City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon, everybody. I would like to call to order the Special City Council meeting. The time is 3.07. City Clerk Duarte, would you please take roll? Yes, Mayor.

Council Member Pemberton?

Here.

Council Member Sosa?

Present.

Council Member Trujillo? Here. Mayor Proctor-Mortiz?

Present.

And Mayor Prometa? Present. Now it is time for public comment regarding the items listed on the special meeting agenda. City Clerk, did we receive any correspondence to be incorporated into the record? We did not, Mayor. Okay, then if we don't have any public comment, I will make a motion to close public comment. Can I get a second? Second. So ordered by the Mayor. And we have a really good meeting today. We will now move on to the one item of business on this special meeting agenda is the presentation and discussion of fiscal year 2026-2027 proposed city budget. City Manager Bradley, who's got the staff report?

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. I will actually go ahead and introduce and kick off the presentation, and then as we go throughout, I'll turn it over to different staff for various sections of the presentation. So if we can bring up the PowerPoint, please. I will say this is, I think, my fourth budget, so pretty excited to present to you the proposed annual budget for fiscal year 26-27, which seems pretty odd to say those big numbers. The years are going by fairly quickly.

They sure are.

I will kind of just give a little overview. One, I want to thank staff for all the hard work that went into this budget. I will say thanks to our interim assistant finance director, Marlon Ramirez, for his hard work and his team for all the effort in putting this budget together. I will say this has probably been one of the smoothest BUDGET PROCESSES THAT I'VE BEEN THROUGH. I WANT TO THANK THEM FOR THEIR ORGANIZATION AND EFFICIENCY IN GETTING THINGS THROUGH AND GETTING IT ALL DONE AS WELL AS TO ALL OF OUR STAFF. THIS PROCESS STARTS USUALLY BACK IN DECEMBER, JANUARY TIMEFRAME WHERE WE START LOOKING AT our mid-year budget, projecting out what our estimated actuals are going to be for the year, as well as starting to put together our revenue and expense expectations for the next fiscal year. So this has been a multi-month process, different reviews that we've gone through. And like I said, it's been very smooth. That's not to say that everything's perfect. If you remember last year when we were at this dais doing the same presentation, I had mentioned to you that we were kind of worried about the economic outlook, about the economy, how things were going. There was, as I mentioned at that time, potential to have some regressive actions that might have been necessary as we got to the mid-year. I'm thankful and glad to announce that we didn't have any of those kind of issues. We've had a decent year. Things have not been Perfect, we'd like to have a lot more money coming in, but we're still battling inflation, but we've actually towed the line this year and we've had a pretty successful year. Especially as you look around and you see some of the communities in our area and other places having struggles with budgetary issues. Downey is still very financially strong. And I think a lot of that has to do with leadership of this council and also the great economic base that we've built over the past many years. We're pretty successful, and I think we should be proud of that. If we can advance the slide one more, please. This year's budget is going to be kind of similar to last year, except for a little more optimism in the economy at this point. We're still presenting to you a structurally balanced budget, which I think is very important, which means that we're living within our means. Today we will have presentations. I'll kind of kick things off and talk a little bit about our overall objectives for the year and then I'll look and we'll talk a little bit more about the specifics of the budget. I'll turn it over to Marlon to do that section of the presentation and then at the end we'll have each of the departments come up to you as you can see outlined here and present and talk about their department, their functions, how they're budgeted and their accomplishments and things that they're projecting to do next year. If we can advance one slide please. So I want to kind of kick off JUST TALK ABOUT SOME OF THE BIG PICTURE THINGS THAT WE'RE LOOKING AT AND THAT HAVE BEEN BUILT INTO THE BUDGET FOR 26, 27. AND THESE OBJECTIVES, WHILE THERE ARE MANY OTHER THINGS GOING ON, ARE THINGS THAT WE THINK ARE OF KEY IMPORTANCE FOR NEXT YEAR AND THEY COME LARGELY ALSO FROM OUR STRATEGIC PLAN. So looking at fiscal responsibility, we want to continue to make sure that we're getting our GFOA and CSMFO recognitions for excellence in budgeting and excellence in financial reporting. I think that's important. We're going to continue that tradition. At our last meeting, the City Council approved the contract for the Space Center expansion project. I'm pretty proud of that. We do have a lot of work left to do, though, in raising funds for Phases 2 and 3. So Phase 1 was approved last meeting with the funding for that. There is a little bit of funding left for that, but that project is largely funded. The Foundation is going to be looking to expand itself to help its fundraising activities and really ramp those up, as we still have about $20 million to fund. to raise for the next phase two and three. So work still to be done, but pretty happy that we'll have a nice building that's gonna be built here over the next about a year and a half, two years. So good stuff coming on that. Continuing to adopt as we go into next year, make sure we have our structurally balanced budgets. We're not gonna lose that as part of our efforts. AS I MENTIONED, ECONOMIC VIBRANCY IS A BIG DEAL, AND IT REALLY HELPS MAKE US RECESSION-PROOF. WE WANT TO HAVE A GOOD DIVERSITY OF BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES WITHIN THE CITY. WITH THAT, THE COUNCIL APPROVED A FEW MEETINGS AGO THE DISCOVER DOWNY BRAND, A REDO OF THAT, SO WE'RE GOING TO BE WORKING TO IMPLEMENT THAT AND GET THAT ROLLING AND EXPANDING WITHIN THE CITY. as well as implementing the Economic Development Action Plan, which was approved a few months ago. It's going to be key to continue to support the existing businesses within our city, making sure that they are strengthened and strong, as well as attracting new businesses to the city so we can have good opportunities for places to eat out, good shopping, as well as good, strong jobs within the city as well. looking to expand and develop our small business program, as well as continuing the development of the Back 20 and the Rancho South campus areas so that we can fill some holes within our community, continue to expand our economic base. Looking at efficiency and adaptability, we've been working on our enterprise resource planning platform, which is basically our finance system, our HR system. That's going to continue into next year. The current system is reaching its end of its life, and so we're moving into a new system as we go into next year. We have put a lot of emphasis on making sure that we have virtual opportunities to not only do plan checks, but also obtain other permits. So we've been expanding our Excel system so that you can engage with the city, not only the hours that we're open, but on a 24-7 basis. So all of our departments have been working to put as much as we can on our permitting activities online. You may have noticed that we have a .org designation with our website and with our email addresses. It's time to go over to a .gov. So that's also part of our plans for next year to make sure we take care of that. As it relates to quality of life, safety, and infrastructure, we're talking about the Space Center coming online in the next couple years. We do want to make sure that we begin next year looking at ramping up our operations plans as well as our staffing plans for that facility, so that'll be part of our work plan for next year, as well as expanding on the security cameras that are in our community and in parks. We're going to be hitting Independence Park, Discovery, Sports Complex, and the Wilderness Park next year. And really beginning the phase one of our security master plan and rolling out the license plate readers throughout the community. I know the council has talked a lot about that and that is in our work plan for next year as well.

Looking at the cameras and the cameras in the parks, part of security plan, LPRs, all of that.

Correct. It'll be rolling out that first phase, which will include streets and other places.

Are we going to discuss that? I wanted to see what are the parks that are being considered.

The parks are right there. We have Independence, Discovery Sports Complex, and Weller's Parks that are proposed for next year.

Three new ones. Which ones do the park off the five? Oh, Dennis the Menace. Mm-hmm. IS THAT ON THE LIST?

IT'S NOT CURRENTLY ON THE LIST. I THINK IT'S PLANNED FOR AN OUTLYING YEAR. THAT'S NOT CORRECT. YES.

SO THERE'S A CONCERN JUST ON THAT AND I DON'T KNOW IF I'M JUMPING OUT OF TURN HERE BUT THE CONCERN WAS IT'S FREEWAY FRIENDLY AND WE SHOULD HAVE CAMERAS THERE BECAUSE THERE'S BEEN ACTIVITY.

I THINK WE WILL BRING IT BACK WHEN WE ROLL IT OUT. WE CAN HAVE MAYBE A MORE IN DEPTH CONVERSATION AND TALK ABOUT PRIORITIZATION THEN IF THAT'S OKAY WITH THE COUNCIL. Then lastly, looking at public engagement, we do have an election next year for districts two and four. We will be doing master plans, master plan updates for the arts master plan as well as the parks master plan, so it's a great opportunity to have a conversation with the council and with the community, talking about the priorities for arts engagement within the community as well as our parks and our parks programs. We have FIFA going off here this month, but we want, after we complete that, to move on to LA 28. We have Olympics coming in two years and making sure that we have the ability to leverage those opportunities, that opportunity that's coming. And last but not least, we've heard from the council that there's really an emphasis on making sure that we continue to highlight our successes. So we want to make sure that we do that in our social media posting and our messaging to the community, as well as continue to expand our social media presence in general. Next slide, please. Looking at staffing proposals and the budget for next year, we basically are staying flat. So we came into 25-26 with 470 full-time equivalent employees. We are proposing the same number for next year. We do have a few for efficiency and for succession planning purposes changes to our staffing allocations, in particular looking at some reclasses in parks and recreation, adding a going from a recreational manager to a deputy director and then in public works we have some efficiency changes in the department which all of which are net zero changes so we're just kind of moving some things around for efficiency sake adding and taking away a few positions so looking at the public works executive secretary going to an admin aide and secretary to an executive secretary and eliminating an associate civil engineer and they keep down a beautiful coordinator that that function will still be absorbed and still exist it's not going away it's just that PARTICULAR POSITION IS GOING TO CHANGE. A COUPLE OF NEW POSITIONS, ONE IN FIRE, WE WANT TO INCREASE OUR PLAN CHECK CAPABILITIES AND SO WE'VE ADDED AN EXTRA BODY THERE. THE SPACE CENTER NEEDS SOME ADDITIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANCE SO WE PROPOSED AN ADDITIONAL BODY THERE AND AGAIN A COUPLE OF POSITIONS IN PUBLIC WORKS TO DEAL WITH EFFICIENCIES MOSTLY AROUND ENGINEERING NEEDS AND MAINTENANCE NEEDS. Lastly, the impact again is we started 25-26 with 470. At mid-year, around December, we made some changes in the IT functions, and we dropped two positions there, which mostly went to contract work. And we're proposing two additional bodies in the 26-27, so we still have 470 equal employees going into 26-27. Next slide, please. So here, just quickly, kind of recapping that, if you look at sort of our three main employment centers within the city, we have police at 190 FTEs, fire at 112, and public works at 77, and you can kind of get a good snapshot of how each department is staffed. Next slide, please. Just looking at the overall budget proposal, we are at about $327 million, all funds. The general fund makes up the largest portion of that at $122 million, 37% of the budget. Capital projects are just short of $93 million, and all other funds are just above $112 million, again, for total appropriations in this budget, proposed at $327 million. Next slide, please. The general fund does have a reserve requirement at 35%. That is a rolling average of what occurred over the past three years with the general fund revenues. 20% is the stability reserve or economic opportunity reserve. And then we have our 15% for emergency reserve. Total reserve requirement, 35%, would be $37.5 million. Next slide, please. This is overall a summary of the general fund position. We project to end the year at $42.2 million. We do have a carryover project, which is an enterprise resource planning project, which is $900,000 that's going to be carried over. So we have a projected fund balance at $43 million at the end of this fiscal year. Again, we have a couple of projects finalizing the ERP. We do have the third tranche for the YMCA. So that's about $1.2 million total. If you look at the revenue and expenditures proposed in the budget for next year, we're at $122.1 for the revenues coming in and $122 just short of one for expenditures. So we've got about a $73,000 budget. IN THE BUDGET FOR NEXT YEAR. SO PROJECTING THE FUND BALANCE AT THE END OF 2027 AT $41.9 MILLION. THERE ARE IN THE FUND ABOUT $8.5 MILLION IN WHAT ARE NON-SPENDABLE ACCOUNTS FOR A NET SPENDABLE AMOUNT OF $33.5 MILLION IN THE BUDGET. NEXT SLIDE, PLEASE.

AT THIS POINT I'M GOING TO TURN IT OVER TO INTERIM ASSISTANT

MARLIN TO TAKE OVER THIS PRESENTATION AND KIND OF TALK ABOUT ALL THE DETAILS OF THE BUDGET FOR YOU. ANYTIME THERE'S ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK THEM. WE'RE OPEN TO DIALOGUE AND TRYING TO MAKE SURE THAT EVERYTHING IS CLEAR AS WE GO THROUGH THIS PRESENTATION. AT THE END OF THE FINANCIAL PORTION, THEN WE'LL START BRINGING UP THE DEPARTMENTS TO TALK ABOUT THEIR INDIVIDUAL BUDGETS. THANK YOU.

Thank you, City Manager Bradley. Marlon, take it away. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the City Council. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to present the proposed fiscal year 26-27 annual operating budget. Before I start, I just want to thank the department heads and I'd like to thank the budget coordinators for the countless hours that they've spent developing this budget. I also want to recognize the finance department, specifically our finance manager, Francesca Navarro, our senior accountant, Susie Martinez, and our budget analyst, Shantay Duran, for their work in helping develop this budget. I also want to thank the budget subcommittee for taking the time to review the proposed budget, ask questions, and provide feedback during this process. So we'll start with estimated revenues for all funds. This is approximately 277.9 million. This represents an increase of approximately 1.5% compared to last year. Of that amount, general fund represents approximately 122.1 million or 44% of total fund revenues. All other funds represented approximately $155.8 million or 56%. These funds include restricted or dedicated revenues such as enterprise revenues like golf and water fund, special revenue funds, grant funds, Measure S, Measure D, and other funds that are outside of the general fund. While this slide shows a full citywide revenue picture, it's important to remember that many of these revenues are restricted and cannot be used for general operating purposes. The next slide provides a breakdown of general fund estimated revenues. For next fiscal year, the general fund revenues are projected at approximately $122.1 million, which is an increase of $2.85 million or 2% compared to fiscal year 25-26 adjusted budget. The key drivers of the general fund revenues continue to be property tax and sales and use tax. When preparing these estimates, staff reviewed current year activity, year end projections, historical trends, and information from the city's revenue consultants. We also considered the broader economic climate, including inflationary pressures, consumer confidence, interest rates, and potential impacts from state and federal funding changes. Starting at the top with property taxes, they are projected at approximately 40.5 million, which is an increase of 1.6 million or 4% over the adjusted budget. Property tax remains the largest general fund revenue source and represents 33% of total general fund revenues. Property tax revenues are growing, but only at a steady, moderate pace. Most of the increase is coming from the normal 2% annual inflation adjustment under Prop 13. Currently, we're seeing fewer home sales and higher interest rates, which means fewer properties are being reassessed at today's market values. There is construction and remodels occurring, but not at the same pace as years before. Therefore, they're not adding much value to the new tax rolls. These factors keep property tax base increasing, though at a slower pace than during times of strong market activity. Next, we'll cover sales and use taxes, which are projected at 29.5 million. This is an increase of 291,000 or 1% over the adjusted budget. Sales tax represents 24% of the total general fund revenues. Sales tax trends are varying across industries with some sectors outperforming others, while others are experiencing slower growth or declines. And due to this varied performance, the city expects its sales tax revenue to grow by approximately 1%. Because of this, we are budgeting conservatively to ensure that we do not overestimate revenues in an uncertain environment. And like Roger mentioned earlier, it's just consistent with many cities throughout Southern California. Next year's budget is being developed in a cautious economic environment. Cities are seeing modest revenue growth, softening sales activity, rising personnel and operating costs, and a continued demand for investment in public safety, infrastructure, technology, and quality of life services. As a result, many agencies are budgeting conservatively. Next, I just wanted to provide clarity on the franchise taxes and revenue for other agencies. These are the decreases that you see in this table. These decreases represent one-time revenues that is not expected to occur next year from grants and one-time payments. Also with respect to operating transfers, a decrease of 6%. This is primary tied to revenue that the city receives in gas tax, which is adjusted at the state level every year by CPI. However, the state is projecting a decrease in these funds over the next decade due to increasing EV sales and expanding EV infrastructure. For all revenues, we will continue to monitor throughout the year and we'll report back to council during the first quarter and mid-year as was done this year.

Could you just quickly touch, did you touch on other revenue? What's that 11% increase? Big numbers kind of jump out.

So other revenue, this is for strike team reimbursements. These are cost recoveries that the city receives for whenever the city sends out strike teams. These are also gate fees that the city collects from the Downey area recycling and transfer facility. So those revenues are expected to go up slightly.

Thank you.

The overall is $170,000. This next slide is a visual representation of the general fund categories we just discussed. The chart helps show revenue categories remaining relatively stable with changes based on current trends, known activity and conservative assumptions for the upcoming fiscal year. This next chart focuses on sales tax and was provided by our consultant, HCL. This slide demonstrates a long-term change in taxable sales activity, including the difference between brick-and-mortar sales and online sales. As you can see, overall sales activity rebounded after the pandemic, but consumer spending patterns continue to change. Brick-and-mortar activity has shown pressure in recent years, while online sales have continued to grow. This is important because not every online sale results in the same local benefit to the city. There are rules related to point of sale, fulfillment centers, whether a transaction occurs in state or out of state, and how the sales tax is allocated. Because of this, staff continues to monitor online sales activity and how this impacts city tax revenues. This next slide shows the fourth quarter sales tax report by a major industry group, also provided by HCL. Downey's receipts for the fourth quarter were down 1.1% when compared to the same quarter last year. This reflects a mixed sales climate where some sectors like general consumer goods showed growth, but others such as auto and transportation and fuel and service stations experienced declines amid shifting consumer spending and broader economic influences. The auto and transportation sector experienced a slight decline of 0.1%, while higher interest rates and other economic factors are having an impact. Overall performance in this category remains fairly strong. The general consumer goods sector continues to perform strongly, representing the largest portion of sales tax among the major industry groups. Sales in this category increased 1%. And this sector includes retail sales primarily intended for personal and household use. Next, we have fuel and service stations. This was down 11.9%. And this is, again, is primarily due to electrical vehicle sales and the growing EV infrastructure network. The state is also looking at a decrease of 5% over the next decade, over the next year. State and county polls are down by 0.8%. These are the online sales that we mentioned in the previous slide. E-commerce remains strong, but growth has leveled off compared to the previous year. The slide is a good example of why staff looks beyond overall sales tax number. And even when sales tax is increasing slightly, not every industry is moving in the same direction. Some sectors may be growing while others may be flattening or declining. Just one other thing to note is that during the same period, Downey performed slightly better than the county and the state that performed at minus 1.2% and 1.6% respectively. and staff will continue to monitor sales activity throughout the year and will provide updates up throughout fiscal year 26-27.

I do have a question.

I do have a question. So we're saying that we see an increase in online sales compared to the brick and mortar. How are we really honing in on that increase if we notice that brick and mortar businesses or sales have been kind of like stagnant? Anything we're doing or we're focusing on those online sales?

I can address that, Mayor Pro Tem. I think if you remember from our action plan presentation, one of the things we talked about is the addition of housing to try and shift that point of sale further to the home, and then also working with a lot of our brick and mortar businesses who are adding more of the online spending amenities, whether it's showrooms or in-store pickup and those sorts of things, working with them to make sure that we're flexible on those types of uses.

Next, we have the general fund expenditures by type. The total general fund proposed expenditure budget is approximately $122.1 million, which is up by 2% compared to the adjusted budget. Looking at the general fund expenditure budget by type, the largest category is salaries and benefits, which is $81 million, or 66% of general fund budget. And this allocation is consistent with what we expect for full-service cities. This is followed by operating transfers at 11.6 million or 10%. These are the transfers made to outside funds, to funds outside of the general fund, such as the theater fund and the space center fund. Next we have the general fund proposed expenditures by functional area. This slide provides a broader view of how general fund resources are allocated by service area rather than by the individual department. The department heads will go further into detail with their budget in the upcoming slides. This next slide shows the general fund proposed expenditures by department. The total proposed general fund expenditure budget is approximately $122.1 million. This is approximately 2% increase year over year. Together, police and fire represent 58% of the general fund budget. This reflects the city's continued commitment to public safety as a primary driver of the city's budget. I also wanna note that as mentioned in the previous slide, the Columbia Memorial Space Center and Fund 39, the Downey Theater are outside of the general fund. In the general fund, you will see these transfers out to support these operations. The non-departmental category is approximately 11.7 million or 10%. This includes citywide costs and obligations that are not assigned to one operating department, such as transfers, pension-related obligations, and other centralized costs. That concludes the staff overview portion of this budget presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Marlon. No questions for me. I just want to say thank you once again for all of the hard work that has gone into presenting this proposed budget for us. Colleagues, do you have any questions, or are we ready to move on?

Oh, it's very thorough. Thank you very much. Of course.

Thank you.

Thank you, Marlon.

All right, Mayor, if it pleases the Council, I will move forward with the staff presentations. And I think our first group, if we can advance the slide, is Public Safety. And we'll start with Pete. I'm going to invite Chief Lochner up to present on his department. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor Formoto, members of City Council. It's my pleasure to introduce our budget this year for the police department and go over some of our accomplishments from the 25-26 and what we're looking to do in 26-27. So the one that sticks out to me the most is the big decrease in our crime stats as measured by the FBI index crimes. This includes homicides, forcible rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larceny, motor vehicle theft. We were down 18% last year. That's the second straight year we've been down, and this year we're projected, so far we're down just under 10%. The lowest numbers we've had since pre-pandemic, so very proud of that. That's all due to the hard work of all of our officers, all of our professional staff, and working together as a team and getting everything done. We're continuing our homeless outreach. We're out there every Monday working alongside different departments with the city, working with code enforcement. CITY MANAGER'S OFFICE. I THINK WE'VE MADE A BIG IMPACT ON RIVERBED. WE'RE OUT THERE EVERY MONDAY WE USE HOST FUNDS TO SUPPLEMENT THAT FOR THE POLICE DEPARTMENT. WE'VE BEEN ACTIVE AND CONTINUING TO GO TO THE COUNTY TRYING TO GET EVEN MORE MONEY FOR US SO OURSELVES AND A COUPLE OF OUR SURROUNDING CITIES ARE BEING VERY PROACTIVE ESPECIALLY IN THE RIVERBEDS TRYING TO WORK WITH EACH OTHER AND USE THOSE FUNDS. WE'RE ALSO PUSHING FOR OUR officers to be out there trying to be more visible. We've had a little increase in citations, wasn't too drastic, but our traffic collisions did go down this year. So they were down a couple percent, so we're proud of that and getting out there, really trying to educate especially the schools during the school drop-offs and pickups. Other campaigns that we're trying to do, we have a grant every year through OTS. We just got an email on Friday saying that we are tentatively granted our grant for this year, but it was slightly less. We got, I think it's $265,000. I think last year was $330,000. So it did go down a little bit. I don't know specifically why that is yet. I'm guessing it's probably the budget in the state, but we're also looking at different avenues to hopefully supplement that as well. Another big thing, and I'll touch on our goals as well, is our recruitment team. We have a dedicated recruitment team trying to get out there and find the best candidates that we can for both our sworn and non-sworn positions. You can see that our budget highlights, Martin pretty much covered all of it, but the one thing I would point out on ours for the police department is when you factor in everything in there, the biggest expenditure for us is our salaries and benefits, which totals a little over 84%. Finally, for our goals for next year, this was already asked a little bit about our LPRs. We're looking to improve our technology with our LPRs. Currently, we have the flock systems in the downtown area, which was added a couple years ago. But for 10, 15 years, we've had... DIFFERENT LPR SYSTEMS THROUGHOUT THE CITY BASICALLY ON THE BORDER OF OUR CITY. MOST RECENT GROUP WAS FROM ALMOST NINE YEARS AGO AND THAT EQUIPMENT IS ANEQUATED AND NO LONGER IN WARRANTY AND NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. SO OUR STAFF IS LOOKING TO FIND OUT WHETHER IT'S GOING TO BE FLOCK OR A DIFFERENT VENDOR AND WE'LL BE BRINGING THAT BACK TO THE COUNCIL. Hopefully sooner rather than later after the new fiscal year to get further direction from you on which vendor to use. And again, just to touch on the recruitment, somebody had asked me too, with Measure D we got 12 more sworn officers. I haven't been able to dip into that yet. We're down 18, currently down 18. It's not for lack of effort on our recruitment team for hiring and our special enforcement team. We've been very fortunate to be able to fill most of our professional staff positions. We were making some progress with our sworn to, but we had one that didn't make it out of the academy, one on training. We've had a few that have left, moved out of the state, in fact, and just through attrition and retirement. So that's something that we're actively pushing. One of the things that we're going to do again this year that was very beneficial for us last year was doing a one-day recruiting event. We're looking to host that in July, so stay tuned for that. We'll get that out here very soon. We've got the academy dates in August, October, and then in January as well. So we're hoping to get as many in there as we can. And then we also have an updated flyer coming out very soon to show what our salary range is with the new benefits that came in with the contract that you guys recently approved. So we're hoping that will drive some more candidates as well. And with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

Thank you, Chief. Appreciate the report, just the whopping 18% decrease in the FBI index crimes. That is definitely a well-noted accomplishment in the increase of 6% in total arrests. I think that, again, our commitment to public safety and making sure that our community residents feel safe, those are great accomplishments. Thank you. Colleagues, do you have anything to add?

Yes. Definitely, we should be talking about that great accomplishment. I don't know if we can get that out through social media, but I think the community needs to know there's been a drop of 18%. Congratulations on that. I would still someday like to see some form of community officer. Now with the creation of the 5th District, I'm hoping that someday we could perhaps consider a community or a district CSO. So perhaps it would be five CSOs. I don't know if we could start with three and maybe see if one CSO can cover two districts. But it would be somebody who nine of five would be out in the neighborhood and getting to know the neighborhoods. and if people have non-emergency issues, it's almost like they can talk to the CSO, someone who might be there for two, three years and become a familiar face for residents. I know LAPD has a community officer program where they do that with full-blown police officers. Obviously, our resources are limited, so some sort of community service officer who would handle the neighborhood watch, programs in his or her own district. Our neighborhood watch program, I think it could be a little more active. I would like to see if we could promote or do something about expanding the Neighborhood Watch program. Did you want to say something on those?

Yeah, we actually have a recruitment process going on right now just for the Neighborhood Watch coordinator. It's going to be a dual role. It's a lot of social media and getting that message out. So that's been a long process. We have interviews this week. HR has been really great with all of our different positions that we've been trying to hire, but that's one where we're actually having them do – Test to show and demonstrate their abilities to do things but one of the things that we've noticed and that we want to do with that position to is to get the neighborhood watch groups more active Give an example. We had one recently the person was claiming to be a block captain and they might have been a block captain But it was about 17 years ago And other people have taken over since so it was still an active group But it's really getting out there and getting some of the ones that have been a little stagnant trying to get them more involved and get them get them rebound but That's going to definitely come when we get this position filled.

Don't forget to add coyotes to the agenda of things to discuss, especially in the areas in the 4th District, probably, where coyotes are a little more prominent. The last thing, Chief, I worry about space for you, for your department. And the Volte buildings, I think, present an opportunity for us to expand your department, at least the building portion. So... Perhaps you could put in motion something in your department for you and your future chiefs to consider. What would it look like if you were to be given some space for your department in that building? What would it look like? Is it even feasible? And feel free to say a bad idea. But I do worry about space for your department. I like the fact that we're finally going to enclose this area to talk about expanding you.

City Manager Bradley and I have had many conversations about the footprint of what the Civic Center area is going to look like for the future, certainly when I'm gone. But trying to get that parking lot dealt with first, having the area to either expand or build another building here in the station, and we've even talked about the Volte building and other options.

The Volte building, I mean, our uses are so limited over there, really, for office space. Imagine if we could put some sort of substation down there. I think that'd be a great benefit for the residents. Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chief. I just have a quick question. And I ask this fully understanding that I know it's really competitive, extremely competitive for law enforcement agencies to attract qualified candidates. So remind me, how many vacancies do we have for our sworn right now? And also, how many do we have in academy and or training right now?

Yeah, so certainly we're... We're down 18 spots right now, so 12 of them were Measure D spots. So if you look back on even before we had the Measure D spots a couple years ago, we were down the double digits. I think we were down 14 or 15. So we've made an impact on there. We have currently... and we count these as basically sworn, but we have four right now that are currently on training. We have four more in the academy. Three are gonna be graduating in July. The other one's graduating in August. We're looking to have anywhere between three and four. I'm talking about this with my background investigator sitting over here watching me. We're looking to have hopefully three in the academy, three to four in the academy in August. And then hopefully that same number, especially with the one-day event in October. And again, hopefully that same number in January. But a lot of it is the retention. That doesn't also count the people that we have IOD, people on maternity leave. So there's a whole lot of different factors. And I tell you, that's all I can do to boast about our staff and to have the decrease in crimes and the increase in arrests and tickets with the limitations on staff right now. They're doing a phenomenal job. So very proud of them.

Yeah, with that said, I just want to emphasize, I know it's really competitive and you basically have agencies poaching from each other. And with crime stats down, I do want to emphasize and congratulate you and your department. Thank you. Thank you.

I have a question on the LPRs. I thought I heard at One Neighborhood Watch that maybe there's only about four cars that have them, officer patrol cars, or do all officer patrol cars? Is that something that we have or want or need so that they have that capability?

So the LPR, there's a few different variations. So we have, I believe it's three of our cars right now have the LPR, the citywide and mobile, I guess you would call it, because they're driving around in a car. Those are also getting a little old as well. What I'm looking at and what my staff's been looking at is looking at different vendors where we can get additional cameras. That's better than just a few cars driving around because if we have it fixed throughout the perimeter, basically everybody coming into the city, that's the old antiquated system, which is vigilant, which is not one by Motorola. That's not a option I'm going to be presenting to you guys at some point because that's like you've got to buy it all up front, pay a big... I would estimate close to a million dollars. It was $700,000 nine years ago. So whereas Flock and some of the other competitors, it's more of a lease program. So you're basically spreading that million dollars over a 10-year period. So 100, 130,000 a year, somewhere around there. We're looking at different vendors to increase the amount of cameras, not just around the perimeter of the city, but being able to focus on a couple other areas. We've spoken to some other business owners, property owners, see if they would like to contribute to it as well to just to build it out. But that's something we will be presenting to you guys shortly after the new fiscal year.

The foot beat that we have Friday and Saturday, is that like 6 p.m. to 3 a.m.? And does that take away from the officers that are normally doing the beat, or the beat is covered and these are additional?

These people are additional. So what we're doing, it's from 8 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. on Fridays and Saturday nights. And we're using overtime, using our regular overtime budget. It's one of those things where it's so busy down there, we have to have dedicated people down there. And we don't necessarily need to have them there for a full shift. So that's why we do it there. And then it frees up the officers to really focus on other parts of the city. They'll still action patrol that area, but having the two designated people down there helps out a lot because it's extremely busy down there.

Yeah, we appreciate that. That's for sure. On the riverbed cleanups, is that mostly around the 605 area? I know we do 105. Do you go pick a different area by the freeway to do that or just specifically 605?

They go all over. So it's both Rio San Gabriel and Rio Hondo. They'll go train tracks. Hopefully I'm not stepping on... Keep going with it? All right. We're hitting all those different spots. Rancho Grounds is another one that's been popping up a lot. I'm working with the county trying to get those cleanups. I know the railroad was out there because somebody sent me a picture and said, hey, great job. They're finally out there. But we're also, the other thing that I like about it with the host grounds is we're coordinating with other cities and working with them. It's one of those things like historically you come in from one side, they go to the other side of the riverbed and they're in another city. Then that city comes out and they push them back over your city. So we're trying to work together and come out the same day and deal with both sides of the riverbeds in the same day so they're not just leapfrogging.

Thank you. Just lastly, I just would say with our new officers that do come in, maybe we can have a, what's our first acknowledgement and the first of our council meetings to meet them, to come in and thank him. And just to get to know them a little way that the council can see their faces.

I can certainly do that. We've done it in the past. I don't know if it was a COVID thing that stopped it or not, but yeah, we'd be happy to do that.

I think it was a COVID thing. Several brothers have come in, so it would be nice to see them at a council meeting and thank them.

Absolutely.

Thank you. I just want to remind the council, we have a lot of presentations to go, so we need to keep our comments and our questions a little bit down. Let's go ahead.

City Manager. If that's it, we'll go ahead and bring up the fire chief for the next presentation.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor Fermenta. I am proud to share with you some of the accomplishments that your fire department has done in the last year and share a little bit about us as well as our goals for the coming year. As you know, the fire department is a lot more than just responding to fires. With our eight divisions, we take an all-risk approach and try to address and improve public safety throughout the city. That includes risk reduction, responding to emergencies, and really trying to achieve our mission. Last year, it was a busy year, and we do have a lot to show for it. As you're well aware, and you've seen it at the community events, and I'm extremely proud of it, is our new fire truck. It's something that's going to serve the city for the next 20 years. And it was a long time coming. We've increased our community engagement. And speaking to you, when I first became fire chief, that was a common theme that I heard. And we increased that by 60%. Whether it was through an annual report, hosting fairs, hosting events, attending city events, we want our fire department to be out there in the city and connecting and engaging with our residents. You've heard the assessment, or I'm sorry, the accreditation name thrown around there for a few years. I am extremely proud that we should be receiving a draft of our community risk assessment and standards to cover, which is the first major milestone in the accreditation process, hopefully within a week. so we're going to keep rolling with that and more to come on that in a moment and lastly the warren high school fire technology program was a huge success they had almost 150 students in its inaugural year and they're looking to expand that with emt training next year For our budget, looking at a total budget next year of just over $35 million. That does include 112 full-time positions with salaries and benefits making up just under 80% of our total budget for the coming year. Next year, as I mentioned, we're looking to complete the accreditation of Downey Fire Department through the Center for Public Safety Excellence. This would be a huge milestone for us and help us plan for the future. with the first milestone nearly complete. We're looking to develop a community-wide cardiac arrest plan. Our numbers right now are on par with what's happening in the rest of the state, but I firmly believe that we can do better. If we can take some focused efforts, we can really improve the outcomes of victims of sudden cardiac arrest for our residents and our visitors. looking to change how we do fire prevention uh we want to adopt or we will be adopting a risk-based strategy where we're going to really focus on the highest risk businesses and locations first following that we're going to things based off of the risk stratification what do they do there how do they do it is going to determine how we do our inspections and how we enforce our fire prevention fire prevention codes And lastly, we want to continue increasing our community resilience by hosting an emergency preparedness fair and engaging with our regional partners. Because when emergencies happen, it's not just going to be on the fire department, it's going to be on how well we prepare the community. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Chief. Outstanding, just looking at the numbers, responded to 13,088 emergency incidents, 579 fires and 9,037 medical. That is just outstanding. We've got a mighty, mighty fire response and police response as well. Thank you. These are excellent accomplishments. And from an emergency management standpoint, I'm definitely looking forward to that emergency preparedness community fair. Those are always important in making sure that we educate and provide the hands-on for the community to mitigate any potential disaster. Colleagues, do you have any thoughts, questions?

Yes, Madam Mayor. Every kid should know how to, well, first of all, every home in Downey or apartment should have a fire extinguisher and smoke alarms. Can we use Prop D funds just like we did for the ring cameras? People were able to... I WOULD LIKE TO SEE IF WE COULD OFFER FIRE EXTINGUISHERS AND SMOKE ALERT ALARMS, SOME SORT OF PROGRAM LIKE THAT FOR OUR DOWNY RESIDENTS. teach kids for them to learn to come in and be able to, I'll tell you, I don't know if I know how to use a fire extinguisher. I'd probably have to read the instructions, find my glasses first, right, and then do it, but can we start some sort of programming for kids, maybe in conjunction with DUST, and provide fire extinguishers and smoke alarms?

I'll answer it in two parts. For the first section on using Measure D funds, it's actually we partnered with the Red Cross to not only provide but also install smoke detectors in homes. We have written federal grants to try to expand that program. We're not relying on an outside agency, but we're actually going to be doing it ourselves. And so we're hopeful to hear something about that by about September. Awesome. uh and for the fire extinguisher training that's actually something that we do provide at the um emergency preparedness fair and it's it's a hit you give a kid a fire extinguisher and light a fire everybody loves it but it does it does give them some foundational training uh as far as expanding that um it's something we could look into when is that when when did that occur the community the emergency preparedness fair uh was in december of last year i believe

And it's at the fair that the kids can learn how to do that?

That's correct. Kids, adults, they can make sure that there's more information about the next one. So that's really advertised.

It was well advertised.

Yeah. And maybe we could actually... what is it, September is emergency preparedness month, and maybe we can do, if it's not the end of September, depending how the schedule and the calendar is, either September or October, but also have the information through social media platforms about, you know, PASS, right? The pull, aim, secure, and sweep for the fire extinguisher.

Never heard of that. Can we focus, can you tell the community that, and I did hear about the mergers prepared. I would not have thought, oh, they're going to teach kids how to use the PASS. If we could specifically put that on social media, do a video, come teach your kid how to do this, and you will get a fire extinguisher, please. I would appreciate that.

Maybe at our national night out, when we already have all the kids right here, you're here, there might be a little area that they could do something. Oh, that's great.

But the focus should be every kid in Downey should know how to use a fire extinguisher, and every home should have one. We're happy to provide that information. Thank you. Not a problem. Thank you. That was great.

Thank you, Chief. Just quick questions. How are we doing staffing at all levels within the fire department?

Currently, we have seven vacancies. Later this week, we're actually going to be graduating two from our tower, and we have an ongoing recruitment right now to fill the remaining holes.

What about support personnel?

Support personnel? We are fully staffed in support. And as soon as the budget process is through, we're going to look at rounding out our fire prevention bureau with a new position.

Chief, can you briefly mention the application change that happened recently?

Absolutely. For the first time in over a decade, we've gone from hiring exclusively paramedics to opening up to people who have an EMT certification, which is emergency medical technicians, a little bit Less invasive than a paramedic. What that has done is it took our total recruitment numbers from double digits up to well over 200. So we have a better applicant pool and the intention is to then send those the hirees that we get to the paramedic school to get them trained up as paramedics.

Thank you. May I? Sorry. Look, I'm big on qualifications, but has Downey ever had a woman firefighter? Do women apply?

We have had females in the past. They have left for a variety of reasons. We've had female applicants, and I believe we have several in this most recent round, just a cursory review of the applications.

Do we have one current female active firefighter?

We do not. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Chief. Thank you for the presentation.

Mayor, we'll move on to our quality of life section, if we can. And that will bring up our Parks and Rec recreation director for this presentation.

You'll have to keep us to one minute also, like speakers. Sorry. We'll be here till 9 p.m. I know, it's good.

This is really good. This is an opportunity, but certainly we can definitely ask additional questions offline.

If we have time, I'll make notes and come back.

GO AHEAD, JASON. GOOD AFTERNOON, MAYOR AND THE COUNCIL. TODAY I'LL BE PRESENTING ON THE PARKS AND RECREATION DEPARTMENT. WE WILL BE GOING THROUGH A COUPLE OF OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND THINGS THAT WE GOT DONE AS WELL AS SOME OF OUR GOALS. HERE ARE DIVISIONS YOU HAVE FOR US AS WELL AS OUR ESSENTIAL SERVICES. I HAVE A GREAT TEAM. YOU GUYS KNOW A LOT OF PEOPLE been on our team for over 20 years and served the city. They take our essential services very serious and something that we always talk about is that last sentence, just being committed to providing services that really strengthen our community's image, provide a sense of belonging, increase public engagement and promote health and wellness. Throughout our events and our programming, that's something we try to really focus on and making sure we're adding that and hitting all the different areas. Fire got a new fire truck and we got a new mascot.

I love it, I love it.

From the council's direction, we were able to launch successfully Apollo. Sorry, Ben. It's a great mascot so far that's been kicked off. We did some community events where we did naming surveys for folks, also did some online surveys. We debuted him on social media, not him, sorry, Apollo on social media and has been at some of our events so far. We're trying to really make it a community partner. We do have some street teams that go out to district events, school district events, as well as some of our other partner events that happen in the community. We try to get Apollo out there. Apollo is starting to get requested by some organizations to be out and really be something that people understand being a city mascot. In radio shows, right. There was a said radio show that he was requested for. And so we're very excited about that. Throughout the year, we've hosted over 30 events throughout the year, engaging thousands and trying to do what we can to do exactly what we said, make people feel they belong here. bring community and neighbors together. And for every big event that you guys are aware of, like our Havana Nights or our Bunny Patch or some of those bigger events, some of our smaller events in different neighborhoods are really bring our people together. Even our Veterans Day and our Memorial Day, which staff do a great job on. But even our smaller events over at the Senior Center, like our Senior Monday dinners. So once a month they do a dinner together where they come together we serve dinner we have dancing we have food and music for them so something that they really enjoy to the history and christmas light tours that the council had launched a couple years ago that continue to be a success and getting folks around the community to see different things and then be see the lights and the christmas lights that happen during the year also our our go skate day just another small event that we do but to a population who loves it at the skate park and so very proud of staff for putting those together and coming to us and doing that so we continue to do those those. Installing four new pickleball courts. We all hear it all over the place. Pickleball is a craze. Council member Sosa, we know he's out there all the time. And it's been good. So we tried to have a really good approach to it in that we took stats of how many people were coming and doing that on temporary courts for about a year before we made the change over to taking out one tennis court over at Independence Park and installing four new pickleball courts. That's about the measurement. For every one tennis court, you can fit four pickleball courts. Good and bad of that, the cost is right around $30,000 to do that. It's been a hit though. So we now have four pickleball courts and then we still use our four temporary courts as well for a total of eight. And we are tracking that as well. Just to give you guys an idea, since July of this year when we opened, we've had over 500 reservations. So you can imagine the number of people just showing up without reservations as well. So it's been very popular. We're tracking that as well to see as popular as we get. We might be coming back to the council in the next budget asking for another conversion to be able to do that as we continue to keep up with the pickleball craze that's going on. There was some questions regarding doing some courts over at Furman Park. And just some thought behind that is we lost a court over there during Measure S. One of those courts went to the basketball court. So we now only have three courts left. So we would hate to lose another court over there for the community that enjoys to use it for tennis. And we have eight courts over at Independence. It really is kind of our pickleball and tennis center. And so that's kind of where we want to grow over there. And so if you guys have any of those questions or any of your constituents ask, that's why we made that decision to do that.

You mentioned temporary. Is it possible to make a temporary court on the tennis court at Furman?

We can. Yeah, definitely. We have to look at some of it for staffing because our staff have to put out the tennis nets and then take them back in every night. But it's something we can definitely do, especially on certain occasions.

I've heard that, too, in that area.

Actually, my old neighbor called me. He wanted me to ask, can you add, is there room to add a pickleball court at Furman?

An additional court, not change one of the ones we have. We don't have room on either side. We would either hit the parking lot on one side or we would take away the walking trail on the other side. It's very popular over there. Or the fitness center on the other side. So I think we're kind of built out in that location at Furman Park.

Refer them to Indy.

I promise. It's only a mile and a half away. But yes, we've had some inquiries as well.

What if we did two pickleball courts on top of the parking lot that we're not using? Downtown. Oh. Someday, if we're not going to use the top of the parking lot, I mean, we could possibly use it for something flat, like a pickleball court. Just an idea.

Noted. We will put that down. One of the things we were really excited about is transitioning the Park Ranger program over to the Parks and Recreation Department. It has lived in PD's department for quite a number of years. and then just for different reasons um losing a lot of park rangers end up wanting to come pd or their schedules stuff like that it was getting really hard to recruit so uh the city manager asked us to look at ways to to to transition it and see what we could do to bring back the recruitment so we have four positions that have been filled so we have four current park rangers that went through our training as well as pd has been great in helping us with the transition both in training as well as equipment. We have old PD vehicles. They were getting ready to recycle. They had become park ranger vehicles. We have radios. So right now they are a sight and observe for right now. They have to go through some training. I'm sorry, observe and report. They have to go through some trainings in order to be able to sight in the future. But right now we have them stationed at the parks that we have the most complaints for issues that would fit them. So we have a very big problem. Crime is also down with dogs off the leash. over at Rio San Gabriel. So we get a lot of people who want to go let their dog off the leash and just run around. We have programming there. We have a playground there. We have a lot of things that are going on there. We have one or two residents who are very interested in that and call us every day about dogs off the leash at Rio San Gabriel. So we've made an attempt to have our rangers over there as well as over at Dennis and Menace Park where we buy the freeway. Any issues that we have close to the riverbeds, whether it be Treasure Island, Crawford, and Rio, and Wilderness as well, just to be an added presence there and help us out. If we have any types of parking issues that we've witnessed, they'll be our intermediary to be able to check on it and then get a hold of parking enforcement and able to do that. So we're excited about that moving forward. They're also trained in de-escalation right now. So a lot of the rentals that we get at the park sites, with folks who have a shelter and have a reservation versus some that don't. Sometimes they get a little upset. So instead of having to call PD for some of those, our park rangers are scheduled on Saturday mornings as well to be able to handle some of those issues that go on in the parks. And then if there were any major issues in the city, they would also be used for traffic control or community service, anything else that they need. So I'm very excited for that right now.

Jason, a quick question regarding that. So you said we have four current positions. What is the goal for the park ranger program? Is it to grow it? And are there any plans to add additional park rangers in the next? FISCAL YEAR?

CURRENTLY WE HAVEN'T ADDED ANY TO THE BUDGET. CURRENTLY WE HAVEN'T ADDED ANY TO THE BUDGET. THAT'S SOMETHING WE CAN DEFINITELY THAT'S SOMETHING WE CAN DEFINITELY LOOK AT AS WE RAMP UP THE PROGRAM. LOOK AT AS WE RAMP UP THE PROGRAM. I THINK THE IDEA FOR THE CHANGE I THINK THE IDEA FOR THE CHANGE WAS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE PEOPLE WAS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE PEOPLE THAT ARE DEALING WITH DAILY THAT ARE DEALING WITH DAILY ACTIVITIES AND ISSUES HAVE AN ACTIVITIES AND ISSUES HAVE AN ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM UNDERNEATH THEM ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM UNDERNEATH THEM TO HELP WITH THOSE ISSUES AND TO proposed any expansion yet, but as we continue to build it out and grow it, that's definitely something we'll look at.

And what are the hours that these park rangers are in the, you said, Rio, Dennis the Menace, Wilderness, and Crawford?

Their shifts change and their locations change. So right now, depending on emphasis of what we're getting calls for, the issues, I can tell you for sure on Saturdays and Sundays, they are at Furman Park and Apollo Park and Wilderness, where we have a lot of shelter reservations and we do get some conflict at times. And then during the week, they're usually over at Rio San Gabriel for the dog park issues and at Golden Park where we also get a lot of dogs off the leash. But we try to move them around in different locations of what we get. There was a hotspot over at Treasure Island for a little bit with some folks coming in off the riverbed. So they can make that initial contact and then either contact CityNet or PD depending on what they need.

Okay.

Thank you. How often does a ranger visit the skate park?

We have a dedicated security that's there in the evenings. And then during the day, the attendance is not very high. So I would say not very often, only when they're making a general rounds to every park. They have a checklist that they should hit every park every day to at least stop by and be visible, but not as high necessarily at the skate park because of the dedicated security we have there.

Who cleans our bathrooms at the parks?

Lots of people. So during the day, our parks and recreation staff will clean those. At night, our janitorial staff that we have goes around to the parks and does service there. And then as needed as well, public work staff, if it's a bigger issue or a bigger mess, they have to clean up.

We should have janitorial during the day. Can we expand that contract? Those bathrooms are filthy. I would not want my kid going into those bathrooms. I'm really embarrassed by our park bathrooms. If you all could look into that. If you need more money to expand janitorial services, please let us know. Thank you.

Thank you. We will look at it.

I'll ask you the same thing, Jason. Thank you for that report. How are we doing staffing levels across the board?

In general, we have 11 full-time staff and roughly about 200 part-time staff. We have big swings in our staffing. So during seasonal time, we hire close to 70 or 80 folks thanks to our HR department. And we do a summer hiring event where we're able to hire a lot of our folks at one time. But we have had a good, I'd say we're operating at least 85% right now of being staffed throughout the entire year. Typical college kids leaving, coming, going, career changes, really trying to talk folks into staying in the profession as we get them. But yeah, we're doing good there.

So we're sufficiently staffed?

Yes. Thank you. One of the last ones just here is just park visitors. I think it's important for you guys to know what's happening at the parks and how many people are coming through here. A lot of this data we have thanks to economic development and Placer AI, and we're able to actually see the amount of visits to a pretty good degree. So we've had over 2 million park visitors throughout this last year. Some of our parks, I mean, just to give you guys an idea, in April... Wilderness Park, just in the month, had 50,000 visitors. Furman Park had 50,000 visitors. I mean, we're very popular. The theater, the golf course continues to be very popular, as well as our senior center and also our transit. So just some big numbers that hit a lot of different populations and areas throughout the city. So proud of what the team has continued to accomplish and continues to look forward to as we go. Moving on to the budget, just real quick, and the way we break down, $7 million of our budget is coming from the general fund. And then just a little bit different for us is just over $12 million are coming from other funds, which is the golf course, the theater, and also transit. So just some different sources of our funding there. And then some objectives coming up. Complete park renovations. I know you've heard this before. Rio San Gabriel Park. We are finally excited. This has been a three-year process for us. We hit some major roadblocks with the county. Really like to thank public works staff for helping us get this going. We just started doing some soil testing this week. So it's a huge milestone for us because we can get soil testing back to the county to prove that the levels there are sufficient for us to actually start building. They wouldn't let us start construction on anything that we had to go more than 36 inches into the ground, which is the majority of all of the playground and walking trails and picnic shelters and everything that we're supposed to do there. Part of that, we have two different funding sources. So we've been working with Caltrans. We've reached a point where we were going to lose that money, but we were able to work with them. And thanks to public work staff for helping us do that. So we are getting started on that project, hoping to have some of that stuff done and scheduled out and cleared by the county by the end of the calendar year and the majority of construction happening next summer so we can get that going. But we'll give out notice to the council and to the community once that happens.

So we saved the funding on that because that was critical. We did save the majority of the funding, yes.

We were able to pay for actually the soil testing with some of that money. And they're letting us buy some of the equipment that we have to buy in store ahead of time so we can use that money. But we won't be able to pay for the construction part of it like we were before because it won't start in time. But we're still able to salvage a good, decent amount. The next thing we're excited about is the 10-Year Master Plan. It's been to 2016. It's very similar to what you guys have been going through with Community Development Department's update to their plan. There'll be extensive community engagement, different sectors, seniors and kids in sports and arts all over NC. What do people need? What do they see as our biggest needs? What do they see as our biggest room for improvement? And then this plan will come back to Council to involve Council on multiple levels. staff, different groups in the city as well to really come up with a plan over the next 10 years of where we're going, what needs to be updated, what kind of capital improvement projects need to be included over the next 10 years to really bring our park system where it should be and continue to look forward to 10 years out after that. So we're excited about that.

Jason, question. Regarding the installation of the security cameras at Discovery Sports Complex Indy Park in Rio San Gabriel, when could we anticipate that?

This will begin July 1st and be done by the end of the fiscal year. And one of the things we go by to Councilmember Trujillo's question earlier about Dennis Domenes, we really go down the list of parks. Our goal is throughout the next five years, all of the parks will end up having cameras. We started two years ago. And every year, we've been able to knock out two or three parks, depending on the size. And really, depending on the internet connectivity, kind of what we've been talking about, that there'll be a security master plan that involves that. But we try to go down the list from our most visited or our most programmed parks or areas that we've had the most police incidents. Dennis and Mattis is definitely middle of the road for us when it comes to both population and some of the instances. But it is on the list to get cameras eventually.

And who maintains that footage? Is it PD or your department?

It's a software company in the cloud, basically. And so we work together with PD. Whenever there's an incident, we're able to go back and retrieve that and share footage, which we've been able to do now. Furman Park has cameras. Apollo, BJR, Golden, and Rancho right now all have cameras. So almost half of our parks are there. This will put us over the 75% mark.

It's the same camera system.

Yeah, same camera system.

If I may... When I hear five years out for security cameras, and we're all about public safety, I get concerned. Why should we wait? I mean, in the next five years, crime is going to happen. So I almost feel like we have an obligation to get these cameras up as soon as possible. This is like security, public safety is number one. So, Council, I'd like to see if there's some way that we can get Park and Rec this money NOW.

I WOULD SAY PRIORITY FOR US WOULD BE TO LOOK AT THE LICENSE PLATE READERS OF CAMERAS TO GET THEM OUT FIRST. I THINK THAT'S PROBABLY OUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE. COULD THE COUNCIL WANT TO, IF THE COUNCIL WANTS TO ACCELERATE THE WHOLE PROJECT, THAT'S SOMETHING THAT WE COULD DO. WE HAVE TO LOOK AND SEE THE AVAILABILITY OF FUNDS, BUT IF THERE'S A DESIRE OF THE COUNCIL FOR US TO FLESH THAT OUT AND BRING IT BACK WITH THE FINAL BUDGET PROPOSAL.

THE ESTIMATED COST JUST ON THESE THREE PARTS. YES, THANK YOU. THANK YOU, DEAN. THAT'S A GOOD QUESTION.

JASON, DO YOU HAVE THAT NUMBER WITH YOU, BY CHANCE?

Yes, 125,000 is what we're looking at for these three parks.

Total, per park or the total cost?

For these three altogether. Total, 125,000. Total, 125,000 for three parks.

And then how many parks are missing after this? So you have these three parks, and then after this, how many more parks are missing? If we could spend 200,000.

Wilderness, Dennis, Brookshire, Independence, Crawford, Treasure, Temple, Eight more parks.

Madam Mayor. What is it? At a cost of maybe a quarter of a million?

If you're interested, let us cost it out and bring it back as a proposal. Because the other part for us, too, is to look at whether we have the staff capacity to do that as well, too. But if that's your council's interest, we can put it in as the proposal for the final budget adoption. We can talk about it more in detail.

I think as a council, we are interested. I see everybody's.

I heard that staff capacity is concerned. Are staff installed these?

Well, we'll have to manage the project and get involved. Yes, so there is somebody that's involved doing the work, absolutely.

Currently, it's both public works and IT is a huge driver in this because connectivity has been the biggest issue as well as where they go and making sure we have the infrastructure up for them. So there's definitely staff involvement along with some of my staff. The biggest one is connectivity is the biggest issue that's the most costly right now. But we can work up a number and come back.

But everything that we do has a staff component to it. I mean, we may be a contractor, but we have to manage them. We have to make sure that it's designed properly. I think we need a motion.

No, that's good. I think overall, I think it's something that we're all interested in, like safety and security cameras throughout.

Particularly because looking back at the numbers, Jason, we have some beautiful parks. And just looking at the 2.2 million park visitors a year, that's huge. And we can only see that that's going to continue to increase because... Your team is putting up some really incredible events, and it draws a lot of attention. So I think that it would be good for us to look at it.

Just to piggyback on some of the questions we asked, now that we installed security cameras in some of the parks, I know we have RMI going out throughout our parks. Has the security cameras helped activity of RMI going to those specific parks? Or you feel like they still have to go to those parks for that activity?

The activity might have changed. So I think we did have a lot of transits overnight that were congregating in certain areas that has kind of moved away. Now RMI is able to shift focus on some burglaries that we've had at the golf course and some other issues. But the cameras have definitely been a huge help of seeing what's going on after hours in those locations.

And there's signage so people can see that, right?

Correct. I know, because I know that we are considering about 226 for RMI contract, but just something later on.

But you know what? If it's public safety, it's beneficial. But we'll take a look at it and bring it back to you for a final proposal. Thank you.

Sounds good. Thank you. Thank you, Jason.

Yes. Celebrating the 70th anniversary in the Corporation of Downey, staff has been able to meet with a group of the Historical Society, the Downey Conservancy. We've had three meetings with them now just to discuss what they would like to see, some ideas that they've had. So we put together a list for those. So we will be incorporating it into the I Love Downey Festival. These groups love the event. because it's such a community-driven event. So the event itself will have a 50s theme. The programming on the stage will also be 50s themed with some carpenters and some other Elvis entertainment that they were asking for. There's going to be a big encouragement of class reunion meetups at the events, especially classes from the 50s and 60s for them to be able to do. We will have a... Looking to do some residents sending in family photos to the Patriot throughout the years in the 50s and 60s as well for them to highlight. Various elements of the event will also feature organizations that are coming to the event themselves featuring their organization from the 50s and 60s and how those organizations have grown. The YMCA, the Conservancy Historical Society and throughout the years. There will also be a special segment. CBS KCAL news anchor Suzanne Marquez is a past Downey resident, so she's agreed to do a segment and be on stage and kind of lead some of that that's going to be happening. We'll be doing a birthday cake and there's also a commemorative 70th anniversary pin that we'll be giving out to folks at the event. So that event will really be kind of our home run hitting there for the 70th anniversary. The Conservancy so far is excited, and Historical Society will also be having a big showing there as well. So...

Do we have a date for that event already?

September 19th.

Excellent.

And then lastly, for objectives and goals, explore the construction of a splash pad. We currently have funding for plants, so we will be going out to that at the beginning of the summer so that we can get some plants together and some explore costs of that, of what the splash pad, a possible construction would look like.

I had a brochure, and I put down Vortex at one of our conferences. You know them, right? Yep.

There you go.

That's fantastic. That really makes me happy.

Don't forget to consider the location in front of the Space Museum where we used to have our, like, veteran stuff, and it was always, like, mushy. Yep. If you make it a splash pad, I think we can still use it for ceremonies because we can put chairs and just turn the water off, right? Possibly. So it would still kind of be, like... I think we could still use it for ceremonies or for gatherings, and it could also be a splash pad.

We will investigate.

Thank you. Lights at Furman, when are those scheduled to come in?

I've got to turn over to Matt. Sorry, Matt. Victor Baumgartner.

I don't know what our latest... Yeah, I would say that...

I WOULD SAY THAT WOULD BE SUMMER TO FALL OF NEXT YEAR WHEN THE PROJECT COMPLETES.

I KNOW THE DOG PARK AT GOLDEN PARK DOESN'T SOUND LIKE IT'S GOING TO WORK OUT BUT YOU BLURRED IT OUT.

WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS WITH THE EXPANSION OF THE DAVE GAFFIN DOG PARK BUT THE MENACE IS A PARK OWNED. DID WE FEEL IT WAS TOO SMALL?

That and we close it at certain times. That parking gate gets closed after hours in certain times of the day. But that grass area out there was something that we considered. We also considered expanding the shelter footprint there because it is such a popular park for families who do areas. So I think it was just a mix of what was the best for that usage of the green space that's available.

At some point, I'm going to ask for you to recommend another location for dog park. Preferably somewhere in the south side of the city, but I'm open to locations. So I don't know if you already have a possible location. Have you considered another location or is it too soon?

I think it's too soon right now, but we can look at some options.

We have talked about it in the past. I think we can resurrect that conversation whenever you're ready.

I would like a recommendation for this council to consider about another dog park somewhere in the city, please. Do I need a second?

With the parks master plan, that will include that, right? Exactly. The parks master plan will be our huge driving document.

Why don't we wait for the master plan? When does the master plan come out?

Well, it's going to be next year's activity, so it'll probably take about six to eight months to complete. So, yeah, so probably something in the spring of next year.

Spring of 27.

In the meantime, we can just keep driving and looking.

Thank you, Jason, great job on all the activities y'all do. Thank you.

And only 11 full-time staff, that's amazing. You really, I have to give you a big round of applause. really because the quality of life um in in our city and just seeing everything that parks and rec you guys are awesome um not that pd isn't our father but everything that drives uh our community in terms of engagement and in the quality of life uh it really has that connection to your department, Jason, and you guys do phenomenal. Thank you.

Just to finish, that Dia de los Muertos is your number one big, let's see, involvement and hours put in. What would you say is your number two of all of our events that you put in a lot of time and effort?

Havana. And it's been our biggest riser in attendance over the last two or three years.

I think last year, did we break our new record? I think it was 15,000.

We were over 10 for sure. I don't know if we got to 15, but we're close. We're close.

All right.

How many events do we have throughout the year? Over 30. Over 30 events.

Wow.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

We can continue on, Mayor. We're going to bring up Director Dickow for the Space Center presentation as well as the library.

Council, I know we are all, and I'm the first one to make comments, but we are 30 minutes from our scheduled time slot. We're going to go fast. We're gonna let you move on and keep us on track as well.

I'm a two-for-one, so we can go through this really easy. Cost savings. I will speak about the Columbia Memorial Space Center first. This is what we do. This is who we are. I have four full-time staff for the Space Center, and our mission is to ignite communities of creative and critical thinkers. All right, so we got a new fire truck, got a new mascot. we're going to build a new building. So that's the big accomplishment from 2526. Last week, he awarded a contract for the new Space Center expansion building. We had the groundbreaking ceremony in November where we started doing site prep after that, pre-qualified a bunch of really great construction firms and got us down to that contract. So we're very excited to see the big heavy equipment come in later this month. uh like i said we completed the fire safety uh system for the spatial inspiration which is going to allow us to open that for public use or public visitorship it's almost completed it's got to get signed off and then later this summer we start the public visitation um At the same time, the current Space Center building is not being neglected. We finished our Challenger Learning Center renovation. That was partially funded by a grant through the Challenger Center headquarters in D.C. We have a brand-spanking-new mission control, and they upgraded our spacecraft. We have new missions, and we're rolling out the advertising for that to schools for field trips in the fall. We launched a bunch of new programs this year, including one of them, which is supported by a $150,000 grant, which is called the Lowrider Lab. We're working with the California Lowrider Alliance to have kids come in on Sundays to build custom bikes and remote control cars. And they're doing all the engineering, all the electronics, all the prep, all the machining, all the painting. It's an art and science program, which has been really successful and fun. We launched our BIA virtual tile program to donate funds for the new Space Center projects, and we were the LA hub for the Artemis II missions, which kind of happened by accident, but that only means that we're on everybody's radar screen. Going forward, here's our budget. You saw that before. Goals and objectives for next year. I'm going fast. Obviously, begin construction of the new Inspiration Building. The building itself will take maybe about 18 months, probably a little, maybe a little less. But then we move in the shuttle and we get everybody on board. So we should be opening in a couple of years. Obviously, we're continuing our fundraising campaign. The building itself is funded, but all the stuff that happens, you know, renovation of our current space center, the grounds around it, now we have a campus to take care of. That's over the next few years, and it's all been planned in phases. That's what the board will be working on. Obviously with the new building, it's gonna completely change our operations and how we face the public, so we're gonna start implementing that plan and thinking about the programming and all the stuff that comes along with that. And then one thing that, we're a collecting institution, just like any other museum, and we're a Smithsonian affiliate. So over the years, and as the population of folks who worked on our site starts to age, we're getting more and more really great Stuff a lot of artifacts and papers and things like that from the space program coming into the building So we've been working for the past year with a consultant who's been helping us to modernize our collections development plan Helping the catalog and all that kind of stuff we're gonna continue that next year and make sure that our archive is well preserved because we've become now a learning center for Historians and researchers who are looking into the aerospace history of Southern, California Any questions about Space Center have you considered asking the community if if they know of any artifacts any documents you know that maybe someone in their family left behind it's in a garage and there's a box of stuff like hey we're interested in looking at it for sure and we not only do we do that um do we get the word out about that to community members but most of them just also find us um a couple years ago i say this story all the time we got about 12 boxes of stuff from a local um The local family, the father had passed away. They were cleaning out stuff. That's where we found we have a flag that flew on the moon and a bunch of space food. Those are things that many museums don't have, but it's just in somebody's garage. That happens all the time.

If we could share that on the other social media. Yeah. Because I've never seen that.

Part of the modernization plan is to take photos of all the stuff that we have coming in and start posting that on our website.

I understand we hired a fundraiser. Is the fundraiser working out? Is he or she paying for themselves? Are they broadening any money?

For sure. She's doing great. She's been able to start our CRM, which is the customer relations program, which is to track all the donations we've got in the past. She's identified new donations, and things are moving forward. She came on board in January, so we're still in the, like, let's ramp this up phase.

And we're going for the big Boeings of the world?

Oh, for sure. Okay.

And the last thing is I'm worried about parking. I've said this a couple times. There is a building that is today a unique fitness.

Mm-hmm.

and it borders our property there it used to be a shrimp farm and i think former mayor cartosi may be involved with that property i'd be curious to see how long that lease is just think of the possibility of having parking there for our patrons for the city and maybe acquiring that property i mean we'd probably have to pay market value but if parking becomes an issue i really think that would be a viable option so take a look at it next time it looks all black for sure and And by the way, I'm not saying we should kick out Unique Fitness, please. Just for clarification. Just for clarification. No, no. I understand our Mayor Brottain works out there. But someday, if anybody wants to move, if there's any possibilities of acquiring that property, I think it would behoove the city because of the location right next to the museum. Thank you.

All right. I will say this. I've worked in three major museums and every single one of them that I've been there, we've done a big parking project. So this is probably my turn for this.

At least to the north. I know that's another property owner, but anyway.

I will say that we have met and we were talking about parking at the Space Center after the expansion. We actually met today to talk about it. So we are working on the issue and seeing what we can do.

So we have a little bit of time. Can I move on to the library?

Yes, please.

All right, Downey City Library. This is what we do. We're a library. We have books and stuff. This year we launched our Downey City Library app. So this is for the public. You can do almost your entire library experience on this app. You can check out materials. It's on iPhone right now. We've been having an issue with Google. which everybody's had. But yeah, it's a great tool for our patrons. We've launched a ton of programming at the library. The studio and the workshop continue to be well used. But we've also brought... So this year we hired a full-time assistant to our children's librarian. That was kind of... It was an open position that we filled this year, and she's been doing great. She's launched this Pokemon Club, yoga programs for kids. We are programmed to the hilt at the library right now.

It was a full-time what position?

It's assistant to the children's librarian. Okay. And then along with that, we started growing our partner programs. You know, libraries tend to not reach out and partner with other groups, but we are not like other libraries. So this year we forged a new partnership program with the LA Galaxy. We've been working with some gaming groups to start the SoCal Game Night and a group called Vision to Learn that's been helping with some of our children's programs.

Sorry, I have one question. Do you work hand-in-hand with our youth council to bring in some programs that the youth want?

Whenever they have a suggestion, yes. Absolutely, yeah. And the goals for next year, we're going to start our new strategic plan. We just kind of wrapped up the last three year strategic plan that came out of our renovation of the building. So this year we're going to be looking at new ways to make the library continue to be awesome. Finally, finalize the coffee cart. finish that RFP process and have refreshments outside again. And then we're going to start looking at creating an interactive learning and play area in our children's department. Right now, children's is super well used, and there's a section there with some just store-bought play material. We want to make that into more of a location for young learners. And so we're looking at ways to implement that. We're going to have to hire designers and all that kind of stuff, but it's part of our plan. ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LIBRARY?

YES, REALLY. GO AHEAD. DO WE GAUGE THE APPROXIMATE ATTENDANCE VISITS TO OUR LIBRARY OVER THE LAST YEAR?

WE'RE CLACKING IN AT CLOSE TO 300,000 ATTENDEES.

Thank you. Again, just a quick comment. Thank you for the incredible work you're doing with the Space Center and certainly the library. Council Member Sosa and I had the opportunity BE AT THE CITY OF STEM IN LOS ANGELES AND WOW, WHAT A TREMENDOUS EVENT. THANK YOU. THANK YOU FOR CONTINUING TO CHAMPION STEM AND CHAMPION WHAT IS POSSIBLE THROUGH THE VARIOUS PROGRAMS HERE IN THE CITY OF DOWNING.

I think I've mentioned before, and the answer was it wasn't, we are not open on Sundays because there wasn't enough attendance. But I keep seeing sometimes on social media that on Sundays or in the summer, why aren't we open in the summer on a Sunday? Maybe it's a 12 to 3 or 12 to 4. But maybe it's something we could revisit or take a look at cost-wise. But it makes sense in the summer, at least. Did we do that before?

I actually wanted to ask that question. Yes. We have done an analysis of that, which I shared. If you like it, we can bring it back as part of the final budget presentation.

Could you?

Okay.

I think it's about $20,000 per weekend or something like that.

It's closer to $25,000-ish. Per weekend.

Yeah.

No, to be able to stay open with staffing. Oh, okay. It's just that we really... YOU KNOW, IT'S A BALANCE OF IF YOU, WE DON'T GET A LOT OF ATTENDANCE ON A SUNDAY. OKAY, LET'S BRING THAT BACK. IF YOU CONSTRICT THE HOURS, THEN YOU'RE JUST HAVING PEOPLE.

ABSOLUTELY.

WHEN WE SAY BRING IT BACK, WHEN IS THIS GOING TO HAPPEN? BECAUSE THE SUMMER'S ALREADY HERE.

NO, WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT IS WE'RE BRINGING IT BACK WITH THE FINAL BUDGET PROPOSAL ON JUNE 23rd, BECAUSE THIS IS FUNDING THAT'S BEING ALLOCATED FOR JULY 1 THROUGH NEXT YEAR.

OKAY. CAN WE JUST MAKE A MOTION TODAY? I MEAN, THE KIDS ARE WAITING.

IT'S NOT ON THE AGENDA. IT'S NOT ON THE AGENDA. WE CAN'T DO THAT.

OH.

But we will bring it back as part of the final question.

And I think the council members bring a very good point. The summer can be such a critical time for families, especially those that are here in town.

If you want to do a second, I can bring it back at the next meeting in June. I would like to make a motion.

I'd second that.

But for appropriations of this year, that's possible?

I'd like to authorize the city manager, Ben Dickow, to spend up to $25,000 to immediately start opening the library on Sundays. Well, do I have a second? It's more than a cost issue.

I'd like to see some options. I'd like to see maybe some limited hours on Sundays during the summer.

Absolutely limited. Yes, limited, limited hours.

Let's look at some options. And I think he's going to have to look at his staff to see how quickly he can get them activated too. But I hear you.

We'll bring it up. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Ben.

Also, we're launching the summer reading program today. The what? The summer reading program today. That's our big thing. So that'll keep kids busy over the summer.

Yeah, that's true.

Thank you. That's true.

Thank you. Okay, moving on to...

We'll move on to economic development and bring up Director Ramirez.

Good afternoon. Thank you. I will be brief.

I'll just say I hope to see you in that picture.

Too much fun. I've moved on.

We did see you already. I mean, that's why we say that. That's true.

Got a new photo.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Just a reminder, economic development is not just economic development, it also includes our housing services divisions and our homelessness solutions divisions, which as you've heard from many of our department heads already is very active. And so we work jointly across all those three areas to support our vulnerable populations, our local businesses, but ultimately to try and enhance the quality of life we have in our community. Some accomplishments I just wanna highlight, we completed our economic development action plan and we're in the implementation phase of that. We continue to host free technical assistance workshops for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We just wrapped up our Small Business Month series. This year was incredibly successful. We had more attendees than last year, and we had a lot of folks stick through us throughout all three workshops, and they're asking for more already, which is a really good thing. We also expanded our Small Business Saturday program. If you recall, we highlighted the most visited small business in Downey, which was Tropicana. And then we continue to advance redevelopment of the Back 20 and also the STEP team and the homeless team, they continue to coordinate daily on response to homelessness throughout the community, as well as in our riverbeds and around Union Pacific. Just a quick breakdown of our three full-time positions. We are general fund supported, but we also receive a significant amount of support from local, state, and federal grants, those being HUD, CDBG, and HOME, PLHA through HCD at the state, and then also our Measure A allocation that we've now started receiving for homelessness and housing. And then as we look forward, we're excited about continuing to implement our economic development action plan over the coming year. We're really excited to launch the new Discover Downey at ICSE Western. ICSE Western is the West Coast regional conference of that association. So not the Vegas one, but the one they bounce between Palm Springs and San Diego in the fall. And so we'll be doing a Downey booth there and really hard launching Discover Downey. And then continuing to advance redevelopment of the back 20. And then again, increasing our free technical assistance programming for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The new element of which will be a really intensive eight week sort of boot camp to bring sort of ideas and entrepreneurs all the way from the beginning to hopefully opening their business at the end of that process. I have a question.

When you look at the accomplishments for this year, achieved 25% reduction in the number of people experiencing homelessness as compared to last year. Do we have a specific number?

I know what the exact number is. I can't recall off the top of my head, but I'm happy to provide that for you.

Thank you. Go on.

I think with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Colleagues, questions, comments?

I'm so happy with the prioritization of homeless solutions. They're doing a great job and a great outreach. Yes.

Thank you. Thank you, Austin. I do want to congratulate you on the small business workshops. I had the opportunity to attend two out of the three, and, you know, the room was pretty full. And so that is a testament to our community's desire to know more. and also a testament to the good work of your team, your department, in making sure that we produce this type of programming for small business owners and incoming entrepreneurs.

Thank you. I will say real quick, thank you, Austin. I will say that I know that when businesses come in, it's basically a private transaction between the new business coming in and the landowner, but the city's obviously involved. But I will say that as a longtime Downey resident, the variety of dining options is amazing, and the residents are noticing that. So thank you for your part in that. Thank you.

Appreciate that.

No other comments? We'll turn over to Community Development and Director Wheatron.

See, we're getting better, Mayor, right? We're getting better. Yes.

This is a really great meeting and I really wish more community members were here to listen to all of this because it provides such a great review of the accomplishments and then the goals and objectives. So thank you. Irma.

Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the City Council. The community development is responsible for improving and sustaining the health and quality of life for our Downey neighborhoods, our businesses, and overall our built environment. The department consists of four divisions. Our planning division, which is in charge of planning the future growth and development through the implementation of our general plan and our zoning code. The building and safety division, as you know, reviews plans, issues permits, and conducts inspections to ensure that our buildings and our centers are built according to code. Our code enforcement division works to preserve the neighborhood quality and upkeep our property values through compliance efforts. And our administration division oversees our overall departmental operations, budget management, contract administration, and oversees the modernization initiatives that improve customer service and efficiency within the department and also across other departments, which I'll touch on a little bit later. During the fiscal year, I want to highlight a few accomplishments. Staff made substantial progress in completing the city's comprehensive general plan update, including extensive community engagement, initiation of the environmental impact report that analyzes all components of the general plan, and the actual preparation of the general plan element, which is due to become available for public review in the next few weeks. The department also has continued the implementation of the city's code streamlining and improvement program, expanding administrative review opportunities that you've heard at a recent council meeting, removing outdated code provisions, clarifying outdated sections of our code, and overall updating our code consistent with state laws. Some of those items that we touched on at a recent council meeting is updated state laws related to ADUs, JADUs, density bonus, SB 9 projects and other types of code amendments. Staff has also advanced the modernization efforts by implementing additional online permitting and electronic review enhancements, expanding digital services and improving coordination amongst our partners in the planning divisions which is within our department building and safety but also other departments including fire, police, and public works. The city's land management system has been expanded to include online permitting services for fire, police, and public works as of today, actually. Finally, the department facilitated also the restoration of the Downey's historic McDonald sign and established the city's first historic preservation program through the development of our first historic context statements and architectural style guides, which are due to become part of our general plan release of our general plan later this month. And to highlight, I won't skip over this slide, the 24 full-time positions that makes up the fantastic community development team. Special thanks to our Deputy Director in the Planning Division, Swati Mishram, Co-Inforcement Officer Rudy Monroy, and our building official. and our fantastic management analyst. Together, we're able to put together this budget, but more importantly, the accomplishments and the goals for next year that we'll be able to accomplish as a team. Looking together, the department will continue enhancing our online permitting system. We'll continue to look ways to refine our permit system, not only in our department but across other departments. We have already planned other enhancement, other online permits for not only the community development but also the other departments that I mentioned. So we'll continue to work as a team to implement those streamlining and online permitting systems. We'll also continue to focus on streamlining our municipal code, addressing also a direction that we've received from the City Council, including updating the city's lighting and discount store regulations, revisions needed to comply with new state laws, which is a never-ending task, and also identifying other clarifying code sections that staff identifies that may benefit businesses and the general community. Another priority will be the completion of the city's general plan update, which will, as you know, establish the future vision and growth for Downey for the next 20 years. And finally, the department will continue to focus on our proactive code enforcement efforts focused on property maintenance. continuing to focus on vendor enforcement, encampment response and cleanup efforts with other departments as you've heard today, and also continuing to follow up on our vacant lot ordinance and the property registration program that was put in place recently. We'll continue on these initiatives and continue with our ongoing commitment to deliver efficient services, supporting our economic investment and preserving our community character by implementing your vision. So that concludes my presentation. Thank you.

Thank you, Irma. Again, I want to say thank you for continuing to work hard for our residents. The streamlining and efficiency projects that your department has undertaken are incredibly valuable and much, much needed and well appreciated. you know, well received by our community. I know your department sometimes it's in the crosshairs of a lot of, you know, complaints, not because it's not doing its job. It's because residents, you know, want to see faster, faster, faster. But I do want to highlight that the progress that we have seen is is tangible. And I know that with your 24 full time positions, doing everything that this department is is doing to preserve our neighborhoods and move forward in the planning and building, all of that is not easy. It can be a pretty monumental task, but I do want to emphasize that the improvements and the efficiency is very, very well received. So thank you. Thank you.

Madam Mayor, I think both you and I have brought up, we would like to be named an all-American city in the future. Does that come more into your department, or is that Roger Shaw?

That's out of the city manager's office, and yeah, we've heard that.

Yes. Will you be speaking today? I would like to request that we start now.

I will not be speaking, but we'll talk about that when we get to that.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Trujillo. I think that's been something we've discussed before, and we're working on so many cylinders. It's tough to keep up, I know. Thank you, Irma. Thank you.

I will ask Director Baumgartner.

Yes, Council Member Pemberton has a question.

Just touching on publishing our monthly development updates via email. I enjoy looking at those and what's coming through the city. And you mentioned that it is on our social media website. On our Facebook and Instagram, do we provide a link where the public can see that, show our successes? Is there a link or they have to go to our website to find that?

There is a link, and we'll make sure that the public information coordinator has the updated link. We have kept it on the same webpage, so any QR code or any web link lands on the landing page of all reports. We found that that's the best way to get the message out to the community.

Yeah, I don't think our public sees the website or the emails, but I think it would be best if we kind of highlight via social media and say, this is the monthly so-and-so, and then they can go to it themselves to the webpage. If we just provide the link, let's show them what we are doing and what's coming into town. I know they're looking for something, but we'll just show them what else we're getting into town. Another one, the proactive intervention on property maintenance, and I circled the vacant lot and buildings. I like that we have now a policy in place about vacant houses because I'll bring up, I'm working with SIACA and a number of coyotes that were starting to live at this four year vacant house that nobody knew of, but we're working together on that. But again, it's, it's being that proactive that we see a house that's in disrepair or is a blight to the neighborhood. Oh, that could be. And we start doing some research on it. I know I've reported a few, so I'm glad we have a policy that we can at least adhere to. So thank you.

You're welcome.

all right thank you moving on to uh yes i i want us to uh stay stay on time uh i know we're going to be here a little bit after the the allotted time but this is great information so thank you where's the wedding schedule what time is this right now thank you mayor and council uh with public works department yes here where we have our four divisions uh admin and engineering here at city hall sort of first contact with the public and our maintenance and utilities divisions that handle all of our work in the field Looking at our 2526 accomplishments, we completed 25 CIP projects, including paving a total of 25 miles. We completed the Firestone Lakewood intersection improvements, and today we're starting to install the 16 streetlights on three residential streets, which should wrap up in the next two weeks. We've removed 550,000 square feet of graffiti, and completed the water rate study and the rate increase. Our budget for operations is $10.2 million coming from the general fund. The large number that you see there, the $124 million, a lot of that comes for our CAP project and all the grants and local return money that we manage for those projects. For our 26-27 goals, we plan on beginning construction of the new Space Channel Inspiration Building. We're meeting probably next week to start kicking this off with the contractor and starting to work on the logistics and then beginning work about a month after that. We're going to complete the Bellflower Water Improvements and Pavement Rehabilitation Project. BEGIN IMPERIAL HIGHWAY PAVEMENT REHABILITATION SOMETIME IN THE NEXT PART OF THE YEAR AND COMPLETE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DOWNY AVENUE GATEWAY SIGN PROJECT. WE LOOK TO COMPLETE YEAR ONE OF THE RESIDENTIAL STREET LIGHT CIP PROGRAM WHICH WOULD BE WHAT FOLLOWS WHEN WE COME BACK IN JULY WITH THE STREET LIGHT MASTER PLAN AND COMPLETE THE PFAS TREATMENT SYSTEM DESIGN. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Matt. When are we scheduled to complete construction for the Downey Gateway sign?

That should be in the late fall. I would say probably like November-ish would be the time that we're looking at that.

Perfect. Thank you. I think this, one of the things that I would like to see, I know this, I'm looking at the 25 miles paved, 17 of residential streets and the five miles of the arterial paving. I think it's important for our community to be aware this has been a multi-year project. And if I recall, the council, we, agreed to move forward and fast track the paving. I think this started back in 2021, if I'm not mistaken. So certainly here's 2026, it's been a few years. We wish we would have been able to do everything in two years, but just seeing the advanced and rehabilitation of streets throughout our city is fantastic. What I would like to see is having this information in our social media platforms and really, again, when people think about the multi-year project, this is where we are and how much over the last five years we have been able to do because I think this is phenomenal progress and the $31 million invested have to be highlighted.

THANK YOU, MAJOR.

THANK YOU, MAJOR. SAME QUESTION FOR YOU. SAME QUESTION FOR YOU. HOW ARE STAFFING LEVELS IN HOW ARE STAFFING LEVELS IN PUBLIC WORKS?

PUBLIC WORKS? WE'RE SOLID. WE'RE SOLID. I THINK WE HAVE A FEW VACANCIES I THINK WE HAVE A FEW VACANCIES HERE WITHIN OUR ADMIN AND HERE WITHIN OUR ADMIN AND ENGINEERING DIVISION WHICH WE'LL ENGINEERING DIVISION WHICH WE'LL BE RECRUITING AND FILLING IN THE BE RECRUITING AND FILLING IN THE NEXT COUPLE MONTHS. NEXT COUPLE MONTHS. AND THEN THERE'S A COUPLE OF AND THEN THERE'S A COUPLE OF POSITIONS IN OUR MAINTENANCE POSITIONS IN OUR MAINTEN

38 alley segments, I think we had identified about 125 or plus, but for next year we're only doing, it looks just like 15 alleys.

That's correct.

Is that because of funding?

Yes, we were able to jump on 38 segments this year because we had some large grant funding from Clean California Grants. So that is what enabled us to jump on that. So this year we're spending about, projecting to spend about a million dollars on those 15 segments.

And Imperial is going to be done next. What about Lakewood Boulevard? Is that on the radar?

Yeah, so Imperial and Lakewood are next, I think. And Lakewood. Yeah, I mean, they're the next ones to do after we wrap up Bellflower. So Imperial being the one that we are zeroing in on as the one that we should move forward with.

So we'll be bringing back a conversation to council probably in the fall-ish time frame to talk about the next set of work and priorities of that news.

What do you foresee then, say, two years out? Is there most then all the main arteriores have been covered?

Well, that's what the conversation will be covering. I think we're getting ready to do Bellflower and Imperial. Then after that, we're going to bring back the next set of work and talk about how to prioritize that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I had a question about lighting for existing art in public places like the banana. Would Public Works be able to add lighting? I mean, that was solar lighting. Do you think we can look into that? We'll have to look and see what resources we have for that one. I don't see it lit at night unless I'm missing something.

I'm not sure about that. Let's look into it and we'll get back to you on that.

Yeah, and in the future, Roger, when we do these projects, I imagine that Public Works gets involved in art in public places. We should consider lighting so it's visible at night.

As a base kind of price. Thank you. Appreciate it. Gotcha. Thank you.

Thanks, Matt.

Okay. Next, we'll go to the last few regular departments, general departments. Human resources first. Okay, Director McQueen, thank you.

All right, good afternoon.

Hello, Matt, hello.

James. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today about the Human Resources Department. As you are aware, the Human Resources Department provides a full range of HR services to the city's employee population that consists of approximately 800 both full-time and part-time employees. So first up, we have is one of our new requirements that came into effect in January of 2025. In accordance with AB2561, agencies are now annually required to give a status of their job vacancies. And if the vacancy rate is over 20% per any one particular bargaining unit, the city is required to provide some additional information. So that's the first item that we have up. Along with that, we're required to identify any changes or anything like that that we are doing to address any of those vacancy rates. For the second year in a row, I'm happy to report that we do not have any vacancy rates that are in excess of the 20% threshold required. So we'll get into that a little bit more in the next couple of slides. But along with some of the recent initiatives that we have been working towards is that we did in December of 2024 implement this NeoGrav Attract module as a way to attract passive candidates. And then we're also increased our advertising for different positions. And then we're also increasing the testing and frequency of some of our testing specifically for the police officer position. So on this slide, we have a breakdown of the budgeted positions and the number of vacancies for each one of the different of the city's bargaining units and also our unrepresented positions. One thing that we'll just point out is there's a slight difference just in the timing of some of the other data that was mentioned earlier, just based on the data in which we pulled this information that's represented in the slide here. You will see the different breakdown by each of the different units. And overall, our rate is at 9.89% with 46 vacancies. And we do have a decrease year over year of approximately 2% that this rate did decrease year over year.

James, just a quick question. This is year-end? I'm sorry? These vacancy totals?

They're very recent. Within the last two weeks, I believe, is when we pulled the report, which the data was represented. Thank you. So it was current at that time.

Thank you.

It gets a clear definition of the Downey Public Safety Auxiliary Association versus the police officers. We know the POA and PMA. What is the safety auxiliary system?

So the safety auxiliary is the non-sworn support personnel within our police and fire departments. So that's your dispatch, your records, parking enforcement, community service officers, those positions. Forensics as well are included in those. Whereas the police officers association is the sworn police officers only. So that's the non-management employees, police officers up to the sergeants around the police officers association.

Okay. Thank you.

So then we have an overview of our budget. We are staffed with five full-time positions and two part-time. And then so our accomplishments from this year that we're most excited about is the first is that we're happy to announce that we have multi-year, four-year bargaining agreements with most of the city's associations with six that we achieved this year that are listed on the screen. Most recently, we have the Downey Police Management Association, which also has agreed to an agreement that will be coming before council shortly for approval. Additionally, we implemented a new employee recognition program that was launched this year, in which we recognized seven employees who represent the city values, and it was a peer-nominated program, and so there were seven employees nominated by their peers that received the awards this year. Also this year, we processed a total of a little over 9,000 employment applications, which represents an approximately 46% increase year over year with the total number of applications received. And this resulted in the establishment of 116 eligibility and hiring lists to meet city staffing's needs. This resulted in the hiring of 42 full-time position, which included nine police officers and two firefighters, and also an additional 87 part-time employees. And so our goals for next year is that we do have, along with the, it's been mentioned earlier, the enterprise resource system that's being implemented over this next year. Human resource has a lot of components that are associated with that. So it is a pretty large undertaking for us is that this system will touch many of the different services that we offer. So we'll be spending a lot of time in that. That does include new time and attendance, position control, onboarding, benefits and leave administration, performance review system, an employee self-service portal, and also a separation and off-boarding system that we'll be working on implementing over the next year. So with that, that concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you, James. No questions. Great job.

Thank you. All right, we'll bring up finance now. Thank you.

The finance department primarily manages the city's finances and includes functions such as budgeting, accounting, treasury, payroll, business registration, water billing, customer service, accounts payable and accounts receivable. Our accomplishments over the last year developed a structurally balanced budget for the 14th consecutive year. The city was recognized, actually the city received a GFOA award for the 13th consecutive year for the budget. This is just a testimony to the city's commitment to transparency, accountability, and clear budget communication. Finance also completed the fiscal year 24-25 annual comprehensive financial report, which received an unmodified audit opinion with no material misstatements and earned an award of excellence for the 26th consecutive year. And then lastly, like James touched on, we began implementation of the ERP system. Right now it's focused on finance. So I would say about 25% of our time currently is spent working on the ERP implementation. Next, we'll cover the budget. The finance department has 16 full-time employees, currently no vacancies in the department. The department budget is approximately $4.1 million. In terms of all funds, the 23.1 million is attributed to funds that are outside of the general fund. These include pension obligation funds, debt services, and internal service funds. So these are funds that, they're not operating funds for the department, but funds that the department oversees. Goals and objectives for next fiscal year is to complete the ERP system. This is one of the most important operational improvements for the city, and once this is implemented, the new system will improve accounting, purchasing, payroll, accounts payable, human capital management, reporting, and access to financial information. One of our other goals that we have is the GFOA Triple Crown Award. This would recognize the City for excellence in all three major areas, the budget, the annual financial report, and the popular annual financial report. This report, or the PAFR, is a short, easy-to-read summary of the ACFR and explains what funds come in and how they're spent. And we recently made a post on the City's social media so that the public can have access to it. Receiving this award would be a major achievement for the city and would reflect the city's commitment to, again, transparency, accountability, and high-quality financial reporting. Another goal this year, and in fact, the goal that we have every year is to continue with structurally balanced budgets, just ensuring that revenues reliably support ongoing expenditures. And last but not least, we have an enhanced budget book that will be published starting next year. This budget book will have improved navigation, expanded transparency tools, and a more user-friendly presentation of financial information for the public. The goal is to make the budget easier to understand, easier to navigate, and more accessible for residents, council, and staff. That concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

I don't have any questions. Just thank you, Marlon, for providing such detail. I know in the budget subcommittee sessions that we've had, you've provided a lot of really good information, so I appreciate that. I have two quick questions.

How old is our current WE'RE FOCUSING ON THE ERP SYSTEM, WE'RE FOCUSING ON THE ERP SYSTEM, UPDATING THAT, GETTING IT UPDATING THAT, GETTING IT CURRENT. CURRENT. WHAT ARE WE USING RIGHT NOW? WHAT ARE WE USING RIGHT NOW? LIKE THE SYSTEM DATE IS IN THE LIKE THE SYSTEM DATE IS IN THE 90s, 2000?

90s, 2000? IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME. WHEN I STARTED MY CAREER WE WERE WHEN I STARTED MY CAREER WE WERE USING THAT PROGRAM. USING THAT PROGRAM. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME.

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME.

WINDOWS ONE. WINDOWS ONE. WE USED TO HAVE THIS OLD AS-400, it was like a DOS-based system or something, which is very archaic. And then we jumped into Tyler, which is the current one we use, so it's been like 20 years.

So this will be, the lifespan of this new system could be 10 years, 5 to 10? Well, it's a long time in computer years.

I'm sorry, if I could jump in. So the current system is over 20 years old, and it's run out of Eden, is the name that we are using. It comes to the end of life, this coming up here in 2027, so it won't be operable. So it's why we are now doing the ERP transition. WE'RE MOVING OVER TO TYLER TECHNOLOGIES MUNIS WHICH THEY NOW HAVE CALLED IT ERP FOR SIMPLE SUBJECTIFICATION FOR THEM. MOST CITIES USE THAT. THE IDEA IS THAT IT WILL LAST FOR 20 TO 30 YEARS AFTER THIS IMPLEMENTATION.

DO WE NEED TO UPDATE ANY OF OUR CURRENT COMPUTER SYSTEMS, OPERATING SYSTEMS?

THAT'S PART OF THE IMPLEMENTATION. THERE'S GOING TO BE AN INTEGRATION PROCESS WITH ALL THE OTHER MAJOR SYSTEMS THAT WE'RE USING. SO A GOOD EXAMPLE WOULD BE THE ASELLA PROJECT WOULD BE INTEGRATED INTO THE SYSTEM. Okay, moving on.

All right, we'll move on to the city clerk.

Good afternoon, mayor and council. Thank you for the opportunity to present the city clerk's goals and accomplishments. Some of the responsibilities of the city clerk's office include managing the city's municipal elections, processing public records requests, production and distribution of the city council meeting agendas, managing and coordinating city council meetings, and maintaining the city's municipal code. Some of our accomplishments this year have been completing the full implementation and functionality of an agenda management software, updating the city's records retention schedule. We processed approximately 1,300 public records requests this year and 60 subpoenas for copies of records. We collaborated with the city attorney in the process to address the completion of the city's election systems matter. and we transcribed approximately 50 council meeting minutes. This is our budget highlights. Our small and mighty office is made up of two full-time positions and we are supported by the general fund. And then some of our goals and objectives for next year are successfully managing the November 3rd municipal election for council districts two and four, collaborating with our city attorney on the implementation of SB 707 mandates, and also working with our city attorney to complete the biannual review and update to the city's conflict of interest code. And that is all for us.

If you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Alicia. Just want to reiterate our appreciation for you and your mighty team processing 1,300 PRAs and 60 subpoenas. That is a lot in addition to managing the demands that this position requires you to do. So thank you. Thank you.

Appreciate you. I'd rather you not say that is all, because that is a lot. There's a lot of behind the scenes, especially with running the elections. We've even had a special election. And as I turn the page to see, two full-time positions, two, right? So we really do appreciate you. You do so much behind the scenes, and you're very knowledgeable, both you and Augustine. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your support.

Question. Where are we with the hotel user tax? Have we had discussions of when we plan to put this back on the ballot?

Yeah, we're going to bring that back to you on June 23rd. So that's going to come up.

Perfect. Thank you.

We'll turn it over to the city attorney for the next presentation.

Good evening, or I should say good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Thanks for the opportunity to say a few remarks about my office this afternoon. As you may know, the office is modestly staffed. It consists of myself and my paralegal, Carrie Dynald. I would be remiss if I didn't recognize her contributions publicly. She has really enhanced my office's ability to deliver both timely and sound legal services and advice. So a big thanks to her. For the last fiscal year, here are some of our notable accomplishments. Alicia alluded to this as well, but we concluded our election systems transition process. If you may recall that previously we were a four plus one system, meaning four individual districts in a citywide district, that it was a rather unique system, possibly one of the only type of systems in the state. This Transition process was motivated externally by a threat of litigation, but in the end, the outcome was one that brought us in line with most jurisdictions in the state of California, such that we are now a pure, what I'll call a pure five-district system. This year's elections is the first time in which those new maps will be used in seats, or districts number two and four will be elected in the November election. We did resolve some high profile matters. The details of which I'm not quite at liberty to disclose here, but the council will be familiar with them during our presentations in closed session. They primarily had to deal with the police and land use cases. For the Prop 218 water rate adjustment, this year we availed ourselves of a new legal mechanism that served to minimize challenges to our rate adjustments together with our public works colleagues. We were able to implement that successfully and we in fact had no challenges to the water rate making process. And finally, my office oversaw the charter review and charter amendment initiatives. While those amendments are currently deferred, I did want to say that how important the process was. I'm grateful to the ad hoc committee for all the work it put in. We will have those amendments ready to go if and when the council decides to proceed with them, but they did serve to modernize, they will serve to modernize the charter, and it was an endeavor that had yet to be undertaken, that is the study of the charter from top to bottom. As important as all those are, I would just highlight, too, I think what we do on a day-to-day basis. And together with Cary, my office is able to provide timely and sound legal advice to all our partner agencies here at the City. Whenever their goals have a legal dimension to them, we're able to help them facilitate those goals. And I think that's among the endeavors and objectives I think we take the most pride in, is assisting our colleagues, and certainly the Council as well, with its priorities and objectives. Just a brief snapshot of our budget. We are primarily general fund supported and as modestly as we are staffed, we are also modestly budgeted. For the next fiscal year, some of our primary goals and objectives are to support the general municipal elections. As always, continuing priorities to advance the city goals, councils, and objectives. I'm sorry, city council goals and objectives. To resolve some legacy litigation that was still pending when I came into the office almost three years ago. Implement the New Brown Act requirements under SB 707. The council received a report to that effect just the last meeting, and I'm working with the clerk's office to implement those changes, many of which take effect on July 1 of this year. And finally, a continuing exercise of ours is to deepen our in-house expertise through continuing legal education so that we can provide even more services in-house. And that's all. If I have any questions, I'll be happy to address them.

Thank you, City Attorney. I just want to highlight what a great professional individual you are. Your expertise and your thorough knowledge. Anytime we have questions about any legal advice we need, you are there and you are responsive and you are thorough. So I just want to say how much I appreciate you and the expertise you bring to this team.

Well, thank you very much, and allow me to express my appreciation for the Council for all its support in everything we do.

John, I did have a question, Madam Mayor. Have we ever looked or considered identifying a body of cases, common type of cases that the city will confront to possibly hire another in-house attorney? I mean, is there a way of doing the math to see if we didn't farm out these cases to firms and maybe we're getting to litigation and you might say, Council Member Trujillo, it's just a bad idea. But have any other cities ever done that, looked at it? a type of law that we could bring in an in-house attorney to support you, not just with those cases, but in other areas as well?

Yes, that is something that I have given some thought to, Council Member Trujillo, and thanks for the question. I will say just initially, cities of our size typically have one or two in-house attorneys. I think Downey's especially fortunate to have an in-house model. It's a model I strongly believe in. I think it enables the attorney to really give bespoke, tailored, and custom-advised to the jurisdiction that he or she serves. But to get to your question a little more concretely, I do think that is an option that I would like to look into for the future. It would mean that we could even handle more matters in-house particularly litigation. It's something that I've started to pencil out. It's in its very nascent stages, and it's something I would appreciate the council's consideration for in the future, whether it be the next fiscal year or even the next one. But I think that it would be very advantageous for us to have another attorney in-house that would be able to handle that together with myself and my paralegal, and to provide even more of a diversity of legal services to the city.

If I can, I'd say, well, John and I have talked about this on a few occasions, so it's something that I think we'll probably bring forward when we're about ready to do so. But it's something that we are looking at.

Operative words being cost savings. Thank you, John.

And I do think that the in-house nature of the... It's certainly not to say that an attorney who doesn't work for the city can't provide sound, high-quality legal services, but it's just my own personal belief that someone in-house just has a special... duty, if you will, to the client that he or she serves. And I just will say in closing that one of the highest duties that an attorney owes to his or her client is a duty of loyalty. And I just, I would like to say that my office takes that very seriously, that duty.

Thank you.

Thank you. I just want to thank you for your, you exude professionalism, but you're also very open and receptive and we can all come to you with any kind of question and you're giving us your expertise, advice. And for my colleague here, Councilman Sosa, go Vikings.

I think we have just one more department. Thank you very much. Final presentation on the strategic plan. So I'll turn it over to the assistant city manager for the final department presentation, city manager's office.

Thank you. Thank you, city manager Bradley. Hello, assistant city manager Rojas.

Good afternoon, Mayor Fermenta and members of the City Council. Thank you for the opportunity for the City Manager's Office to share the accomplishments of our team. Regarding the office, as you're aware, the City Manager is responsible for the implementation of policy decisions established by the City Council, and the City Manager provides administrative direction and is responsible for managing the day-to-day activities of the City. Our office also has multiple divisions. You're going to see public information, legislative affairs, special projects, ADA language access, and information technology. And before I continue, I do just want to highlight some key team members. We are also a small but mighty team. So Judy Montenegro, our assistant to the city manager, and also Alex Perez, who is our public information specialist. To highlight some of our accomplishments for the year, so one of the biggest one for us being selected is one of the official 2026 FIFA World Cup Fan Zones. We're working closely with the Parks and Recreation Department in leading that event for the June 20th that is coming up in a few weeks. We've also received authorization from LA County Board of Supervisors to negotiate for potential redevelopment of the Rancho Los Domingos South Campus. The exclusive negotiating agreement with the county is expected to come to the council within the next two months. And the Public Information Office, we have reached 300,000 social media followers, which is actually one of the highest in the region for any city agency, so something that we're really proud of.

Go Axel.

We have also launched a new city app, Downy Connect. It's enhancing resident engagement and service accessibility. We have approximately 5,000 residents currently registered, and we continue to promote that. We also completed the Welcome to Downey mural on the city's parking structure. We also held the groundbreaking for the Gateway sign to downtown Downey, established an AI policy. This is also something that I know it's more of an administrative process, but something we're proud of ahead of many agencies is having an AI policy and tools in place to assist city staff with their day-to-day operations. We also on the IT side completed phase two of the workstation replacements and migrated the organization from Microsoft Office 2019 to Microsoft Office 365. I know this may sound very small, not a big deal, but it's actually a big deal for our staff. They can do many things now on their day-to-day activities, so we're happy to bring that forward. And also on cybersecurity, we've expanded our security operations center and capabilities and held a cybersecurity tabletop training for all city staff. Here is a snapshot of our budget. We are primarily funded by the general fund. We also have some funds out of Measure D and Measure S, primarily for IT, that is supporting IT and public safety and their operations. That's where you'll see the $930,000 there. And our budget of nine full-time positions that's out of that budget. And then to wrap up for our department, we begin the implementation of the Arts Master Plan. We're going to explore the digital billboard near freeways, implement phase three of the city's strategic plan. We're also gonna continue exploring opportunities for the 2028 LA Olympics and also looking at hosting a few countries. Hopefully we'll be announcing that in the next couple months. We're gonna continue progress in the development of the Rancho Los Amigos South Campus. and continue working with Metro on the development of the Southeast Gateway Line. We're also going to update the city website and other resources to be compliant with new ADA laws. Just for some context, the DOJ did implement new accessibility requirements for websites for government agencies, and so we need to be in compliance by that for April 2027. WE'RE ALSO GOING TO BEGIN PHASE ONE OF THE SECURITY MASTER PLAN UNDER I.T. JUST TO ALSO GIVE SOME BACKGROUND, THIS TIES IN VERY CLOSELY TO PARKS AND RECREATION AND THEIR CAMERA SECURITY PROGRAM. WE'RE GOING TO BE LOOKING AT A MASTER PLAN TO BE HIGHLIGHTING ALL AREAS IN THE CITY THAT DO NEED SECURITY, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, WHETHER IT'S CAMERAS, WHETHER IT'S KEYS, TO MAKE SURE IT'S A VERY HOLISTIC APPROACH REGARDING SECURITY THAT ALSO IS GOING TO LOOK AT MAKING SURE WE ARE USING ONE SYSTEM THAT'S COMMUNICATING THROUGH ALL SO WE CAN EASILY GET IN and also ensure that everything is on the cloud so it's easy for our IT team to retain information and also share it with our police department. And then one of the last major goals for us is we're going to .gov website transition. So we also need to transition to .gov by 2029. So we're going to be implementing that this upcoming year. I do want to note it's not on listed on the slide here, but we are going to explore the All-American City application. I'll just note that it's an extensive process to go through that. Usually it takes about two years to go into that process and takes extensive staff timing. So we're going to be exploring that and we'll share that information with our city manager, Roger Bradley. And this concludes staff's presentation. Staff is available to take any questions and we just want to thank the City Council for the support of city staff as we go through these goals and accomplishments.

Thank you. Thank you, Vanya. Again, great presentation, and thank you for all of the tremendous work that this office is involved in. We appreciate you. Now, let me ask you, the .gov website transition, you said that is supposed to be done by 2029, but we will be starting at...

Yes. So we actually have already obtained all the domains. And so it's just a matter of moving, directing our web page and the email addresses. So we thought we would start that a little bit earlier to help get the notification out to our public and make sure they are aware of it as early as possible.

And we are wanting to complete this by? By the end of next year. By the end of next year. OK. Questions, comments?

Yes, thank you. Two requests for the app. I was wondering if we could include, when you hit start request, if I do library card, If parents are, for some reason, I feel like the community is moving away from websites to apps. So if all they have is any app, if they try to get a library card for a kid, it doesn't come up. So if we can direct them, if they start requests, get a library card, it'll link them to where to get a library card and reserve a shelter. if somebody thinks this is the downy app and maybe this is how do you reserve a shelter at a park nothing comes up so there's a way if somebody inputs reserve or shelter or a park something that reservation it'll link them to how to do that you got it um thank you

Thank you so much. I wanted to touch on digital billboards, and it says near Free Voice. Have we explored digital billboards in the city? Because the marquee that used to be at Stonewood would always announce events. I'm trying to find other ways to get the news out to the residents of what we're having, where we're having it, when we're having it, like the special needs awareness that wasn't, many people didn't know about it. Is it maybe because we don't have it as an allowable digital billboard on our code, or is it?

So that could definitely be one side that we look at since Firestone is a major arterial for us. Typically, billboards are a long phrase just because they're viewed sometimes as light pollution and blight. So we're trying to balance that. But we'll definitely work closely with our city department on the best places and provide them as options to the city council.

There's a little bit of maybe a difference between like a marquee kind of a thing that maybe you might be thinking of.

No, I think I should focus with the digital billboard. We go to conferences and they talk about having digital billboards. You know, say like one of the corners where there's a static billboard now, which is the paper. I think it might be advantageous for us to have a digital billboard or two that we can actually use to advertise our items as well as whatever the product might be advertising.

Yeah, and usually they go along the freeways, but we'll have a conversation.

More within the city, though, but not on the freeway.

I've raised this previously. I call it an LED sign billboard, and I wanted to propose that we do it in front of the oldest McDonald's, the oldest operating in the country, because we already have four billboards in those corners. And I would like it if we can replace those four with one centralized in the middle, but I don't know if that's possible. But I thought that that intersection, Councilwoman, would be a great intersection. It's non-residential, so we don't have to worry about the light pollution. It's very well trafficked. So many people come from all kinds of places there really to see our announcements. about our city events. I thought that would be a great location.

So definitely when we bring back the report, we can show different options and the reasoning for staff's recommendation in the different areas.

So it is in the queue to discuss this? Absolutely, yes. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, Vanya. City Manager, oh yes, MPT.

I do have one question. You said there's only 5,000 people that are subscribed to our Downey...

Yes, to our Downey Connect right now, we have approximately 5,000. We're going to need to promote that and increase it. Okay.

I know we are short on time. We have one last presentation. It will be an overview of our strategic plan from Judy Montenegro.

Good afternoon, Mayor, from members of the City Council. So I'm going to be providing a brief update on the third quarter progress for fiscal year 25-26 for the Downey Forward 2030 strategic plan. This progress report highlights the progress on the strategic actions identified in the plan. So as you know, the strategic plan is intended to provide a roadmap that reflects the community's vision and values, sets actionable priorities for the council, Downey's future, and guides budget allocations for specific actions and projects. So the strategic plan outlines five council priorities, 16 strategic priorities, and 101 strategic actions. These actions are categorized by timeline with 44 short-term, 48 medium-term, and nine long-term. So the following metrics are provided for tracking and presenting this quarterly update for the period of January 1st through March 31st of this year. The strategic plan's implementation continues to advance steadily with 44 actions actively underway and 40 completed at the end of this third quarter of the current fiscal year. So progress has been made across all priority areas, particularly in efficiency and adaptability, which has advanced to 70% completion, up from 63% in the previous quarter. Additionally, economic vibrancy has advanced to almost 75% completion, up from 70% as previously reported. So progress continues to be made across the short-term, medium-term, and long-term actions. As you can see in this summary dashboard overall, the total completion of the strategic plan stands at 67.9%. This percentage represents a cumulative progress across all five city council priority areas, which will continue to increase as actions advance, ultimately reaching 100% when each action item and priority area is fully completed. This concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Judy, thank you, thank you. I do have some remarks regarding the strategic plan updates and what we have, the presentations that we have gone through this afternoon. And as we review Downey's proposed 15th consecutive balance budget, we're doing more than approving revenues and expenditures for the coming year. We are reaffirming our commitment to responsible governance and long-term planning. A balanced budget is an important accomplishment, but balancing a budget alone is not enough. True success comes when a community pairs fiscal discipline with a clear vision for the future. That's why strategic planning is so critical. Strategic plans provide the roadmap that guides our decisions. They help us ensure that we're not just simply reacting to challenges as they arise, but proactively preparing for the future. I think this council has been intentional over the last few years in working on that strategic plan. And again, this strategic plan allows us to align our financial resources with our community's priorities to establish these measurable goals and make investments that will benefit residents not only today but for years to come. I'm a big believer, we are big believers in strategic plans. As we looked and reviewed every presentation, every one of you touched on strategic plans, right? And so, because without strategic plans, a budget just becomes a one-year spending plan, right? A one-year spending document. A budget, you know, with a strategic plan, a budget becomes a tool for achieving the broader vision, and you just showed us that, Judy. It's important to note that as cities, face increasing pressures from rising cost, aging infrastructure to economic uncertainty, and changing the community's needs. I think it's really important, more important than ever, to think beyond the next fiscal year. The strategic planning helps us identify emerging challenges, seize the opportunities, and ensure that every dollar we are spending supports the long-term objectives of this council. I want to emphasize that the reason Downey has remained financially strong is not simply because we have balanced budgets. It's because we have worked to make thoughtful decisions that consider today's needs and tomorrow's realities. And I want to say that our continued success is going to depend on maintaining that mindset. The most successful organizations, businesses, and governments understand that sustainable progress requires both financial stewardship and strategic foresight. So many times as Council, we are hit with so many asks from the community, and we are in this position because we want to do better and we want to serve our communities. But I think one of the things that we need to continue to keep in mind, particularly as we are in an election year, is that we must continue to invest in infrastructure, in public safety, in our economic development, in technology, in community services, in organizational excellence, in ways that support the shared vision for Downey's future. Again, 15 years, 15 consecutive balanced budgets. We should also recognize that our responsibility extends beyond balancing the books. Our responsibility is to position Downey for continued success over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. A strong budget keeps the city operating, absolutely. But also a strong strategic plan ensures that our city thrives. Together, this is what creates the foundation for a resilient, more prosperous, forward-looking Downey that future generations can be proud of. So in closing, I want to say that 15 consecutive balanced budgets represent 15 years of keeping our promises to the people of Downey. right, protecting essential services, safeguarding taxpayer dollars and building a stronger future for our community and really being transparent and I want to say in reviewing this, the budget subcommittee met last week and we met some months before and looking at where we are and reviewing, we've had to make tough decisions and But it is our commitment as a council and certainly City Manager Bradley, your leadership and everybody working together that brings us to this point. And so I want to say thank you to all of the directors that presented today, I want to say thank you to the city manager, you mentioned at the beginning of your of our meeting, that this had been one of the smoothest process, you know, you've you've had, and again, is a testament to the the work our priorities making sure that we are aligned we want to make sure we we do so much and we help the community and whether it's lights or paved alleys and roadways and also additional public safety and we can't do everything but a 20 downy forward 2030 strategic plan will get us there and continue to be fiscally responsible. So thank you. I know I've spoken for more than five minutes now, but I did want to highlight and mention to our community residents that may be watching us on YouTube, or simply for the record, how critical this point is. The strategic plan with a balanced budget, you know, go hand in hand. So thank you.

Thank you. I think that's all from staff, Mayor. If I can, I'd just say great words. I appreciate the comments. I do also want to thank staff again for the hard work, presentations today. Thank you, Council, for the comments. We have a number of follow-up items that we'll bring back to you. But hopefully, again, it looks like there's another comment, but I just want to say thanks for all the hard work, and thank you, Council, for your hard work on this, too.

Thank you. MPT Ortiz.

Thank you. I just do want to say thank you to the staff and the team to really make this possible. I know you put a lot of work into it, and I really appreciate it. I do want to say that... As much as I really appreciate everything, my only concern, and hopefully next year we can discuss this, if we can split this into maybe possibly two meetings. I think we have a lot of questions, and this is a very important document. And at some point, you know, I was just sitting down like, oh, well, do I ask question or do I do I wait or speak behind the scenes? I really, really appreciate all the work that each of the department heads really took the time to really do this. And I do have some questions and I do want to really focus on on the hard work that you all have done. and I know we were rushing it in two hours, and maybe next year we can possibly split this in maybe two meetings so we can handle that, because I'm sure we all had questions, and I don't want to be rushing out in two hours. This is an important document.

Or allocate three hours.

Or allocate three hours. I think that's a positive.

Yeah, there you go, three hours. We did, and we're still ahead of schedule, so we can keep talking.

But I do want to just end by saying thank you to everybody here for really working hard and presenting this presentation, so thank you.

Well, I will say, too, if I can, this is not the final budget. The final budget has come back on June 23rd. So between now and then, I'm happy to talk to you or anybody on the council that has any further questions or clarifications that you need. So I'm happy to do that.

I wanted to mention, I guess, this is the, I didn't know which department to mention to, but maybe we can take a look at our city holiday decorations. I know we have our beautiful tree that we did years ago, but in seeing social media posts prior year, that we might not have enough on Firestone, or we might not have enough compared to some other cities, and I want us to be the shining stars. So I want to maybe allocate, we can look to see what we have, what we might do better in getting some holiday decorations on some of our main streets. and allocate that in the budget. And then...

I second that, by the way.

And I think I might have mentioned before, we can discuss later, but just to throw it out, Wi-Fi in downtown Downey. Many times when we have events and there's a point of sale, our point of sale doesn't work for certain service groups because there's no Wi-Fi and we can't connect to the bank across the street or the building that's made out of concrete. So there's no Wi-Fi whatsoever. I don't know the cost involved or how we might go about doing that, but just around that area. And third, I'd like to continue. We had a little bit of a pilot program we started this year, continue funding for the spaying and neutering of cats for just Downey residents. I know we've had a good turnout for that. Maybe look into it and discuss that later because right now SIACA is in a transition with management. They're not at a point to start a new program. We want to get going with what SIACA needs to do just in the management sense. So maybe have another line item to continue where we are now, but we can discuss that in the amount.

If there's seconds on those, I will say that and point out that we only had a surplus of about $73,000. So there isn't a lot of room to add a lot of things to the budget.

Five or 10 or something like that.

But we can bring back those conversations. And if there are areas that you'd like to reprioritize, we can talk about that too. But happy to evaluate those.

Yeah, the string lights need to second.

So I think I had three.

I'm envisioning string lights for.

Decorations on Firestone is what I heard. So is that a second on that one? Okay, thank you. And then the other one was Wi-Fi in the downtown? Second. And then last one was the spay and neuter program for year two.

Second.

Okay, thank you. We'll bring back those proposals as part of the final budget adoption on June 23rd. And then we can talk about where those sizes might fit and all the other ones that were proposed too. So thank you.

Excellent, excellent. There's no other comments. I will adjourn the meeting at 541. Thank you, everybody.