City Council - workshop

All right. Thank you, everybody. We're going to call this meeting to order. City Council Special Meeting Agenda, Wednesday, September 16th, 9 a.m. Roll call, please.

Council Member Bocco. Here. Council Member Klein. Here. Council Member Fugazi. Here. Council Member Hilton. Here. Council Member Marks. Here. Council Member Ramirez. Here. Mayor Bozzo.

Here. Item 1.3, City Clerk's Report on Posting of the Agenda, please.

Thank you, Mayor. This agenda was posted on Thursday, September 10th at 8.15 a.m.

Okay, we're going to go immediately to public comment. Do we have any public comment this morning?

I have no speakers.

All right, then we're going to go right to it. Item 3.1, Fire Service Evaluation Study Session, Current State of the Gary Fire Department and Future Service Delivery Options. Staff report, please.

Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Favorite city council. Before I get started, I wanted to take a minute and give recognition and without embarrassing two people that basically asked them to be here today. So I'm going to recognize Jennifer Fortino and Kelly Burke. They are basically the engine that make us work in admin. So without them, this presentation couldn't happen. I couldn't be here. And basically all the administrative support that keeps us running every day doesn't happen. So they're back there. Not to embarrass them, but thank you very much. So today you're just going to hear a lot about the firefighters, the fire stations, emergency response. I'm just going to take the assignment that I got in a work plan in 2025. I heard what you said in March. of 2026, and I took it to heart. We spent the last five to six months compiling as much data as that we could. We could pull it from the last 26 years' worth of reports and studies and information that's been compiled. So I'm really not here to tell you that we need more people or more stations or more money. If I really started there, we just kind of skipped the most important part of why I'm here, and that is a policy question and some direction from counsel. And what I'm going to ask you today is two pieces. What fire service capability do you and the community expect from us? I'm going to go through the presentation, but as the lens that we look through is what does the community expect? What do they want from us? And I know we're a fire department. I started my career in the 80s, and we were a fire department. Today we're a safety net. We respond to emergency medical incidents, whereas we know the paramedics that respond to those individuals, that is their first portal into health care nowadays. So what we're asking you to take a look at is what does the community want from us? This evaluation is just a continuation of the last 25 years. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the fire department is failing or we're below standards, and in fact, it's the opposite. As you can tell by the firefighters sitting behind me, they do an absolute incredible job with what we give them every single day. Every single day, there is no less than nine firefighters and paramedics at all three of your permanent Gilroy fire stations. We do the best we can and what I ask them to do is staff the interim fire station so at best we can get between 11 and 12 firefighters on a really good day that increases our capability and capacity to handle the increasing emergency responses within the community. The question is now whether the system around us as the department has enough capacity for what the community has turned into. It has grown around us. The demand has increased. And what I'm asking you now is, is the four stations that we've committed enough for the city to move forward over the next 10, 15, and 20 years? What I'm not asking you this morning to do is choose between a city fire department, a county fire department, Califier schedule a contract that's not what we're doing today. I'm asking you to just take a look what service you want What the community wants and then how best we provide that There are three things that we're going to walk through with a study session first I'm going to go through where we currently are and where the department is today, and we'll touch on the service environment. We understand population has grown. The fire and EMS delivery around the city has changed. Second, we're going to establish that four continuously staffed three person, three firefighter engine companies is the right level of service for Dilroy. Then third, policy direction. Tell us which alternatives, if any, are worth taking into a deeper study. What I'm not asking is to change anything. There's no service delivery, no provider change. We just need policy direction about the outcome of our service and what deserves a deeper, in-depth study. But before we get into some numbers and the histories, I'm just going to actually kind of walk through what we're evaluating. What is the fire department? Well, I've heard this for many years. The fire departments are compared to an insurance policy. And I'm going to disagree. We are not an insurance policy. You'll see all the time. An insurance policy kicks in after something bad has happened. What you're asking us to do is we are an intervention system. When somebody calls 911, it's because it's at the beginning of something bad happening, and they expect us to intervene and mitigate whatever that is. As the fire grows, as the patient's condition worsens, we've seen it in the WUI, we see vegetation fires, we have to get there. And it is a cliche, but time truly matters. You've heard this time and time again. A fire in a house, a fire in a room, or a vegetation fire, 16% gets bigger and bigger every minute that we're not there. And eventually it gets to the point where it might outpace what we can do with the nine firefighters from three fire stations every single day. My job is to have the trained people, the apparatus, provide them the right information, have enough command capacity, and that includes the battalion chief or operations chiefs to be in charge, freeing up captains and the engine companies to do what they're supposed to be doing. The one way to understand the scale of this responsibility is I'm just going to point out some of the obvious facts. Property value of the entire city of Gilroy is $12.4 billion. And that's just The scale I'm going to kind of throw out there, but I'm being really careful with that number because what I'm not saying is that the fire department is actually saving $12.4 billion, but that is our investment. We are not the insurance policy. That is the investment we promised back to the community. There is the economic impact of anything that happens to that $12.4 billion that 0.1% of the investment within the fire department That is our safety net that we promised the community. It is not just the buildings. These are people's homes. These are the people. You ask the firefighters what my mantra is, we are here to take care of people. We take care of the people in the community, the people that work for us, including all of us. We're all included in that people. In 2026, our firefighters and paramedics have responded to and achieved what I'm going to call ROSC, return of spontaneous circulation. That means 11 citizens of Gilroy had their hearts restarted by the firefighter and paramedics of your fire department. All four stations, including the interim Santa Teresa station, have been involved in that. So it's not isolated to a Chestnut or Los Animas. All four are impacted in that. So when I talk about a four-station baseline, that's what that is. That's 11 lives. What I'm also not saying is I can't tell you did they all leave the hospital. I don't know. But the paramedics got their hearts restarted, got them to the hospital, and gave them the best chance they can have to survive. I'm going to put some numbers on lives. But what I'm saying, it is not what their life is worth. This is just based on federal economic numbers. The feds look at $14.2 million per life saved if we can intervene on mortality. Again, it's not what their actual life is worth. It's just an economic number the feds put on that. And what I'm not saying is 11 times 14 million. That is, 14 million is the price we as a community put on lives. So when I say 11 lives were saved, I want to impress upon all of us that that is the importance. So a cardiac arrest, a patient saved, a child pulled from a pool, any one of those things, that is the impact to each family and each person. What is risk? I'm not going to give you any kind of complicated formula. There are a lot. Community risk reduction is a big part of my job. Three simple things that risk is. What can happen in the community? How serious can it become? And what kind of capability do we have to intervene? So I have that up there. It's really good stuff. What can happen? Fires, cardiac arrests, car accidents, hazmat vegetation fires. I can go on and on. What can we do? How serious does it get? If we had a house fire in the Glen Loma community and it was unchecked, that fire will go from the room to the floor to the house to the neighbor's house. It will go unchecked. We will intervene. And our plan and what we train on is to intervene early enough to make sure everyone's out of the house life and then preserve that property. And given four stations, three person on each engine that goes to that, that gives us our best chance right now to keep the fire small and make sure if there's a savable life, we will save it. What matters to our response system is where the call occurs, what it requires. Not everything requires two engines, three engines, all the stations. It could be a non-emergent single engine from one station to go help that person. Some of our incidents can escalate extremely quick. What impacts Gilroy, and I'll give you some numbers, is not just the one. Significantly, it's the second simultaneous. Monday we had three simultaneous. It was the fourth simultaneous emergency within the city that stresses us. And it's not physical stress on us, it stresses the system. I'm going to walk you through some of the language that I'll use. And you're going to hear me talk about capability and capacity. So capability is very simple. This is what we can do. So when I talk about training and the commitment, if they train three hours a day, whether it's probationary training, engineer training, captain training, command level training, EMS training, hazmat training, rescue training, there's all the stuff that they need to have to maintain their proficiency. This is their capability. Capacity is what of the resources you have available. The readiness is you have the capable people on an engine that creates the capacity, and are they ready and available at that time? When you drive by the Chestnut Station and they're gone, the first thought that we should think about is, There's no one there. What happens if there's a call in the Chestnut area? What happens when you drive by the Los Animas station and there isn't a fire truck in there? What happens? So these are these things when we say you want the firefighters in the station decompressing, taking care of themselves, making sure they're fueling themselves, getting their equipment ready so they are ready for the next 911 call. That is the one thing we do not control. We do not get to say when the next call comes in. That is not part of what we get to do. The resilience, Monday we had two units committed to a call. The resilience left me with two more. Third call came in, we start wondering, is this it? Are we going to stop at three because I only have one? unit left. That's our resilience. When we lost that, we lost our resilience. Now what we do is we actually have to lean on regional partners. So county fire now fills that resilience for us. Mutual aid fills that resilience for us. And that's how we function. So capability, capacity, readiness, and resilience. You're going to hear me kind of talk about those. Capability is what we can do. What happens when our capability and our capacity draws down? This is our best thing. Four stations, four available companies. Three firefighters on each one of those. This represents 12 firefighters on duty. This is Gilroy. Those are our four stations. You can see the Tree Haven, Mastin, this is a bigger picture. The little dots that we see are real-time incidents that have happened within the city of Gilroy. This is our public-facing information. That's what you actually see. So when you take a look, that is incidents that we've responded to. 47th, incredibly busy station. They're committed to a lot. Not just incidents, but the training itself. The highway, Pacheco Pass, they have a lot of stuff that they cover. First call comes in, you lose that big chunk. With four stations, we have a resilience factor of three left. We can see how much we can still cover. This is only providing this was a single resource response. We get a cardiac arrest, we need two. Obviously we get a house fire vegetation fire. We dumped the city. This is a single Company response. We just left a significant gap Between between chestnut and engine 48 at Los Animas Arguably Los Animas is busier in chestnut, which is incredibly busy. We just lost 50% of our capacity to handle calls and So those firefighters in that station, when you drive by, the chances are they're already committed to something. And this is what it looks like for our community. Drawdown now, we've lost 75%. This is what we see. And let me take you back to this one. This has happened 770 times this year. We call this simultaneous or overlapping calls. This is what this looks like 135 times every single month we dump this. We lose 75% of our capacity over 130 times this year. That leaves mutual aid, auto aid, or one company available. So currently in this configuration, we have the interim station 50. We're already moving on to the new permanent station. We're going to staff it with an engine. three firefighters on there. When I go back to the capability of what we staff currently based on staffing and overtime availability, there is a rescue medic at that interim station. The rescue medic is staffed with two. They don't have the same capability that a Type 1 all-hazards engine has. So when you see a fire engine or the aerial with the big ladder on it, That can handle anything. That is the best thing we can put on the road today. It's staffed the best we can do it, and it's equipped the best way with the best equipment we have. The rescue medic only has the two firefighters, no hose, no water. It can stop the clock on cardiac arrest. It can really help, but it is not the same capability as having the three other engines. So right here, currently, In our current model, we have tapped out Gilroy's capacity of handling an all-hazards incident. But what we still have available is the rescue medic with two and auto aid or mutual aid. This has happened 32 times so far this year when we have just totally lost all our capacity. It just happens. So at this point, the dispatchers have to pick up the phone. They have to call county communications. They have to now activate auto aid agreement with the county. That takes time. That's phone calls. And we have to assume they're even available. They might not be. So we can't assume that we always have help coming. So that's what it looks like when we draw down. So going back to where we've been for the last 26 years, This was on the work plan. I spent a lot of time with a lot of help, a lot of history. 2000 was the first master plan that I could find. I found notes in 2003, CityGate update 2004, LAFCO study in 2010. Between 4 and 10, we did our first station evaluation. That was in 2007. In 2007, it was 35-year-old stations, too small, outdated, didn't meet the modern growing fire service. They had said, we're going to have to address stations. LAFCO in 2010, an integral part of this in 2015 was another council priority of revisiting The stations is just a theme that we're doing and we're trying to handle is how do we look and evaluate very expensive property and stations. Fifteen was a priority. Sixteen we did another study on the stations. At the same time, another study was done for our emergency communications center, just In case you didn't know, PD runs that, so I can't really speak to that, but we are an in-service user of the 911 fire dispatch. They had their recommendations. That was in 2016. 2019, CityGate came back, updated where we were at. Same common themes came up. Fire stations, Station 4, what's your capacity, what's your capability? So all I'm doing is looking at these things that have been recommended since 2000. 23 was another LAFCO recommendation. Same things. We need to cover the southwest. You need a station. You need to increase your ability to handle your increasing call volume. And at that point, they really put the stress on regionalization. And I'm going to tell you right now, regionalization starts with the top and all the way down to the bottom just because the fire chiefs agree to something it's sometimes hard to actually see the boots on the ground do it so we do the best that we can the firefighters train they interact with our surrounding partners on a daily basis we do Well, basically we call it interagency training. They're at our stations. We cover their stations. We do a lot. We do everything possible to help regionalize what we do in South County. We're sitting in 26. And by now, I already know you know that we need this fourth station. That's why you've invested the money. This is why we're saying that's our new baseline is the fourth station. Service demand, it's exactly what it says. People call. 2009, Gilroy at that time actually had eight firefighters on duty. They ran 2,727 calls. They increased the staffing. That's when it went from two engine companies with four firefighters to three with three. And that is our current model now. The current baseline we're asking and making sure we are kind of establishing is four with three. In 2025, the workload that the firefighters handled with their original nine, backed up by the interim station as best as we could staff it, is now well over 7,000. That's single incidents. Now, if I go back to a fire, it's one incident but takes four to five companies, 15 firefighters and chiefs. So it's kind of misleading. I'll tell you, 7,000 incidents generates 8,300 unit responses. So the real number is how many times are the fire trucks moving, and it's 8,300 times. That's three full-time Those same nine firefighters plus whatever we can put at the interim station. That's what that looks like So here's our first major policy point Our core system is the three permanently staffed three Oh or three person companies Santa Teresa is still an interim station. That's why it's variable and It is a high priority force. And the reason it's a high priority isn't just because of the people. That also augments capacity and capability of the existing other stations. If there isn't anything in the Santa Teresa area that has to pull the Sunrise Station, the Chestnut Station, the Los Animas, it starts pulling people into other areas. Now, if you remember that piece, now we have gaps opening up that we can't cover. Covering the city of Gilroy with traffic and road miles is increasingly difficult. So we call that travel time For the purposes of the evaluation it is our Three but we're moving to the four our city model what I'm planning on is is that we can reliably produce 12 firefighters every day. For the city of Gilroy, that would take about 45 full-time employees. That is not 45 on duty. That's just an overall 45 spread over three shifts to provide 12 firefighters on duty. It's the workforce necessary to account for leave, training, injuries, vacancies, and turnover. I also want to pause right here just to be clear. I'm not asking for 45 people. I'm just saying this is what it takes for that capability and that capacity. 2023 is the LAFCO. I'm just going back to 2023 just because that's the most relevant and the newest piece that we can go to. If I go all the way back to 2000, 2004, or 5, or 10, that's significantly in our rearview mirror. 23 is still relevant to us. It reinforced several things that we're already familiar with. We have aging facilities. We do have some fleet needs, but the city has invested with engine companies, replacing our command vehicles. So the city is investing in us to move forward based on LAFCO recommendations. Technology is still a thing. For the fire department, AVL, it's a fancy acronym, which is automatic vehicle locator. CAD, computer aided dispatch, we need the two of those to talk. If you're wondering how this currently works, a caller calls 911, gets routed to the Gilroy public safety answering point. They figure out it's a fire or medical emergency. We can't track individual fire trucks. They will track existing physical property. So if it hits close enough to 77 Chestnut, that station goes. There might not be the fire truck in it. It might be out and about. This is the technology piece. These are the things we want to share. So we bring forward technology. We need a way to track and share between vehicle locating and the computer-aided dispatch that they can read a fire truck in real time, grab its current location, and reroute it to an emergency. That's pieces of the technology. Regional service. We share as much as we can with our partners, and they share as much as they can with us. So we are doing the best that we can. So since 2023, we've invested, you've invested, the community has invested in the Santa Teresa Station. It's advancing. Apparatus and command vehicles have improved. The infrastructure is moving. Absolutely want to be clear. This is not a story of neglect at all It's a story of progress and how quickly we can move through to meet the recommendations And then we also need to decide what's still required Just based on the larger system that we have State of the department our current condition and need this is the fair summary of where we're at A frontline apparatus of improved technologies advancing. We are pushing that through. I'll be honest, the facilities are mixed. We have two fire stations that are well over 50 years old. I share with the firefighters that it's a nostalgic feeling walking into the two older fire stations. When I was a child, my father was in a fire station. Those were the stations I went in. So to me, it's a real nostalgic thing, but it's also a reminder of they are aging. We've addressed it with two studies. We understand there's a cost and there's investment involved. So we are totally understanding of what it takes to meet the recommendation of addressing seismic issues, comfort issues, shared facilities within there. It's just they're not modern fire stations. We did recommend and talk about seismic upgrade. We are in the process with the facilities of a remodel plan. Right now it's still a plan that we are pushing forward. Today's workforce has evolved from even when I first started, where it was just a smaller footprint. There were single company stations. You would cram one truck, four or five firefighters in there. That workforce has changed. They are old. They are outdated. Heaven forbid, if there's an earthquake or natural disaster, there is a chance the fire station itself can be incapacitated and may not be functional. That is the whole seismic piece. Super expensive we totally understand and have to respect the finance in or the inability to address that But that is where where we are right there the remodel piece Please come visit our fire stations. It's they are a Piece of history in the firefighters every single day take great care of them. So when I talk about nostalgia It is really for me to go, this is amazing, the amount of effort every single day that firefighters put into that to make sure those fire stations function. They're clean, they take pride in it, and it shows every day. Staffing and recruiting. This is for the four companies, again, that's our baseline. Just kind of go back what that actually takes to put 12 firefighters over those four companies For municipal or city department working at 56 or you're gonna hear me talk about 2900 and 12 hours it takes 45 Staffing is only part of that capacity You have to have a 24-hour incident commander That is a chief. So departments will call them battalion chiefs. We call them division chiefs, operations chiefs. You kind of hear that number. What that allows is within our standards of coverage and recommended industry standards, you put somebody in charge of all incidents within the first nine minutes that now allows those three firefighters on an engine to go to work. If we don't have that command officer, we're going to ask the captain on an engine to now take command, and that reduces those three firefighters' capability. The captain now has to multitask, do hands-on, and then also see the bigger picture of what's unfolding in front of them, putting more work on the remaining two. So that's why the command level chief has to be integrated into there. Our three division chiefs, not only are they on a 24 hour work week, the Bay Area standard is 48 straight, followed by 96 off. So I ask every single day, our three division chiefs, please work your 48 hours. So they are on duty for 48 straight hours. They also have a full-time program they manage. So we have an EMS chief, a training chief, and an operations chief. They then provide myself and the city an additional 10 hours every single week in addition to those 48. And that is that program management. Our EMS chief makes sure there's QI, QC, there's training, there's CEUs. People need to maintain their paramedic. They go to meetings. All that's required. The training chief has to do their plan. They have to make sure the probationary firefighters, firefighters, engineers, captains, chiefs, all maintain their training, all under the auspices of maintaining our ISO rating, which is currently a two. So far, their effort has shown that we've increased our ISO rating from a low 80 to 88. So increasing eight points, class one is 90. So the amount of work, your existing workforce, I can't thank them enough or acknowledge it enough. That's what that looks like when they work that hard. But when we talk about organizational capacity, that's what happens. We start stressing the system out and asking people to do more than they can actually handle at a certain time. Technology. We talked about that. The regionalization is already happening there. We're just trying to maintain. And in some areas, we are actually going to catch up. The piece I'm going to throw on there is the middle. It's called Tablet Command. And that is a proprietary platform that we are looking at in the way we want to create interoperability between the state of California, not just our five surrounding counties. is that platform allows us and allows all the fire departments to share situational awareness, share incidents so we can talk, we can see. It's digital information. If we send a crew to the Timber Fire, Cal Fire, the other fire departments all use a common sharing platform that we can actually track their vehicles, we can communicate digitally, we can share information they can see. So these are these pieces of not just regionalization, but interoperability with our partners. So now we understand what the service is. Four stations, four engines, 3-0 staffed with a command officer and administrative support. One can't function well without the other. It will suffer. The municipal model, the city model remains our baseline. We've identified some shared services with Morgan Hill, South County JPA, regional model, Cal Fire Schedule A contract, county fire contract, county fire annexation, and a Gilroy Fire Protection District. These are screening alternatives only. Some actually may be practical, some not. Some may be financially attractive, but there's a trade-off. It may look good, but you're going to lose something. There's a good and bad with everything we do. It could be financially attractive, but you're going to lose local control. Others may preserve local control, but require more city investment. The important thing is that we just don't start choosing a certain organization just based on price, because there's always the cost for that. Number one, and I'm just going to go through these really quick, I wanted to be very transparent and open and at no point have we, we have a contract or talked to or anything with any of these providers. This was just part of the study that we looked through. We used our methodology to come up with what we figured is the best way to move forward. So number one is just enhancing and investing in your current fire department. Number two, while yes, it might be practical, it's probably not feasible. That's a Morgan Hill or a shared Gilroy service. Probably not very practical in the current situation. model right here. But it's on there. South County JPA, a joint powers agreement or regional model. This would look something along the lines of Gilroy Fire Department contracting administrative and command oversight to, say, county fire. County fire could offer, say, hey, we will provide all chief level support, administrative support. You just provide the firefighters on the engine. That could be your JPA type piece. So you would lose probably division chiefs, administrative support, and fire chief, and they would contract with that. That is a model within San Mateo and Marin County. Number four, we hear this a lot, the CAL FIRE contract. That is what they call the Schedule A contract. That is a contract where CAL FIRE provides service to a city. County fire provides contract. fire protection and EMS within Santa Clara County. They also have annexed. So you'll see both of those, a contract and an annexation. And then the last one is the Gilroy Fire Protection District. While extremely complicated, and I'm not here to kind of tell you to walk you through, these are all points where if an alternative service delivery was requested or directed, This is where we'd have to bring somebody in and tell us how that would work. Fire protection district, you stay within your same incorporated part of the city. You would just switch from, let me get it super simple, from a municipal fire department into a fire protection district. Your funding changes from basically a general fund, public safety department, to a property tax based. So based on just cursory numbers from AB8, that's your amount of money that's authorized for fire protection based on property tax, there really isn't enough money to fund a fire department just based on that. So we'd have an alternative revenue stream. So the reality is municipal fire department number one, CAL FIRE number four in a form of either a contract or annexation with county fire. Those are the most realistic service alternatives that we have. This is the bridge that we talked about when I mentioned the risk at the very beginning and the provider comparison that we are now talking about. The underlining community risk doesn't change just based on the name or the patch that you wear. It doesn't matter. The risk is the same whether it's Gilroy, Cal Fire, or County Fire. The residents are the same. The geography is the same. The EMS workload, the fire workload, the potential for the simultaneous incidents, everything stays the same. So we're just talking about who can sustainably provide fire and EMS within the city of Gilroy. This is the analytical discipline behind The evaluation, every option, every option has to be tested against the same service expectation. Four staff stations, three firefighters on every apparatus, command oversight, administrative support. Everything, so it's an apple to apple. When we compare the services, it's local control, it's workforce pension and implications, capital obligations, the annual cost, transition, labor transition can get very complex, and regional depth, response depth, available resources, et cetera. If one model assumes it takes 12 people on duty and another model assumes nine, the cheaper number doesn't tell you which model is more efficient. It just tells us that there's two things that are priced differently. Basically, the methodology that we did, we walked through there, was one service that is being currently provided in Gilroy spread among anybody that could sustainably do that. So the meaningful comparison is long-term cost and the capability for the same expectation. This is where the financial and our stats will come in and kind of help us screen And like I'm saying, this is just planning estimates. These aren't contracts. This is just pulling numbers from what we can see. I didn't model anything for Morgan Hill. That was just not an applicable model for us right now. They are happy with their service. CAL FIRE provides a Schedule A contract running through 28. That is not something that we modeled through what that would even look like. I didn't model any South County JPA. Even doing the fire district crunch those numbers real quick set them aside and say what is the most? Realistic thing we can do and I'll walk you through some of these pieces Four stations four engines three on each twelve people could potentially cost the city Sixteen point almost nine million that doesn't take into account any kind of colas or MOU changes. This is today and if we added to get us up to 45. And what that looks like, the city is already invested in the city with promoting people into captain positions. We have 12 captains promoted to fill all four stations. We've promoted engineers to fill all 12 engineer positions across those four stations. What this would look like is now filling in from the bottom with firefighter paramedics. That's where we come up with that. CAL FIRE Schedule A contract, $16 million. Did not engage with CAL FIRE in their contract. So I just want to kind of sit here just for a second here and just kind of walk through these real quick. What we see for fiscal year 26-27 for CAL FIRE is is 44 incumbent firefighters moving into the CAL FIRE system. The reason it gets pricey for CAL FIRE under their Schedule A contract is we would, the state would red circle, and I'm not going to get into the weeds, but basically labor would transition without taking a CAL FIRE pay cut. Their salaries are lower than what Gilroy pays. So they would transition without a pay cut. And what that normally means, if you red circled them, they just stay frozen in their salary until the rest of the CAL FIRE employees work their way up. Once they're equal, then they all move back up together. So just based on moving that many employees over, that's what that would look like. This is just a planning scenario. This is not a CAL FIRE quote. So I just want to be clear. We're going to move down. I'll just take a look for a county fire contract. And this is, again, this is not a quote from the county. This is just derived quite literally from their current contracts. It's a planning estimate and we come up with a 23 point, almost 4 million. This is just based on one. We just pull it from what currently the city of Campbell pays for. They have two stations, total of six firefighters, three on each, and they also share a battalion chief for command oversight. And what we did not do was just double that or come up with that number. There's a whole other methodology that we used. Annexation is totally different than a contract. We do have experts that will kind of walk us through that, or you have to contract for that piece to come through with a study. This is just a recurring revenue transfer. And the reason I have a range based on there, and there's a midpoint of about $16.1 million. And I'm going to pause right here just so I can make sure I speak clearly so we don't misunderstand anything. That number is not county fire offering to provide a $23 million contract or worth. they annex it and they drop that price that is not what we're saying a contract and annexation are fundamentally different financial structures and in a second here I'll kind of walk through that contract versus annexation the distinction is very critical here under a county fire contract Gilroy would remain the governing city and would essentially purchase that level of service. So what we're doing is apples to apples. Four companies, three on each, a dedicated command oversight and administrative support. That's our apple to apple that we're doing. So we would purchase that level of service. Our current benchmark with that service, based on current contracts from the county, Right now our numbers would say a little over $23 million for a contract. Annexation is not that transaction. Service responsibility and governance would transfer. So basically the question on annexation really becomes how much of the property tax or other revenue would transfer out of Gilroy into the county to fund county fire. So for planning purposes, we estimated county fires for company direct service cost. We used 80% is the midpoint, about $16 million, 85% of the planning range, and where we come up with that. So annexation, $14.1 million. That was just The real world example, when the South Santa Clara Fire Protection District was dissolved, county fire took it over. They inherited, they got the property tax that was allocated for fire protection from that district. So it was $7.8 million off the top of my head. That's where we come up with a 54%. Santa Clara County then has to fund the other 46% So if there was a similar Annexation within the city of Gilroy, it would be the low point based on the South Santa Clara model So that's where 14.1 would come in that would be the 15 or 54 percent Seventeen point one that's Los Altos Hills Annexation model that is where they pulled out about 85 almost 90 percent of the property tax to fund that There is still a gap over the next ten years that County fire would tell you it's about seven and a half million dollars So it they are not pulling dollar for dollar or a hundred percent in case you're wondering where Gilroy's property tax is about this year And I don't want to misspeak too much, but we're sitting at about $22 million in property tax. Property tax obviously goes into the general fund and helps build that out. So there is a piece of that that would come out of the property tax, go up to the county, and we would lose the property tax piece, and then you would also lose some real assets, whether it's station and property and vehicles. That's what that would start... covering on there so that's where we kind of come up with those numbers and like I said this is planning estimates only there's no contract out there we have not engaged we just want to start kind of throwing out what we can find in the existing county here what drives this it's a lot of it has to do with compensation County Fire just has a higher compensation than Gilroy, so you can just see that's kind of our real world. And this is just the compensation pieces. We have to kind of look at the provider costs, also includes relief staffing, the command, supervision, training, prevention, administration, fleet facilities, technology, capital responsibilities. There's a lot that really goes into this. But it does help understand county fires direct service and contract costs. I went up for 20 years. So we started in 2025. So this will push us up to 2045. The final part of the evaluation is looking beyond the Santa Teresa Station. Gilroy is continuing to grow. EMS truly is our biggest workload 70% of our calls is for somebody that is having a medical emergency We know that will increase it's not just a Gilroy thing. It's not a state of California thing It's kind of across the nation is our population ages They're going to require a higher level of service from the fire department Personally I Don't think it's responsible That I can just basically pretend to tell you what exactly the fire service organization should look like in 2045. I don't know. All I do know is I can go back to 2000 and 2004 and 2010 and kind of see what they predicted and where we are, and it's fairly accurate. They kept telling us, be careful. You're going to get bigger. Your service demand is going to increase. People are going to want a higher level of service, and they're going to expect it. And we have seen it. So we have to anticipate in the next 20 years that will also increase. Governance matters here too. If Gilroy changes governance in the future, decisions about staffing, deployment, priorities are removed from council priority and moved to a different governing agency. Be very clear, if you have your own fire department, you get to set priorities and have that open communication with your own fire department. You contract, you buy a service, you annex. They make the best service delivery model for you. So if I can bring it all the way back to where we started. We just talked about what the fire department actually provides. intervention capability there they go intervention capability that that has it has to exist before an emergency occurs so we have to actually have people ready and available in the correct locations or we're not going to change the outcomes that's great that we might have Firetrucks still located and sunrise, but if something happens across town, it will still take them to get there. We've talked about with the capability What it takes to to exist? People property and productivity are what we're here to protect. So the three P's we're always here to take care of people That's all of us. I take care of these people because these people need to take care of the communities people This is what we do property is absolutely essential. If we were to look through the lens of if there was a tragic fire that outlet, the outlet fire in a strip mall is extremely hazardous to firefighters. At best today, we might be able to put nine firefighters on three engines. If we increase that capability and capacity, we could get four if none of them are already on another call. The other call happened 770 times so far this year. So if there is a fire in a strip mall, we don't have enough firefighters, which is normal in cities our size, so we rely on partners. The partners also have to be available. A strip mall fire for the size of the retail shops would take 27 firefighters to safely handle Today we'd get you nine within the first 10 to 12 minutes. And then we need assistance from auto aid or mutual aid. One thing I want to do, and I did talk about how busy we are, the value of the systems really not measured just based on that they are running calls or they are busy every minute of the day. Part of their value is they have to be available for those calls. So we are saying your call volume only captures 30% of your day. Your training adds another 10%. What do you do with the the other 40, 45% of your day. That's not the question we're asking. We should actually say, are they available enough for something that happens in the community? If we start stressing the system that we currently have beyond that much, they are not ready to be there. I know that was a lot, so thank you very much. I wanted just to make sure that I covered a lot, so thank you for bearing with me with my notes. That concludes the presentation that I have. I'm happy to answer any questions. I do kind of throw out there that if we have questions and some of the answers, if it's a has to do with providers or any kind of proposals or property tax stuff. This is kind of a cursory thing. I do have some information, but it was really just to kind of get us on the same footing and see what direction we want to do from you on where we can go in the next five years, 10 years, or up to 20 years.

So if I could just round out the conversation a little bit for the council and talk a little bit about what we're looking for next today. Rob's provided you great background on where we're at and some of the challenges we face, some of the options that he's brought to the table as well. We know that this is the first in a number of conversations with you on fire service delivery. We wanted to introduce sort of where we're at and what we're thinking about and then provide an opportunity for feedback from the council, questions from the council and areas of focus and concerns that we need to go and work on and bring back to you for the next one. So really an introductory conversation to what we see as a number of them that leads into a decision ultimately we think with some more solid direction in the early part of the next calendar year. So thank you very much.

I'll start off with Council Member Ramirez.

Thank you, Mayor. And I have several questions, so I'm looking behind it if you say that's enough. Thank you for your presentation. This was laid out very simply and you articulated it very well. I just have some questions that I have and then questions I get asked. And one of the questions I'm constantly asked by the community or comments that have been made, can you help explain why we have more than one paramedic? Why don't we just go to, well, there's one paramedic and two firefighters. Why is everybody a paramedic? Can you explain that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. The service level that we currently provide mandates what we do is to have one primary paramedic. Their sole focus is on whatever is in front of them. And that could be a singular patient, two patients, three patients, more. On a typical year, we run well over 5,000 emergency medical calls. That generated well over 5,300 patients. So we run incidents where there's more than one patient. We run incidents where the patient's condition is so severe that one person is tunneled in on, let's make sure they start breathing. I need somebody to start getting medications. I probably need somebody to start figuring out where the heart monitor goes. I probably need somebody to start landing a helicopter. So it's not just one person can do all the skills. It could be. It could be one person doing the skills. But what happens with a paramedic? And I'm going to throw this out. I still have my paramedic license to this point where you can't turn that off. And I don't want them to turn it off. I need them to look at the bigger picture through a paramedic lens. Because when we're tunneled in on these life-threatening emergencies, We see what's right in front of us. I also need somebody to see the bigger picture and intervene at that point, too. So the best we can do is two paramedics. The other piece is the ambulance provider from the county provides that level of service. That is not us. That's based on county EMS. They could show up, determine that patient's level of acuity mandates a second paramedic based on, you know, I got to take your fire medic. What that does is now degrade the capacity and capability of the city's fire trucks or what we can respond with. If you had one medic and they're on their way to San Jose, We just now went down to two paramedics for a population of 60,000 people. Having two paramedics enhances that to say, at least we have two people remaining on that, and one is still a paramedic that can at least intervene.

Thank you. So on average, with other fire departments in the area, Do we have a higher than average overtime? And is that based on minimum staffing?

Or are we just kind of average? I don't want to, boy, I can't really speak to the other fire departments, but inherently through the fire service, overtime is to make sure you have the minimum amount. So what is a little awkward about Gilroy's overtime usage is that even up until this week, we send firefighters out into the rest of the state to help with what you see, whether it's the Plaskett fire, the Lucas fire, the Timber fire. That accumulates reimbursable overtime, but it looks like overtime. While those firefighters, we sent six out. We bring six back in to make sure those spots are taken care of. That's overtime. It's reimbursable. But it looks like we're churning through the overtime. But what we actually look at, I feel we use less than what's expected out there just based on operational overtime. Somebody's sick, somebody's hurt. It feels like to me that that is lower than what's the industry standard.

Thank you. How often do we rely on mutual aid?

Often so mutual and auto other way they're a little different mutual aid would be something from Cal Fire or Morgan Hill It's not an automatic thing. We pick up the phone say can you help us and they most the time they will say yes Automatic aid is a little bit quicker. We already have a an Agreement with them saying if we call will you send a chief and an engine? So county fire and us have an automatic aid. If we have a fire in the city of Gilroy, we cannot get enough firefighters to cover all the tasks that need to be done. They send us their help. If they're available, then they'll move somebody else down. Yes, that piece does.

Doesn't LAFCO recommend five stations?

There is the fifth station or fifth company. So what that could look like, what really helps with our capability and capacity would be adding a fifth company. If you ever see the fire trucks driving around, you see our normal engine company, especially in Gilroy, most of the time you'll see another bigger one with the ladder. So we have truck 47 out. It's not staffed. It's just a specialized piece of apparatus that needs to be staffed. Those trucks with those big ladders that would be a fifth company that we need to provide a level service that we can't provide just based on what we have. So as a piece to that What's being approved residential in the city of Gilroy and immediately surrounding us, we're not getting a bigger footprint. We're now going vertical. So the higher we go, the more it stresses the firefighters out, because how do we take people off balconies? How do we do anything that's above ground? So yes, we need eventually to get to five companies. Now, if you put the fifth in a station, awesome, it spreads us out, but minimum, We could double one up, say, at the Chestnut Station.

Council Member Ramsey, I'm going to bounce a little bit, and we could always come back. So I'm going to go to Council Member Fugazi.

I really like the map that you showed. That comes from a website, right? GilroyFireDepartment.org? Yes. Who manages that site? I do. So it is a city resource now?

I hope it to be. What we did in January, the national... Well, basically, we switched the American Fire Service into a different reporting platform that is really public-facing and transparent. So we call it the National Emergency Response Information System, NARIS for short. So Gilroy transitioned into that, and that's where all that information comes from. So we just port that information into an easier-to-digest website.

So we have the public data. This is basically similar to citizen rims for the police kind of thing. Yes.

Perfect example, absolutely.

Okay. None of us, or I don't know if any of us knew about it. I didn't know about it, and I'm pretty much tied in. I didn't see it linked off of the website from Gilroy either.

So where it is sitting right now, with any kind of website, we get it up and running, and then we try to break it. we're just kind of saying, is the information, does it work? So where it's at right now, I wouldn't call it beta testing, but that's where we're at. Is it reliable? Does it show the right data? Is it pulling it? Is it updating? Is it something that we actually feel comfortable sharing that information? And so far since it's been up, the answer is yes. But we check it every single day just to make sure it is accurate information. What we don't want to do is provide anything that is incredible. It is live.

It is live. And it doesn't it's hard for me to know that it's actually the city. That's why I asked because there is no real indication on there. Is that an outside company that we had build that?

No, I did that.

Claude?

A version of it, yeah.

Because I can tell from the things. It's great. It's a great resource. I love it. And I love the information. I love the interactivity and I'm very familiar with that stuff. So thank you for doing that. The next question I have is A number of cities, so in everything that you were working on and comparing and we're talking about things like survivability and how much a life is worth and all of that, and a lot of cities I've seen now, everything we've compared looking in the model that we have, right, which is, and excuse me, I am not Mr. Firefighter, I understand what these things are all called, but you have a big fire truck that has people that can do fires and people that can do medical stuff. That's the layman's way, I guess, of explaining it. But a lot of cities I'm seeing now are moving to what they call single role EMS, right? And so when we're taking a look at this, are we taking a look also at possibly changing the model since we have such a high preponderance of medical that seems to be happening that don't require necessarily an entire big truck coming out and having all of that? And so I look at Palo Alto or Folsom or there's a number of cities that are doing this. Is this something that we'll be exploring?

So I did pull that up as one of the models, and right now it did not fit what we actually thought would be appropriate for Gilroy. And the only reason would be is when you have a single role, say a paramedic like Palo Alto, and by single role means all they can do is EMS. So you will hire a paramedic that all they do is maybe get on an ambulance and or, maybe a squad or an apparatus that just goes to medical calls. That's all they can really provide. The way we looked at our model, if we were investing into people, what people based on what we can afford and what we can do would be the best utilization. So we wanted an all hazards person instead of a single role. And that's where we said the best model that Gilroy has based on having where we want to go is 12 is to have 12 all hazards people, not just a single role. If we can invest into more or the primary mission, Palo Alto can transport. They have what we would call 201 rights, so they are kind of an old school EMS transport capable. It also goes into what can you recruit. So sometimes there is a challenging piece to get qualified firefighter paramedics. That's that whole recruiting and retaining them. So sometimes it's actually easier to find somebody that says, I don't want to go into burning buildings. I don't really want to do that. But what I can do is provide quality paramedic you know, assessment and skills.

It's one of the reasons why many of them are going to this, too, is because of that, the recruiting issues. And I understand we have a vestigial desire to keep things the way they are. I just wonder if given the amount of medical, it's either they're making the wrong choice and we're going to keep with our right choice, or it could be their choice is right for them. But, I mean, exploring what that is and, you know, my belief Correct me if I'm wrong is that there's diminishing returns right in terms of your survivability with costs, right? So you can start raising your costs a lot and you just get less and less Improvement as you get close to everybody lives right which is obviously an infinity number and It's great that we have had such incredible survivability but if it comes at a cost that is unattainable to us and And other cities are looking at other models which may knock us down a half percent here or there. I'm wondering whether or not we should explore that as well as opposed to, well, let's keep everything apples and apples. And when we do that, this is what it looks like. So I would hope we would explore some of those scenarios.

So the great piece, and I'll give you a little piece of history. The fire service is cyclical. A lot of things, it's new is old again, old is new again. In the mid-1990s, the fire service implemented what we would call the squad system. On that squad was a paramedic, maybe a firefighter or an officer. And the idea was to save wear and tear on the fire engines, because we were sending a fire engine on what could be low-acuity medical calls. So it just puts too many hours and mileage on a million-dollar apparatus, so we went to squads. We'd send an ambulance with two, the squad with two, and if the patient's acuity increased, we'd actually ask for more people to come through. The fire service kind of changed the way they looked at that and said, it's so hard to predict somebody on the other end of a 911 call, and they would say, well, I'll give you a real world example of what happened. I'm sitting in council on Monday, call comes in, And it sounds like it's going to be a cardiac arrest. We couldn't tell. So the operations chief goes, this sounds pretty significant. Let me get up and leave. You're just kind of reading and listening between the lines. Didn't come in that way. So if we would have sent two and two, and they get there, it is somebody not breathing, and their heart stops, we would have then had to send more people. So what we just decided was send more at the beginning. So there is that delay. The trade-off is wear and tear on the apparatus.

So it's kind of a trade-off on what level of service... Well, there's a trade-off, obviously, like I said, in costs to survivability that happens all the time. And you're trying to find what that number is. I know it sounds very... coarse and morbid maybe to discuss that way but it really has to be looked that way and in terms of yeah I mean my my reality is growing up and seeing the show emergency and you know seeing those guys go out and they didn't have as many you know calls and maybe not as many medical calls but just with the numbers that we see here it just something is not making sense and when I see a lot of these other cities making these kinds of same moves that's just what I want to leave it with.

I'm going to jump to Council Member Klein next.

Real quick. You mentioned about certification, you know, going from 8 to, what, 88? And talking about training, you know, three hours a day and whatnot. Looking at, we have structures being built higher, bigger, taller. And needing training for that type of building, that type of structure fire, what are we doing in terms of finding a training facility or looking at a training facility so we can incorporate those types of things and just acclimate ourselves to that?

I appreciate the question. If I can tie this all the way back, everything that we are doing, planning, or moving to is always tied to one of the studies. So we all, basically as a staff, we've pulled a strategic plan plans and ideas from existing studies. Three different studies from 2000-2004, even in LAFCO and 10, said that we need to address the capacity to train the firefighters. In 2026, we identified a potential ability to actually create a training structure behind Chestnut. It is a city investment. And what that would look like would provide firefighters the ability not just to train for firefighters, these buildings that are going vertical, but probationary training. How do you pull hose? Can you search? Can you crawl? Can you get used to the dark? Believe it or not, it's super claustrophobic. There's a lot of things that we need to train. It is a funding source that we need to identify. We have a plan in place. We have proposals ready to go. It's just something that's right now kind of unfunded. And when I talk about our division chief that's in charge of training, He is dedicated to that and that is basically his sole purpose right now is how do we get our people trained and what is the most realistic way to provide that training.

What's the number as far as estimated budget?

Where we got hung up was about $90,000.

Overall 90,000 or?

90,000 would have given a dedicated training structure behind the Chestnut Fire Station. We just couldn't get that over the finish line.

I'm going to jump to council member Marks next. Before you ask your question, just a reminder to council, I probably should have said this early on, is that we're going to handle this like a typical council meeting. After the questions are done, we're going to go to public comment, and then that's when we can start some deliberations amongst ourselves and brainstorming and that type of thing. Go ahead.

All right. This is just a clarification. County, you said, was going to cost per year $23 million, correct? Correct. Who pays, or let me ask you this, does the city of Gilroy pay that $23 million to county?

So that's how a contract would work.

That's what I thought.

And I'm just going to go based on kind of real world to the city of Campbell contracts with County Fire to provide two stations, six firefighters, and a battalion chief portion. And out of their general fund, they write County Fire a check for that.

All right, so that's what I thought. I wanted a clarification for the public because If we're only investing $16.8 million, my question would be why would we want to invest more to another agency when we could be putting it into ourselves? But I think I know why. Because it's better benefits for the firefighters going with county. So that's something that needs to be talked about in deliberation. Also, how many calls are relegated to the homeless in that 5,000 number that you gave us?

I don't have the the number exactly for you so I can get that back to you. We do track that. So in the platform that we had talked about, we have that information for you. So I'll follow up with you.

MS. All right, because that's important to know, too, if it's something in management that we can do to lessen the number. All right, thank you. MR.

Yes.

MR. Council Member Bracco.

COMMISSIONER BRACCO. On the north end of town, Do we use county fire most of the time there out of their San Ysidro station?

So believe it or not, your firefighters within the city provide great coverage. Anything in the city, they can cover. Where we would see Mastin Station off the 101 in Mastin is the closest county fire, and then there's the Tree Haven over by Gilbert Gardens. Those are the two closest that we would see We'd see masting along the 101, or any time we cannot get the appropriate amount of firefighters, like, say, to a fire or a capacity drawdown, we don't have anything available. But we can cover the north end if Sunrise, Los Animas, or Chestnut are there. But if we needed more, yes, they would absolutely come down.

And is the Treehaven station, is it staffed all the time now?

County fire puts it 24-7. But we can't always guarantee that just based on we don't control county fire. They can run their own calls. A lot of times we just don't know what they do.

Thank you. You have another question? Okay.

Just three more. Just real quick. So you made reference to the seismic retrofits in the two stations. Is there a backup plan? So, you know, by that I mean

You talked about a catastrophic earthquake, right?

And you alluded to the fact that we might not get those, a response from that station if something were to happen. But moving beyond that, and we've passed the initial emergency and we realize we cannot utilize that station, do we have another and to house those staff members and apparatus and all that kind of stuff?

We actually do. And we would implement that no different than, say, relocating them for a remodel or anything else. So our number one plan would be to relocate them to the current EOC, providing that was habitable for them. So within the EOC, there is some living space for the firefighters And then there's covered space to put a fire apparatus. That would be our go-to. And if that was unavailable, then we'd probably be looking for plan B or C. And I can't tell you exactly what that would be. It'd just be, what does the rest of the footprint within the city look like?

I'm asking that because catastrophic earthquake in this area is a reality.

It is.

If we transitioned to one of these other alternatives, is there a guarantee that our firefighters would staff the stations? No.

Once there is a labor transition, that labor force becomes labor of theirs. And then all of a sudden you're kind of beholden to their MOUs or their contracts or their culture or really how they do seniority-based staffing or movements or bids. There's a lot that kind of is inherent within the culture of the fire departments.

So conceivably, CAL FIRE could say, okay, thank you so much. You're going to be stationed in Bakersfield.

So CAL FIRE would be different. If you were assigned a Santa Clara or SEU unit, you would most likely stay within the SEU. If it was a Schedule A contract, that means you would stay within that contract for that city. So there's kind of different pieces. Now, the thing with CAL FIRE II that we have to kind of throw out there is the SEU unit, it's not just Santa Clara County. They cover a lot. They have about 18 stations, and they're spread over a lot, and they provide a fantastic service that we see. What that would look like is basically Sacramento would have to be in contact with the SEU fire chief and say, do you have capacity to currently take over a city the size of Gilroy with 60,000 people and four additional stations. Can you, as that fire chief, manage that in addition to everything else that you have? That's a pretty big haul. I'm telling you, as a fire chief, that's a pretty big responsibility. So you would have to get them to agree to take kind of that burden on too.

OK. And then just trying to understand this, when you talked about the annexation, That fifty four to ninety seven percent that you had on the screen is that percentage roughly between those numbers Get into our general fund would be then paid out That's a really good question fifty four percent is exactly how the the South Santa Clara Fire Protection District

What the county got based on their property tax was 54% of the overall service cost. So the service cost is not being covered by the property tax that's allocated for fire protection in the unincorporated piece. So the 54% is what they collect, 7.8 million, covers 54% of the total cost of that service. Now, the high end would be the Los Altos Hills model where they have a higher property tax. Now, that's not just property tax. That's all their other things from Prop 13. There's all these things that go into different communities, how they allocate certain monies. And they also had money set aside within their fire protection district and provide their kind of fire service. So that high end matches... The same level service, $12 million for two stations, two trucks, 3-0 on there is $12 million a year based on their annexation. That percentage is their only pain, not the full cost. So the idea for the county fire department in the county was we'll take lower money up front, and then over time the property values keep increasing. So there will be a point, most likely at 10 years, and this is just in that one model, that it will become cost neutral. And then the property will continue to climb, probably matched by whatever the fire protection cost increases. But the idea is once you've given up that property tax, you don't get it back. That percentage is permanently allocated to the service that you're providing.

But until that time, that That deficit in the South Santa Clara Fire District is being paid for by where? Just the overall surplus of dollars that they have from other areas?

Yeah, so the upside to having a large regional fire department, one of the big things, is you have a large regional fire department. And the way it really works for county fire is everybody contributes into their budget. So if I were to say county fire has a fiscal year 26 budget of 184 million dollars that goes into that that pot if you will and then However, they pay that service comes out of that pot. So what they're not doing is Reallocating money from Cupertino to cover this gap or anything. It just comes out of that pot everybody puts in they provide the service and

Thank you. And then I have another question, a little bit separate. Back to annexation, though. Safe to say, if you said this in the report, sorry if I didn't get it, but I did hear you stress many times 4, 4, 4, 4, so I was afraid to ask, but if we went to a fifth station, safe to say it would be on the east side of 101?

If you wanted, so that's where we have a study that says yes.

Okay.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

Based on that, if there was a study that said we'd go to a fifth station, and if we decided to have a conversation about annexation. Does the county fire station at Mastin help with that?

It depends on the true location. And I don't want to get too in the weeds, but I can speak to it really quickly. We have a study that talks about relocating or moving stations. So it depends on what the investment within the city. Do you want to relocate Los Animas to over here? It kind of shifts the station from Chestnut over to here. It means the fifth station would go here. So there's a lot of moving pieces and parts to it. But the Mastin Station coming down the highway would not be, it would help, but you would have this really time delay piece to it.

Okay. Thank you. Okay, we'll go to Klein, then to Fugacci, and then we'll go to public comment.

Looking at whether it's contracted to county or annexed, what would happen if it's either one of those, what would happen with the fire district down here? You have the, you know, they're currently here. Would that be absorbed into the big picture, or would that still be functioning on its own?

When you refer to fire district? Well, right, the county's running those, yeah.

So that would just be absorbed in the big, with the annexation, or with the contract?

Where the fire district used to be is now county. So the county took over their four stations, that whole 320 square miles, that belongs to them. If Gilroy contracted with County Fire, it would just be kind of one seamless piece under a contract.

And the same thing with annexation.

Yeah. In essence. The biggest difference would be, and I'm so not advocating one way or the other, so please don't take these. I'm just trying to be super transparent here, that to be... cost effective for county fire takeover Gilroy would have to be a contract of such length that they're not worried about something changing within five years, losing the contract and something happening after they've made this investment, took the people and then five years the contract goes away. So that would be a concern if I was the fire chief. So it would have to be some longer duration contract. You're talking 10 years, 20 years, something of significant investment on their end. Annexation's basically permanent and Policymakers would say that property where that fire station is that asset gets relocated or reallocated to County and now they kind of own it on the contract piece City would have to maintain that station city maintains all the assets.

They just are providing service in the people Well in the annexation of the properties then you have two aging stations. They would take that burden on to yes Yeah, so that burden would ship the city and

And that goes on your guys right negotiation how that works they might say hey you have some aging Stations, that's not really fair on the county to fix them.

So right, you know, yes, that's part of the discussion As I go to forgot see as you said back on the model if you reallocate those assets like a firehouse they also have to paint it and cut the grass and

Correct? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. They also have to paint it and cut the grass. Or no more grass. Grass is out. They have to paint it and cut the shrubs. Yeah. Because you have to convert them all. The shrubbery, yeah. Go ahead, Fugazi. Then we'll go to public comment.

Do you feel that the Los Altos annexation is really a good comparison to be used with Gilroy? Because in studying it, it looks like there's a lot of differences between what their situation was, and then moving to go to annexation, it seems way different than our situation.

Totally agree, and no, it's not. It is just a, we had to look at it and just kind of see, and Every city is different. It's when you've incorporated what tax laws, you know, the tax exchange. It is so much. Way beyond anything I can do. It's just a model that we could create based on the methodology that we use to try to get apples to apples. If a direction would be, and this is just for example, we would like to study annexation into the county. Can't even offer that because we haven't even talked to county fire. You would have to bring somebody in that would have to address that. all those dissimilarities between that piece.

Okay. And you had said about with contracts that generally as a chief you'd want to have like a 10- or 20-year contract or what have you. But Morgan Hill's contract wasn't that long with CAL FIRE, was it?

It is not. It's a five-year, about five-year, $54 million contract with them.

And with the contracts, obviously you can wait for them to expire, choose to do something different. Correct. The city takes on some risk because there's some unknown depending on the length of it. But with the annexation model, you're done. You can't go back on it pretty much. Isn't that correct?

I don't think you can. I mean, there might be some kind of loophole or whatever, but I would like to use the words that once you've given up that control to an annexation, you've given up control of that.

Exactly. Thank you.

All right.

Thank you, everybody, for the great questions. We're going to go to public comment.

Doug Mirrorhead.

Good morning, City Council, City staff, and Gilroy firefighters.

Hold on, Doug. One second. We're going to get your mic.

We want to hear you.

Thank you. Again, good morning, Council, City staff, and Gilroy firefighters. My name is Doug Muirhead, Morgan Hill resident. I spent some time a couple years ago heavily commenting on the LAFCO fire service review. I thought the presentation you got today was excellent. And laying out, you know, the various strategies going forward is going to be an interesting discussion for you. I wanted to add just a couple of comments to Councilmember Fugazi's observations about the equipment that's being rolled, big truck, three firefighters for preponderance of medical issues, not fire issues. A possible partial solution is what European cities do. They have separated out EMS. They put them on motorcycles. And you don't wear out your trucks and you're not stuck in traffic. But that kind of depends on whether you know what you're getting into. So that brings me to the second part of my comment, which is if the state were to get its act together on next gen 911 and you started having video incoming with the 911 call so you could see what you were dealing with, would that change the calculus that you use, whether this is a good idea to have a separate ability for EMS separated from rolling big trucks to fight fires? It's a fascinating topic. I'll look forward to see what you do. Thank you.

Thank you, Doug. Just real quick, if I could interject, because there's lots of good points on potential for future technology and what that looks like. Different service delivery models, for instance, EMS is a big conversation countywide right now. And certainly there's opportunities for adjustment, I think, in the future. We really needed to lock in a baseline for apples to apples comparison. So that's sort of what the chief has done with his four station model and the current EMS service delivery. So that's where we're at from a comparative perspective. RESOURCES MODEL SO WHEN WE'RE OUT LOOKING AT WHETHER IT MAKES SENSE TO LOOK AT A COUNTY MODEL OR A STATE MODEL THAT WE'VE GOT THAT BASELINE COMPARISON SO WE'RE NOT CHASING SORT OF WHAT THE NUMBERS ARE ACROSS DIFFERENT SERVICE DELIVERY OPPORTUNITIES. I THINK THE EMS IS ONE THAT THE CHIEF IS ACTIVELY ENGAGED WITH NOW COUNTYWIDE SO I THINK THERE'S POTENTIALS THERE BUT TRYING TO HONE IN ON SOMETHING THAT'S STATIC FOR US TO DO THE ANALYSIS ON.

Thank you. I'm going to start off with Council Member Hilton.

Thank you. So I'm glad to finally get this discussion started so we can all start dropping some stuff on the table. You know, one thing that really grounds me that I'm really focused on is obviously a good delivery model for the residents of Gilroy and the future residents of Gilroy. And at the same time, you know, ensuring that, you know, we have a healthy place for that individuals want to come to work, that they they want to be a part of this fire service and they want to provide the fire and EMS services here to Gilroy. But as someone who this coming January is going to be the most senior on this council and who's been invested in this as a, this is my professional career as well. You know, with all due respect, I'm a little disappointed. It seems that we're still kind of slow walking this, if you will. Some of us have already seen this for several years now. Us talking about what do we want the fire service to look like and getting explanations on what the delivery model is. AND IT LOOKS LIKE, YOU KNOW, WE'RE GOING TO CONTINUE TO SLOWWALK THIS INTO ANOTHER CITY COUNCIL TURNOVER, WHICH MAKES ME NERVOUS. And at the same time, I'm watching another chief sort of counting down their days until they reach their five years vested on CalPERS, which bothers me a little bit too. I feel like we've already done a really good deep dive on our last LAFCO service review back in 2023. We agreed to have that side letter, which was fought really hard with local 2805 and the council up here to get that agreed upon that we would look for all options of governance and not continue to just sit up here and talk about planning It's why we placed the fire service evaluation on our work plan when this current city council was seated in February 2025. And it's also why in June 2025, when we adopted this on our work plan, it was the first opportunity for our brand new fire chief to put that on the work plan, have that in the budget, clear expectations, start working on it with the recommendations from LAFCO service review, the bargaining unit that we were working on it. I used to meet monthly with the city administrator talking about it as well. and you know that never happened until we all started until we got the new city administrator we all sat down we wanted to know our priorities even though we already had a work plan and you know that was the opportunity where all of us all seven of us remember we did that straw poll and all seven of us said we want to start focusing on this I think it's because all seven of us already realized what the history was and where the direction we were trying to to move in, not necessarily planning, but looking at the governance. And I know you had it on multiple of your slides, Chief, that today is not supposed to be no change in fire service governance or service providers recommended for action at this study session. I understand that that's how you feel. I understand that that's maybe how some staff feel, but I'm ready. I hope that there's, my fellow colleagues up here are ready. I know that the Gilroy Firefighters Local 2805 who are, you know, showed up today in numbers, who've been out of a contract for more than 60 days are ready to talk about governance today. So I've got a few more other comments, but I'm really hoping that we can push some stuff forward to staff, including governance structure today. because I don't know when this will come back, whether it's gonna come back after the election or before. Thank you.

Why don't I just go all the way to the end and move this way since everybody's hand went up at the same time, thanks.

Chief, so if you contract with someone for fire service, the city would still be responsible for the equipment and the fire stations? Correct. And then if you go with the annexation, It would be off of our, off of us completely.

I believe there would be some form of negotiation between the two parties of what that would look like. And there's also other costs that would come in through there. We have unfunded CalPERS liability that would have to get added and you'd have to negotiate those pieces. So there's a lot that really goes into just the contract and the annexation piece, but for asset-based, you would maintain control of those assets, the fire station and trucks under a contract.

So under annexation, would we still have some kind of like a contract to govern... Who's responsible for what? You know, say, like, an example is our ambulances. We're supposed to have them down here, but they're not sometimes. What can we do if we went with annexation and all of a sudden our firehouses are empty and our trucks are in San Jose?

It's kind of one of the prices that, when I talk about price and cost, that's what happens when you lose governance. There is some political back and forth that you can do, but basically if I were to see what happens in the other annexation models, the county board of supervisors becomes the fire board for the service down here. The county fire chief would dictate what needs to happen, and most likely they would want to maintain adequate fire and EMS down here. I'm just going to say that They're going to try to provide the best level of service. But if it's not the level that you guys would want, I don't know what sway you would actually have once you've lost that governance.

So I got to respond to that a little bit. I mean, we're sitting right next to a city administrator who has plenty of years of experience with this. In other cities, Saratoga, Cupertino, Los Gatos that did that. And whether he can speak to it or someone else can actually speak to that relationship of what it's like.

Well, we really don't have a representative at the county.

So I think both points are accurate. So certainly relationships matter. And when I was in Cupertino and Saratoga and we were directly under contract with County Fire, I spent a lot of time building a relationship with the fire chief so that we could have those dialogues on what the service level needs were and where there were gaps. But there's challenges with that. In Saratoga, we were dealing with significant wildfire urban interface challenges. And the city's priorities were much more intense than what county fire was able to provide as a service. And so the city ended up taking on a significant role in that element of the service delivery. So it goes both ways. There's not always an opportunity for a county fire to provide the level of services that the local jurisdiction wants.

And at the same time, too, you also have an administrative level position assigned, basically, to have that relationship with Matt through us or through whoever that council is. There's somebody assigned there where you have that constant back and forth. Just imagine it on a different scale. It's no different than the Mosquito Vector Control or the Gilroy Library District, right? It's like, if the Gilroy Library shut down, I would expect Council Member Bracco to come back and be like, hey, you guys, they're going to shut this down. but you still are here and there's providing services. That's what I'm talking about. We don't have control over our library, but you, with your relationship, you do have that control and that's how we're able to continually advocate for more of it.

Okay, why don't I jump to Bugazzi?

So I think it's actually part of this conversation they're having too, which is while we are part of Santa Clara County, making these comparisons to these cities up there is IT'S ALMOST FARCICAL FOR ME BECAUSE THE DOLLARS IN PROPERTY TAX PER CAPITA UP THERE, ALONG WITH MANY OTHER THINGS, WE ALL KNOW THAT WE ARE THE REDHEADED STEPCHILD OF THE COUNTY NO MATTER WHAT. AND WE CAN SAY THAT THIS IS A DIFFERENT DIVISION OF THIS OR THAT, AND I REALLY DON'T NECESSARILY NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS. ALL I KNOW IS WHEN THE COUNTY IS IN FRONT OF ANYTHING, IT'S SOMETHING WRONG. THEY'RE OUT OF MONEY, THEY'RE NOT COVERING THIS, THEY'RE DOING THAT, AND THEY'RE NOT SOMETHING WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO DEPEND ON DOWN HERE. JUST LOOK AT THE HOMELESS SERVICES. So, you know. Okay, but before you go on, this Santa Clara County Fire Department is not the county. You say that, and I get it, okay, but I have.

But it has nothing to do with services for.

Sure, sure. In the county, they're a completely separate. Except we would have zero control. They're an independent district. So if you let, just let me, let me continue, cuz I'll listen to it all from you in a second. The Los Altos thing is certainly interesting in all of this, but when you look, as the Chief said, the CalPERS situation, the amount of assets that we'd have to give up, the amount of control that we'd have to give up, all of these different things that add on top of that, it takes a serious, deep look for us. And I think when I go back to what the City Administrator said a little while ago of how we're taking a look at this and the apples to apples, totally behind that. But I would say that In addition to apples to apples with all of these possible things, another one of those possibilities to compare to those is a change in the way our service model works. And say, OK, well, if we kept the service model the same, we have it in Gilroy the way it is, this is how it's running. It's how it's running now. This is how we could see something happening because we got direction on A and B from this panel here to go and look at this more. And then in addition, Do we have to run in that model? And if we ran in a different model that you could think up, given the situation that we have, what would be the outcome from that? We would have this kind of a service change and this kind of a cost change around it. And yes, it would mean some reassigning of people and positions. And there are all kinds of ancillary things that come with that. But I think it's not fair for us to take a look at this whole game plan that we have to analyze without throwing that into the mix. Thank you.

Council Member Marks.

Yes, I have a few comments. Council Member Hilton, you talked about workers coming to Gilroy to a healthy place to work. However, the county isn't going to remodel our stations. City of Gilroy will, and we would have to absorb that cost.

For what?

Well, you're talking about, well, then you explain, what do you mean by coming to work in a healthy place? What does that mean to you? Because to me, it means coming to a station that's remodeled and, you know.

Correct. And have the city of Gilroy done that?

And they're not probably going to because that's going to cost a lot of money because we've already heard the county is not going to pay for that.

What are you saying? Because that's not.

What I'm saying is don't mislead the people in thinking that if we go to county, all of a sudden.

Go to county through contract or annexation?

Both. They're not going to pay for the remodeling.

If you go to county through annexation, we give up everything that we have and the county is responsible for it all. We transfer the property over.

They're supposed to be responsible. That doesn't mean it's actually going to happen.

No, it actually is going to happen.

Okay, let's move on because I don't believe that. I can't wait. Okay, and then we talked about, okay, you said earlier that When we talked about this a year or two ago, we were going to focus on looking at these models. Focusing and adopting it are two different things. To me, when we focus on something, we are learning about it. And what I'm hearing today does not make me want to jump at all because I've got a lot of questions that I don't think we're going to come out on the better end of this. This needs to be studied very carefully. You know, especially who is taking on the financial responsibility. Yes, I understand the pension's better. Yes, I understand the salary's better. However, are we better off? You know, and I don't think we should be giving up local control on our fire stations. The money is very different in Los Altos and Saratoga than it here is in Gilroy. I agree with Council Member Fugazi. You're right. It's very, very different here. Thank you, Matt, for sharing what you did because that is an eye-opener for hopefully a lot of people to say we are not comparing apples to apples. So council, future council, I hope you go in with eyes wide open before you do any jumping.

I have a question for Council Member Furgati. Can you expand a little bit on your idea of a service model? So that was what you said earlier about even your idea about the way we do medical calls.

Yeah, again, I'm the farthest thing from the expert, which may be in some ways really helps because I'm just looking at it from a real common sense perspective, which says we have this many EMS calls. We have people who we have to have trained to do multiple things. We have fire engines going out on EMS calls. For me, it just seems strange. And then when I went out and did some investigation, I see that there are changes happening You know, quite rapidly, you might say, in a lot of other cities where they're creating these hybrid models to have, you know, EMS, paramedics, whatever, you know, separate. I don't understand it all, but I understand that many cities are experiencing the same problems we have. And I believe that keeping the same thing the way it's been going is not working. So maybe we need to explore that, too.

I THINK EMS IS A GOOD TOPIC FOR US TO BRING TO COUNCIL AND TALK ABOUT. IT'S EVOLVING NOW AT THE COUNTY LEVEL. I THINK IT NEEDS TO SETTLE OUT JUST A LITTLE BIT, AND THEN WE SHOULD BRING BACK AN ITEM TO TALK ABOUT EMS SERVICES COUNTYWIDE AND HOW WE FIT INTO THAT AND WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE IN OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE. I THINK THAT'S WORTHWHILE.

I LIKE THE IDEA OF LOOKING AT A DIFFERENT SERVICE MODEL IDEA HERE AS PART OF THE FUTURE EXPLANATION. I THINK I SAW THE SAME NEWS REPORT ABOUT WHAT THEY'RE DOING IN EUROPE. And I'm not sure that we're going to, I'm ready to see, sorry, you guys on a bunch of BMW, Euro, touring bikes, they're really cool. I don't think we're quite there yet, but it goes along with what Council Member Ramirez asked about, Council Member Fregati asked about, is now would be the time that we can look at tweaking the service model. At the same time, I have absolutely no problem of asking for further conversation and a study on annexation. Because that's why I asked that question about, we do have all these other assets that are sitting next to us, right next to us in Gilray, whether it's at Hecker Pass or on Mastin. And I believe we need to have that conversation, a study on annexation as well. And we don't, I know that Council Member Marks is uncomfortable with the idea, if we lose our assets, what will the county do with them? Well, those are the things that we'll find out in the study. So I'm not going to believe one way or the other, or no, because I don't know. And I would like to have that conversation for sure.

Can I ask one quick question?

It's not really a statements question. Maybe Harjo is the one to answer this. When we're looking at these four stations and these assets and whatnot, I mean, a rough figure, what are we talking about in valuation here? Is this $200 million? Is this $100 million? Is it $50 million?

Well, the new one's $13 million.

Well, no, but this doesn't take into account the property and everything else. So, I mean, it's just like where are we in our mind on this? Yeah.

If I were to ballpark it, it'd be less than $100 million just because of the aged facilities and the apparatus that we have. But we can certainly come back and give you an estimate as part of our research, what that is. All right, thank you.

Sure. Go ahead.

Yeah, I was just going to add on to that. I know City Manager Matt Morley kind of touched on this. The conversation around alternative service delivery model I think those ideas are definitely happening. Conversations are happening. They were happening about five, seven years ago when the county was looking at the ambulance contract and how the ambulance services are provided. So those are very active. But for Gilroy or all those agencies that are providing the services in the county, the county EMS really sets the guidelines. So I think there will be some implications that are driven by the county in the EMS space. And I think while we may have ideas, we'll still be a little reliant on how the county dictates some of those. So I think those are active conversations to have.

I don't really understand all of those different intricacies. I just know what I read about what Palo Alto did, right, and other things. So that's...

I'M GOING TO KEEP GOING THIS WAY, AND I'LL GET BACK TO YOU, COUNCILMEMBER BRACCO. ONE LAST COMMENT ON FACILITIES. THIS IS WHY I WANT TO HAVE THE STUDY, BECAUSE WE DON'T KNOW. YOU MENTIONED, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT CHESTNUT. YOU, CHIEF, SORRY.

YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT CHESTNUT, AND YOU CALLED IT NOSTALGIC.

WHEN I WENT THERE, I WAS HAVING FLASHBACKS IN MY FRAT HOUSE. So I appreciate what you guys are, you know, you guys have pride in it, I can tell, but it is very nostalgic. And I'm not suggesting by going to the county that you're going to get an automatic remodel, but we have to have this conversation based on the aging and the deferred maintenance that we have on all of our facilities in Gilroy. I cannot imagine why we can't have this conversation to see what we would get out of it. So I'm going to go to my left and keep going, and then I'll go back to Bracco.

Yeah, and same thing. And the reason why Los Altos is being used as an example is go ahead and strip out all the numbers. It's the process that the chief was trying to mention to you, that others and myself were trying to mention to you, to draw it to you. So when you're wondering, like, what is annexation? You have questions after this or whatever. Like, you can go and read the staff reports from LAFCO. Read the staff reports from Los Altos. Watch the YouTube video from LAFCO. so you can see what it means and how it sounds and how everything is transferred, irregardless of numbers. And I do want to make sure that we're able to see this. I mean, we can continue talking about it and planning it and studying it, but I think at a certain point, we need to make a decision on what we're going to do with our fire department. I'd like to see that come sooner than later. And the last reason why many of us have been using the Los Alamos example of annexation is that it was shown that it could be done in 90 days. Thank you.

Council Member Ramirez.

So I appreciate, first of all, I appreciate our current firefighters wanting to move perhaps to an annexation because of the salaries and benefits that go with that. I don't fault them for that at all. So I'm going to just throw that out there right now. And if we decide to move in a direction where we maintain control I think that we need to really give attention to that and how we can bring that up to parity. I do have the same concerns that Council Member Fugazi and Council Member Marks have. I ran on local control because once we give up local control, we do not get it back. And that brings significant concerns to me especially when there's anything county associated with it, we do not get the attention that other cities get. We do not have the influence that Los Altos, Saratoga, all those other places have. We are always just kind of, oh, wow, hill road. And that's evidenced with the ambulances, right? The ambulances are... ambulances are often times up in the north county or you know at BMC or whatever and then we're having to lose and I saw it on a ride along that I went on where we didn't have access to an ambulance for a stroke victim and we had to lose station because we had to go get that ambulance and provide that service that the county says that they will provide for us, but they do not. So I have significant concerns about giving that up. I am open to looking at annexation and what that provides. I would fight 100%. You know, if we went in that direction, that they take on immediately the retrofitting of the Sat House system. BUT I AM ALSO VERY INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT SERVICE MODELS THAT WE CAN PROVIDE WHILE MAINTAINING CONTRAINMENTS. SO THOSE ARE THE TWO THINGS. THANK YOU.

COUNCIL MEMBER CLINE.

BEING PART OF COUNCIL AND THE SIDE LETTER THAT WAS PUT FORWARD A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, TO HAVE THIS DISCUSSION, I'M REALLY HAPPY TO HEAR WHAT WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT TODAY. I KNOW WE TALKED ABOUT THIS YESTERDAY. me and Councilmember Hilton, just the different models. And it's been talked about for almost two generations, we've been talking about the issues, the challenges. We talked about remodeling fire stations, but in my experience, I just did, two years ago, San Carlos replaced an existing aging fire station. FIRE STATION, NEIGHBORHOOD FIRE STATION, WITH A BRAND NEW ONE. SO WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT REMODEL, YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT REPLACEMENT. THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. IT'S NOT REMODEL BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH THAT GOES. THESE TWO STATIONS, YEAH, THEY'RE RELICS. THEY'RE OLD. WHEN WE SAY RELIC, IT'S ACTUALLY THEY'RE OLD. THEY NEED TO BE REPLACED. SO THAT FACTORS IN THE STUDY, FACTORS IN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT REALLY LOOKS LIKE IN THE NEXT THREE TO FIVE YEARS AS WE DISCUSS THIS. AND I'M WITH YOU ON THIS We need to do this now, not later. And is it, I agree with local control, especially with the challenges that we have, but do we have that ability to keep that local control with the model we have now? And that's what we have to talk about. And be honest about that. I also look at, at least just an idea, and I've talked with others about this, so it's not new for some of you, but again, a fire district that would be both Morgan Hill and Gilroy. I know they have the contract with Cal Fire, but they're also growing exponentially, residentially with building out all the different things. Their costs are going up, so they're going to have to look at that in two years. And so having that discussion too, as a fire district working with the two cities where we keep that local control in South County, at least has to be part of the discussion in my mind. I may be off, you know, be, you know, out of my mind in that, but I really want to see that, at least discuss that as part of these discussions. Annexation, of course, that would solve our challenges in long-term, potentially, and we need to look at that. So we've got to have that discussion, and I say, with you, now, not later.

Thank you. I'm going to jump back to Council Member Bracco, and we're going to try to wrap this up. We're at the two-hour timeline.

Yeah, I agree with a lot you said, Mr. Mayor. This deserves more conversation, but I want to see... hard facts. You know, what's it going to cost, you know, to go ahead and reach out to the county, get a price. What's it going to cost? What are we going to have to do to the stations? You know, find out exactly what it's going to take, what it's going to cost, what we can expect. And I think we need to reach out to, as we've seen with this data center, we need to reach out to the community. because I don't think they're gonna be very happy about it, or they may be, hopefully they will. And what Councilman Klein said, you know, my first study session 21 years ago was this. Yeah, we're still talking about it. And it was a four three vote to keep Gilroy on the side of the truck.

Council Member Fugazi.

I mean, I want to say just outright I am completely against annexation. I don't even think we should go explore the idea. I don't know how many other council members feel that way. I think you should probably get a straw poll on that to see whether or not it even bears out. The whole idea of giving up all of our assets, all of our control, future costs, future large sums of our property tax, depending on how it's structured, All of it sounds like a super, super bad idea. I want to add also that the chief had talked about how an organization taking on a contract wants to take on a contract for 10 or 20 years. The same thing stands for a city, right, or for me in the private sector. Even when something costs slightly more, me understanding that I've got a 10-year contract or a 20-year contract allows me to have predictability and allows me to not have to think about something nearly as much as I would otherwise. When I get into the situation where I have a year-to-year or every couple of years labor negotiation and all of these kinds of aspects, and I love our force and everything, but it is an aspect that we have to deal with all the time. It's an overhead that we have as a city to deal with. And having somebody, something, even if it's an expensive county contract, I don't know, means that it's predictable. Then it's something we know what our costs are going to be. We know what is going to be going forward. And if we have the control and we need the money and we need to have better fire stations, we can bond and figure out a way to get fire stations and the community can drive that as opposed to, again, being the redheaded stepchild that may or may not get a county to come in and take care of what they need to in the way that our community wants them to. Thank you.

Council Member Marks, final comments?

Yes, my final comment is I don't think we're ready to make this decision now without a lot more studying and a lot more facts. For me to agree to this, I want to see the dollar and cents. And I also have problems with giving up local control because once you give it up, you don't get it back. And those are just my thoughts.

Thank you. Council Member Hilton.

Um, you know what, real briefly that I completely understand the local control thing, but you know, I want to, I want to hear how you're proven what you've done with local control. Um, and to me, the proof has been in our budgets, our work plans, our studies. We've been studying this for as long as Brock has been on the council. He says, um, I'm getting frustrated with it. It's been six years of sitting here talking about it and planning on it. Um, and, uh, you know, proof, Show what you've done with your local control, even if it's just you yourself. That's what I've been trying to do, is to try to show the community a direction that we can go in. A direction that I feel that this city has failed, city admins have failed, the fire department admins have failed. Annexation would basically mean no more labor negotiations, no more personnel management issues, no operational liability. no budgeting for multi-million dollar fire engines no maintenance projects no station replacement programs i think we need to get completely out of the um fire service uh service business and you know hopefully councilmember brocco will be able to have this discussion before you leave in december i think that would be important for you to be a part of it I think that it is pretty easy if we were to go up and actually ask all these agencies instead of making guesses or having a council member try to be the biggest advocate. I don't like being in this position, but at the same time, I come here and all we're doing is talking again. I was expecting to get exactly like here's what annexation costs. Here's what contracting costs. Here's here's where we've been. We can't go here. Like I want I want to make those decisions. I only have two years left in my current term I really hope that we can get this done.

Thank you councilmember Ramirez So I appreciate the fact that you guys have been studying it for 21 years I haven't only been sitting here two years and now we're faced with it. I need to have the answers I need to have the information I would like to have it expedited so that we don't continue this conversation for the next 21 years and But I am certainly not ready to say, let's go annexation or let's do this. I need to have the information as robust as it can be and as expedited. And that's where I feel.

Council Member Klein, we're giving you direction, correct? Yeah. In that sense. So this is our opportunity to do that. So I'm all for that. Let's get going.

Okay, so I think what I'm hearing here is we do want to give direction regarding a service model. I'm going to let Matt wrap it up, but we do want to give direction and we want feedback on a service model other than what we use, right? As well as I do believe that I am hearing, even from you, you want more information on annexation.

I want it on fax, dollars, cents.

Great idea. And I'm hearing that from the left as well. So, so far... City Administrator Morley. We do have some things that we would like and you can wrap it up for us.

Thank you. So yeah, we appreciate your patience and with the presentation today and the input that you provided is super helpful and it provides guidance for us and for me specifically who is new stepping into this conversation. We do understand the need for pace and we will continue the pace on this and we'll have that conclusion for you VERY SOON, I THINK TO IMAGINE THAT WE'LL HAVE ONE MORE DISCUSSION ON THIS AND BE DONE WITH IT IS PROBABLY NOT REASONABLE, BUT THERE WILL BE A COUPLE MORE DISCUSSIONS THAT WE HAVE MOVING THIS FORWARD. I THINK THE DECISION FITS NICELY INTO A PRIORITIZATION AND A BUDGET CONVERSATION THAT WE'LL HAVE AS WE LOOK AT THE FUTURE BUDGET, SO I WOULD THINK THAT THAT'S A GOOD TIMELINE FOR PROVIDING SOLID DIRECTION TO STAFF IN WHERE WE'RE HEADED. That said, we will have another discussion this calendar year as we bring additional information forward to you. I hear that you want to hear data on annexation and the cost associated with that, as well as contracts, and what the options are with numbers associated. So we'll bring that. And the service delivery model is certainly something that we want to handle, probably on a separate track, but also good data for us, good information for us to have. So thank you for the constructive conversation today. Thank you very much.

One more comment from Klein? We will do it the same format, study session, instead of a council meeting as far as nighttime. And we do the same approach. I prefer this because it gives you the chance to have a good, solid conversation.

And so as part of this, you're going to be reaching out to these organizations to get firm numbers. That's what you're hearing. Yes. Good.

Thank you. Five-minute break before we go on to the next topic. Thank you very much.

Good job.

Green is go.

A call. How about now? Can you hear me now? Okay. All right. Well, welcome back to the meeting. We're going to turn it over, go directly right to our two staff members, Derek and John. I'm not sure who's going first, but take it away.

John.

John's up first.

I'll go. I'll go. Mayor, council members, community members, thank you for the opportunity to come and speak about your capital improvement program This is something that we've been wanting to do for some time, and finally the stars aligned to kind of set up for what we believe is an important conversation. We, along with our staffs, which many are in the audience here today, are very proud of the work that we do on behalf of the community and you to deliver capital projects, maintain facilities, utilities, and to keep things working throughout the city and keeping our streets safe and other things safe so our first responders can also get there in a safe and orderly manner as well. Today we are kind of pushing two things. The primary issue is just to give you an update and status a bit on the current fiscal year. CIP, we're really kind of at the beginning of that, but we want to let you know what's going on, what's happening. as we look forward in this fiscal year. And secondarily, to kind of look at what's coming in the future, which is a new five-year CIP and a new biennial capital budget, which will be coming next, starting next January. And we'll talk a little bit about that. So again, the Capital Improvement Program is a consolidated planning and budgeting tool, so it's a bit of both. And it's important for many reasons, and basically every function of the city in some way benefits from the capital improvement program, whether it's having air conditioning here at this office, whether it's having a roof overhead that's not leaking, or whether it's the streets, whether it's fire station remodels, a new fire station, or having wastewater collected and taken to the plant, or water delivered to your home, whatever. means that's what we do here. The future needs and maintenance side is typically tied in with growth planning, which comes primarily out of your general plan, which right now we're operating with the 2040 general plan. And some of that also will involve, and we'll talk about that briefly later, impact fees and how those kind of fit into also the capital improvement program. So, thank you. The CIP planning cycle, as indicated, is coming, staring us down right now. We are already commencing work on the 28 to 32 CIP and trying to align those projects with known budget issues that we have, the funding sources and things of that nature. Some of that is going to have to wait until the end of January when we have a full understanding of fund balances. But we're going to do the best we can to try to align with both the funding that we do know of as well as council strategic priorities. Those strategic priorities we anticipate coming again to the new seated council in February. So we will have to be nimble. and make sure that the CIP also recognizes that some of those priorities may adjust according to direction from council at that point. And ultimately, that would be a June 2027 adoption of both the CIP, the Capital Improvement Program, and the biennial two-year capital budget. So along with that today, thank you, we are not going to talk about every project that was listed in the staff report. We don't want to belabor that point. What we would like to do is just speak to a few items, particularly some of those items that aren't as high visibility sometimes, but they're important nevertheless. Some of these are high priority items, pickleball, and I'll talk a little bit about where we are schedule-wise on that one. So this one I'll take right here, which is the reduced speed limits near the schools. I'm very happy to report that we were able to, between our staff and contract work, install over 300 new signs to implement the reduced speed limits near all public schools and the two major private schools in the city. That was an extremely challenging task to accomplish, and we accomplished that within two days of the opening of Gilroy Unified School District. So I'm proud of the performance of everybody on that. Thank you to the council for the funding. Thank you to... Mr. Morley for pushing us along on that one. I hear some complaints about people can't drive 15, but I think we all know if you post at 15, you at least probably are looking at 20 at worst case scenario, right? So it's kind of human nature. So it is not perfect there. So that's where we are from one of those items. We also have some other items, and these are completed projects. We've talked about the replacement of the restrooms at Oakside. Again, we've kind of beat that one, but I want to say thank you again, and this is working well. challenged with some operational issues, nighttime activities and things of that nature, but things have been getting better. And then we also kind of under the radar with your $500,000 allocation of funds in the budget for smaller capital projects and improvements, we were able to do the resurfacing of both the courts 5 and 6 of Los Animas. There were cracks running down the very middle of those and they need to be reworked and rebuilt a bit. And also as part of that we resurfaced the tennis courts and public works staff followed that with resurfacing around the asphalt adjacent to the handball courts. So that entire kind of area It certainly was refreshed and at a bargain basement price of less than $80,000 in total. So I think that was a significant improvement for money, but a significant benefit out of that.

With that, I'll turn it over. Thank you, John. I appreciate the introduction and good morning, counsel. Derek utilities director, so we're going to touch on some of the projects if you see a red bar around the projects Those are the projects we're going to touch on as John mentioned earlier. We're not going to go over all of them We don't want to bore you to death, but there are these are the important projects. We'd like to talk about You got me all right So the first one from utilities is the Well 8, 8A Rehabilitation Rehab Project. So this is two of the wells. One of the largest wells, Well 8, went offline back in 2022 due to a nitrate exceedance. If you remember or recall back in 2022, we had to issue a do not drink. Since then, both of these wells have been offline. Both wells tie into one common header. And so what's going on in this project is it's a little bit hard to see in this picture up the top right there is we are installing a new nitrate analyzer. And so that's going to look at the incoming water quality as it exits the well. That will be tied in directly to a PLC. It's essentially a mini computer, you can think of it as. And that will allow the well to run. And if there's any sort of starting to see an exceedance, it will automatically divert that water to waste and or shut the well down. What's the location of this one? This is over off of, it's close to, help me out here. Corner, thank you. Thank you. I'm still getting familiar with the streets. So yeah office 6 by Costco Two wells on one lot So yeah, this well has been off for way too long. So we are expediting repair on this Beyond the nitrate analyzer. Well eight will get a new pump new column And when this well goes back online, which is projected by the end of the year with approval from DDW, which is our regulator and We will then have all nine wells back in service for the first time for almost five years. Definitely. Yes. So we do see in that area with ag higher nitrate levels than we do inland. And so just for reference, the MCL is 10 milligrams per liter. So this one historically has ranged between seven to eight. and we got that one spike that exceeded the 10. Because it is an acute health hazard, that's why we had to issue the do not drink water. But there are additional measures that can be put in place, additional sampling, so we're working with DDW to ensure that when this well goes back online that there won't be another exceedance in the future.

Just one little question. So do you anticipate any concern with the Amazon being there next to it, those increasing because of that? No, not at all. Thank you.

This well is really deep.

It is deep. Yeah. And so, again, it's by ag. And so there's another well that's close by, well seven. And that one historically has seen higher than 50 percent of the MCL for nitrates as well. It is pretty common in ag. Unfortunately, it's one of the constituents that is the most costly to remove for treatment and one of the harder constituents to treat for water. So there are variable options. One of the ones we would look into if the problem gets worse on that side of town would be blending potentially with another source, which is your cheapest route for treatment. I don't have that off the top of my head. I believe it's around 600, but I don't know the exact number.

That can go...

Can you speak a little closer, please? Sorry. Thank you.

Can you drill deeper to get under that contamination?

It's potential. So one of the things we looked at on this particular well is packing off a portion of the screen so that we're pulling from a higher portion of, or I'm sorry, a deeper portion of the aquifer. Unfortunately, the driller's log didn't match what was actually in the hole. And so the entire portion was screened. Once the screen started, the rest of the well was a screen. So you can't put a packer in there because it's just going to go around the outside through the gravel pack, right? But there are options to drill deeper. One of the problems you have with drilling deeper, though, then you hit another constituent, and that's arsenic that's usually shown in the deeper aquifer. So there's give and take. You know, right now we are – basically steady states with nitrate over the last five years looking at historic values. This well had just that one blip that went through over the 10 causing the violation. In hindsight, what probably could have happened, there could have been additional confirmation sampling done right away that probably could have not required that do not drink water. But unfortunately, that was the event that happened. But yeah, going forward, having this monitoring in place, we'll be able to see the tread lines. If we see something starting to rise, That's when we would look at either a replacement well, which would be drilling deeper or in a different location, right, or adding wellhead treatment or blending. So there's a variable amount of options. It's what's the most cost effective for the city and what makes the most sense.

Further development though of the area would potentially reduce that too, right? Because there'd be less farmland that would be percolating down the nitrates and phosphates that go into the soil from the fertilization, right?

Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's also nitrate plans in place for ag to reduce the nitrate loading. So we're not seeing as heavy of a hit as we did decades ago. But it takes a while for that to clear up, yeah. And so IT'S KIND OF THE NATURE OF THE BEAST. WE SEE THIS WITH A LOT OF CONSTITUENTS THAT WE DON'T THINK OF AT THAT TIME, SUCH AS PFAS IS ANOTHER ONE, RIGHT? AND SO, YEAH, JUST KIND OF THE CARDS THAT WERE DEALT. So the next CIP we want to touch on is the replacement of our meters to our AMI network. So these are remote reads, not drive-bys. They go to a central station. These are important because we can track water loss, determine leaks right away, and then it reduces labor hours to actually physically go out there, pop the box, read it, or drive by and read the meter. This is a project being done in-house. We are 95% done with the project right now. We anticipate being done by the end of next year. And so as a follow-up question to be asked, what are we going to do if we're not reading all those meters right? The other component of that is actually doing a meter testing program. And so bench testing or testing in place are large meters or revenue meters to make sure that they're appropriately reading so we can spend staff time that would normally be used to read these meters on actually doing a robust meter testing program. The next one here is the straw wastewater improvement out the wastewater plant. So this is an expansion from eight and a half to 11 million gallons. This is nearing completion. They are in the testing phase right now, clean water testing phase. We anticipate being done in November. This is a long-standing CIP that's been on the books for a long time. This is a cost share between the cities of Morgan Hill and Gilroy, 58, 42% respectively between, actually not respectively, with Gilroy being 58%. And yeah, again, nearing completion. And with that, I will turn it back over to John to go over some of his ongoing VIPs. Pickleball.

Thank you again for your support, your funding, and your continued interest and the community's interest in this project. I am here to provide some information with regard to schedule, one that I'm not thrilled to have to deliver. But we have a long order issue with the fence post that is creating a bit of a delay. If you've been by, you'll see that there's been sort of somewhat of a stoppage. And that's just the whole project has become contingent upon delivery of the fence post. And those fence posts are due to be delivered next week, be coated. AND BE INITIATED AND INSTALLED. INITIALLY WE WERE LOOKING AT AN OCTOBER 6 END DATE FOR CONSTRUCTION. WE'RE PUSHING NOW TOWARD THE END, BASICALLY THE LAST WEEK OF OCTOBER AT THIS POINT FOR THE PROJECT. SO SLIGHT DELAY. THERE'S AT THIS POINT NO AMOUNT OF MONEY, NO AMOUNT OF EFFORT IS GOING TO PUSH THOSE POSTS COMING ANY EARLIER THAN WHERE WE ARE AT THIS POINT. SO WE WILL endeavor and provide additional updates, the website will be modified accordingly and we'll put out information through Rochelle to make sure the community is aware of this delay. Thanks. I am pleased to say that our trash capture project is on schedule to have all installed before the December deadline. 61 of 73 are in place. And the remaining should be in place within the next month and be fully in operation. We are also related to this, starting our survey work on the Track 2 provisions rather than going for the trash capture. The council directed us to look at Track 2 as an option, which is a non-structural improvements for dealing with this. And we're starting work on survey. and have software in place and proceeding toward track two. So I'll give you that update as well. Thanks.

All right. I'm going to take it from here. So next up, we're going to talk about projects in preparation and or design. We'll start with utilities first. You can see a lot of projects on the list right there. Just for history, it's kind of been stale for a little bit with utilities, so we're trying to push out a lot of CIPs in the next year, year and a half. We're projecting to do about half of the five-year CIP in about the next 15 months. So we have a lot of projects in design. A lot of those projects we have bundled, too, for efficiencies. The first one we'll talk about here. Thank you, John. So this is what we call the Water Utility Improvement Project. So this is six separate CIPs that we bundled and consolidated into one large CIP. So this project consists of about 8,150 linear feet of water main, 16 hydrants, 150 service laterals, several fire building connections. There is a jack and bore crossing, and then there's a bridge crossing on this. So it's a very large project, approximately $10 million in design. We are at 95% and reviewing the 100% design plans right now. We hope to go out to bid and award early next year. So as part of that, this project will affect Swanston, Casey, Broadway, Sargent, Church, Gurries, Murray, and Monterey. Again, these were separate CIPs, and we consolidated into one large CIP for efficiencies and to HOPEFULLY GET A MUCH CHEAPER UNIT COST AS IT'S MORE REWARDING TO THE CONTRACTOR OF HAVING THIS LARGE PROJECT. THE NEXT PROJECT THAT IS IN CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW IS THE WELL NINE McCARTHY WELL. I should say design and construction. So the city got the lot last year for that well nine. We put in the test wells. We tested the water quality. Water quality at that particular well is looking promising. Low levels of nitrate, lower levels of arsenic, and no PFOS were detected in the test wells. So the next step is to build the permanent well. That right now is at 65 percent design. Once that borehole is completed and the well is installed, the next step will be installing the pertinences and the pump house and making the connections. And we anticipate doing that early next year. Just to note, this is the first new well that the city has drilled and constructed in approximately 20 years. This is a well to promote development. And therefore, impact fees will be used for the purpose of developing and installing as well.

Question on that one. It shows two lots there, right? Is that correct? that there's actually two lots in that space?

I believe it's one single lot. So yeah, it's one lot. It's size large enough potentially to add a big station for the corp yard. Yes, correct. And then the other component of that is we want to make sure we had enough room if we needed to put wellhead treatment in the future. out there. The problem we're having right now with some of the old existing wells, if we need to put wellhead treatment in there, the lots are extremely small and we can't fit. If we want to put a GAC, a GAC filter on there, there's just not room to do that. So now you've got to find another lot to purchase. So yeah, this is a large lot. We are also looking at other alternative uses for it beyond just the well. But the parcel would be normal, would be much larger than what you're normally seeing right now just because We need to have room for future treatment just in case it's needed. A good question. The next CIP is the service line replacements, steel service line replacements. So in the picture, you can see this is kind of why we're doing these projects. So no, that's not an actual picture. But there are some that look like that, but no. Yeah, so galvanize their original lines. It's not any indication of bad water quality. We do have well water. It is hard water. These lines are, you know, 75, 80 years old past their useful life. This tends to happen. And so we're going in to replace 50 of these steel lines. And then there's a section of main two inch main off of Monterey that we want to relocate to a 10 inch existing water main.

Was changing them to stainless or to?

No, it would be to copper.

To copper, okay, because I was just going by the picture here.

That's galvanized, yes, that's galvanized and the top would be, looks to be stainless, correct, yeah. The next project is the St. Louis Hospital large meter installation. So this one is currently under construction now, actually. And so this is replacing a failed meter out there to a new AMI meter. But also the key point to this is adding in redundancy. So we're adding a bypass line to that meter facility. So in the future, we don't have to shut down the actual hospital to replace the meter and or test it. And so we are doing a tap, a hot tap is what we call it, when we work on the system live to run a bypass around the meter to facilitate us to be able to change it out in the future. And then we are coordinating with the hospital on this one as well to add in a backflow device right after the meter for system protection as well. We are doing a majority of it in-house besides the hot tapping as we don't have that piece of equipment, but the rest will be done in-house. Yes. And the next project here to touch on is the joint sewer line, the trunk line. It's really replacement and rehab. And so there are several deficiencies within this joint trunk line that require either a cutout of the existing trunk line or we call it a cured in place liner that will be put in. So basically a slip line that goes inside of it, which is a much cheaper route to do. And if you're going to ask, why don't we do that for the whole pipeline, I wish we could. There are components of it that are just too failed to allow us to put a slip liner directly in it. So those sections need to be cut out, replaced with a new section of main. The other sections that are still in decent enough condition to slip line will get a slip line.

So do you determine that with, like, a camera pig or something like that?

Correct, yeah. So these all got a video assessment on them, and they were found a couple sections at the top, the crown of the pipe, to be in severe deterioration that required the bane to be cut out. So this project is at 95% design as of, actually just hit my desk yesterday, so we are reviewing that now with a goal of construction next year.

I have a question. Are there redundancies in all of that line? So how do you fit in a new piece if the wastewater never stops coming?

Yeah, so there is a joint trunk line. So there is another line actually next to it. And so this is We're kind of blessed in the layout of this line to be able to bypass relatively easy to the line next to it. If you don't have that ability to do that, you're running a lot of above ground high line pipe to the next manhole to bypass. So pretty fortunate and kudos on the previous staff on the design of this to allow us to do this relatively easy. These are still big transmission mains, require big bypass bumps and whatnot. I'll turn it over to John for the next set of updates.

I'll give you a brief update on Lions Creek Trail and the day road improvements associated with that. So Lions Creek Trail I'm thrilled to announce has been given the funding authorization from Caltrans so we are good in that respect. This project, sorry, I have to operate my own clicker. So this project has changed a little bit and I'm not sure this is the last time we've been here. Originally, we were hopeful that the total amount of the grant funds we had for this project would allow for construction from Kern to the pedestrian bridge that accesses to Christopher High. When we finalized basically around 60% design, it became very clear that we were going to be well over budget. And at that point, we made the determination to request modification of the project description, which was approved by Metropolitan Transportation Commission earlier this year. And what that did was limit the area from Kern to Santa Teresa. And we also maintained the intersection improvements, the crosswalk and the improvements at that point. And at this point, we are in line potentially for additional funds from FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

THAT MEANS WEST OF SANTA THERESA THAT WE WERE GOING TO DO BEFORE IS NOT GOING TO BE DONE UNLESS WE GET THE FUNDS Correct.

It's designed so, and we believe that we have funding committed from the feds for that westerly piece, but at this point the project is limited to that easterly section, which is, I think, the most critical piece because we've got multiple access points reaching Christopher High, and if we get the crosswalk and the improvements there, that will basically make that a safer point of access for all heading eastbound from there. So that project is proceeding, and we're happy with that. We are still, I'll just say, unfortunately, many of our projects are involving other governmental agencies and entities that we don't control. For example, the intersection here is subject to encroachment and approvals and design review by county engineering. The project itself with the trail is within valley water jurisdiction. And we are still awaiting their review approval finally on this. But we will get that in this move forward. But that becomes a challenge at times for us. And I'll just click through there and actually go back one. There's also questions. Individuals have come to the council to ask where we are with the HAWC. The pedestrian crossing for Gateway seniors, that project is at Caltrans awaiting their authorizations for the right of way work and hopefully funding approvals. We anticipate this going to bid very soon and proceeding to construction early next year. And so we're happy to see that. finally get there. Another item which is probably off of most radars is the traffic circulation master plan and traffic impact fee analysis and this is a very important piece of work that we've been working through with Kim Lee Horne our contractor. Part of this is and what you're seeing here is just an example of one of the intersections that that was conceptually designed by the consultant, reviewed by our staff, and this leads to then costing out what those costs are and then allocating what future development really's relationship is and contribution to these improvements. There are 110 intersections that we've had to look at in this regard and so it's taken quite a bit of time and this will be coming forward to the council after the first of the year for consideration of the impact fee as part of that process. Thank you. We are also moving forward with the library EV chargers. That item is actually on your next council meeting in October for some actions proceeding with that. We were able to get an extension, which we're thrilled on that one, to allow this grant to continue forward. And this is one of those great situations in which the city's contribution is virtually nothing other than the staff time for administering all the capital construction pieces paid for by either Silicon Valley Clean Energy or through a grant on CMAQ-related and other air quality issues. Thanks. And I won't speak to any of these. We can certainly come back to those. We just weren't going to highlight those additional items that are in design. I will jump to Santa Teresa Fire Station. The council is aware of that project pretty well. But I'm here to report that we are proceeding forward with the design. The work is on time, on schedule. And we're meeting basically weekly with the design team to proceed. And there are some minor revisions and changes that are occurring, which is a good thing to look at from the bridging documents. But for the most part, everything is as was intended and designed through the bridging documents. So good news on that front.

John, can I ask you a question? Sure. I've noticed they put the fencing or the walls up And they're doing all the work that they're supposed to be doing adjacent to our property, in essence?

They were able, this is KB. Yeah, KB. I knew him as Kaufman and Broad, but KB Homes was able to construct those walls without use of our property. So those are now constructed, and they're commencing with all the work on that subdivision.

But it won't impact us then? Not impacting us. For the future? Okay. Not an issue at all. That was a question that we had about that. and what they would do or wouldn't do. It's all taken care of.

It was, and we still met and continued conversations with them, and it offered them the opportunity to use our property under certain conditions, and they chose to work from that side. Okay. Okay, thanks. And there will be a sign coming up very soon on that that just says future construction, future fire station. I think it's good for the community to know what's going on WITH THAT, BUT BEYOND THAT, I THINK IT'S REALLY GOOD FOR THE FOLKS BUYING HOMES IN THE FUTURE TO KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON IN THAT CORNER. WE ARE. WE HAVE THAT ACTUALLY ORDERED AND COMING. SORRY. We have just a brief pedestrian improvements in Monterey Road, all of these sort of dealing with sidewalks and improved mobility. The first one is a project that's kind of probably off the radar screen for most folks, but that would be constructing sidewalk along Miller Street and Miller Park on Carmel adjacent to Brownell Middle School. That's, I think, a needed project in that area. And then we have other improvements at Prince Valley and 9th Street that are looking to, again, link and connect improvements with. And ultimately, we've also submitted a sizable OBAG 4 grant, OBAG 5 grant for completing sidewalk both Easter both to the north and to the south on Monterey Road east side so

All right. I know we're kind of on crunch time here, so I'm going to just kind of fly through the last two slides.

If you could hang on one second. I have one other question. You did have sidewalk repair on there, right?

Yes. Yes.

And I'm sorry if I'm confused with all the sidewalk repair stuff in general, but back in April of last year, I put in for the sidewalk repair on the southwest corner, for instance, of 1st and Monterey. And it still is an ad a issue and I don't understand how if we're paying for sidewalk repair We don't get priority in some of these areas of walkway And I appreciate us doing all the new stuff, but maybe just a quick explanation I will I will tell you this we're planning to come in January to talk sidewalk program and sidewalk prioritization and sidewalk liability issue

And that will be a significant point of conversation regarding that. I can certainly take offline any conversation you want regarding the rest of that.

Let's wrap up the presentation so that we can get to a couple questions before council members have to excuse themselves.

I'll just jump through real quick. I think John and I are both very committed to the CIP. And we are still building capacity in our departments. Utilities was a newly created department in the last couple years, and we're still building the staff levels appropriately. But we're both committed to executing the CIP in full force. And the last slide here is just kind of looking ahead. And so as some funds come to an end, we are looking to do a nexus study here soon. And then from utilities, a new rate study. We will start initiating that fiscal year 2027. as the last rate goes into effect January 2029. So be on the lookout for that. And then as John mentioned earlier, we are currently working on the new five-year CIP BEGINNING THIS MONTH TO TAKE TO THE COUNCIL HERE IN THE NEAR FUTURE. SO WITH THAT, THAT IS OUR PRESENTATION, AND WE'RE HAPPY TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS.

I WILL START WITH COUNCIL MEMBER MARKS AND RAMIREZ, BECAUSE THEY MENTIONED THEY WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE BY 12.

JOHN, JUST REAL QUICK, WHERE ARE THE CHARGING STATIONS AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY GOING TO BE PUT IN?

WESTERLY SIDE OF THE BUILDING.

AND HOW MANY?

We had intended six, but that would include two different types of chargers. We're looking at going to maximum four of the faster charge.

All right. Thank you.

Council Member Ramirez.

Just a quick thank you. Great presentation.

Oh, yeah. Council Member Hilton. Yeah, please.

Yeah, I want to give my thanks to you also, John, for our monthly meetings that we've had ever since you've been here. This specific CIP and whether they're unfunded or funded, to me, I've always looked at them as like the hopes and dreams of Gilroy residents, right, or council members or staff. It's a place that doesn't need to exist just because it doesn't have funds attached to it, right? And so to me, that's important. I was around on the Bike and Ped Commission when we created that. So I just appreciate that part. And also, Derek, you just mentioned it. You guys are already trying to figure out what you want to put in here. So I just want to throw that back on my colleagues up here and the future candidates that are trying to come on here and the commissioners and all those people that this is your opportunity now. to think of those chartered projects that you want to try to get in here and try to pitch it to staff members, pitch it to us. It's our job to start bringing these things forward because before we know it, you're going to be in front of us looking for an approval, actually planning commission first, right, for looking for approval. And by that time, it's a little too late. Never too late to put an item in the charter later. But I also wanted to thank staff behind you. You guys do a tremendous amount of work. And I've always appreciated it. Julie, you've been around just as long as I have. So I just appreciate you all and everything you do. All those service requests that come in to get things done and to get things smooth out there and just make Gilroy beautiful and functional. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Council Member Klein.

I was with Councilmember Hilton. Same thing. We were part of the change in getting this split of public works to utilities. And so to see this process and see how it's really the fruit of it, and it's really moving along in a really great way. Staff has really come behind it and putting things together. And Derek, you coming on board, it's great. Really appreciate the job you're doing. And this is a great report, both of you and your staff. Great job. Thank you. Appreciate you.

Quick question for Derek. Yes. Could you talk a little bit more about the piece of equipment that denitrifies the water that you talked about at the well number eight? So is that temporary? Does it do it on an ongoing basis or does it shut it down completely until personnel comes?

So what's going in currently, it doesn't remove the nitrates. It's a nitrate analyzer. So it's analyzing the nitrates being produced from the well. And so what happens is if it starts to see an exceedance, Before it hits that 10, it's going to go what we call blowdown, so it'll go to waste. If it's still exceeding beyond that, we will just shut the well down. And then whenever that exceedance occurs, then the operator will get called out, and we're not going to have an automatic restart because this is an acute violation. So we're going to have operator intervention to actually go out there, restart the well, test the well, and see if it's within a parameter that we can rerun into the system.

That's pretty interesting. And then I have a question for John, or this might even be for Council. One thing that I didn't see on the list of CIP, whether funded or unfunded, but it was a conversation that I always heard even before I was a candidate or mayor, is this pump track. It seemed like the community, there was a lot of conversation in this community about a pump track for a long time, and I don't see that on there, and I wish it was.

It is on there in a different way. We're proceeding with the parks and rec master plan and part of that will be to evaluate and assess what new opportunities are out there, how do we proceed, what new activities and certainly pump track is one of those that's being tested even in the upcoming survey work.

Is there an appropriate time then? Would that be maybe next spring when we're talking about funding?

We'll be in a full community outreach process over the next six to eight months. There will be ample time for that group to convene and communicate their interest and their desires for that.

Yeah, and I'll just piggyback off that. There's two of us up here that are going to be here with you next year, and we both have been hearing the same thing. We both want to see it, not only for the community, but but I do know that that's the same exact way that pickleball arose too, right? There was no charter project for pickleball, and that became the common theme where even people just wanted to say the word pickleball, even though it had nothing to do with the conversation. So yeah, I want to hint that too, that even though it lives, It lives inside the sports park master plan also, right? It's like phase four, phase five, that we moved it back over there a long time ago. So at least it lives somewhere, but yeah, to have its own charter would be pretty cool to see. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks. Looks like that's about it. Yeah, that's right.

That's it.

Right on time. Thank you very much. Thank you. We've got public comment. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Public comment. I have no speakers. Okay. Thank you very much. That adjourned. Meeting adjourned. 12.01. Thank you.