls as addressed by our city managers not proceeding with new projects and not proceeding with any new construction activities has a potential for reducing or a reduction in the city's funding of the capital improvement program by 3.8 million. However, vital projects such as resurfacing, slide repairs, the geologic hazard studies, and many more will not be executed this year when there may have been an expectation by the residents that these would continue to move forward. Staff does not recommend this option at this time either. not proceeding with new projects, as well as not allocating local match funding for grants will free up some funding to assist with present active projects. Staff also recommends proceeding with present projects such as resurfacing and slide repair and the slide repair on bridgeway economic impacts to the construction cost may be apparent at the time that we receive bids for these projects such that it may be necessary to not award some of these based on the available funding so let me kind of summarize that a little bit in an easier form at this point in time we we are ready to go ahead and bid some of these projects so let's do that let's go out and get bids and find out what they cost now if the bids come in exceptionally high we can make a decision or the council can make a decision at that point in time of whether to proceed with this work or possibly cut it down in some way, shape or form. But that gives the council and the city the opportunity to make a decision at that point in time. Next slide, Sergio. There we go, we've got some economic impacts on the estimates. Okay, next slide. All right, balancing and identifying which projects may not be executed this year is a difficult process. So next slide, Serge. Here we go. Some projects can be significantly impacted by the economy, such that the cost for these projects may end up much higher than noted in the CIP, which is a planning document. allowing staff to proceed with the bidding projects and continue to move forward with the work identified in previous capital improvement programs will help to allow these projects to proceed. So thank you so much and I'll turn it back over to our city manager. |
| 00:31:01.49 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. Okay, thank you, Kevin. So before we get into the questions, I want to kind of address some things that I call loose things that we need to understand and get some direction from the council on. There were commitments made by the city council to various groups in the past, whether it's to our seniors or our business community. And so those commitments that are in this year's budget, it's really important for us to do a review of did we follow through with those is there some carry funds forward that we could utilize in the coming year or also to you know maybe look at new requests so when it comes down to things like our senior program that's in the budget the monies that were allocated to um |
| 00:31:02.95 | Kevin McGowan | and |
| 00:31:47.60 | Chris Zapata | EDAC the question is you know did they spend all that money and if they have somebody carried forward how can they use that or do you want to claw that back I would recommend not but as it relates to the smaller asks you know I'm talking between ten thousand and a hundred thousand dollars my recommendation is don't hang up the budget process I'm trying to fix those today all of those things I think can be brought forward with some staff analysis and then you can decide if you want to move forward with them or not. But to not continue what we've committed to and to not listen to future requests i think that would be a bad medicine so what i'm suggesting is keep the commitments you made see if there's any carryover funds and how those could be reutilized or not but any new request that's not in the budget from community groups needs to be weighed on its own merits by the council after some analysis. And I think that will save us from wondering, do we fund X program or Y program in this budget cycle? The answer is everything's possible. but everything has to be justified. So with that, I'll conclude my comments and see if you have questions for... myself, Vivian, or Kevin. |
| 00:33:04.14 | Unknown | Thank you, Chris. Can we stop the screen share for a second so we can see? who might have comments. I'm sure all of us do. I have many, anybody particularly eager to start us off? I mean, I'm happy to. So Chris, I just want to confirm. So this is, I think, good news. We started reserves with 30% of our general fund. You had recommended 16.7, and it seems like you have a scenario here at 23%, right? What did you do differently? from a high level so that the community can sort of follow along that gets us not from 16, but the 23% and stuff. |
| 00:33:41.77 | Chris Zapata | Well, it's what you all as council did. So when we started talking about, need for your reserves. And you know, early in the year was 31, 30%. And we took a hundred thousand dollars here. And now we're talking about, you know, $3.2 million. So, so that taking you down is, is, is what I would call a function of our |
| 00:34:02.75 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:34:05.84 | Chris Zapata | of our challenge. we went from 30 to 23 percent we didn't go down to 16.7 percent and that's because we started to cut things travel training um you know expenses that you know weren't uh essential to the operation of our services uh you know reconfiguring positions freezing positions uh things that you know are in a perfect world you wouldn't want to do downsizing staff in certain departments starting with the city manager's office the parks and recreation department and we still have to look at more of that but but that was all to the good that i think you're referring to mayor killman and those were necessary things as i go back to our approach you know let's be more efficient let's figure out what we can do differently with the resources we have so don't we don't have a an ongoing issue with not enough money for our expenses so uh if we hadn't done those things if we'd have kept certain contracts certain positions not froze things not done things that were more cost savings, then we would probably have a bigger problem than going from 30% to 23%. You'd probably go a lot lower. And we've also looked real hard at our expenses to the general fund, like our capital improvement program. We would love to spend more money on the infrastructure in our city. But the bottom line is that 1.2 million that you've allocated from Measure O to keep going and to break last year's budget, scenario created a bigger problem so so if you take out that 1.2 million and you added it like we did last year our structure probably would be two million dollars and if you had ARPA monies you know 1.7 it would be one million dollars |
| 00:35:47.14 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:35:50.73 | Chris Zapata | if those one-time monies are gone, and we recommend you use them the way they were intended and so going from 33 30 31 to 23 was not an easy thing to do it's still not where you want to be but there were some steps absolutely taken to make sure it wasn't worse |
| 00:36:08.16 | Unknown | Okay, and let me ask you just real quick attachment five. I know I gave you comments, I'm sure others did as well. Does that attachment reflect our comments or is it the original list that you would share with the council? |
| 00:36:20.40 | Chris Zapata | That is the original proposed list. Mayor, it does not reflect your comments because there really hadn't been a forum to collate those and talk to those but but I will talk to you individually about them if you wish. I think that there's absolutely a need for the full council to review that with the public and you know then have a big council conversation with what makes sense in there and what doesn't. I want to point out that you know it was structured in five key areas with a 2022 horizon on some ideas, a 2023 horizon on other ideas, and a 2024 on other. So obviously the ideas and the timeframes are subject to your direction, but it was important for me to put that out there so that we could start to in earnest look at what we would be doing so that we can replenish our reserves and do the things we need to do so that we don't have a structural deficit in the future. |
| 00:37:13.66 | Unknown | Okay, and then I've got a ton of CIP questions, but I'll hold off on those and just ask one more here. which is sort of the miscellaneous bucket. So you talked about other budget commitments and you recommended we not deep dive those today. I understand that. But I am curious to understand your recommendation around not looking at monies that were allocated like the EDAC money is not bringing those back into the budget. That's sort of part one of this question. And part two is you mentioned other smaller contributions, but then you went from 10K to 100K, which is a very big delta for me. I'm wondering what is the, in aggregate, the number, the dollar amount of those other smaller contributions. So if you could address the EDAC comment and then just in aggregate the amount of the other smaller contributions, that'd be helpful. |
| 00:37:57.23 | Chris Zapata | Yeah, so EDEC held a meeting last Monday. And one of the questions was, you know, we went in front of the council, they directed us to look at certain things And the question I had was, where are we with what we were committed to doing and that being spent. So I don't have the exact answer as to what the total amount is that EDAC did not spend. I do know that there was a two-year commitment to a marketing agency that we're in the first year of And then I know there were some that may be getting a little bit you know, And I don't know the answer today may be used for the request that, you know, the council asked EDAC to look into. one of them being the formation of the business improvement district which would take a little bit of money to set up. and that's expected to come from the city. If the carry forward, which I'm guessing is in the magnitude of $75,000 based on the CDA contract, is still there and there's a little bit more, you would want to consider using the excess for the the BID, Piss of Truman District, but if you're going to not do the second year of the community creative digital agency contract. at 75k i don't know that we're not locked into that with an agreement i have to review that but that's what i'm talking about the little things i'm talking about hey chris i'll have |
| 00:39:24.49 | Unknown | Hey, Chris, hold on. I need to, I recommend that you spend, you provide us a little more detail on that because I'm trying to reconcile that with your other recommendation that we reduce the board's in committee and the board's in committee time and staff time and oversight. We had allocated $300,000. I don't know how much of that was spent. Now we may not have as frequent meetings. I don't know where we're down on that. So I think we need to reconcile those two things. |
| 00:39:48.33 | Chris Zapata | Sure, thank you. Yeah, and so if one's a bigger challenge, the other one's a smaller one, we can certainly get you the EDAC numbers. The economic impact of restructuring boards, committees, commissions is more of an in-kind impact. I don't know that that's a budgetary impact, that's staff time, but we certainly will get you the information from EDAC because that was a big push last year. It was in a magnitude of 200 between 250, $70,000 is my recollection, but where they are with their spend, I want to know that too. We'll get that to you. And then I think what we need to do is balance that against some direction that they received from the council, which was we're interested in lighting downtown. We're interested in a business improvement district. And although it sounds counterintuitive, I want to tell you that a business improvement district is some seed money, but it turns into an allocation of funds in a specified area that would involve other people's money so it would build an ability to market uh event secure and maintain you know a part of town that pays that money so i i am a big supporter of vids if they're done right and so you asked the uh edac folks to do that so i think they're following through on that the question is how it's paid for and so again I'll get you the information on where we are with EDAC thanks for the question |
| 00:41:09.80 | Unknown | And then the aggregate of the other smaller contributions that range from 10 to 100K? |
| 00:41:13.48 | Chris Zapata | I'd have to ask Vivian, you know, we have senior program, $10,000, $20,000 to attend the budget. I'm not so sure what other little asks are in there. But you know, you have a $21 million general fund. on the expenditure side so we carry forward some things like the program for helping our seniors in terms of mobility. And I think that was 10 or $20,000, Vivian can correct me. But little things like that to me are important for the community's well-being. the fabric I don't know that there are big things that you want to really involve yourself in today if you think that they should go away or continue we have them in there as continuing I can get you a list of those before the 28th or sooner But there's not a lot in there, Mayor. |
| 00:41:59.79 | Unknown | Okay, thank you. All right, who would like to go next? Yeah, Councilor Clevelin-Walls, please. |
| 00:42:06.10 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, thank you, Chris, and thank you, Kevin, for the presentations. I think, you know, I think some of the mayor's questions are going, little bit to something I'm struggling with, which is this level of detail of the budget is not, I think, what we've seen or it's not what we've seen in the past, and it's not organized in a way that we've seen in the past department by department. And I think last year it was very helpful to kind of get back to that in our, that Friday session that we did where we could have a slide on each department and we could kind of see the background. So I think that's just I think we should get back to that next year. I'm not sure why we didn't go there this year. I think, Chris, your slide today about the pie chart. was very helpful and the slide kind of department by department showing the change |
| 00:42:54.18 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:42:54.24 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | from last year is very helpful. And, but what's not, what we can't tell from either the pie chart or the chart, the table showing our, adjusted budget from last year and the budget this year is why the numbers are fluctuating. So you gave us a very high level of description today, which I appreciate. And you told us to look carefully at something like the police department, which is going up 8%. But I don't think we really understood why that's happening. So if we could go back to that, slide and get a little bit more detail on some of the bigger swings. appreciate that and particularly the 8% increase I mean, I know we have vacant positions. I thought we would either be holding steady for possibly going down vis-a-vis our last year's budget. So I just kinda wanna understand that. |
| 00:43:46.07 | Chris Zapata | So I will ask Vivian to help me with the detail on specific budgets, specific departments, but the costs go up. simply because what's in place at the city now is you have a system of of compensation that evolves step increases And so you have people that are subject to anniversary dates. The cost last year, they hit an anniversary, they get a good evaluation, then they get a step increase. That's an increased cost. We all know that our pension costs have gone up. So that includes that as well. So when you look at some of these increases, you think, well, why would they go up if we haven't added staff or we haven't given people a cost of living? The reason is essentially that. People are still getting steps. There is still an increase in our retirement costs. And so as it relates to department budgets, that's a given. And so we are trying what I call very hard to work through a bargaining process with our labor groups so that everyone understands that. even though you may not see a Go ahead. Sorry. |
| 00:44:51.83 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Sorry, but so can we go to the slide? Because some of the department budgets are going down and some are going up. So, and I don't think it's all step increases, but maybe if it is, then I think we should. |
| 00:45:03.15 | Chris Zapata | We should. Well, I started with the big one, council member, and that's the police department. Okay. |
| 00:45:07.76 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | So if that 8% is step increases, is that what I'm |
| 00:45:10.75 | Chris Zapata | For the most part, pension costs, pension burden. |
| 00:45:15.69 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Well, the constant costs are coming out of a different account, right? That's not our operation plan. |
| 00:45:15.78 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:45:15.88 | Vivian | I'm sorry. |
| 00:45:16.13 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:45:16.15 | Vivian | Thank you. |
| 00:45:16.18 | Unknown | in this thing. |
| 00:45:20.86 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | The police department budget shouldn't be showing Is that are the police pension obligations in that budget? |
| 00:45:27.32 | Chris Zapata | uh, I believe so. |
| 00:45:28.74 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I believe so. A different line item. |
| 00:45:31.39 | Chris Zapata | that's that's salary salaried So if their salaries go up, that's definitely in there. So can you pull that slide up, Serge? general fund revenues. |
| 00:45:45.97 | Unknown | Like five, such. |
| 00:45:48.01 | Chris Zapata | Number seven. |
| 00:45:49.15 | Unknown | Number five, everybody. |
| 00:45:56.36 | Chris Zapata | to this one. There you go. No, that's expenditures. Are we looking at expenditures? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, no, that's it, Serge. You got it. |
| 00:46:10.80 | Chris Zapata | So if you have specific questions on specific departments and you wanna go to one of those departments, let us know and we can address those. |
| 00:46:19.76 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | And is this, this is posted? I'm having a hard time finding the presentation posted online. Is it posted? |
| 00:46:27.22 | Chris Zapata | You know, this PowerPoint was sent out yesterday afternoon. It will be posted. |
| 00:46:33.76 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay. I mean, I got it from you. I just don't, it's hard for me to view it at both times, unless it's in Granicus. But okay, so for some reason, I can't read on my slide what the police says. at the very bottom. |
| 00:46:53.67 | Chris Zapata | It says two patrol cars, equipment, and professional service require training expenses as part of the increase. |
| 00:47:03.66 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so I did send to both Kevin and you, and I believe |
| 00:47:04.03 | Chris Zapata | and then, |
| 00:47:08.87 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | to Borebacher that TAM has opened up a solicitation for vehicle procurement especially zero emission vehicle procurement that with some significant amount of grant funding even for heavy-duty um, public works or police. So I think that's, you know, that would be helpful to pursue. I know this has come up a couple of times as our vehicle fleet has turned over. kind of not really following our policy and our low emission action plan so that's I would just note that as a potential if that deadline hasn't already passed. And then |
| 00:48:00.41 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | the IT thing, you know, we saw this once at a OMIT committee meeting and I think It would be. helpful to take another look at those agreements. I think we've already entered into contracts for this year, but it was very difficult to understand from the staff presentation. exactly how those increases were you know, coming through, we were trying to consolidate in one provider. But as you mentioned, that's not a huge amount of money in the overall scheme of things. Thank you. um I was also wanting to ask, so I would just say like this slide is pretty much the main meat of the department by department expenditure and it's, at a very, very high level. So I'll just make that comment. And I guess the suggestion that we get a little bit more granular I mean, obviously we don't want to get too far down, something more than this before the 28th to just better understand where we're going. . is you've mentioned a couple of times now that we don't think we are fully collecting our business license tax and possibly our cost recovery fees in the community development department. So I understand we're not gonna fix that between now and June 28th. but can you just outline the plan to make sure that we are getting close to full cost recovery for both the business license tax and community development department cost recovery fees. |
| 00:49:43.23 | Chris Zapata | yes thank you for the question um so number one uh you know the the person that collects and helps with that is our contract consultant hdl we have quarterly meetings with them we will be asking them about all of our revenue projections to see if there's any movements and we will be asking them business license collection so that's that's what we pay them to do i just heard different stories that you know we may not be doing that i've heard them from council people at council meetings that you know certain individuals aren't being charged and you know that's a question mark as to why so we are aware of it need to look at that hdl will help us with that on full cost recovery you know that's uh with the community development department we are where we were with the finance department a year ago trying to get new people into place so that we can in fact find out where the needs are where the opportunities are but we do know that cost recovery is something that's integral to that department and so you know are we recovering our costs from applicants uh is that um rate that we're charging uh you know appropriate all of the things that a department should do but we haven't really had the stability in that department to really tackle that It's a little bit of a work in progress. I would suggest that there is, you know, you know, some real need there, starting with the director position where we got to figure out, I got to figure out for all of us in our organization. And then, you know, the rebuild and the orientation of all the new staff that's come in, much like the finance department. So cost recovery is a big question mark for me. The HDL is just a revenue stream or the business license tax is just a new revenue stream that we need to make sure that we're collecting what we should be collecting and if we're not why and that's the questions that i will provide to hdl with vivian The one thing I want to point out is in your packet, so if you want granular detail every account every expense and every revenue is in your packet we can repackage that in a way that makes some sense but yeah i know |
| 00:51:50.57 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I know, Chris, I know it's there. It's just not comprehensible. I mean, it's not, you can't look at that long list and understand what that means. Or I can't. I mean, maybe some other people are more, But it's not done in a department by department way. It doesn't highlight the differences. Um, You know, I mean, you were here when we did the presentation last year, the department by department presentation. It showed, you know, how... um, things were allocated to staff within a department. Yeah, I see the attachment, but I guess I'm just saying, repackaging it would be really helpful. |
| 00:52:31.72 | Unknown | I'm sorry. |
| 00:52:31.88 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 00:52:32.03 | Chris Zapata | thank you yeah I mean I know it's |
| 00:52:32.62 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:52:32.64 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I mean, I know it's there. I know it's there. I just can't. I mean, that attachment is not. |
| 00:52:33.21 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:52:33.26 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. |
| 00:52:33.31 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 00:52:38.15 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | at least for me, not useful. Um, maybe for others it is. Um, And then I, so going to the inner, so I just think it's so important. I know this isn't the comment time, but if we're not collecting revenues and we have a budget, we're dipping into our reserves, we really need, I think that's a pressing issue to make sure those things are on the front of the list. Going to intergovernmental transfers, we're showing still showing that it's zero. but, I'm not sure. I think you said in your presentation that the county budget includes $500,000 to Sausalito. are we at a point in time where we can add that to the intergovernmental transfers? and show that in our budget. |
| 00:53:24.39 | Chris Zapata | Yeah, well, I talked to the county manager yesterday and he said it's in the budget and they'll be adopting a budget and you know short of the board saying you know no to that a budgetary item at Marin County, which I don't believe will happen. we could book it. It's up to you. We definitely couldn't book it. I just want to put the caveat out there that stranger things have happened. You know, let's say they don't do it and then We've put $500,000 in there. Happy to do it. Just need some direction from the council. |
| 00:53:55.44 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay, well I think Council member the suggestion at the last meeting that at least our we should have an asterisk, if we're gonna not book it, we should have an asterisk next to the 3.2 million that that's, will be 2.7. |
| 00:54:08.10 | Unknown | 3. |
| 00:54:11.93 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | that DPW shortfall will be less if the Marin County money comes through. |
| 00:54:19.44 | Vivian | I think we did put a story to explain that we expect that 500,000 from the county in the step report. I don't remember what place you let me take a look at it. I remember I did put that there. |
| 00:54:36.31 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay, it just wasn't showing up in the presentation today. |
| 00:54:38.61 | Vivian | It's not in the presentation, it's in the step report. We didn't put in the presentation. Okay. |
| 00:54:45.32 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | And then Mayor, did you wanna, I have comments and questions on the capital improvement plan. Did you wanna bisect? Did you want, should I stop now? Have other council members ask |
| 00:54:54.93 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:54:54.94 | Unknown | That's it. |
| 00:54:55.03 | Unknown | question. |
| 00:54:55.35 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Um, you |
| 00:54:55.72 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:54:55.74 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 00:54:55.75 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:54:55.77 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | It's a good thing. |
| 00:54:55.97 | Unknown | Is that okay? Just so we can go through first. Okay, thanks for that. Great questions. Thank you, council member. Let's go to the vice mayor. |
| 00:55:04.81 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Thanks a lot and thank you to Kevin and Chris and Vivian for your hard work on the budget. I know this has been a long process and I really appreciate it. and And I had similar concerns in reviewing the budget that Councilmember Cleveland Nulls expressed with regards to being able to see the items for each department. I know it's all listed out, but it's a little bit difficult. So the feedback I would give would mirror that I'm interested in our projections in revenue. So when you look at the document that shows the changes in fiscal years budget, what we adopted last year and this year, for instance, for building use or I think the number is around 600,000 for both. And in your planning document that you sent through with the suggestions for how we can make structural changes to the budget, and, in the 2022 recommendations. And as we all know, we've hired Michael to look at leasing and how we can do a better job of optimizing, Is there a reason why we didn't project for that? Are we just trying to be incredibly Um, you know, conservative with our projections, or do we think that we're not? Because I think we've talked a lot about the opportunity there. And I think there's a couple of other instances where there's clear action items in the memo you sent through for 2022, some of which we're already doing and that's not necessarily expressed in the staff report. So could you maybe speak to that specifically the leases, some of the other items. And I'm also curious as to whether you wanted us to have a separate meeting to give direction on that, which it seems like is the case and we should have a discussion about, but some of those things are already clearly in motion, at least for 2022. |
| 00:56:38.94 | Chris Zapata | So let's have a separate meeting for the three year plan to attack the deficit and replenish the reserves. So I think that's important, but you have the plan. regarding the estimates on property. We worked with Michael Wagner specifically on, you know, what his assumptions were and his estimates were on, you know, certain rents and so forth. And so, you know, if they're conservative, you know, That could be the case, but we absolutely did work with him to get to a number that he felt comfortable with. |
| 00:57:14.55 | Vice Mayor Blousey | And you feel it's the same from last year as this year. It won't change. |
| 00:57:19.49 | Chris Zapata | Well, some things should change, but in the aggregate, I don't know that we'll see a lot more money or we shouldn't see less money now that we have him on board, but there are some opportunities there. And I think I would not want to, presuppose that we're gonna see them until they actually happen. And then obviously a budget is an estimate, it's a fluid document, you have a major review, and you audit it at the end of it all to see where you ended up. So there is absolutely time throughout the fiscal year to adjust the budget, to adjust revenues, so on and so forth, based on what's actually happening. So that's why I said at the beginning, you know, what we're giving you is our best guesstimate, estimate, projection on what we think we know. But obviously we don't have all of our information and won't. But yeah, we can certainly... look at some type of adjustments to the good or to the bad as certain things come online or don't, because that's what we hired Michael to do. |
| 00:58:20.99 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Well, and similarly, when we last year, when we were looking at the budget, there were, and as we were faced with post-COVID, we had a number of scenarios that we looked at. This is the budget we'll adopt given this scenario. This is the budget we'll adopt given this scenario. I'm not saying we need that same level of comprehension here, but it would be useful to see this is what our best case is for the revenues from real estate. This is what our best case is for intergovernmental. For instance, there's talk that the state may match what the county gives us. So that's an extra 500,000. So it's just good to have an idea of that when we're thinking about these things, but I know it is a living, breathing fluid document, which is great that we can make changes and plan for. You also noted, you know, one of the things that you did to cut back expenses was to get rid of trainings, but then one of the reasons for the 8% increase in police, you said was trainings. Is it just not consistent with that department or I'm just curious as to how that happened. |
| 00:59:07.97 | Chris Zapata | That's a great question, Vice Mayor. Thank you for that one. Because there's training that we do for professional development, and then there's required training. |
| 00:59:09.03 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Thank you. |
| 00:59:16.84 | Chris Zapata | that certain positions and classifications have to have. In particular, the police department has some required training that costs money. Certain departments have some of that as well. But for the most part, any non required You know, usually, you know, you send folks to different trainings for their own professional development and growth. And we put a freeze on that. But the required training, we did not. |
| 00:59:40.92 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Okay, that's a good clarification because I wanted to understand that point. |
| 00:59:43.94 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. |
| 00:59:44.01 | Vice Mayor Blousey | And then on the IT specifically, I know that the mayor and I have talked about the desire to establish a city app, for instance. I'm wondering if this is like a, a comprehensive cost for the IT, if we know it's gonna include anything else that we might need to take on, or if we should just assume this is how much we're spending and we're gonna get the current services that we're getting. |
| 01:00:03.65 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. So we want an app. a C-Click Fix Sausalito app. We want that, and we've asked for that. You know, there have been some changes in that structure. You went from Stafford and Marin IT to Marin IT. We went from Heidi to Elliott. All those things happening. And as of yesterday, there's an opportunity with Mill Valley to maybe share an IT coordinator. So we have someone in-house. So really want to explore that. So this is the budget that we think we can work with. But obviously it can be adjusted. All budgets can be adjusted down. It's just a question of |
| 01:00:44.86 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:00:44.90 | Chris Zapata | the will and the reasoning. So in this one here, |
| 01:00:44.98 | Unknown | to this. |
| 01:00:48.74 | Chris Zapata | You know, my biggest concern is I keep carrying, you know, we need to replace a lot of our past life assets. I keep hearing that, you know, we need to enhance our cybersecurity and all the things that that entails. I keep hearing that we need to do more help desk functioning. And so we just changed from two providers to one. And that was, you know, three months ago, as mentioned by Councilmember Cleveland Nulles. So we're just working through that. But I am hopeful we can cut some of that cost, but not at the expense of operating our city and our digital platforms. And also not at the risk of having things that are so old that they break and then we can't, you know, perform things that are expected these days and with people's iPads, iPhones and Androids and all of that. So we want to see click fix that. That's in the budget this past year. That's part of what the IT consultant is charged with. So I would check on where that is, but my understanding is that we were reviewing different types approaches, but that we were going to get there. maybe not by July 1st but that's definitely a priority. |
| 01:01:59.35 | Vice Mayor Blousey | And then another question, one of the ways that you've done cost saving this year has been through consolidation of departments and changes in personnel. And I know we're still seeking potentially hopefully community development director. It shows that the budget decreased for CDD by 19%, but our I'm not sure. our non-department or basically our consulting went up 569K. Is that because of our potential contract deal with the interim community development director? And is the cost for a community development director or new development director and planners reflected in the budget going forward, or is it assuming that we have the interim? team. |
| 01:02:35.63 | Chris Zapata | Yeah, so let me let Vivian answer some of that. |
| 01:02:39.63 | Vivian | Yes, can you let me say something? So for CDD, basically in fiscal year 21, 22, the adopted budget is over estimated for cost recovery project that we talk about during the mid year. So when we compare to the original higher cost for CDD to the lower, so that's why the decrease, but that doesn't account for the new contract with for live that we talked about on the previous meeting in the budget. |
| 01:03:15.03 | Vice Mayor Blousey | So that's not included in the budget at all at this point. No. That's a substantial, that's $487,000 then that we need to account for. Right. |
| 01:03:24.33 | Chris Zapata | But let me make sure I understand that with Vivian too. So when you approve that this year, that's in this year's budget. |
| 01:03:28.45 | Vice Mayor Blousey | So, |
| 01:03:32.63 | Chris Zapata | Okay. Going forward, those costs, as I said in the staff report, there will be some savings because if it takes us one month, two months, or three months to hire a community development director, we're obviously not paying double for the consultant and a position that doesn't exist. So the net cost of that contract was about $200. 50 60 000 if we run it out through six months but you know that's budgeted this year this budget, you made that commitment this year, but the savings would be realized next year. And I am really, really, understanding that, you know, that's an expensive contract. and that we need to, in fact, you know, get on the quick path to uh, recruiting and retaining our own in-house director. So, um, Yeah, that's one that's a little tough. hopefully, you know, we can succeed this time and bring someone on that will be here for some time but that whole department has been as you know a work in progress for a year and that will continue to be until we get a director to lead it so i'm trying to do that so we can cut that contract cost down from the outside of six months. But those expenses are in this year's budget is my understanding. |
| 01:04:54.19 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Okay, it would help to have that a little more clearly articulated because it shows that there's a 19% decrease, but given that we stand to have 250 at least of the cost, even if there will be cost savings, We've been so conservative in other areas of the budget with regards to things like revenue projections. So that should be consistent. And I would like to see at least a more clear what is the budget for CDB with the consultant costs, given that that's what we're, that's our operating costs for community development right now, if you could. |
| 01:05:20.24 | Chris Zapata | could yeah well part of that cost too though uh vice mayor thanks for this is an important one is you know we need some help in staffing the uh housing element process so there's some additional costs and there's some additional uh permitting costs we need advancing permits we ask for more hours over six months than we normally would instead of you know a thousand hours over six months i think we asked asked for 1,300 because we have a backlog of permits. So that's built into that additional 250,000 in addition to the higher cost for a director than an in-house director would be. |
| 01:05:55.73 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Yeah, but nonetheless, that's part of a community development budget. So that should be more clear that the consulting cost is covering all of those if possible. Okay, I have questions about the CIP as well, but I will turn it over to other council members. Thanks again, Chris and Vivian. I appreciate your hard work on this. |
| 01:06:09.54 | Unknown | Thank you very much. |
| 01:06:09.74 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Thank you. |
| 01:06:10.52 | Unknown | Thank you, Chris. Council Member Hoffman or Saviasky would like to go? |
| 01:06:18.50 | Unknown | one-up questions this is the third time we've looked at the |
| 01:06:21.53 | Ian Sobieski | Oh, that's okay. Excuse me. I think a lot of the questions are answered. |
| 01:06:21.99 | Unknown | Okay. on. |
| 01:06:26.38 | Ian Sobieski | Hi, Chris. Good morning, and thank you for the presentation. I think it will morning to everyone. uh, Thank you. I think. I wanted to back up my colleague Susan Cleveland Knowles's comments that the expenditure table is at a very high level. That was my reading of it as well. Many things are globbed together there, and I think some clarity Again, a big bucket level still, but just a little clarity between increases that are built into our personnel structure. versus one-time expenses versus some discretionary expenses. And I think you've outlined a whole range of discretionary cost savings that you've implemented that have had a huge positive effect on closing our deficit. And. it does leave open the list however in that one chart that you showed does have some things that look like they could have been expenses that could have been delayed a year and so a discretion was made not to and but it's unclear if that was significant in any way compared to the the real meat of the cost increase which could have been personnel expenses so A little bit more clarity on that I think would So, serve the oversight function of what we're looking for here in this dialogue. I believe it's basically two buckets that we're looking for an oversight function and what the budget is so just sort of a check and balance of looking over what the what the expenditures are and where the expenses are. For example, it's great that we're spending almost 100% more on various park expenses to support the infrastructure of our parks. It sounds like most of that is personal costs and for landscape people. That was what I recall seeing on that table. Um, So I think that's great. We should blow our horn that we're actually doing more with less in that and taking care of our parks. But it would just be good, I think, to have a little more premium clarity. So I would back that request up Um, But really my question was, of And I think the need of today's meeting or future meetings really is the guidance and choices section of the bucket. So I appreciate that there are a fair number of oversight questions we could ask. but you wrote that memo, which is I think attachment five that outlines a bunch of ideas for how to have a three-year plan to attack their structural deficit. And of course, that's the big enchilada here. that's the thing that is going to swing our budget future for this year and many years to come. And so my question, I guess, is what do you want this meeting and future meetings to be Thank you. oversight and sort of granular looking at the upcoming budget cycle. versus discussion and choices to be made in reaction to this substantive memo that you wrote. |
| 01:09:27.09 | Chris Zapata | Let me see if I can walk through those questions. So you want clarity on the cost increases, clarity on the revenues, and then you want those in a more traditional packaged buckets as council member Cleveland knows, feels that that's necessary for comprehension and understanding by the community of, you know, what we're actually doing. So all the detail on the budgets is important. And I understand that you don't, you know, you have staff to kind of, that into things that you know are traditional and normal the reason I put all of those in there is because I wanted the council to see every single line item expense every single line item revenue so if you had questions about them and you could raise those but looking at them yeah councilman including those is absolutely right it's a little much so you know we could break them into departments because you know account codes account codes and little offsets to decide that say admin or finance aren't sufficient. So we will do that. So you can see each of those and understand how we arrived at our whole expense package of about $35 million and our revenue package. So all of that's important. As it relates to the three-year plan, one of the things that I thought was really, really well done, Council Member Cleveland Nose, thank you for this, is say, don't ask us for $3.2 million without a plan. And so, as we try to meet timelines and limited meeting time. We're trying to put stuff in front of you You may feel uncomfortable approving, I get that. But that resonated with me that, you know, you don't ask that big of an amount in continuous years and then not have some approach. Yeah, we talked about doing that in mid-year last meeting. I thought it important to do it now. in a draft form. So I would hope that over the next six months that you know we do have some time set aside on your docket so that we can talk about a lot of those things in there but as vice mayor blousey noted some of those things are in process and we will be talking about them just because we have to. Next meeting we won't just be talking about adopting a budget, we'll be talking about Measure O, which is part of that plan. you know going down the road you'll be talking about other things that may impact uh you know be parts of that plan and internally you know we already have to start doing some things that you know create um expenditure reduction or idea generation and we will start that july 1st i have surfaced with our team the need to look at potential cuts this year As of last week, I think that the council agreed that that would be a bridge too far. So let's grit our teeth and look at it one time, dollop of funds from reserves again, but we absolutely have to look at ways internally to become more efficient because we know that this thing is not going to get any better unless we take aggressive actions And so some of that answer is reduction, some of it is efficiency. some of it is holding the lines but some of it is also new revenue and that's in that plan. So I would love to continue to have a discussion about that plan and that's why it's included in this document. So not only the council sees it, the organization knows it, but the public sees it because some of those things in there obviously involve the public's support for it. So the budget we need to get done and I hope we get done this year. We have to get it done legally, but I am really, excited about the idea of looking at a plan so that we can, you know, not have this conversation in the future, a plan so that we can, in fact, replenish our reserves. But that's going to take some work and it's going to take all of us, not one of us. |
| 01:13:24.19 | Ian Sobieski | Okay, so what I'm hearing is that this meeting and the next two are not so much to make concrete decisions about the memo you wrote. and the various options. This meeting and the next two are really going to be focused on the slides you show here today with the budget of the upcoming year. |
| 01:13:42.90 | Chris Zapata | That's correct. You know, there'll be a little splinter here, a little splinter there. As I said, the Measure O conversation is in that plan. But you know, you'll do that on I'm the 28th because you'll get a consultant report on you know what a survey says about appetite for expanding or extending that so that started but you know that's just that's not the the of me saying, you know, we're going to work on that three-year plan on the 28th. Just pieces of it will start. The internal stuff will start. But the big discussions about many of those things require extended conversations with you and the public. So I would have guessed that over the next six months, we can do that. And we should. Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.21 | Ian Sobieski | Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.24 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.26 | Ian Sobieski | Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.45 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.58 | Ian Sobieski | Thank you. |
| 01:14:28.60 | Chris Zapata | you |
| 01:14:28.84 | Ian Sobieski | Well, in that regard then, kind of feeding off of both the mayor's precise inquiries about a particular line item that she used as an example. And Susan Cleveland Knowles' comments on that. on that table. Do you recall last fall, sort of in anticipation of perhaps this kind of dialogue, we asked for those department presentations to talk about three scenarios, what you do with 10% more budget, where you can do a 10% less, which I think that ask was really to try to help indicate us and give us some sense of the a sensitivity analysis to what would the impact be on this department. if the library had 10% more money or 10% less. what we see in that one table. |
| 01:15:16.15 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:15:16.74 | Ian Sobieski | are, actually quite substantial swings beyond 10%. Some cases a reduction, in some cases very substantial increases. Uh... It seems as though what we're asking for is if you want, the City Council's help in making choices around those items. or in terms of just our oversight of those decisions being made that we want to have something akin to that which is a real understanding of if we were going to increase the budget less what that would impact would it be delaying a vehicle purchase would it be not. filling a vacant position, I assume. and conversely what the benefit would be just to pick on the substantial increase in parks, the deferred maintenance that we need to catch up on for the implementation of, let's say, the landslide task force objectives that need to be done by choosing to do an increase in expense. I imagine it would look like a table that has some some trade-offs that are implicit in the into percentages. Is that something that that resonates with you? Is the team able to produce something like that? Would that be helpful in this dialogue? |
| 01:16:29.98 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. And that would be helpful. And that conversation to have the departments make presentations was something that was requested by you all. And I felt very strongly about, so we did some of that. I think what really needs to be focused on in this particular meeting is, you know the budget itself and then you know as I said again budgets are estimates and fluid and if we want to make reductions or additions to them you can always come down it's easier to come down not buy the trucks or as Councilmember Cleveland knows said you know get a grant and then take that cost out of there but over time you know if those things are happening to impact your budget whether there are new costs or opportunities or you know things that don't go in a scheduled way so that you can in fact not spend the money, not by choice sometimes, but the bottom line is we're trying to adopt a ceiling budget is a ceiling we have what's called a GAN limit and so once we adopt the budget you cannot exceed it without some help but you can always lessen it so again the estimates are fairly conservative that's been my nature and At the same time, I understand that there are some potential, you know, things that could help the revenue picture. But I always go back to this, it's harder to raise money than it is to cut expenses. And so if you adopt a ceiling or a budget and you want to go back and look at some of these things or we get some help from areas that we didn't anticipate, then that's all good. But I don't want to start with this premise that we have a budget that's balanced and not talk about how the challenge is. Last year when I came on June the 7th, I watched the budget process and frankly I was very, very new to it. Every city does it sort of the same way but differently. So I watched it and so that's the Sausalito way, okay. But in my mind, it was the budget. built on one-time money. And that's apparent. And so the challenge this year is to try to reduce that to the extent that you know it's you know understandable and palatable but it's going to be work it's going to be work so i don't want to you know. dance around this idea we could do a better job we can if you want different charts and clarity on these things we definitely should do that and we'll do that But the idea of working on this thing in a holistic way by asking departments to provide their input at the, uh, at every level. is different than having a department head come up and talk about 10% reduction or 10% cuts, which they will do, but they need help from their team. So I want to do that, Council Member. I want to do exactly that. Last year, I got complaints from the departments that they weren't allowed to do it in the budget process. And I understood it was a pandemic where they couldn't sit up there and talk about their budget request with the council and the public. This year is kind of the same fire drill for various reasons, but we should do better. We will do better. But I would caution the council about, you know, getting into real detail on, this particular budget given the time constraints. Also with that caution to say that you can always lower it in the future. You can say no to different projects at a council level. You could say something in a mid-year adjustment. There are a lot of things. provide you the levers to you know contain costs or cut costs if you're uncomfortable with them as you adopt the budget but you have to adopt the budget first |
| 01:20:14.91 | Chris Zapata | Okay, thank you. |
| 01:20:15.56 | Ian Sobieski | Thank you. |
| 01:20:16.78 | Unknown | Thank you, Councilman Savesky. I see Councilman Cleveland all says your hand back up. |
| 01:20:20.56 | Ian Sobieski | Thank you. |
| 01:20:20.66 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:20:21.74 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:20:21.86 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Well, if Council Member Hoffman has any comments, I just wanna, I have a, just, I think, I just went back and looked at our presentation that we received on June 18th last year. And I think just as an example on starting on slide 13 it goes through each |
| 01:20:40.19 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:20:41.00 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | department. And it has a pie chart for each department that shows salary costs, capital costs. You know, it's very high. It's not detail like the postage, you know, like the one we've got today. Postage is $2,000 and 13 cents. But it's It's categorized in a way that's very easy to understand. And then most important to me, each department showed what the FY expenditures were for that particular department three years ago, two years ago, and for the budget we were considering last year. So you could see the trend line. Are we going up? Are we going down? Like what's happening? And they were, I think that Charlie Francis, who was our acting finance director at that time. Did this all through OpenGov dot com. Like, I think it's just a I don't think it's a big Well, I don't know, but I was led to believe that it wasn't a time-intensive task and it was really, really, really helpful for me and I think it really helpful for the public. Wow. It may just be too late in this budget But when I asked at our last meeting for, we had the big concept of our overall stuff that we were gonna look at and that we were agreeing that we were gonna dip into our reserves at the level of about 3.2 million. That's what we agreed last time. And then I asked if we could see at a more granular level how that was playing out department by department. And I think that that, I just went back to understand what I was looking for when I asked that question at our last meeting. And I apologize that I didn't wasn't more clear. just for our finance director and city manager, if you look back at that June 18th staff report and you look at the slides department by department starting on slide 13, If we can't get that level of specificity before we approve the budget this year, I still think it's helpful for the public and for us. to look at those trend lines, at least the chart that shows kind of a couple, three years back up to our adopted budget this year and then we can kind of start using that for our projection to get to the relief for our structural deficit. So I'm not asking for this. I'm not trying to make work. I'm trying to understand the trends and the, where we are escalating costs continuously and the departments where we're holding steady and what happened in the pandemic. So I just wanted to bring that up as an example of something that I found incredibly useful both for the two functions that I think Councilmember Sobieski artfully described as our oversight function and our kind of decision-making function. to help staff. So anyway, so that's all. And I'm sorry to, I just wanted to to be clearer about what I had hoped. And even if we can't get it by the 28th, I think it still would be helpful going into our mid-year budget next year to have that information when it's available so that we can use that. to address the structural deficit. |
| 01:24:00.43 | Chris Zapata | Thank you for that question, Councilmember. That provides a lot of clarity. We absolutely can do that. go back three years and show you what the trend line is and give you a little more detail. So we will do that. Uh, And in terms of granularity, I guess I'm having some some difficulty with that one but maybe we gave you too much granularity but we can in fact package that if you want to see it just as you saw it last year that's that's that we can do that |
| 01:24:31.59 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:24:32.03 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, City Manager. |
| 01:24:32.74 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:24:32.76 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Okay, Councilman Huckman. Thanks. I don't have very many questions in light of the good and numerous questions that the other council members have asked. But thank you to Chris and Vivian for this heavy lift of getting us where we are in the past year. So I know it's a huge, huge effort. Um, I would think that, you know, it would be helpful to see the trend lines. I don't know if it's... if you can do it or achievable by the, you know, by this cycle in the next few weeks, in light of all the other work that you guys are working on and trying to get us to you know, completion on this budget, but I think that would be helpful as well, but not not absolutely necessary for us to be making a decision at this point. I do have some more comments, but obviously I'll do those later. So thanks. |
| 01:25:23.40 | Chris Zapata | Thank you. Yeah. Customer Huffman, Vivian and I will talk, but the ask is reasonable. we should be able to do this by the 28th and have that information for you all to see and the public to see when you adopt the budget. |
| 01:25:40.65 | Unknown | Okay. Thanks Chris. Okay, so let's go back around on a capital improvement. program questions and Council Member Cleveland Knowledge Research Patient, so do you want to start us off? |
| 01:25:53.67 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:25:53.69 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Sure. So if I understand correctly, our capital improvement budget for this year, the recommended budget is $1.8 million. with 1.2 million dollars of measure o and 600 of other funding opportunities, is that generally correct? That's the staff recommendation. |
| 01:26:15.85 | Kevin McGowan | That is generally correct, yes. |
| 01:26:18.11 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay. And Um, I think, so it was helpful to see the capital projects on the list. I think a lot of them are Street oriented, which we've talked about at prior meetings. I guess my question is, so I am the TAM, Transportation Authority of Marin, representative from the city council. And there are numerous upcoming grant opportunities And I'd like to just kind of understand which ones of those opportunities Sausalito feels like it's best positioned to apply for and I realize we probably can't put those, book those monies, you know, or rely on them because it's a competitive, but could you just speak in general about where you think our strengths lie and what types of projects we might be able to get I mean, look, TAM is a very, it's easier because we know those folks. you know, our public works director and our manager, city manager, meet regularly with them. It's a pretty accessible form of funding. So I'm just wondering if you can give a sense of what you think we can position ourselves for this year. |
| 01:27:45.27 | Kevin McGowan | Sounds good. Thank you very much, Council Member, for the question. And we do work rather closely with folks at TAM. Some grants that come through are not, they're not well suited for us. In other words, TAM has some grants coming through from the federal level, which when I reach out to our representatives, they say, no, these type of grants, they need multiple millions of dollars and our town, our city is not well positioned for them. They don't have a great example at this point in time Thank you. they need multiple millions of dollars and our our town our city is not well positioned for them they don't have a great example at this point in time of that i'd have to go back in my notes to find that but our some of our projects are well positioned for grant applications and we recently submitted for two of them one of them is the coloma street sidewalk improvement project. It currently has a grant assigned to it from Safe Routes to School. But since we're anticipating possibly extending that sidewalk up to another street, we are applying for another grant in order to bridge that gap, so to speak, and have enough money for it. That's an ATP grant. So we recently submitted for that one. In addition, other projects that are shovel ready. Now we've talked about this in years past, where we have a project, where we have plans, we're ready to go. Let's go bid it. We just don't have enough money to construct it. Those type of projects are well positioned to go out for a grant and move forward. We are moving forward with a plan to improve the signal system on Easterby and Spring Street. Our design team is moving forward with that. And so in anticipation that we would have the plans ready to go, we also applied for an ATP grant for that project, thinking that it would be well positioned for soliciting for funds to support a signal improvement project at that location. Now we have other projects that we're moving forward to moving forward with as well. One of them is the improvements, excuse me, one of them is the safety study between Napa and Johnson Street. We don't know what the improvements are yet. So that one isn't ready to apply for grant funds because the improvements aren't designed. They're not shovel ready. So what I generally look for is all the shovel ready projects that we have. I contact TAM so that I say, okay, what things do you have coming up from a grant perspective that we would be well positioned to apply for. And so that's how we work together to try to figure some of these things out. But the shovel ready thing is important. And looking at grants that are coming through from the state and the feds where our projects would be well positioned is the other thing we look for. |
| 01:30:39.23 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay, that's really helpful. Thank you. I think that was my main... I mean, I think those are a good source of funds. So if we can succeed on one or all of those applications, That would be great and I would love to see that Coloma Street safe routes to school um, I love the idea that you're combining that with the sidewalk that will also help the Sausalito the Rotary Project at the further end of um, Coloma and Ulima. That would be a great intersectionality of two important groups in the community. I might come back around but I think that was my main main question. |
| 01:31:20.17 | Kevin McGowan | One quick comment on the Coloma Street project. We're keeping track of the timing on the project too. In other words, some of these grant funds have sunset dates. So we wanna make sure that we, Keep track of those dates and don't lose track. Like I said, keep track of them and and make sure we get into construction at the right time so we don't lose any funding or don't get any hot water around it. That's one of the reasons why when we look at the CIP, when do we actually go to construction? And that will that comes into play when we when we try to get additional funds, like I mentioned, from ATP to extend the sidewalk up to the next street. |
| 01:32:01.46 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, well, I hope we're not in danger of losing our original 400 and $400,000 grant for Coloma. |
| 01:32:09.61 | Kevin McGowan | No, but we track it. |
| 01:32:11.40 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay. All right. |
| 01:32:12.97 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:32:13.09 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 01:32:14.05 | Unknown | THANK YOU. Kevin, I got a couple questions for you. Oh. I'm interested to understand when you project, you know, these are our 36 projects. We've got eight. that are happening. Um, I'd love to see, we're talking about trend lines, over the last three to five years, how many projects actually get completed as projected? |
| 01:32:37.02 | Kevin McGowan | When you say as projected, are you thinking of as a schedule or as the funding itself, which comes in underfunding or greater than? |
| 01:32:43.80 | Unknown | Thank you. Two separate questions. One is when you just give us numbers and say, we've got eight projects and we've got 36 overall, how am I supposed to understand that from year to year? So I guess there's a subset questions like, are those eight projects multi-year projects? Is the funding for the multi-year? When does it get booked on our books? just a little more granularity, because just to see 36 outstanding projects doesn't really tell me the likelihood that you would actually be able to perform or execute on any significant portion of them. So how should we understand the sort of the execution rate on some of the projects that get scheduled. |
| 01:33:23.69 | Kevin McGowan | It's a good question. I think if you really want to dive into that, we need to take a look at the actual CIP document that I've provided. And I provide this each year as a draft document where it goes into the granularity for each specific project. Now, we do have schedules for each one of these as well. So we can provide you with a schedule that shows multiple years for some projects or shows when we can go from bidding to construction on them as well there are schedules within that granular document that was provided to you as an attachment on April 12th we may have to I'd be glad to sit down with anybody and show you how that works because here in a council meeting to get into that much detail might be too much. So feel free, happy to meet with anybody on that. |
| 01:34:19.27 | Unknown | Yeah, no, thank you for that, Kevin, because it leads into my next question, which is I'm trying to understand how the percentage of projects that come in under or over budget. So, I feel like we got this sort of high level, but I don't really know in practical sense in terms of planning and projecting a budget, how it should be interpreting some of these numbers. So maybe for that conversation, if you could also have some sense of how many come in under budget, I'm gonna come in over budget, what the significant delta is, that'll give us a better sense of what type of monies we need to be allocating or keeping in mind. |
| 01:34:51.31 | Kevin McGowan | This is another great question. And I usually participate in the Marine Public Works Association meetings, which happen monthly. And what generally I requested last week is what are we expecting the cost to come in at in the next year or so? So if we had a standard inflation rate where things were not changing over time i would suggest that our our estimates are okay not great but okay because usually our estimates are based off of the construction that we've done in the past for example if we pay we have a certain tonnage cost for two two hundred dollars a ton Now that should be okay for about a year, but this is a strange year. So what I've asked our public works association is, where do we think we're gonna be ending up? So to get back to your question, which I think is getting to some of the numbers that we're providing you as well. For resurfacing projects, we can expect the cost to go up 15%, just at a minimum based off of oil prices. In addition, there could be more things associated with the economy, labor forces, things that are going up that are out of our control. But our cost estimates that are shown in the CIP are generally based off of our knowledge from the last cycle, the last year. And we can try to predict going forward, but to be honest, it's throwing a dart at the table, you know, best guess sometimes that that's where we end up. |
| 01:36:32.29 | Unknown | Okay, yeah, thank you. I think this deserves a little bit more analytical granularity because you're right. if you're throwing the dart, we're throwing it too. And that's a little bit confusing. Okay, so some higher level things. Where do we stand on the FEMA reimbursement? And is that getting booked against outstanding accounts? Or was that already accounted for? |
| 01:36:53.92 | Kevin McGowan | In the memo that I sent over to our city manager and our finance director, I've noted that we are pursuing receiving funding from FEMA as well as Cal OES on the slip out from 2019 or the mudslide. Now, we are still working forward with that. We have a special consultant who's familiar with this and he's been in contact with the state. Now, I believe that the state is willing to reimburse the city for a portion of the amount. We don't have anything in writing yet, but we are continuing to pursue that at this point in time. I did not include this amount in any of the budgets or the revenues that are coming back into the city. Why? Because we haven't had much success with FEMA in the past. I just don't want to count on it right now. That's my recommendation. If it comes in, super. That's great. But for now, I don't want to include it. |
| 01:37:52.21 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:37:52.24 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | And then the last question for you is sort of |
| 01:37:53.90 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:37:53.91 | Kevin McGowan | Thank you. |
| 01:37:54.20 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:37:54.61 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I'm sorry, I think you asked an important question there and I wasn't sure if I understood what the answer was. I believe that... we booked those costs. back in the year. that they were So the costs have already been booked and we've already suffered those losses. And so anything coming back in would be a positive to our budget. And could Kevin or Chris, our city manager, could you just confirm that? I thought that was a great question, the mayor. |
| 01:38:20.31 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:38:20.32 | Chris Zapata | you |
| 01:38:20.66 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:38:20.68 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | asked and that we should understand. |
| 01:38:23.04 | Chris Zapata | Yeah, that is true. Council member Cleveland knows. uh the money if it came in would be additive we haven't booked any new money even though you as a council have directed us the consultant is working congressman huffman's office is helping us i think the council in particular uh mayor kelman has reached out and they are working on it but if we do see that in some shape or form that would be additive that would be new money |
| 01:38:54.63 | Unknown | Okay. Thank you for the follow-up. And then this is a sort of a final thread that maybe it was a longer conversation, but Council Member Fibonacci brought it up. is sort of a this idea that we do have grants opportunities. So what's missing here, I don't know where we are in the grant process. I don't know if we have any monies that we could So, um, they can at least tell the public, hey, we're applying for a million dollars worth over these five areas. I know TAM has great money available and we have some of that money for EV charging, but then I see EV charging shows up in the capital improvement program, but I don't know how much of that is out of pocket for us and how much of it is coming from the grants that are out there from TAM and MCE. And so it would be very helpful to understand that operationally how we're pursuing grants, how it's getting applied. Not all projects on the CIP list are equal in terms of money from our pockets versus money from grant monies. So if there's a sort of a general comment you can make on that, I'd appreciate it. I understand it requires some more granularity, but I do think that this grant program and you had it in your slide, Chris, is so important, but we don't have a lot of information about where we are on it. |
| 01:40:00.11 | Chris Zapata | I can start at the highest level with that mayor. First of all, after the October 30th priority session you said go out and get us some grant resources. So at the beginning of the year we did that and we started to apply. It's in your, it will be a budget or not a budget, a council item in the future to give you a grants update. The issue has been how much time we have at council meetings in these coming days, whether it was the housing element or other things that were a priority, but we absolutely intend to give an update on where that stands, what we've applied for, what types of grants we've applied for, and what we've received or not received. But yeah, we're going to do that for sure. Matter of fact, I think more importantly, we've created a structure where we have two flexible grant writers. We have a full service grant writing team, California Consulting. We started to schedule weekly meetings with them some of you have sent offerings that you think might or programs you think might make some sense for us to analyze it relate to a lot of areas and so they're applying for what we've asked them to There's some thoughts about some bigger grants that involve our one-off specialist in grant writing. But yeah, we'll give you an update on that very soon. We just need to set that at agenda setting committee so that it's at a time and place where you all feel comfortable with that. But yeah, it's on the docket. It's been on the docket. |
| 01:41:26.94 | Kevin McGowan | Okay. So one thing to add to our city manager and to your question, Mayor, if you take a look at some of the detail sheets that I have provided, you'll see that in some of the EV station projects, we do separate out grants versus what is a local share. Now, the grants generally cover things like the actual station itself, the purchase of it, as well as maybe some electrical work to hook it up. But some of the trenching in the underground work that generally is not considered. So that's where some of the local funds come into play, where we've got to go ahead and trench to put in an electrical line. So some of those they do have two parts to it. One is the local share and the other part is the grant itself. So we do have some granularity to that. But if you need more I'd be more than willing to happy to sit down and take a look at each one of these. |
| 01:42:19.39 | Unknown | So thank you, Kayla. Much appreciated. Okay, I'm gonna stop there on the CIP stuff. Anybody else have any other questions? And we do have members of the public, so we can take public comment and come back and we'll have more questions. Yeah, please whisper. |
| 01:42:33.82 | Vice Mayor Blousey | I just have one quick question. So when looking at the memo from there's the four options that we can pursue. And it looks like the recommendation is option four eliminate some of the current project allocation and there's a detailed attachment. But in the presentation today, It seemed like the option was a little bit different than just eliminating, it was eliminating and then pursuing making decisions based on grants, which I don't see here. Is that the, is that your, current desired recommendation, Director McGowan? |
| 01:43:01.58 | Kevin McGowan | Thank you, council member. Yes, that is. We did take a close look at that between our finance director and our city manager late yesterday and kind of rehashed out some of these things. So the direction that my understanding is from our city manager is let's keep going with bidding these projects. In other words, let's not just directly say, oh, we're not going to do this right now, but let's go bid it. Let's get a price. is let's keep going with bidding these projects. In other words, let's not just directly say, oh, we're not gonna do this right now, but let's go bid it, let's get a price. And that way we can make a decision at the award time, whether we want to award this project or maybe part of it and move forward in that fashion. |
| 01:43:43.43 | Vice Mayor Blousey | Okay, great. Thanks for clarifying. really helpful just given the memo is really exhaustive but that wasn't in there so I was trying to reconcile the two points. Sorry about that. |
| 01:43:51.70 | Unknown | Sorry. |
| 01:43:52.46 | Vice Mayor Blousey | No problem. Okay, thanks. |
| 01:43:55.02 | Unknown | Bye. Any other questions or let's go to public comments? Okay, I don't see any hands raised. So Serge, can you please explain how to provide public comments? |
| 01:44:04.27 | Serge Avila | Sure, radio or audio public comment participation was submitted to two minutes per speaker. If you would like to make a comment, Please raise your hand in the Zoom application and you will be called upon when it's your time to speak. To raise your hand from a phone, press start nine and each speaker will be notified when the time has elapsed. Madam Mayor, it looks like we do have some public commenters. The first- comments will be Ray with me. Ray, you've been unmuted and us shared your video. |
| 01:44:35.12 | Unknown | Welcome, Ray. Thanks for being here. |
| 01:44:40.87 | Unknown | Yeah, hi. Sorry, the lighting's a bit funny here. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we hear you and see you. Okay, great. So very, very quickly, if you want to continue with approving a budget where you have no reduction in services. You basically have no choice but to approve on June 28th the recommended budget from the city manager. OK? You have no choice, basically. So second, well, you can, but then if you do decide to start tinkering dramatically, you're reducing services, which you don't want to do. Be aware of the fact that, and city manager can correct me if I'm wrong, be aware of the fact that um, Any extra labor costs resulting from your ongoing labor negotiations are not included in this budget. And rightly so. You don't want to tip your head. But that means that whatever monies that costs is coming directly out of reserves, in addition to what the past year. I think I would just echo that what Susan indicated that let's see this repackaged by department. If you're doing that, make sure for each department your salaries and benefits are divided into separate line items. because you have a tendency to put in an amortized the unfunded liabilities across departments, and then you were completely confused as to why some things are going up and some things are going down. So make them separate line items. The final thing I would say is the plan, obviously, is the really important thing. If you're not tinkering with this 3.2 million deficit, Therefore, I would recommend that an update on the plan, come back to city council. every other meeting. is the progress that's being made. Remember, if you've got a $3 million deficit, you are spending reserves at $2,000 a day. Thank you very much. |
| 01:46:51.99 | Unknown | I think you're right. I really appreciate those comments. So, um, Yeah, thank you for that, took those down. |
| 01:46:58.28 | Serge Avila | Our next speaker is Vicki Nichols. Vicki, you've been unmuted. to share your video. |
| 01:47:07.33 | Vicki Nichols | Good morning, council. tough decisions here. I appreciate the city manager doing their first stab at this budget. This is like being the first author of a document that then gets vetted by a zillion people. So he's taking the, the suggestions very gracefully. Um, I'd like to look at a couple of things. It was mentioned about EDAC. You know, EDAC got a three-year commitment for what they asked for, which committed over $300,000. I'd like a re-look at that and see how effective the first year's actions have been. I'm mainly speaking because from a historical perspective of the city, the city does value its historic character. We have not been funded, had funding and had it taken away. And unless some of these communities, projects are eased up, we will never be able to get this funded. So we are not a nonprofit that lobbies as loudly as some. there's probably two of us on this commission that are really holding the torch here. But some of these projects need to be looked at. What is the, but How are the revenues rebounded versus the dire predictions we had before? I am not against business, but I'm about being fair to all of the community's needs. And frankly, I'd like to see the line item detail. I'd like to see the council voting on these conditions so we know where you're placing your values. I'm very frustrated by this. I don't know any other way to bring it to your attention except to keep talking about it at each of these budget hearings. So I appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you, Vicki. Thanks for making the time. |
| 01:49:02.98 | Serge Avila | Our next speaker is Megan Lockett. Megan, you've been unmuted. I'm going to share your video. |
| 01:49:12.74 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:49:12.76 | Megan Lockett | Megan, good morning. |
| 01:49:13.51 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:49:15.12 | Megan Lockett | Good morning. Thank you. Megan Lockett, My name is Megan Lockett and I've been the permanent technician for the Department of Public Works for the past four years. Megan Lockett, I have enjoyed being a part of a great team of employees and growing in my career with the city and public service. |
| 01:49:22.97 | Unknown | uh |
| 01:49:29.57 | Megan Lockett | I'm very concerned about the suggestion to potentially reconstruct the city's work week from 40 hours to 36 hours per week which would result in another 10% furlough. During 2020 and 2021 fiscal year, the union employees agreed to accept a 10% furlough in order to save several positions that were subject to layoffs. And it's frustrating that this is being proposed again when the city has the resources and is willing to spend them on consultants, but don't want to invest it in its employees. With the current economic climate, our families can't afford to take another 10% furlough, and that would result in losing even more valuable employees which would include institutional knowledge, customer service, essential city services, including permitting and increased permitting times, AND EMPLOYEE MORALE. We have worked extremely hard and have gone above and beyond to be loyal to the city during these challenging times. I hope the city will do the same. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. |
| 01:50:32.83 | Serge Avila | Our next speaker is Sandra. Bushmaker, Sandra, you're being unmuted and has to share your video. |
| 01:50:39.01 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:50:39.03 | Sandra Bushmaker | Welcome to Morning Central. Good morning. I just wanted you to take a good hard look at the EDAC budget request. I sat in on their meeting and they showed that they had not spent all of their budget allocation from last year and also to to measure if you can uh The benefit that the city is getting out of the, budget requests from that particular committee. They're pretty hefty for a single committee. Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:51:11.48 | Unknown | Okay. Thank you, Sandra. Any other public comments? |
| 01:51:15.29 | Serge Avila | met a mayor there. We just have another public commenter. |
| 01:51:20.22 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:51:20.25 | Pat | Welcome to Pat. |
| 01:51:22.19 | Serge Avila | I'm glad you've been unmuted. |
| 01:51:24.66 | Pat | Thank you. Quick comment. I guess we're talking a little bit about this plan. First of all, I'd like to compliment the city manager. I think his professionalism and knowledge of other standard processes will serve us in good stead. In terms of the plan, There are several items that will have to be resolved if they're to get on the ballot very quickly. And I would certainly support the notion of Taxes on cannabis, if that should pass. And, uh, Rent increases for the fire department. Um, I hope you can focus on those and get them on the ballot. In addition, if there is going to be a discussion of creating plazas, that would have to be a ballot item. And I wish you good luck with this. I think you've got a good city manager here and please listen to him. Thanks. Thank you, Pat. |
| 01:52:28.65 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:52:29.95 | Serge Avila | Madam Mayor, there are no other hands raised at the moment. |
| 01:52:30.08 | Unknown | Okay. Very nice. Okay, so we are going to close public comment now. bring it back up. Thank you to my colleagues. It seems like we have some, alignment around, I wrote down four main things, and thank you, Ray Withy, I'm gonna copy some of yours, but overall overarching theme here has been more granularity on a department basis. I think that's been made clear by several of my colleagues. I don't need to read. repeat that and then as some of the public said, you know, repackages by departments as part of that. make sure we separate the salary and the benefits into different line items, and then bring this back to council on a regular cadence for our benefit and the benefit of the members of the community. Any other comments or direction to give to staff and the city manager? |
| 01:53:19.42 | Ian Sobieski | I guess I have a question for Chris. What does he think about the suggestion of having a regular engagement with his memo, and I think it's attachment five, He outlined a variety of steps. I think you said, Chris, over the next six months, planning on bringing it back with the expectation we'd be hammering it off. And I'm wondering if there's a lot of meat here. And These are real choices to be made. Maybe there's things to add and subtract to this. Do you imagine having a regular, what's your, what do you imagine the regular structure See you. to get into a final plan, final three-year plan for you know, what a structural deficit would be to Have it be an agenda item every other time with the idea of advancing the ball or you imagine some other structure. |
| 01:54:08.72 | Chris Zapata | Thanks for that question and I appreciate it. um, Mr. Withy's comments. Yeah, it's important if you don't have a balanced budget going forward. then the services that the community and businesses and visitors enjoy will always be at risk. So to focus on this, I went back to October 30th when I said three things. number one your finances number two your infrastructure and number three your bandwidth. And so I think number three is well underway, thanks to you all in terms of figuring out what it is that we want to do with board commissions and committees. And you know how we manage our resources that way. That one's something in process and appreciated. The finance thing is an ongoing thing. And the one reason I wanted to do this SOS to fiscal health presentation, which I did in April, was to give people why we have a structural deficit. And I think that I don't want to rehash that, but I thought that was the most important thing to do so that we didn't just walk up and say, I've got a problem again. It's pandemic. It's not the pandemic. The pandemic exacerbated it. It's other things that have made it what it is. So we need to attack that. So we will do that. And whether we want to or not, things will happen in the next... uh, month, two months, three months to start to advance those things that we talked about doing in 2022. some of those things are under my control some of them are under your control some of them are part of a public dialogue and approval process but yeah no we just like we did with the strategic plan it was pointed out to me we have a great strategic plan we do how do we align what we do at council meetings every Tuesday with that strategic plan as you can see now we have |
| 01:55:43.86 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:55:43.87 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:55:43.98 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:55:56.99 | Chris Zapata | uh you know an alignment there's a section in your council reports that say when you take this action it does this in concert with the strategic plan or they help the strategic plan goals or objectives we can do the same thing and we should do the same thing with our structural deficit you know when we do our fiscal analysis and we have a fiscal impact statement we should say yeah this is you know something that will help or will impact or it will hurt so I am you know it's up to you as a council how much time you want to spend on you know fixing your finances I think that's got to be along with the internal side of fixing your people and your structure which we've been working on for a while |
| 01:56:01.96 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:56:40.86 | Chris Zapata | Those are the two parallel things. your purse and your people. And if you can figure those two things out, then you have an opportunity to achieve a vision. So we've been working on the people and we've been struggling with the purse. So I think wallet, but let's say it the way it should be said, that personal wallet, we need to make sure that we continue to focus attention on that and not get caught up in all the other things we think are important and want to do. because what you want to do and all the things you believe are necessary to make the community better, some of those take us in areas where we can't focus on the basics, our finances, our people. So I am hopeful that in the coming year we will focus more on our finances. So when I hear a resident who's been on the city council suggest that we need to do this on an ongoing basis, I applaud that. And I also know that that's going to happen anyway. But if you want to make it a structured kind of thing where, like we have done with homelessness, where we have ongoing meetings with that, great. If you want to try to do that with the finance committee, I wouldn't recommend that. I think you need to do that as a whole council. And so if you want to have something on every month that relates to structural deficit updates, what we're doing about it, I would be more than happy to do that. |
| 01:57:59.97 | Unknown | Thanks, Chris. Ian, did that answer your question? Okay, let's go to the vice mayor and then Council Member. |
| 01:58:05.78 | Vice Mayor Blousey | I just wanted to add on to the points you made, Mayor, about the general direction. I think those are all of the things that we've mentioned. The only other thing I wanted to add on was just last year and also even earlier this year from departments, we had the projections of if we had 10% budget, less or 10% more, it would be helpful to have that in the context of looking at this and having like, sort of more optimistic revenue projections and less optimistic ones in making the decisions. So I just wanted to add that. |
| 01:58:32.99 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:58:33.01 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:58:33.03 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, okay. Um, yeah, thank you. So thank you for, uh, obviously to Vivian and Chris for this, uh, tremendous lift and bringing us this information and also, you know, for the clear eyed, I think, um, presentation and recognition the difficult position of the city's end due to the structural deficit. As Chris has said many times, this has been years in the making and now it's all coming due. I would be cautious about making any decisions on optimistic projections of revenue at this point. I don't think we have the luxury of that given our structural deficit. I think we need to be very disciplined right now at looking at the most realistic projections in a very cautious manner. So I think that's what our focus needs to be. I think, you know, optimism on revenue projections as a, as a driving decision making point at this point. given that we're talking about 3.2 however you wanna slice it, $2.7 million deficit Um, you know, we don't really have the luxury of embracing optimism at this point. I think we need to embrace discipline and really look at what the likely you know, what the likely results are. if at mid year or the next year are disciplined, but cautious projections, prove to be low, then great. What a great thing that would be. But I certainly wanna make decisions based on the risk that we've over over projected what our revenues might be. I fully support the plan that Chris outlined to resolve the structural imbalance. And thanks to Chris so much for bringing that, doing the hard work on that. AND I LOOK FORWARD TO focusing in on that in the next year where we'll have to continue our very tough decision making process because you know, we cannot do this again. Like we cannot, absolutely cannot do a 3.2 or $2.7 million deficit spend again, we are just about at I'm not sure. you know, at the hard deck for what we can reach into our reserves after this being our fourth year of deficit spend. So anyway, I look forward to additional discussions next week and in July. And thanks again to the staff and to the city council and the finance committee for the hard lift as well. It's a lot of information. So thank you. Yeah. |
| 02:01:08.19 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:01:08.38 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks for that. |
| 02:01:09.09 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:01:09.44 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:01:09.97 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Yeah, so I agree with the direction. I just, I do agree with Council Member Hoffman that We don't want to see a 10% increase from departments. I think any savings or revenue projections that exceed our expected should go to reduce the structure, go to reduce the money that we've been taking out of our reserves. So I would not think right now that this would be a good time to ask departments any kind of budget that's over their existing budget. perhaps next year. And then the second thing I would just say to sort of Council Member Sobieski's point, And the city manager's response is I think it would be very helpful in July or as soon as possible to get a budget calendar for next year. We were significantly behind on our budget calendar this year, including our mid-year budget. all for legitimate reasons, but that really put us in a difficult place. So I think as soon as possible, it would be helpful to understand how often we do wanna check in on the budget and then to have some clear understanding of our audit. that I understand we're doing ourselves this year. And then... the mid-year budget when we expect that so that we can stay on track and have a sense of how we're doing compared to our projections. Personally, I'd be kind of interested in more of a every two months or quarterly check in, then done every month but I mean it's just I just not sure how helpful the information is more regularly. Anyway. Other than that, thank you for the direction, Mayor, and thank you to staff for all the hard work getting us to this point. |
| 02:03:17.03 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:03:17.83 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:03:17.85 | Unknown | Thank you. Great comments, everybody. I think we're all, like I said, an alignment here. more information we want, some regular cadence of meetings and I don't know if it's every two months or every other meeting, but maybe we start putting it on the agenda at least every other meeting if we have updates. Great, but if not, then you know we can, we can address it. I also Chris really liked your idea. Um, you're evaluating actions basically almost like a SWOT for lack of a better methodology here. Cause I think the community would be very interested in seeing what we think, what the trade-offs are and how we reach our final conclusions. So I would support something like that as well. Yes, Councilmember Sobieski. |
| 02:03:57.59 | Ian Sobieski | Well, I was just gonna elaborate on all that to say that the structure isn't here for a regular And again, this very substantive memo from our leader, our city manager, each one of these bullet points can be a point of update. I mean, you're gonna have, whenever we have the topic of how are we attending to our structural deficit, we can refer back to this, And every bullet point can have an update. one proposal under new and diverse revenue is update fee schedule. I don't know exactly what fees we're talking about or what schedule we're updating, but that can be elaborated. These are the 12 fees we charge. We looked at them. We've decided these six are gonna stay the same these five are going to be increased and this 12th one is going to be decreased and these are the reasons and now we're done with that topic. It's done. That's what we're doing. to attend to our structural deficit and and we move on. And as a council, as a community, we can add new categories. to each of the add new bullet points to each of these categories new universe revenue replenish general fund reserves and address pension challenges, so on and so forth. uh, And then we're done. probably should have some sort of structure as uh Susan described well calendar and and this can be destructured with which we can expand or decrease but rather than changing the format each time we probably should pick a format for how we're going to attack this problem and continue to chip away at it until we feel like we're done. So that would be my straw man proposal, whether it's every other. |
| 02:05:35.97 | Unknown | I'm sorry, so what type of format are you suggesting in particular or anything in mind? |
| 02:05:39.56 | Ian Sobieski | regular words. keep elaborating on his memo. I guess, absent some other structure, it's, we've got must be 50 bullet points here, probably four pages. And I imagine the council and the community might think up some other ones on each of these high level categories, cost reduction, revenue efficiency, new and diverse revenue policies to replenish reserves and address pension challenges. Those are very high level. uh, legs of our table. And within each one, he has delineated a number of topic areas. that we could dive into. Each can have proposals. provide land values for potential sales of properties. Well, the city owns 40 acres. So that's a lot of work right there at one bullet point to decide what to look at and what not to, under new revenues, as I said, with fees. fees, new fees to look at, update the fee schedule. know you can you it's all there in the attachment on the website . So we can certainly have a different structure, but just in terms of being practical, he's already written this, so this can be the structure in each one of these bullet points can be filled out And then we can weekend. he can look for direction from the council uh if we should do more work or if this topic is done like we've done all we can do on fees or this is the way the fee schedule will change. |
| 02:07:05.24 | Unknown | Let me share the feedback I gave to Chris on that, that I'd like to get your reaction, Council Member, which is that, so the list of items in each category is quite long. So I suggested that we rank or accompany them with some sort of expectation of impact rather than just a list? So is there an 80-20 rule? What is the 20% that we'll have 80% of the impact. And then to support that, will it be accompanied by a sources or are used as pie charts? And in that fashion, we can start to kind of organize our thinking so that we don't end up spending a lot of time on bullet number 54. That is going to have a very small impact. Right. Versus, you know, so something that helps us organize our thoughts. And so that was a high level suggestion I had made. But I'm going to put down here on. My summary comments that we should get this on the agenda and have probably a separate meeting to actually really review some of these suggestions themselves. |
| 02:07:56.47 | Ian Sobieski | but I always think I always agree with attending to the things that need the needle the most first. I imagine some of these we won't know until we explore them We just don't know. We might have a guess. I also don't think, I mean, there's a lot here, but there's probably a lot more the community can add, and as we all engage with it, we'll probably have ideas, and So I would just start filling this out and engaging with it. in every every other meeting, every third meeting, What's the update? And where were we last meeting in terms of what we're going to updated the schedule because I don't know what that means. But I imagine filling that bullet point out would be here are the fees we charge. uh And the to-do item would be, what do other communities charge me? And, or what would be the sensitivity analysis be If we increased fees 10% or introduced a new fee. uh, And then we would give direction on whether we should go or he would have a recommendation and we'd either validate or or underline his recommendation. And at a certain point, we'd be done with the fee schedule idea for changing the structural deficit and that bullet point's done. There's a lot of work just going through his memo without even adding to it. And I imagine we will be adding to it. |
| 02:09:23.19 | Unknown | Thank you for those thoughts. Our Councillor McRibon also |
| 02:09:26.94 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, just I think the first step is having a public hearing either at a regular meeting hopefully at a regular meeting on the memo and getting the input from all the understanding what's on there and then adding or subtracting. things that we would like to subtract. And then I think we can move on to a prioritization as you suggested. I think the first step is this is the city manager's recommendation to us. I think it's an excellent start and I really appreciate the time and effort that he put into it. But I think we need to have a couple meeting on it to take feedback and then give our feedback and then we can start aligning prioritizing, et cetera. So that's what I would have said in future agenda items, but I'll just say it now. Thank you. |
| 02:10:14.12 | Unknown | support them. OKAY. well uh so let me just re-summarize again um more granularity repackaged by departments things like separating salary and benefits into line items um bring the plan uh back to council uh both to fully vet everything on there and try to create some prioritization um come up with a calendar sooner than we have had um regular check-ins until we have sort of figured out how we peter that out just make sure we engage the public and we have full transparency around this so maybe put it on the agenda so we can talk about it but then if we only need to do it every other meeting so be it and I think agree on some regular format as we move forward for how we decipher this bulk of information. Any other direction to give to the city manager? We'll see this again on the 28th at the regular council meeting. but any other comments? And just, we do have to run through the rest of the agenda and adjourn uh, the remaining part of the meeting. there'll be other time for comments, I guess. So any other comments to city manager? |
| 02:11:25.23 | Unknown | Okay, city manager, any other questions for us, for direction agents? |
| 02:11:28.25 | Chris Zapata | No, that's all very clear and very helpful. Thank you all. Because, again, understanding a problem, trying to figure out a plan and a schedule to address, you know, the phases or the issues that you face and then implementing that. So I think it's been very helpful for us. I want to say again, you know, different times require different approaches. Different city managers do things different ways. My way is to be conservative. I do not like to use one-time money. I do not like to overestimate revenue streams. I do not like to see revenue streams that aren't diverse. All of those things ultimately harm the organization and harm the community. So when I hear one of our colleagues speak about, you know, what they've done to keep the ship The trains on the track are much appreciated. There's been sacrifices made on a lot of fronts. And today what you would do if you adopted that budget, you'd be making the sacrifice too, because you would be committing $3 million or so to make sure that the people can still do the work that the community expects the businesses want and the visitors see. So this is all good. But I also say this, the city manager's job is to present a budget The council's job is to direct and approve that budget But in development of the budget and the solutions, it's not just the finance department or the department head or the city council or the residents, it's also the employees. And so one of my approaches is to make sure that I weigh in with the employees. And one of those solutions that I think helps the budget is to figure out what ideas employees have to help us do things more efficiently or find new revenue. So that will be an ongoing internal thing that's in there, but's something i will do and i point that out because some of this stuff i will do independent of the council other stuff requires the council's direction and some big things require the council and the community and the organization and so going forward on the 28th you will see a request to do something with measure o which is to your point mayor that 80 20 thing that's one of the big things that you need to do spend the time on because there will be a big return if you do it and a big impact if you don't do it so i'm mindful of that i look forward to your uh as a group's priorities on what you think meet that criteria because yeah you want to spend time on big things that you can't implement and some of the things that you can't you know that maybe not have as much impact you don't spend as much time on but within that plan it sounds like a lot 50 items is what councilman sobieski said but if you break it into three years It's roughly 15 to 20 things a year. to get there and some of those things will happen without the council. Some of those things will happen with the council and staff and some of them need to happen with the community as well. So on the 28th we'll bring for you all the things that you've asked for tonight. |
| 02:14:25.71 | Kevin McGowan | I think |
| 02:14:25.96 | Chris Zapata | I think they're all doable. I think the idea of a calendar with some breaks in there to address structural deficit, we But on the 28th, we will be bringing in the Measure O conversation to you, which is part and parcel to that three-year plan to address this deficit. |
| 02:14:43.51 | Unknown | Thank you very much. Okay, well thus concluded this particular business item, I'll hold over again. or B. So now we'll move on actually to the communications. Anybody here would like to give comment on anything not on the agenda, now would be your time. |
| 02:15:06.19 | Unknown | City Clerk. |
| 02:15:08.13 | Serge Avila | Madam Mayor, I don't see any hands raised, but I'd be happy to provide direction explain to public how to provide public comment if you would like me to. |
| 02:15:16.70 | Unknown | I think we're okay. It looks like we have the same folks in the room right now with us. And Madam Mayor, just a point of clarification, you actually did that at your Tuesday meeting. |
| 02:15:20.85 | Jill Hoffman | I'm not sure. Yes. |
| 02:15:25.29 | Unknown | Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Okay, and then Council Member Committee reports. I don't know if anybody has anything that they would like to share today. Yes, Council Member Clivemos. Thank you. |
| 02:15:38.03 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I have a committee report per se but I did just want to note at the last MCC MC meeting, Marin Council members and Mayors Association just think it was a really great thing for Sausalito that Vice Mayor and I think Klaustein was nominated to be vice president. So that's exciting. And I know that Hasn't been a vote on that yet, but we're sure. luck in that. deliberation along with San Anselmo Councilmember Brian Colbert as president. just wanted to give a shout |
| 02:16:19.97 | Unknown | out on that. |
| 02:16:20.54 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:16:21.45 | Unknown | Thank you for that. Yes, and we're looking forward to that as well and have Sausalito represented very, very well at the county level, really helped us. So thank you for that. Anything else on the community reports? Okay, well, city manager reports, pardon me, any public comment on, the community report. Okay, so then we'll move on to the next item, which is City Manager Report, City Council appointments, other council business. Anybody have public comment on that? Okay, I don't see any public comment. City Manager, do you have anything more you'd like to share with us? |
| 02:16:58.39 | Chris Zapata | No, I just hope that someone doesn't miss the Juneteenth activities from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. |
| 02:17:05.85 | Unknown | Yes, thank you. Just for everybody knows, again, that is Sunday, June 19th, which is in fact, Juneteenth, Rocky Grand Park in Marin City. And I don't wanna call the exact time they start, but I'm sure that currents will educate me on that this evening. Okay, any future agenda items? I think we're all in agreement that We are going to have a memo. on the options and a public hearing on that. Council Member Sobieski. |
| 02:17:35.06 | Ian Sobieski | Yeah, I've mentioned a few things. Um, I brought it up. numerous times that we went through all the rigmarole to agree that we're going to have a league blower ban, but unless I missed it, I think we still don't. uh, So, I'm not sure if we need to how to flush that out of the system. |
| 02:17:53.91 | Unknown | I can speak to that. So I was advised by our city clerk that it's going to the planning commission because there's a noise ordinance component to it. And then after they look at it, we will see it back again. So the community, our director of Department of Public Works is working through the noise component. |
| 02:18:13.00 | Ian Sobieski | Okay. Okay, any J on when that will to come to us, is it next in the fall |
| 02:18:19.59 | Unknown | No, I believe, city clerk, you can correct me if you remember offhand, but I think you said it was gonna be the next planning commission meeting. And if it didn't get on July, it was gonna be in August. |
| 02:18:29.09 | Serge Avila | That is correct, Madam Mayor. We're looking at July 12th or August the 30th at the latest. |
| 02:18:35.25 | Ian Sobieski | Right? Then the other thing, it could have been possibly a committee report, I'm not sure, It may not be at need on a future agenda item, but I put it there in case it needs to be. There's an effort to try to do the farmers market idea that was part of the community survey response to what you do around the Foreign Bank of America building. There is a desire for some businesses. their cultivar, which is, uh, going into the Hotel Sausalito building and others to do a farmer's market in parking lot number two on four successive Saturdays between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. And so that maybe can be approved administratively by city manager, but if it needs any kind of action, then we may need to have it on our city council agenda. And because of the lead time required, since they want to do this August, September and October, Um, It may need to be on the next city council agenda if we have any hope of doing it here in the fall. So I'd like to put that on the radar and the city manager can't authorize it. under his authority, then I would like city council to consider taking it up to authorize this to have a farmers market for the community. |
| 02:19:57.01 | Unknown | Thank you, Ann. Councilman Cribbonance. |
| 02:20:02.04 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | I would just note that there's a lot on our agenda list for the 28th. which is good. I was going to mention the Ferry Plaza. I would love to get an update on that. I've just been hearing kind of. just different things about where we are on that project. So if our great committee, subcommittee could I do see it's on there in terms of the a ballot initiative. I wasn't sure that that was necessary at this stage, but if we could have a discussion about that, that would be helpful. And then the second thing that I don't see on there anywhere is any kind of open session discussion. on homelessness and raised this a couple of times. I think our city manager has reached out to us about various location issues and I'm interested in discussing housing solutions Um, with the rest of you. So if we could add that and find a time maybe not on such a crowded agenda. That would be helpful. |
| 02:21:11.97 | Unknown | Thank you. Great. Thank you for that. And just so everybody knows, we have agenda setting tomorrow afternoon. Yes, it's Friday today at 2 3 30. Well, there you go. It's Friday, which is today. |
| 02:21:26.94 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:21:27.78 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:21:28.04 | Jill Hoffman | THE END OF |
| 02:21:28.71 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:21:28.76 | Jill Hoffman | I'm sorry. Thanks, just with regard to the ferry, Wow. just the parking lot part. at this point that we are recommending that it go to the ballot. I think we have a plan that does not require it to go to the ballot at this point. It went to Planning Commission last night for a study session, wait, today's Thursday, Wednesday. Sorry. But I do understand they went almost midnight. So technically yesterday. So. Anyway, I don't think Anyway, the ballot part of it. I think we are trying to get it back to the city council as quickly as we can. And we're on a track to do that. So working very hard on it. Actually, all of us are working very hard. Like all of us, meaning us staff, You know. |
| 02:22:16.81 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Okay, well, if it doesn't have to come back to us at our next meeting, maybe we could get a one-way communication just so we all understand where things are. Yep. |
| 02:22:21.73 | Jill Hoffman | understand. Yep. Thank you. |
| 02:22:24.18 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Something like that. |
| 02:22:24.94 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I think we could do that. Yeah. And that's it. Further, I don't have any other additions, so further, sorry. |
| 02:22:33.36 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:34.04 | Unknown | And any other reports of significance? and not hearing any, then I will suggest we adjourn. Thank you everybody. Thank you, city manager. Dr. McGowan, Dr. Chu. |
| 02:22:45.88 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Bye, thank you everyone. Thank you. |
| 02:22:47.10 | Unknown | Everybody have a good weekend. |
| 02:22:47.11 | Susan Cleveland Knowles | Everybody have a question? |
| 02:22:49.10 | Unknown | Thank you. you |
Vicki Nichols — Against: Requests a review of EDAC's effectiveness and funding; emphasizes the need to fund historic preservation projects; wants detailed line-item budgets to understand council priorities. ▶ 📄
Megan Lockett — Against: Opposes potential reduction to a 36-hour work week (10% furlough), citing financial hardship for employees and loss of institutional knowledge; argues the city invests in consultants but not employees. ▶ 📄
Sandra Bushmaker — Against: Urges scrutiny of EDAC's budget request, noting they haven't spent all allocated funds and questioning the value returned to the city. ▶ 📄
Pat — In Favor: Compliments the city manager's professionalism; supports exploring cannabis taxes, fire department rent increases, and plaza creation (if placed on ballot) as part of the deficit plan. ▶ 📄