City Council - Regular Meeting

We're calling the meeting to order.

Madam Clerk. To a roll call.

Council Member Andriotta.

Present. Council Member Reedy. Here.

Council Member Brown.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Eklund.

Here.

Mayor Pearl.

Here. Okay, closed session 1A conference with legal counsel, existing litigation, the gathering in. Do we have any Anyone wishing to speak in the audience? Anyone on Zoom?

I do not have anyone on Zoom.

In that case, we'll close public comment. And we will adjourn to closed session. Okay, Blair, would you call your part to order please?

Good evening and welcome to the City of Lincoln's regular meeting of the City Council. Tonight's meeting will be televised and available on Channel 8, People Channel 18, YouTube, and Zoom. Those wishing to address City Council on either a non-agenda or agenda item will be called upon at the appropriate time. Those who submitted a speaker card will be called first, followed by those in the audience, and finally those attending through Zoom. For those participating through Zoom that wish to provide public comment, please use the raise your hand feature or press star nine if you are calling in. Once public comment is open, please wait to be unmuted by the city clerk. Once unmuted, your name will be called and you may proceed in making your public comment. This evening's invocation will be given by Pastor Mark Shepard from Grace Life Church. Once the invocation has concluded, Mayor Pearl will call the meeting to order.

And Father, we thank you for both the mayor and all those represented here and all the council members and officials this evening. And concerning the business at hand, Lord, we thank you that you're giving them guidance, wisdom to move forward to continue to build and strengthen and look out for the best interests of the city of Lincoln. and all the local citizens that they represent. And Father, we ask you for your grace and your favor to be upon each and every one of them in their decision-making process. In Jesus' name, amen. God bless you. Thank you, Pastor Shepard.

Nice to see you again, sir. Okay, call the roll, please.

Council Member Andriotta? Present. Council Member Reedy? Present. Council Member Brown?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Eklund? Here. Mayor Perl?

Here. OK. We have a closed session before this. Mr. City Attorney, do we have anything to report out?

Nothing to report. Update on existing litigation information received.

Thank you very much. Very good. We'll move on to the Pledge of Allegiance. I think I see Mr. Dolencek here. Ron, would you lead us in the pledge, please?

Ready? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you very much, Ron. And it's nice to see you and your lovely bride here also.

Very good.

Okay. Agenda modifications. Do we have anyone from the, my colleagues want to modify the agenda?

No.

Okay. Staff. Okay. Very good. Okay. Information items and disclosures. Do any council members have any conflicts to report on the agenda this evening? Okay. Very good. Thank you very much. Do we have any informational items to share?

Good.

OK, neither do I. Whitney, you good? OK, anyone else? OK, perfect. Rocking through this over here. Presentations? None for me? No, it's coming up.

You went to?

It's OK. OK, I'm marching forward. I'm just following my script here. OK, we're a little bit out of time.

He went to information items before public comment.

OK. We'll have words after this. Okay. Fine. Very good. Okay. Okay. It's very good. Now we'll go to public comment. Public comment. Let me just read that over here. You are correct. I just want to hear a public comment. All speakers time will be limited to three minutes unless extended by the mayor. All comments or questions should be addressed to the mayor. In most cases, the city council is prohibited from discussing or taking action on any item not appearing on the posted agenda, but may engage in brief discussion, provide direction to city staff, or schedule items for future meetings. Okay, do we have any speaker cards?

I do have one speaker card. Stan Nader.

Mr. Mayor and Council, my name is Stan Nader. I live in the 12 Bridges area. At the last City Council meeting under Council-Initiated Business, Council Member Andy Roddell had a very robust discussion about the issue of e-bike riders' behavior and requested the Police Department staff member who was present in the room to report on the current status of enforcement on e-bike riders. violating basic traffic laws. He reported that where possible, traffic officers and school safety officers have been writing citations and working with the school district to restrict the presence of illegal bikes on their campuses. He did state that their ability to provide comprehensive enforcement It's limited due to staffing shortages within the department. This certainly demonstrates the need for more resources for public safety and why citizens need to support a financial measure to make it possible to add more officers to the department. In the mayor's comments, he indicated at his last coffee with the mayor, a major discussion in the meeting was about e-bikes. Council member Andriotta concluded her comments with a very sobering statement. That was if the matter of extremely poor behavior by e-bike riders was not dealt with, someone is going to get killed. And that will be a terrible thing for both persons involved to live with. When the city manager is able to put this item on a future agenda, this matter deserves your serious consideration. With regard to the water master plan and urban water master plan, There is no question that PCW has and will have the ability to provide the surface water supplies that the city needs and that was confirmed with my conversation with PCW staff member. The bigger question, does the city have the ability now and into the future to take that water that PCA w a brings to the delivery point for the city and properly distributed throughout the city given the explosive growth of the city. I raised this issue because over a year ago my lawn sprinklers did not work and my sprinkler maintenance person told me it was because the city was messing with my water pressure. When I spoke with a member of the water department staff, can I please finish? He admitted they had lowered the water pressure in my zone because the city was trying to get more water to the west side of the city. it is obvious more work needs to be done and the water department staff even admitted that in their comments following the presentation of the water urban water master plan please stay vigilant on this matter because it will require your constant oversight thank you thank you stan uh mr manager do we have any uh later information on the e-bikes

Yeah. So the police department has a presentation that they've put together that kind of talks a little bit about what they've done and what they're doing and what they want to do moving forward. And they're going to be releasing that publicly this week, Chief. And we'll use that as the basis for a future discussion on this. A little bit more of a holistic one that thinks about the issue regionally versus just within our city limits.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. And on the matter on the water issue and PCW a council member Eklund and I participate up with the PCW a two by two. We had a meeting last week and it was very productive. They went through all of the information that they have looking out towards build out. And exactly as Stan said, yes, there, there is water for us to continue to build out, which is a very good and comforting for our community, both now and in the future. So thank you very much. Blair, do we have any, anyone else in the interim?

Is there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I have no hands raised.

Okay, thank you very much. Okay, in that case, we will close public comment and move on to the consent calendar. Would any of my colleagues like to pull an item off consent?

Mayor, I just have a quick question on item 13J. Yep. Oh, I know it's not exactly related to this item because it's just the agreement with the Potters. We're just wondering if you knew how much we were short for the new scoreboard out there.

The latest I heard from the friends and from Clifton, who also I think they also are contributing, is that they may have reached their fundraising number. So they may have enough or just close to enough to pull it off. So I'll get a better update for you on kind of timeline of when they think it's going to get done, but the city's contribution helped, and then they've done, they must have fundraised more than, we put in, I think, $100,000 towards it, so they must have raised over $150,000 at this point.

Great, thank you.

Thanks, Holly, for bringing that up. Anyone else like to make a comment on it or pull an item? Okay, in that case, I'll ask for a motion.

Move approval of consent. Do we have a second?

Second. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Passes 5-0. Very good. Okay. Public hearing 14A. Conduct a public hearing and adopt resolution for the benefit assessment district number one update. Mr. Medill.

Good evening, Mayor, council members, and public. I will read a script to present this item. The city's benefit assessment district number one was formed in 2005 to fund operations and maintenance of city flood and storm drain improvements benefiting properties within the Lincoln crossing. It can ranch Cressley grove and Lincoln highlands developments, the city places assessments for the district annually on the county property tax bills and annual engineers report is prepared and approved by the city council. to set assessment rates each fiscal year. For fiscal year 26-27, the assessment rates proposed for the district are at the maximum rate set when the district was originally formed or additional territory was annexed in. The fiscal year 26-27 collection of assessments is estimated to be $95,430. City Council took the first steps in the fiscal year 26-27 annual approval process on May 12th with the adoption of two regulations, initiating proceedings, ordering and improving the preliminary engineer's report and setting the public hearing date for June 9th, 2026. This evening, city staff is recommending city council take the next steps in the annual approval process by conducting a public hearing, accepting public testimony and adopting two resolutions, One, a resolution approving the final engineer's report, ordering improvements and confirming the diagram and assessments for fiscal year 26-27. And two, a resolution ordering the levy and collection of assessments within the district for fiscal year 26-27. Following the public hearing and adoption of the two resolutions this evening, the district assessments will be submitted to the county prior to the June 30th deadline. That concludes my presentation this evening. Myself and the city's consultant from Francisco and Associates are available for any questions you may have.

Thank you very much, Pat. Any questions for my colleagues? In that case, we'll open up the public hearing. Madam Clerk, do we have any speaker cards?

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment on this item? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment on this item? I have no hands raised.

Okay, thank you very much. In that case, we'll close public hearing.

Final comments from my colleagues. I have one question. Just clarification on the diagram that you have on the staff report. The colors say one through four, but the teal one says five on the map. Is that just a typo or am I missing something? that on your in the second part the diagram yeah it says one two and five one two three and five i don't see a four on there yeah there's a misprint that zone five shown in the map should be four should be a four okay that's what i thought and then the number one the yellow that's this the same area yeah the linking yeah lincoln crossing thank you good catch We might want to just change that.

Any other comments on it? OK. Can we adopt both these sections at once?

Separate public hearings, so I'd take them separately.

OK. In that case, we'll do 14A.1 over here, resolution approving the final engineer's report. for district number one. Okay, accept the motion. I move approval. Okay, second. Second. Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed, nope, five-zero, thank you very much.

And I'll move approval for 14A number two, adopt resolution ordering the levy and collection of assessment with benefit of district number one for fiscal year 26-27. Second.

Moved and second, any comments? Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? No? OK. Pass 5-0. Thank you very much. OK. Public hearing 14b, conduct a public hearing and adopt resolutions for the landscaping and lighting district number one. Mr. Medill again.

Thank you very much, Mayor. I do have another script to read. This is far too much for me to memorize, so bear with me here. The city's landscaping and lighting district number one, otherwise known as the LAD, was formed in 1982 to fund the maintenance of city landscaping parks, open space trails, and street lighting. The LAD is comprised of the original benefit zone and 32 additional benefit zone, which in total encompasses approximately 40% of the city's parcels. The city places assessments annually on the county property tax bills to provide funding for operations and maintenance of the improvements benefiting parcels in the LAD. The Landscaping Lighting Act of 1972 requires that an annual engineer's report be prepared and approved by city council to set assessment rates each fiscal year. For fiscal year 26-27, The assessment rates proposed for all benefit zone do not exceed the maximum rate set when the LADD was originally formed or additional territory was annexed in. The fiscal year 26-27 collection of assessments is estimated to be $3,916,760. City Council took the first steps in fiscal year 26-27 annual approval process on May 12th with the adoption of two resolutions, initiating proceedings, ordering and approving the preliminary engineer's report and setting the public hearing date for June 9th, 2026. This evening, city staff is recommending city council take the next steps required in the annual approval process by conducting a public hearing, accepting public testimony and adopting two resolutions. One, a resolution approving the final engineer's report ordering improvements and confirming the diagram and assessments for fiscal year 26-27. And two, a resolution ordering the levy and collection of assessments within the LAD for fiscal year 26-27. Following the public hearing and adoption of the two resolutions this evening, the LAD assessments will be submitted to the county prior to the June 30th deadline. Also, an analysis to develop strategies to address the funding issues For the land that had been previously presented to city council will be conducted. City staff will come back to city council at a later date with findings of the analysis and recommendations for consideration. That concludes my presentation this evening, myself and the city's consultant from Francisco and associates are available for any questions you may have.

Thank you very much. Any questions for my colleagues? One question for our finance director on the deficit. So we've got, it looks like 828,600 For at large that's understandable over here and 1.4 million or that's covering deficits for those districts that can't generate enough there and that's come up, I think, originally, we started looking at this, it was $700,000 and it's so it's growing every year, I assume that there is no. we're not looking at a reduction going forward.

In the deficit, no, there's no reduction going forward. As cost continues to rise, that gap will continue to increase, and the general fund will have to pick up the slack.

Okay, just wanted to clarify that. That was a rhetorical question. Yeah, at some point, we have to do something about that, obviously. Okay, no other questions from my colleagues. Madam Clerk, do we have any speaker cards? I'm sorry, public hearing, I'm sorry, there was something else for a second, got ahead of myself.

Okay, now do we have any... Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment on this item? I have no hands raised.

Okay, very good, in that case, we'll close public hearing. Comments from the City Council? Any concluding comments on this before we vote? Okay, I'll accept a motion. I'll accept a motion.

Question 2, group.

Thank you. OK. And Ben? I'll second. Thank you very much. OK. This is for number 1. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? No. Passes 5-0. Very good. 14B, number 2, adopt a resolution ordering the levy and collection of assessments. I'll accept a motion. So moved. Second. And second. Very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Opposed, very good. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay, general business. 15A, adopt a resolution approving a technology disruption policy for public meetings in accordance with SB 707. Ms. Brown, you are.

Hi. I sit in the back row, so I get to see through people.

Up there.

uh good evening mayor and council members tonight's item is the adoption of the city technology disruption disruption policy for public meetings as required by sb 707. this new state law updated the brown acts teleconferencing requirements effective january 1st 2026 and requires city councils to adopt a policy by july 1st 2026 addressing how meetings will proceed if telephonic or internet service is disrupted During COVID, the city established a hybrid meeting system that enables both in-person and remote participation. Lincoln continues to be at the forefront in promoting transparency, accessibility, and public engagement. The proposed policy outlines the city's procedures to pause the meeting, make a good faith effort to restore access, and ensure transparency and continuity of public meetings. I'm asking that you adopt this policy if you have any questions.

Okay, very good questions from the council. Okay, any questions? Any comment cards?

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment on this item? See none. I will move over to zoom. Is there anyone on zoom who would like to provide public comment? I have no hands raised.

Okay, very good. Bring back to the council. Any final comments or questions?

I think it was good. We've already been doing it. We didn't change, so we don't really have to do anything differently. But I'm happy to say that, yeah, this is on par with what we already do for best practice.

Yes, best practice is good. Okay, very good. Thank you. Okay, I'll accept a motion. I'll move. Second?

Second.

Thank you very much. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? No. Very good. 5-0. Thank you very much. Okay, 15, Bravo. Adopt a resolution approving a full-time police record supervisor position and corresponding salary schedule. Ms. Rodriguez.

Well, for the receipt, retention, redaction, and release of official police records, police reports, and related law enforcement records in compliance with legal requirements associated with court orders, subpoenas, and public records act requests. This request is to establish dedicated supervisory oversight for the records unit and to support compliance with the complex legal and operational requirements governing police records. The department's current supervisory structure assigns oversight of the records and dispatch units to a dispatch supervisor. Because dispatch and records are both operationally significant functions with different service demands, staffing requirements, workflows, and compliance obligations, the dual supervision model is no longer operationally sustainable. If approved, this position will improve workflow management, quality control, record security, and timely, legally compliant responses to records requests and legal demands. It will also allow dispatch supervision to remain focused on emergency communications operations, staffing, training, quality insurance, and critical incidents readiness. The fiscal impact for the remainder of fiscal year for this position for fiscal year 25-26 is 7,094. which will be absorbed in the department's existing budget as a result of some recent vacancies and positions that are currently left unfilled due to leaves. This can be absorbed within the police department's authorized budget, but the total annual cost of the position is $113,511. And a budget augmentation will be required beginning in fiscal year 26-27 to support the ongoing cost of the position. This concludes my presentation. I'm available to answer your questions.

Thank you very much. Questions for my colleagues?

Not so much a question as much as I think in conversation, it sounds as though this becomes more of a growing, I wouldn't call it growing pains kind of thing, but just the fact that we're growing and the department is such that when we're using body cameras and stuff now, there's got to be a series of someone that's keeping track of things that need to be tagged or saved for different incidents and things like that. And if we don't have someone in this position, this could put us in a position that would really be negative for us. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct.

Thank you. I agree with that totally. Any other comments from my colleagues? Holly. Okay. Very good. Blair.

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I see no hands raised.

Thank you very much. Bringing it back to my colleagues. Any final comments before voting?

Yeah, just that I didn't know until we were briefed what an important, valuable position this is and how much, like Councilmember Brown was stating, how time-consuming it is. And it's just an absolute necessity. So it's easy to approve.

Do I take that as a motion? Motion to approve. Thank you very much. I'll second. Very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? Nope. Okay. Passes 5-0. Very good. Thank you very much. 5, Charlie receiving and finally reported status of water, wastewater, and sewer funds. Ms. Racker.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor. So this is our annual report of the status of the wastewater, water, and sewer funds after the correction of the rates charged to our community members. If you recall, a few years ago, we performed a rate study, and as a result of rates not being raised for a number of years, we had to do a significant correction of rates. However, since then, the rates are at a more manageable increase each year. Water is scheduled to go up 3%. Garbage is going up 5% and wastewater is going up 3% as well. And we did commit to the community and to this council that we would bring forward a status of those funds each year before we implemented new rates that we would confirm with the council that they would like us to proceed with the rate increases as they are scheduled. Council always has the option to charge less, not more. But we are recommending that the rates as issued in the adopted schedule are implemented. Since the implementation of these rates, these funds are now in a healthy status. We continue to monitor them. We are using the funds as required to pay for operations and capital projects. And sometime next year, next fiscal year, we'll move forward with a new rate study as we come towards the end of this five-year period. to determine how we move forward with these three funds. And that is my report. The only action is that you confirm not a vote, but just a confirmation that you would wish the rates to proceed as they are scheduled.

Do we have any comments from our colleagues?

And one question so with what my not increasing their tip fee, how does that how what percentage of that is baked into the predetermined rates so assuming we're going to be coming out a little bit ahead because we're using the same rate, but we're not getting an increase.

So our increases are all-encompassing, including all operational expenses, not just the tipping fees. But if you recall, much of our garbage fleet was aging, and we've been able to use some of these funds to replace the garbage trucks, as well as hire additional staff that filled vacancies, and also dealing with the expansion of the city. And even though that new development has to pay its own way. Once those houses come online, we have to provide these routine services.

Right. I was really just kind of looking for the solid waste component. How much does WAPMA make up of that total, just approximately?

I would have to get you an exact percentage. I would say that salaries and wages and our equipment is the largest expense, though.

Thank you. Any other comments, questions? I was not on the council when this whole situation hit a number of years ago, and I know the angst that spread through the community because it was a real wake-up call. Things had not been changed for more than a decade, and that put us onto the brink of insolvency in the funds and it took courage on the part of the city council. It took leadership on the part of the staff to say, we've got to correct this over here and together we move forward. We went out to the community, did a lot of outreach and just said, here is why it has to be done. And the reality was that our rates are still in the midpoint of our competitors. But now the funds are very healthy, and this is what we need to do to protect not just for today, but for the future. So this is very good. Okay, Blair, do we have any comment cards?

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment on this item? We see a hand raised.

Would you step forward, please, Linda?

Come on up.

Linda Derosier, Sun City, Lincoln Hills. I would like to know where garbage is. I don't see it. And he said solid waste, but you have water, wastewater, sewer. I don't see garbage. We need garbage picked up in Lincoln Hills.

I think we do that under refuse.

Okay, so I don't see refuse written here either, Mr. Mayor. We have solid waste.

It's not in the title of the agenda item, but if you click the link, there's references to the refuse. It's probably called refuse, isn't it? Solid waste. Okay, solid waste.

Solid waste, thank you.

Different name for it over here.

Typo. Any other comments or questions from anyone in the audience? Okay.

Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment on this item? I see no hands raised.

Thank you very much. Any final comments from my colleagues? Whitney?

I just want to add on to your sentiment in that it is very difficult, and I was in the audience, I believe, when this occurred, and they had to make the difficult decision to raise the rates, which is painful. I think it's easier to kick the can, and they didn't, so I would not want to change the progress that they've made. And we just keep on our course correction. And I just wanted to double down on what you said.

I want to thank my colleagues, Holly and Ben, for making those hard decisions at that point without without a doubt.

Just a clarification that the legal name of the fund is the sewer fund, but that does encompass the solid waste operations.

All right, could I ask one question? Yes, Evelyn. So to that point, I was just looking at here and doing the math. It looks like the increase for water is $0.86 from last year to this year, unless I'm off. And then you've got the CIP and all that. But what is the solid waste? increase it's three percent this year three percent okay can you do that for me in dollars and cents uh sorry i should i should have done the math earlier i just was looking at the the water because it's right in front of me and i'm just curious yeah it's going up around a dollar ten a dollar eleven something okay okay so to to the to the comments here um I mean, we, you know, we still get comments all the time about the water bill and all that and I'll remind everyone that we have to pay it to, you know, I mean it's, it was a difficult thing to do, but I feel good that even though it's, it's been a challenge over the last few years that we are, we're on a good course now so where we we bit the bullet and we did the hard thing a few years ago but now. It's just going up a little bit each year until we get to the plateau level and then we can decide where we are. And so what I like about this is even though it has been a challenge that we did take steps to help low-income families for a year. And then we also are seeing capital improvement projects. We're seeing hundred-year-old pipes being repaired. We're seeing our infrastructure being strengthened, and that's a good thing. And the other thing that I would like to remind people who are maybe still angry about the utility rate is that what we tried to explain back then also was that if we didn't course correct, the state could come in, take over those funds, and then charge whatever they wanted to. And so I felt like it was our obligation and our duty to protect our resources and protect our residents from that because the state doesn't care. They'll do whatever they want. And so, although it was a difficult time of, you know, the rate study and all the meetings and making that decision, I'm glad we did it. I would, I would take the heat all over again because it's what's best for the city as a whole, for our health and wellbeing and for the infrastructure so that everybody gets clean water, gets their garbage picked up on time. And, um, our, our staff does the best at that. And I really appreciate the work that they do. So, um, not to make light at all, but I was just looking at the numbers and I'm like, okay, so I feel like we're in a good place where we're just raising it by 86 cents or a dollar each year. And it is money, money's money, but we're at a place now where we've done the hard work and now we can enjoy the healthy accounts that we have. And so thank you for staff for all your hard work on this too.

Yeah. Council Member Adriana, just to add on one thing, one of the things we talked about during that period of time was that is proven to be true is that we had a really tough decision at the time about whether we were going to spread the significant increases across a five-year period or get them done in the first year and provide you know more minor increases every year thereafter and What our hope is, is that when we go do a rate study here in a year, we now have addressed the structural problem. And so moving forward, what we hope, what you'll see is what I would call routine CPI adjustments to rates so that we're keeping pace with cost. And we're talking a matter of single dollars and cents versus tens and $20.

And that is my goal for the next rate increase.

Thank you, Peter.

I would like to say one thing that I can just imagine some residents thinking in their head, yeah, but do you really understand how hard it is? And I just want to confirm, yes, it is. And some people might think of it as a minor thing based on their budget, but there are There are a lot of people that are on fixed incomes. And that it was not a decision that I made lightly at all. And just to confirm that there are a lot of residents that it was very hard for them to comply with it. And we did do as much as we could to help out low income and things like that. I just needed to make that comment that it was not an easy thing by any means for a lot of people that were on fixed incomes.

I think anyone who listened or saw the discussions knew how difficult it was, without a doubt.

I want to confirm that, yes, I'm in favor of continuing.

Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Very good comments. Okay, this is for information item only. That's very good. Thank you very much. 15 Delta sales tax measure presentation. Sean, are you going to do that or is Nita?

There's a few of us that are going to do this one.

So I'll start off and I'll try not to steal too much of Nita's thunder. Although in fairness, I have given.

Which means that you're going to, so that's okay.

I mean, I have promises you can't and won't keep. Lots of times now, so... So I want to give a little context to this. What's going to happen is I'm going to share some of the history and some of the work that we've done to get to where we're at tonight and where we'll be next meeting. Nita is going to share with you some data that we've been able to get through polling and other means that represents what the community thinks. And then Chief Mejia is going to share some information about what this could potentially mean for services in the fire department and Chief Alves is going to do something similar and then we'll open up for questions and we assume there will be plenty of dialogue. This is an item that was brought because it was pointed out to me very correctly by one of the city council that I've been having these kinds of presentations and conversations about this issue for a really long time now, and we haven't had it here. And so this is a high level presentation. What you will see next meeting, which will be, there'll be action associated with it, will be a little bit more granular. This is to sort of share the story, share the information we got and solicit feedback. So, as you all know, the city of Lincoln is a full-surface city, which means that we provide a broad range of municipal services to the community. The only service we don't directly provide is electricity services. And that means that we essentially have our services split into two buckets. One bucket are enterprise funds that should be designed to be self-sufficient, i.e., water, sewer, airport. solid waste, etc. And then almost everything else, aside from some services that charge for services like planning, building, engineering, etc., falls into the general fund. And as the financial consultant said last meeting, I thought he put it perfectly, which is that general fund services are generally services that you don't have to pay anything more than you're already paying to receive. So You can go to the park as many times as you want per week, and it doesn't cost you any more money than whatever taxes you pay. And same goes for police services and fire services, et cetera. Um, so in the general fund, uh, the core services that make up those funds are essentially the following. Um, it's not an exhaustive list. Primarily about 70 some odd percent is public safety, uh, police and fire, uh, library services, recreation services, some park services, maintenance, et cetera, are general fund obligations. Um, Unfortunately, increasingly as gas tax has been diverted and whittled down, roads are becoming sometimes a general fund obligation and a whole host of others. So when I started here, one of the things the city council asked me to do that I didn't know at the time was going to be such a monumental effort was was to try to assess why our financial position over a relatively long period of time has always been such a struggle. And for a person like me, what you do is you analyze budgets and revenues and expenditures and you, I always start with expenditures to try to get an idea about is our spend for public services, whether it be safety or anything else, commiserate with the service we're providing and generally reflective of what we see in kind of competitive area. I don't like using the term competitors, but other cities in our area that also provide similar services. So I did. To touch on that for a very quick moment. We did two studies early on. One, our human resources manager did for me on per capita, the amount of employees that we have per capita, meaning per citizen. And that study indicated that for a full service city of our size, our staffing level is actually very, very low compared to almost every other city that provides similar kinds of services. More recently, an analysis was done on the public safety spend per resident. So how much you take our entire budget that's spent on fire and police, how much how much if you divide that cost by the number of residents estimated residents we have how much is each individual contributing per year to that cost and um it even shocked me what we found what we found was that we uh over the past six years and we didn't go back any further than that um Lincoln spends the least amount of money on public safety per resident in Placer County. That's every single city in Placer County, including Colfax, including limits. So it's an important data point because while it's not always an apples to apples comparison, it does give you an idea about how many resources are being put into those core services compared to other jurisdictions. So over the pretty much my entire time here, the city council has placed the exploration of a revenue measure, which can take many different forms. And what you'll hear tonight is that our proposal is going to be that it take the form of a sales tax to explore how that would look. whether the community would even be interested in something like that. What does the community want to see it funding? And what do our experts, you know, your department heads that sit across from me here, think that is most important for them to provide these critical services? And so if you take nothing else away from this whole presentation this evening, just take this. This is the product of years of work and outreach, thousands of written and or polled results from community members asking a very simple question. What kinds of services do you value in Lincoln? How much do you support them? What would you like to see more of? What would you not like to see more of? Or prioritize for us what's most important to you with limited resources. So what will be in front of you this evening and then subsequently in two weeks is a community desire We may have framed the discussion and asked the question, but the data and what you're going to see tonight is not our data. This is what the community has told us that they value and want to see. So before Anita gets to the polling results, I'll add two other little details. This exercise that the council ordered me to go through was a partially because we wanted to be able to provide the best services we can, but it was also partially because we are looking at a significant cliff that is approaching. In your report, NIDA puts together a five-year financial forecast, which is a super useful document if you want a broad view of where we're going to end up in the next five years. Cliff notes, by 2030, at current spending levels and anticipated revenues, what we are today in a vacuum, our reserves will be completely exhausted by 2030. There are many things that could accelerate that, and there are a few things that could slow it. So I think it's actually a pretty good analysis of where we likely will be in 2030.

And what does that mean?

Well, in a classic setting, what it means is that the city council and to some degree your staff are going to have to, with nothing changes, are going to have to make some really difficult decisions about things that are cut from the general fund to make room for other things that you may not want to cut.

And this happened a lot during the Great Recession.

It was a very painful experience and led to decreased services to the communities throughout the state. So what we did in the years that followed is we tested concepts. We ask questions and like I said, Nita is going to get into that data in a moment. Let me, so you don't have to come back to me. I'll tell you what happened is since we've received all that information back, we've, we received all the information and we realized, you know, survey results and polling data is very useful, but what's even more useful is actual conversations with community members and groups. And so for the past, I don't even know anymore, three months, four months, five months. I've been speaking to dozens of community groups, area communities, nonprofits, you name it. I'd speak to a group of two people at Starbucks if they had me. And truly, I actually have given presentations to groups of three people. And that was all an effort to share what we've learned. And to try to hear back from those people that may not have filled out a survey or been contacted by pollers. Are we wrong here? Are we missing something that maybe you don't agree with? And I can, this is anecdotal, but I can share with you that almost nobody, nobody had any significant concerns about what we were contemplating today. Almost everybody was very understanding and generally supportive of the concept. And I'll end by saying this. What you're going to hear in a moment is that public safety ranks very high and retaining and improving our services ranked in public safety in particular, ranked incredibly high in the voter's mind in Lincoln. And there is an appetite to make sure that that is funded through this mechanism. Our job in this process is to educate the community and allow them to come to their own determination about whether or not it makes sense at the ballot box. So but what I will say is that public safety is the foundation of what makes your community special. And especially in Lincoln, for some reason, because it's a nice place to live. And I suppose our sounds based on our data, our people are generally law abiding citizens. Safety has become a being a safe place to live and raise a family or retire has become our brand. We are a safe community with values that are reflective of being in a place that protects the individual and their property. My view is that there are all kinds of things in local government that you can underfund and there are consequences for that. The one thing that can disintegrate a community faster than almost anything is a material change in your public safety services, your ability to respond to critical incidents, the services you provide directly to residents, the crime rates that we may see in the community. So it's a very important decision. And I think it's actually more of a decision of what kind of community does Lincoln and its residents want to be now and in the future, especially as we grow. So I think that covers most of my sections, and I probably stole enough thunder. So why don't you give some data?

Thank you, Sean. All right, so very helpful background and information. And so to get into some of the specifics of why we're here and what we're presenting this evening, as Sean indicated, the city has many challenges with this revenue structure and a lack of diversity. that the majority of our revenues within the general fund are property tax, property tax driven. We have a very small retail base that is currently growing due to additional commercial square footage coming online in the city. But even with that, you know, we can expect continued leakage. Right now, our leakage is around 40% to our neighboring communities, just based on the things that we don't provide that they do. We're working on that working on that hard with the development community. And as Sean indicated that our public safety levels are some of the lowest within the county. Even though that we continue to grow as an agency, we just do not have the funding to continue to add the appropriate staff. In order to continue to ensure that we provide that safe community that everyone has come to love and enjoy about the city of Lincoln. So included in your packet and as Sean indicated is these financial forecast and the estimated fund balance if nothing changes. the general fund will be out of money in 2030. We can see the cliff ahead of us. We're not speeding towards it at full speed ahead. We are slowing to determine how do we avoid the cliff? How do we build a bridge? How do we get over this chasm that is coming towards us? And that is through a revenue diversification and to inject additional monies within the general fund. So why are we considering additional revenues? As Sean indicated, all of our core services are primarily general fund-driven core services funded through property taxes, recreation, library, public safety, even a little bit of services like the LADS that are linking money, right? So we're shifting into other departments that can't fund themselves fully. But it is those core services that rely on those taxes that are currently being shorted. We considered what is the need of the city. The current deficit within the general fund is approximately $3 million, the structural deficit. That does not include the current dollars that are being funded through a property tax sharing agreement with Placer County, which is another approximately $2.4 million. But the whole net is over $5 million. So when we looked at what would fill that gap, we looked at the least amount possible. We considered a half cent sales tax. And while there are advantages with a lower taxable amount and possibly even greater advantages than filling the hole immediately, And that's something to be considered, but we considered that filling that need and allowing us to provide the services that we're not able to provide today is possibly more significant, but that is a decision for this Council to consider and more in depth in our next meeting. We've done numerous outreach programs. As Sean said, he has given this particular presentation, he just gave to this even dozens of times. There was one day where he gave the same presentation three times. He's talked to multiple nonprofit groups, social clubs, charitable organizations, HOAs, community groups, stopping at coffee shops. When you walk across the street and start talking to someone, the next thing you know, we're talking about the needs of the revenue. and the lack and what is missing from this city. In addition, both of our chiefs, Chief Anthony Mejia and Chief Matt Alves have gone out into the community to talk one on one in less formal circumstances, meeting again at those coffee shops and in their daily routine of communicating with our community members of again, what it is that they want, what are their needs, what's important to them, because we really not just to be this want this to be successful because we have a whole right but we want to be this want this to be successful because we want to fill a community need the other thing to consider is that there are neighboring communities that will be moving forward with similar types of measures this coming election cycle So when we first started talking about the structural deficit a couple of years ago, we discovered in some early surveys that the majority of the people did not express or acknowledge or were aware that there was a deficit or a financial need within the community. And so we began education, trying to get the word out, trying to move forward this information of what is the reality of this situation. And I'll say that we have been a bit successful in moving that needle just a tiny bit. And that's really all we can hope to do is move the needle a tiny bit in a city of 55,000 to try to get a majority of the people to receive a piece of information. It's very challenging. But we have been able to move that forward so that we do have a larger percentage of our population that acknowledges that there is a great need or some need. for an additional funding for city services. We wanted to ensure that if this measure was successful, that again, that we are accountable. Since Sean and I came to this organization and even before we entered this organization, the city of Lincoln had turned the corner of its financial woes and was moving towards solid structure, financial sustainability and accountability. Sorry. And so we want to continue that. We want to make sure that we're continuing that and that we're continuing it in a way that is meaningful to our public and to our community. And so we ask this important question. What is important to you in the way these funds are handled if additional funds become available? The highest priority spending funds locally that these funds are locally controlled that they are within the purview of the city to put back into the community. The second highest priority, public spending disclosure. So that could be additional audits, that could be the financial transparency portal, that could be the annual report like I just gave on the enterprise funds, except on a wider scale where we're providing more in-depth information of the monies that are being received and exactly what they are being spent on and how they are being the needs of our community. We also talked about annual audits, independent audits, which is something that we currently perform, but it could be that we have a specific audit for these funds especially. And the other thing that sort of rose to the top was community oversight. While we have a financial investment and oversight committee, it could be that a different committee is needed just for this purpose or that that committee begins to take up the mantle of ensuring these funds are spent in an appropriate manner. And as Sean said, it's important to us to ask the community, what do they want? What are their needs? What are their priorities? So we ask these questions in many different ways. It's not just that we ask it once and we take the answer and we all move along skipping down the road. We ask this question in multiple ways to ensure that we are getting the information from the community that is the answer that their needs are being met. And the highest priority was to maintain 911 emergency response times. Adding advanced life saving equipment and train paramedics and i'm not going to steal chief he is thunder and talk about that he's he's going to talk about that in a minute. Preventing cuts to fire protection and response services preventing cuts to police services retaining and attracting qualified officers both firefighters and police officers. Lincoln is now third safest city, thank you, within the state of California, up from the fourth safest city. As Sean said, that has become our brand, that Lincoln is a safe place to live, that Lincoln is a place where you want to raise your kids, where you feel assured in sending them down the street, not on their e-bikes, walking. to go to the park, to walk to the corner store, to come home from school in a safe manner, and to provide public areas, parks that are healthy and safe for our kids. So before I steal Chief Mejia's thunder, I'm going to ask him to come up and present his information.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council. I want to thank you guys for this opportunity for me to express our need for this sales tax measure for the Lincoln Fire Department. Tonight, I want to leave you with two things. I want to first talk to you about the problem that we're having with our EMS service delivery model. Second, I want to express what our immediate need is for ALS and Lincoln right now. So a little bit of background. Lincoln Fire Department has chronically been underfunded and understaffed. It's really no fault of its own. I would tell you that we started off our fire department in 2001 as a paid professional fire department, but the 08 recession hit, which really took our legs out from underneath us and made us close down fire stations. We had to reduce our staffing model down to two firefighters per engine, which I will tell you is in my business is not really something that's doable. So just mad props to all of our firefighters out here that have really held down the fort during those times. But really what happened in 2022, you were a part of that. Some of you on the council bringing back that third firefighter, Sean ushering in that grant to help us out. But really during that time, we became static. We became stagnant. Other fire departments weren't reducing staffing models. Other fire departments were actually growing in ALS services. But we continue to be understaffed. We just reached our public safety model where we broke free of that, but we still don't have a command staff. We still don't have training staff. We don't have clerical staff. And all of this is a result of kind of like what Nita has explained. But really that's why we haven't transitioned into an ALS fire department. It's not because the city doesn't deserve it. It's not because the citizens don't deserve it. It's just really because of these financial woes. But really what that's really leading us to is that this requires the city of Lincoln to rely fully on AMR, which is a for-profit business, for all of our ALS care for all of our citizens. This is just something that is not gonna be sustainable. As the city continues to grow, this EMS problem is gonna continue to worsen over time. So really what is our current need? I will tell you right now that if you look at the call volume, we've doubled in calls over the last 10 years. The growth that we're trying to bring into the city, that's gonna continue to increase. Out of our call volume, we run more calls than Rockland. We run more calls than South Placer and a lot of surrounding units with a lot less funding and a lot less staffing. And what that's really doing is that growth is not only impacting us, it's impacting Roseville, it's impacting Rockland. And that's what's happening is it's really bottlenecking all of our services at these hospitals. We haven't developed any new hospitals. We have a lack of hospitals. This picture that you're seeing in the background right here, this is an actual picture from Sutter Hospital on a Monday morning a month ago. This is over 14 ambulances on wall delays. Basically those ambulance are taken out of service. They're waiting to exchange care with patients and they can't get back into the system. For other fire departments, not that big of a deal because there's paramedics on every single fire engine ready to render care. We're in a different position. We've had ALS calls that will end up at our station. We've had ALS calls that have had 20 minute response times where we can't render care, where we know that these people are now that we're putting our citizens and their lives are at risk because of this service model. So really where we're looking at is our goal is to bring in a top tiered paramedic program into the city of Lincoln. I think it's something that's absolutely doable. I think you have to do it with the right department. You have to do it with the right people. The one thing I want to say is that, you know, the Lincoln Fire Department, I'll tell you, when we went to 2-0, we were looked down upon. We seemed like we weren't as good as other fire departments. But our firefighters, they're resilient. And there's somebody that has come here, they're supportive of this program. I feel like this is a program that we can put on their backs and we can turn this whole thing around. But it's not going to be turned around without funding. And so what we really want to do is we want to bring in high quality, experienced lateral firefighter paramedics. We can't start with basic paramedics that just come out of school. We want to attract the best into the city of Lincoln and build the foundation of this paramedic program off of that. And so really, again, what I want to say is I've gone around and spoken and done this presentation many a times to different people as well. The response, just like Sean, I'm echoing that I've never had one person rebuttal it. And usually the answer to the question after I get done is what can we do to make this happen? And so I think bringing this to the voters is exactly the choice that we want to give them. And it's something I think that we can deliver on. Thank you very much.

The only additional thing I would add is that the Lincoln Fire Department is the only fire department with a senior community that does not provide advanced life support.

Country.

We are the only one that does not provide advanced life support. And Chief Alps.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'm going to present just a couple items here this evening. And what I want you to really understand is I'm strictly going to focus on the basics and priorities. Nothing I'm going to mention are going to be nice to haves. They're all needs to haves. We live in a world of wants versus needs, and today I'm just going to be talking about needs. And these needs are what would fill the needs of our community. It's not the needs of our department. It's the needs of the community and us being able to deliver the service to them. Nothing I'm going to talk about is revolutionary. Everything is common law enforcement. It's simply getting us to where we need to be for our citizens. To say a front our structure is in place there's just holes and there's leakage and and there's a lot of areas for room for improvement that can be resolved. Unfortunately, with funding so to go through my list which is brief initially want to talk about retention so being able to retain our staff. We have a great staff of sworn and non sworn employees and we want to retain them. You see in the news and see on the advertisements, these cities that are, you know, giving 30 50 $70,000 signing bonuses to officers to attract them there. I'm not saying I want to do that. But I want to be able to provide salaries and benefit packages that are at least competitive with these larger agencies in these larger cities to be able to keep our good people here, which then rolls into recruitment, which is bringing on individuals with the experience and knowledge that we can put to work right away and just have that depth that we need for the continuously evolving complexity of the needs of the city, being able to bring those people on board and really just expand our services. Then talking about patrol staffing, policing begins and ends with patrol. That is the backbone of policing and patrol or the black and white cars out there going to calls for service handling business. But they're a mobile force. They stick and move, and they move all over the city all day and all night long. They are our most essential services. And absent everything else, patrol is what would remain. So back in the dark times of our city and our nation, everything else went first, and patrol was all that pretty much remained. We've done a good job of building that back. But again, like I said, there are still some holes that we need to fill. Currently, just talking about patrol staffing, generally right now, our patrol staffing is three officers and a sergeant for a city of anywhere from 56 to 58,000 people. That's low. Yesterday morning, I looked at the board. I had two officers and a sergeant working yesterday morning in a town of 56 to 58,000 people. Where we need to be, where I would be comfortable, is being minimum staffing of four officers and a sergeant. We can get close to that right now, but with some vacancies we're actively trying to fill and some long-term injuries, that just makes it a little bit tough. So right now the board is three and a sergeant, but we need to be at four and sergeant. Once we get there, because again, back bonus patrol, then we start rolling into... specialty unit staffing specialty units or the more specialized units within our department such as investigations traffic specialized resource team and those need a lot of help currently we have two detectives and two detectives handling all the caseload within the city and detectives will take on the more complex and critical cases your homicides your rapes your child abuse child sexual assaults kidnappings that's what our detectives work on Right now, that's all they work on. It's not common for them to work property crimes right now. And I don't like that. I've never liked that. I've never liked the fact that we're just having to let cases with leads go stale because I don't have the people to work them. That's not OK with me. So I want to add two detectives to our detective unit. So we have four. I want to add a detective sergeant to be able to oversee the detectives. Moving past detectives, talk about traffic. How many times have e-bikes come up tonight? And it was said earlier, we have a hard time enforcing it because I have one traffic officer. Our traffic officer is a very skilled individual and most of you know him and have interacted with him and his skills are go beyond just riding a bike. He's out there going to mitigation meetings, coming up with plans with streets and and with the city to resolve problems kind of before they happen or as they happen to resolve them otherwise. So he's really probably spending at best half his time out there on patrol enforcing our traffic laws. I want to add a traffic officer. I want to add a traffic sergeant. The traffic sergeant would take over these ancillary roles and have the authority to make these decisions on behalf of the department. Talking about SRT, you all know SRT. That has just been one of the most impactful things that we've been able to implement over the past few years. With vacancies, we're down to one SRT officer. So he does an excellent job coming up with programs and doing these inspections on certain shops here in town and helping within our homeless community and helping keep that mitigated. It has been so effective. However, we can be so much more effective I want to add an SRT officer. I want to add an SRT sergeant to oversee it. Their cases are so complex, so sensitive, so open to exposure. We need a supervisor to oversee that unit. So really, all of this can be accomplished with seven positions, seven sworn positions. And bear in mind, this is needs. This is you gave me a check right now. This is what I would buy right now. There's a lot more to do in the future, but I'm not talking about wants. I'm not talking about non-sworn, and they're not going to be happy that I didn't even bring them up here tonight. But right now, for service delivery to our citizens and to solve crimes, keep us the third safest city in the state of California. This is where I need to be. Historically, we've struggled to grow. Our department struggled to grow in the city. You all know that. And that's not uncommon with any department here in the city. But we need a solution that gets us closer to being able to keep up the pace with the growth of the city, get us closer to close that huge gap that currently exists. That's always existed. My 27 years here, it's always existed. Nobody in this room is nobody's fault. It just is what it is. But we need a solution to get us closer to closing that gap and to keep pace with the growth of the city. So appreciate you listening to me. Thank you very much.

So that brings us to our conclusion and what we were bringing forward to you at our next council meeting, more in-depth report, but our current proposal after the results of our polling is to request that you consider the introduction of a one cent sales tax for the upcoming November 3rd, 2026 general election ballot. in order to promote public safety, maintain safe children's play areas, retain and attract local businesses for locally controlled funding until ended by voters.

Anita, I'll just wrap everything with one last comment because it's been brought up to me a number of times. Other people have heard my presentations. The term under which, we tested a number of different terms for this. And the data has actually shifted over time. I'm not sure that I can explain it, but the numbers are the numbers. We tested things like a 15-year measure that sunsets, a 20-year measure that sunsets. Initially, what seemed to come back was kind of jokey analysis of this is nine years came back looking pretty good from the voters perspective. Why nine versus any other number? I just think it has to do with nine 99. Um, people, feels like it's cheaper um but interestingly what uh happened in our most recent or freshest data uh is that that shifted and the phrase open-ended measure or until ended by voters um in california there are uh ways that the voting populace can um put um can reverse taxes that are that are levied if uh if they're able to get the voting threshold. And so we debated internally amongst staff a lot about whether or not we were going, how we were going to frame this discussion. And my view is that, I don't think talking and using the term transparency makes you transparent. I think doing things that are transparent, sharing what I'm sharing right now is what real transparency is. And to be totally transparent, My view, I'm responsible at the end of the day for the provision of all of the municipal services that are provided to the community. And our goal, unless otherwise ordered by the city council, is to propose to you what looks like it rated the best amongst the polling results we have. And there should be, and I'm sure will be, plenty of rigorous debate about that, but I just wanted to kind of end with that little additional tidbit. That's fancy.

Thank you very much. Excellent presentations on behalf of everyone over here. I'll bring it up to my colleagues. Holly?

Yeah, so, Sean, I was following you. So, Did you say that nine years is what we're aiming for, or that when you tested again that the open-ended was more favorable?

There appears to be a small marginal difference in support for an open-ended measure or until ended by voters.

I do have those results if you wanted to see that slide.

You have them? Yeah. Why not? I mean, I had to bring it up.

If IT could display what's on the screen.

There you go.

So we asked it not necessarily an open-ended tax measure. That's not the question that we asked. We asked them, how would you like this to be handled? Would you like this to be for a set term of nine years? Or would you like this to be until ended by voters? And again, we asked these questions multiple different ways in order to try to get a statistically valid result. and when we look at that we see that they definitely yes and the probably probably yes and that the undecided who were leaning to yes when conditional questions were asked comes up to 62 percent while the four nine years as a came in in about 56 percent is it a hard 62 versus 56 This is pulling data, right? So it's not a hard number. But that is what appears to be the most likely to be successful with our community.

Mayor Andrada, one last thing. Just so everybody understands, it wasn't simply that we were exploring other revenue means just because. It's important to note that in numerous limited-term property tax agreements with Placer County, we were contractually obligated to explore and push forward at least the consideration of this. So was it the right thing to do fiscally, of course? Was it also required? Yes.

Yeah.

So I'll just say that I really appreciate the presentations, but I don't think that we need convincing. I think that, I'm not going to speak for everybody, but for myself, I'm fully on board with this. I think this is something that we've been working towards for quite a long time. I am very proud of the work that we did to get the nine new firefighters a few years back. but we need to keep going. We need to keep going. We need the ALS. We need more officers. We, it's frustrating because, you know, there's a lot of growth happening and we need to keep up with the growth, but we're kind of forced into the growth. Right. And in a simple world, we would just say, well, let's just stop growing till we catch up. But we're, We're not in a simple world. And so I think it's very important that we do everything that we can to implement measures so that we can protect the residents who live here. And I actually am very so grateful. Chief Mejia was talking about when we were two on a truck. I remember those days. They were terrifying. And our team did an amazing job living through those years. And I've said it many times, and I'll say it again, how grateful I am for all of you and our police force as well. And it's not by accident that we went from the seventh to the fourth to the third safest city. It's because we have excellent public safety staff. And so the ability that we had to implement that or to, I'm sorry, to augment that, I'm very proud of that, but we need to keep going. And so this, I think our residents will vote for it overwhelmingly. I think everyone that I've talked to also is very supportive of it. And then we also need to keep working on the other side with the county because that's really important. And- It's frustrating that we're kind of not gotten there yet, but that's not from our lack of work. It's on that side. So hopefully that can get done. But that by itself is not enough. We need this tax measure as well. So I appreciate staff, all your hard work, the consultant work, and for Police and Fire for being here tonight. And so I'm fully on board and I support this.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything more terrifying than the thought of calling 911 or having a true medical emergency and not having anybody there to respond if it's you or family member or your child. Public safety is first priority always. And not only am I grateful that we've done so well with our limited resources, because that's impressive and that's a completely separate thing, part of our discussion, which I don't want to forget to say again how lucky we are because it's multidimensional. It's a great department. It's a great community. I think there's a lot of reasons why we're so safe with limited resources. That being said, even though it's kind of a miracle and an anomaly and we're kind of a unicorn, we don't want to just continue to take that for granted. And we want to be the best we can possibly be, be robust, and give our residents and our department everything that they need to be and continue to be the best. So yeah, the ALS is a game changer, and I think that that is going to be something that, especially with and aging community, aging, what do you call it? What's the, you know, the politically, you know.

A large adult active community. Active adult.

It was something like, yeah, active adult, active adult community. I like that the best. That, yeah, I want to make sure that they're taken care of because I know we do have a lot of calls in there. I think that's probably the majority of, of our LFT goes in there. And, And being able to offer them the ALS, it's going to do a lot of great things. Not only that, but we maintain our public safety with our law enforcement as we grow. Things change as you get bigger. So we don't want to lose that number three. We want to maintain it, maybe even get better. So, yeah, public safety, again, I know I say it all the time. I'll just keep saying it as my top priority. That's the main reason why we live here. And I... I fully support doing whatever we need to do to make this happen I feel like it was it was done in all the correct ways the way that we researched we communicated advocacy this is a really long-term collaborative process that I know that our staff is probably exhausted but it was hopefully it will have been well worth it when we have the community that we all want to continue to invest in and maintain. So that's enough. I'll stop there.

Thank you.

Yeah. Recently, a group has mentioned something about this as though we put ourselves in a bad place. which, okay, that is a perspective. But if you look at it in a reality perspective, we've done everything we possibly can to make it as successful as it could be. And I was in a conversation with somebody this last weekend, actually, that had expressed to me that on 12 Bridges Boulevard going down up towards Lincoln Hills. He consistently had observed people that go 10, 15 miles an hour over the speed limit. I'm like, no way. But he was pretty adamant that they had been doing that. And I said, well, what do you think? Why would they even do that? His response was lack of police presence. which really kind of makes sense to me that if we don't have enough presence, then people feel comfortable doing things outside of what is right. Anyway, so I'm absolutely in support of this. And it's hard to swallow the fact that we've been doing as well as we have with the resources that we have been given. When I say hard to swallow, it's really just, I'm in awe that we have done so well with what we've been given and my gratitude for the police officers and our fire for their capabilities and everything that they've done is just over and above. I can't say thank you enough and absolutely agree that in addition to this, we'll be doing as much as we can in other areas,

absolutely this is what we need to do yeah first I just wanted to comment on how much I appreciated the somber and professional approach that the staff took to such a serious topic I hope the citizenry takes note of how professional our staff and team is here and how prepared they are The priorities outlined in the various presentations essentially aligned to my personal experience and dealing with the Community don't think there's any real issue there. I echo my colleagues comment about our compliments to the staff and how they. execute with these limited resources and have done so for many years, specifically a call out to our public safety staff who are very clearly punching above their weight in delivering for our Community. and being able to try to give them the resources that they need to be continually successful. I sort of would be a little remiss if I did not echo Council Member Andregata and point out that close to a third of our population pays 20% more to the county for services than the other two-thirds do, and that's something that we really need our friends in Auburn to take note of and correct, because it's doing a disservice to our population, and it's one of the things that's put a the pressure on the budget that we've been experiencing since approximately 2001. Some technical things that I would like to see between now and June. One, we've seen a number of numbers. So, you know, I think last year when we passed the budget, we said there'd be like a $3.6 million structural deficit. The document tonight shows a 3.8 deficit for just the second year. In the presentation earlier today, we had 3 million general fund and 2.4 coming from tax sharing. I think it'd be useful to kind of, all those numbers could turn out to be correct, but I think the contextualizing them and normalizing them to a common framework so people can really understand what we're talking about, because they all sound different and they've changed in a year, I think that would be very helpful to give ourselves and citizenry a clear picture, proper context, I think that it's worth having some continued conversation about the term. FM3 was kind enough to give me some time to kind of go through the methodology of that survey. And you'll notice in that slide that the hard yeses are at 51% for a term limited and the hard yeses for until ended are at 50%. and the rest is in that soft undecided yes. I've been interested to see now that we've had potentially some measures that have gone through in June to see how those survey results taken around the same times that ours did materialize in that vote to see if that really is the case. The survey company, because of the efficiency of words, can't test both the empowering until end by voters and the term. They can only test one or the other because they only have 75% words to work from. And I think that some more thought about that term is worthwhile because I think it's not entirely clear to me that it comes out the way that the initial results said. In terms of the actual rate itself, I understand where the number is and why it's there. One of the concerns that I'd like to get some more information on is the actual impact of one rate over another to the overall general fund. There in the last say 20 years or so, we've done about 90,000 square feet per year of commercial in Lincoln. But in the last 10 years or so, it's only been about 30,000 on average. And so, when you increase your tax rate above everyone else in the county that creates some kind of drag on your commercial absorption and I would be interested to understand what these different rates mean both in the short term, the long term for the fiscal health of the city. Because there's a real drag in being 1% higher than Placer 1 and both communities trying to build out 5 million square feet of commercial in the exact same time. And so I'd be interested to have a little more conversation on that, just to understand what that is, to make sure that when we go out, we go out with a rate that's going to sort of maximize our overall financial benefit so we can deliver the most services, sort of bang for your buck kind of provision. So those would be the three things I'd ask to kind of flesh out between now and the next time we talk about it. Thank you.

OK.

Thanks. My comments are that the services that we're talking about tonight are probably about the most expensive services that a city can provide, public safety, police, and fire. And especially once you start talking about specialized services within that category, ALS providers are more expensive than BLS providers. It just ratchets up. One of the things that I was heartened to see is that our cost per service is so much lower, if not the lowest of any of our competitors. So that tells me that we are doing as best as possible within the means that we're given. It doesn't mean that we can't do better, but we're certainly doing really well in comparison to everyone else. Are all the prices too high? I don't know the answer to that. Would I love to have $3 gasoline per gallon back again? Yes. But the reality is we have to pay for the services that we want. And I think that we're at the tipping point for what sort of a community do we want to see, not just for today, but for going forward. Sean mentioned the brand that we have in Lincoln being safe for everyone here. And I think that that is so important. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think the community is going to be favorably inclined for this measure. Could it be a half cent? Once you, my view is that there are so many needs that we have, not wants as Chief Alves pointed out, not wants, but needs that need to be addressed. I think it's, I think we, just like we did with the utility rates, let's bite the bullet, let's move forward. Let's make sure that we have the accountability on the part of the citizens so that we, however we have that oversight committee, It's in place, they do the job, and so the community understands that, yes, we are going, we're paying more, but we're getting more also. The other thing that I think we need to keep in mind is the fact that while this is a one percentage point sales tax increase, and Sean, you may know the answer to this, what percentage can we expect that we, of the additional six or $7 million would be paid by non-Lincoln residents?

Yeah, it's a super good point. Um, it's a very hard data point. It's, it's weirdly, it's easier for us to estimate to a pretty close percentage, what we leak than what we collect externally.

Um,

I will endeavor to try to give you a very good answer on that next meeting backed by something. But I think your broader point is there's two issues. The first is that sales tax is the only tax, almost the only tax that benefits a specific geographic region, a city in this case, that is not only paid by the residents that live in it. So that's one. Two, The interesting thing when we were calculating what we thought the actual impact to a unit a family unit is. And there's a there's actually quite a bit of debate we've been having internally about what that number probably is because it's based off of the amount of money that on average that a Lincoln family spends on taxable sales right. So there's been some estimates as high as $25,000 a year, maybe even a little north of that. There's some that I've seen that are in the $12,500 to $15,000 range. But the thing that's sort of funny about it is if we are leaking 40% of our taxable sales elsewhere, and probably a very large percentage of them are in Roseville, which has add-on sales taxes, you're already paying that tax. You're just not paying it here. So whatever the total amount spent on taxable sales in Lincoln may be for an individual family, we also, for being fair, should assume that that same family is probably spending 40% of that money in another community paying their sales tax.

Thank you. The other thing I was thinking of is that the state also continues to push a lot of costs down upon the city. We have no choice, but we have to keep that. That's coming out of the general fund in a lot of cases. And then just looking at it from a business standpoint, when businesses realize that they have to maneuver in order to stay afloat and to keep competitive, you raise rates in order to do what's necessary within the bounds of competition. And I think when we look at our competition, we're doing very well. So this is going to be a great debate for the community. I know all of us have gone out and started the debate within various sectors. We'll be doing a lot of it between, assuming that we push this out, which I believe we probably will, We'll be doing a lot of discussion between now and November. This is a seminal moment for Lincoln. We've had a couple in the past, but this really is a big one for us because if it doesn't pass for some reason, will we crash and crater? No, we're not gonna do that. We'll continue to provide the services, but those of us who were around here in Lincoln during the Great Recession and the aftermath knew what that was like. And I don't think anyone wants to go back to that. And I think all our residents really are demanding of the quality services that we have been demonstrating that we've been able to provide and to give them. So it's going to be a great debate going forward.

And Mayor, can I just add one last thing? One of the things that the Mayor and I have said, we spoke about this issue and I've tried to share as much as I can every time I give a presentation because I think that the public debate about this is so important, is that there's nothing morally wrong with having a difference in perspective about whether or not this should be or not be. It's a totally valid position if someone's position was, I don't see the value in that. I'd prefer not to fund it as a taxpayer.

That's fine.

And I don't want to chill that perspective because it's important.

This is a democracy. Absolutely. Any final comments before we open it up to the public? Okay. One more final comment.

I just think if I had to wrap it up and be really concise, I keep thinking when I think about this, I think that you have to pay for what you get. And when we, I think most of us travel around and we've been in other areas of California and the U.S., When you're in a really nice city and you're driving through and you're thinking, wow, this is so great. It's by design. It's not usually happenstance where they're poorly funded and it just looks amazing. It's safe. You see kids out on their bikes. It's because of decisions like this. And so I think when we think about what we want Lincoln to be and as we grow, you pay for what you get. That's it.

Very good. Well said. Thank you very much. Okay. Let's take it out to the community. Do we have any comment cards?

I do have three speaker cards. First up is Stan Nader, followed by Trevor Jameson.

Mayor and Council, in a recent article in the Lincoln News Messenger, in the Looking Back Lincoln section of the paper, the author Mona Orba-Ott wrote about a Lincoln Planning Commission meeting 50 years ago regarding a scaled-down Valley View Estates development project whose tentative map was for 90 single-family residences. The commission voted to withhold the project until placement of public utilities can be installed. And who's gonna pay for that work? Western Placid School District was seeking to purchase 12 acres for a Lincoln High School campus of the original project promoted by developer Charles Joyner. Council member David Curtin who is also a former police officer, questioned how the EIR report determined there would be no impact to police services as the department was down 1.9 men. Commissioner Chair Marshall Weir indicated Police Chief Robert Jimenez had stated in a letter that four additional officers would be required if the original project would have been approved. Fire Chief Al Gulliford requested a study be done by a non-interested party regarding water flow and water pressure in the western section of the town. Deja vu. Here we are 50 years later. The city is in serious need of additional resources for public safety. I believe even though the city staff has been speaking and connecting with the community, there has been a missed opportunity to convince the citizens of Lincoln to vote for an increase in the sales tax. by not creating a business and citizens committee to advocate for the measure as Roseville did when their tax measure was on the ballot, which increases the challenge for the city to pass increase in the sales tax. It's important to build confidence in the citizens and the city's ability to manage their tax dollars in the city to receive the support for increasing the sales tax.

I understand.

After Trevor Jameson is Steve Ambrose.

Mayor, council members, staff, chief, me and Alvis, just wanted to take a moment tonight to come here because this is an important conversation. The work that's gone in that you saw tonight was robust. I remember addressing this body back in 2022 when we were talking about adding staff. Councilmember Andrada was here. We had six firefighters. We had a chief of public safety. Chief Alves was wearing two hats. Took a chance on an idea. And today we have nine firefighters. We have a fire chief. It's time to take that chance again. It's time to step out. I think you, we've heard it. I mean, this is a safe community. I'm very humbled to represent 2,000 firefighters in the Sacramento region, and our 27 here in Lincoln. They do an amazing job with what they have and who they are, and they will continue to do that no matter what. I know that the police officers do the same thing. I'll tell you, this conversation has happened in many communities, and Lincoln's not alone. I know that the staff here, and I know that the council members have worked tirelessly to find funding to put the Band-Aid on, maybe even to make sure that they're doing their job. So I think that, I will just say, from my perspective, that the staff here and the council has worked has done the due diligence, has done the work, and is still going to continue to do the work, that the citizens should feel very good about going after this tax measure. And I would even encourage you to really look hard at the sunset, because this problem is not going to change. To do the ALS coverage that Chief Alves talks about, it is something that is very needed in this community. I'm a paramedic. There's a big difference on a call when there's not an ambulance coming, you have a paramedic can take care of people in their home. So I'll just say this. Local 522, I'm not here to tell you that I know all the answers, but I've seen these things happen in other communities and I've seen what's happened. I urge you to look at West Sacramento Measure O recently. We were able to add an engine company back. We were able to put more service in the street. I know that our members here are members of this community. We are a community partner here. We will stand by your side and we will make sure that the community feels like they're gonna get what they deserve when you put a tax measure on the ballot. So thank you very much. And I appreciate all the work you guys have done. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your kind words.

Mayor and Council, Steve Ambrose. Three minutes and it's going. So first, I would like to echo many comments tonight. Lincoln, a lot of what was said tonight, it's not new. Sales tax, Roseville, if you look, has always been very high. Lincoln, very low. Sales tax leakage, it's always occurred. Staffing in Lincoln for decades has been lean, but staff has stepped up and they've done their job. They've done very well. commend the Public Safety, Police, Fire, and the Command Office of Public Works, their staff. I mean, all of our utility services met every day. Lincoln has had good staff. I think currently it has good staff, and they should be commended at the staff level. Appreciate your comments, Council Member Reedy, on clarifying some of this information, because it says, you know, and looking at the five-year projection, it says in 2030, the general fund is going to be However, it doesn't include the public safety positions that are included in the property tax shift, which is another 2.4. And looking at that, that kind of says, well, maybe the general fund is going to be depleted by 2028. Uh, so maybe some clarification on to the public about what that tax shift entailed. Is that just village seven or what villages did that include? What were the details of that agreement? Is it coming to an end? I mean, if I was one of those positions, uh, having permanent positions and temporary funding, that's not a good place to be. I would be very nervous if I were those in those positions. But certainly clarification on that because it seems like there should be some permanent tax sharing agreement I'm assuming and I believe the unless the county's changed their position, but always in those Discussions it was they were going to fund their needs that they proposed to the city the city had the ability To do CFDs. In fact, I think they were approved tonight by council and So I guess the question is if Village 7 doesn't have a permanent, and maybe I'm talking out of context, maybe it's not Village 7, but is there a CFD in place that's going to cover whatever that is going to end up being? Maybe a couple suggestions. There's a lot of questions. I think we're going to get a lot of questions from the public. I have several. I'm not going to get to them tonight. the ability to contact the city and get those questions and get them answered and publicize them to get trust from the community to support this tax measure, I think is what it is, because it makes very nervous when you're saying we're already in a $3 million structural deficit from the past six years, we'd want to get there again.

So my comments. Thank you, Steve. Yes, I was trying.

Just a couple of those things, please.

Sure.

So, and I'd be happy to have conversations, Steve or anybody that's listening or watching anytime, day or night, give me a call. I've got it all pretty much back there in the brain. The limited term property tax sharing agreement between the city of Lincoln and Placer County was put into place about six years ago. And it was a temporary measure um, to address public safety, uh, shortfalls. Uh, and so think of it like instead of restructuring what we may view as substandard in those agreements, it was a temporary patch. This will get you to a place at some point where you can hopefully come up with some other solution on your own. Right. And, um, The way that agreement is structured is that we receive the vast majority of property taxes in a small area of 12 bridges. It's essentially the area that is in and around Kaiser, that area that's building out right now. And we get the increment from that development for the first year that it exists. That next year, it goes back to the traditional sharing percentage. So the deal was always designed to eventually wind down to nothing or revert back to what it was. The more permanent structural changes that we're seeking, and that area I just mentioned is one of them, would, we hope, address the base sharing percentage between city and county. And we don't need to get into that this evening. It's a very long and complicated story, but we feel like we have a very strong argument for why that's reasonable. Second was related to CFDs. We still do assess a public safety CFD, which was created in 2018. to all new projects in Lincoln. So if you move into a subdivision that was built post 2018, you pay a special property tax that is to fund only public safety as a means to sort of balance what we may not be getting out of property tax with the amount needed to serve that new home domicile. And it's a really important tool and it's super duper necessary. It's designed to try to take off so that current residents and taxpayers are not picking up the slack of new development as best we can. That said, it is not a tool that is designed to improve services, add ALS. It's a tool that's designed to keep you hopefully just head above water so that you can meet patrol demands. And it's designed intentionally that way because while those people that are not in CFDs may not care about new homes that are being built and put into them, that's fine for you today. But is it okay for your children tomorrow that might need to live in one or their children the year, you know, years after that? that need to buy a home in Lincoln, does it help support any of the goals that we all have for affordability? Not really. So it's a really important tool and a tool that needs to remain in place, but it is unfortunately not the long-term solution. Perfect. Thank you very much.

Was there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Jason. Jason.

Good evening, Mayor, Council. I don't have any notes tonight, so I'm going to wing it. So there'll probably be a lot more ahs and ums as I think through my thoughts. I just wanted to start, actually, with Council Member Eklund's comments that kind of share anecdotally. I've been in that position where you had to call 911. A little less than two years ago, I had to call 911 for my daughter. She had an anaphylactic allergic reaction that we didn't know she was allergic to. And the fire department was there in about three and a half minutes. The ambulance took, it was almost 20, it was 17 minutes for them to get there, which, I mean, as your child's gasping for air, it felt like hours. So I've been in that position that you were talking about, and it's not fun. Obviously, I've voiced my support for this from this podium a couple of times as recently as last meeting. And so I'm obviously in support of it. I think, again, not to sound like the town pessimist, I'm always weary of poll data. Because if I polled you guys and said, hey, who wants a giant house on two acres with a killer pool?

Yeah, hell yeah, two of them.

Give me two of them. And then when they're like, OK, well, this is how much it costs, you're like, oh, never mind. I didn't notice. I don't know how to pay for it. And maybe that's why I'm always worried about poll data. And maybe the chiefs and Sean have gotten different responses in there. um, you know, talks with the, with the, uh, city, which, um, I've actually talked to you guys like a lot over the last couple of months. You guys haven't asked me, so I don't know if I should be offended or not, but, um, uh, that's because you've already told me your perspective. Um, and, but, and, you know, this, and this is just my, my two cents. I think the messaging will be important when it comes out, which, uh, I've looked at, you know, measures that have, that have failed in the cities I've lived in in the past. And even as recently, I think as, uh, whatever the one was in 2024 for the measure B. I think the messaging on that one was, in my opinion, was poor and didn't explain exactly what it was covering and what it was going to do, which may not be the only reason why it didn't pass, but I think that's a big reason why it didn't pass. I think the messaging when this comes out will be important about what it covers and what it's for.

I agree with you. That was the transportation issue.

Yes.

And we weren't in charge of that messaging. I'm not saying you were. I'm not saying you were. I'm just clarifying. Your point is well taken.

I get it. I get it. I wasn't saying anybody here was in prison. I was just saying that I think it's important the messaging be clear that this is what the sales tax increase is for. Excuse me. And so that it's clear to the public that this is something that we need and it's what it's for. Thank you, Jason.

Was there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I'm moving over to Zoom. I do have a hand raised on Zoom. Lena, you are now unmuted, and please provide your public comment.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council members. Lena Lebowski here. And first, I want to tell you that I'm in favor of this. But what I'm going to tell you may not sound like it. When I received the survey, I completed part of it. But it was obvious that survey had the goal of getting whoever's completing it to the position they wanted. in the end. So I didn't finish that survey. And when this idea of a sales tax first started, it was for public safety. That was the emphasis. And I'm all for having our fire department and our police department have everything they need. I'm very much in favor of the advanced life support and having paramedics on our fire trucks. Um, as someone stated us active adults who live in Lincoln Hills, a lot of us are hitting about 80 to 90 years old now. So this could be important to us. And, um, You know, if I ever needed that, I would be very happy if there was a paramedic on the fire truck. I know it takes the ambulance a little longer to get to your house. And I know that Lincoln doesn't get a whole lot of property tax off my house because I looked it up and Lincoln gets $194 from my house. And I'm sure... A few months ago, when they came to pick me up off the kitchen floor, it cost more than $194 to take care of that problem. So I'm very appreciative. But I want to caution you, it went from public safety to adding parks, recreation, and library, and now it's expanded to saving the general fund. And what I read says the money can be used for any lawful municipal purpose. But I personally, as a resident, want this money to be spent for public safety. And I don't even care if you never take it off. It can just go on forever as far as I'm concerned. But someday we're going to need a new police station too. There are a lot of things we need. So I just wanted to let you know how I feel about this. And don't forget, I am in favor of this, even though it doesn't sound like it. Thank you.

Thank you, Lena. No, you made your point very clear. Let me just point out that if it's a special tax just for police and fire, that takes a two-thirds vote, which is very, very difficult to achieve. And as we found out the hard way in Measure B with the transportation issue, even though Lincoln voted for it by about 69 percent. Rockland and Roseville pulled it down. So we're going to be living with that decision. Getting two-thirds is very, very difficult. If it goes into the general fund, yes, it could be used for any valid general fund purpose. But the reality is that 75 plus percent of the general fund is police and fire. But I think the key takeaway here is not only are we making that pledge that, yes, this is where the money is going for. But also, there'll be an oversight committee in order to do it. That's the plan. It has to be determined. But I mean, there would be an oversight committee, annual audits, to make sure total transparency. I think one of the things that I've been so gratified to see that this community has done is really to step up in terms of transparency. I think we probably do better than almost anyone that I've seen in many, many cities. And we're going to continue to do that, because when you're transparent, With people, you can bring them on board. They have to have your trust. We are going to be working very, very hard to make sure that we have earned that trust. I think we've come a long way from the bad old days when we didn't have this council and the administration didn't have the trust of the people. I think we do right now and we are not going to lose that presence in the community. So there's all sorts of protections that would go into assuring that the community is going to get exactly what they want from the measure, assuming that it's going to pass. Anyone else on Zoom?

I have no hands raised.

Do you have the final comments for my colleagues? Yeah, I'd like to make one final comment. A couple things. First of all, To Jason, I was not saying that you were saying that. It was a joke because the messaging, that message, that comment has been said a lot. And as the mayor just said, Lincoln voted overwhelmingly for Measure B, but the messaging was poor and the person in charge of it didn't do a good job. And we're all suffering for that. Now, having said that, I would like to say that kind of going to my comments before that. One of the things that I know that I have personally, since I've been on council and my council members with me, the old ones and the new ones here. have worked diligently along with our city manager and assistant and all of our staff we have now, worked diligently the last several years to correct past mistakes from prior employees, prior staff members, and even some prior council members. And that's fine. You know, life is life. But since I've been on the council, one of my priorities was to earn back the trust of the people. And as the mayor said, we've done that. I think, I mean, every city has challenges, right? And you can't make 100% of the people happy. But we've done a great job of earning back trust. And I think that they do trust us in this tax measure. And I'd also like to say that kind of what I've said a minute ago, too, is that we were very... strategic and intentional about using the temporary tax measure from Village One, also the ARPA money that we got to hire more firefighters and police officers. And it wasn't nilly-willy, it wasn't just using one-time funding for staff, because everybody knows as a general rule, you don't do that, right? We had a very serious issue in front of us. We were very strategic and intentional about that, knowing that we were going to go out for this tax measure, knowing that we have other tax issues that we are working with the county and knowing that we have all been, you know, staff and council have been working very hard the last several years. to solve this problem that was created decades before we got here, right? So we're not victims. We're not sitting around playing the blame game. We're doing the hard work. So I just want to make that clear again that this isn't some like fly-by-night thing. Oh, well, we're going to hope it works out. We've been very intentional and very strategic about the money that we've spent that we had the opportunity to use and how we're going to address it going forward. And I'm very proud of that, of the work that staff has done, the work that council's done, and the work that our public safety teams have done. And so people who want to, you know, throw shade and make accusations, I think they should think about that before they do that. Because, you know, and add to the mayor's point, and I've said this a lot in the last two years, Lincoln went from being not transparent at all to being the most transparent city in the Placer County. And that's something that we can all be proud of. So thank you.

Thank you, Holly. Any other comments before we close this out? This is an information item only. So Sean, what's the next step on this?

I think as Nita mentioned at the last part of her slide, the next step will be that we'll incorporate in a lot of the feedback, some of the requests for additional information from council and the community into sort of, the next item will be a version of this. It will be more technical. It will be longer, fortunately or unfortunately. And I believe the requirement is that a four-fifths majority of the city council is required to approve this. If approved, that goes to the Placer County Board of Supervisors who then have a... a duty to request that it be placed onto the November ballot. One thing I've shared with the community, what you saw here tonight, although community members have more and other folks have more specific positions that are more advocacy, our efforts have been education and talking, framing the issue and talking about the path forward that could be possible. After your vote in a couple of weeks, you won't hear that from anybody in this organization moving forward. We will be prohibited from, we are already prohibited from advocating for a tax with taxpayer dollars, meaning anybody that's paid by the city in any form or fashion, to the extent they participate on any level with this, have to do it on off time. They're very strict rules and the city attorney's office will make sure we don't get ourselves in trouble. But to the point that was made a little bit earlier by a resident about who steps in then. We have had discussions with the business community and various members of the nonprofit community. And you've heard from some representatives from our labor community this evening. Those folks will then, if they so choose, will then need to be partial or complete drivers of this process moving forward. Then it becomes a community conversation. So that's the next steps. I think it's the 22nd is our next council meeting. That will be the one where the big decision is made. And then the remainder of the year until the election will be up to the voters.

23rd, sorry.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Okay, we'll close on this, guys. Okay, good. Let's move on to 15E, adopt a resolution amending the 25-27 by any budget. Ms. Racker.

OK, this is my last time at this podium this evening, bringing forward the update to the biennium budget. As the council is aware, once every six months, we'll bring an adjustment forward for changes in estimates, as well as changes in actual revenues and expenses. And that's the item that you have before you this evening, requesting a resolution to solidify those adjustments and amendments and being able to continue spending authority within the city. You have a pretty detailed report in front of you as well as an additional document to provide some information on updates of the changes that we're requesting. So I will simply throw this to the council to see what questions you have. I see John really smiling at me and so I'm very nervous, very nervous about this.

Okay, John, do you want to be first or last? Who wants to be first? I'll open it. First of all, I really appreciate it. I said this before. I appreciate the format of it, explaining exactly what the changes are, why they're requested, and what's going on. And from what I was reading on this, bottom line to our five-year projection, it doesn't change because of these adjustments here.

But the so just as a clarification, the five year projection, they'd be presented earlier in that PowerPoint presentation is from the original adoption of the biennium budget. We don't update that on a regular basis. We will update that for our next presentation. And so the numbers will be more in line.

All right, since I kicked it off, who's next? Or we got to kick it to john. Okay, john, you're you're up. Oh, he's good. Okay. All right. Okay, good. Let's open it up for public comment.

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I have no hands raised.

Okay, I shut it to say this. I'll bring it back to the comments for the council. John?

No comments from me. I appreciate the elaborate and detailed report and I'll move adoption.

Okay. Perfect. We're here a second. I'll second. Okay. Thank you very much, Ben. Okay. All in favor. Say aye. Aye. Opposed. Nope. Okay. Passes five zero. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And thank you, Nita. And, and, and thank you for the staff also for putting that, there's a lot of work that goes into these. Yeah. As usual. Okay. City manager report, Sean.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I'm not going to give much of an update tonight because, to be frank, the work that has gone into the item that you heard two items ago has been a labor of effort that's included everyone in this room. Um, and for at least me, Anita has become pretty much all encompassing for the last couple of weeks. So I'd love to have a lot more excellent updates for you, but I only a couple of little brief ones tomorrow at EDC. Um, Danielle is going to give an update on her voyage down to the International Shopping Center Convention where she was helping our development community and try to find exciting new tenants to come to Lincoln. If you want to hear another version of sales tax presentation, I will be giving it again tomorrow morning to that group.

Sorry, which group did you say?

EDC. EDC.

Yeah.

I'm starting to kind of feel like a, you know, a famous band that only has one hit and I just keep playing it a lot. Yeah, yeah, right. And Council Member, Vice Mayor Eklund and I are going to be attending the PCWA retreat this week where we will be discussing something that they've coined as, I think they're calling it Placer 2100. And it's this sort of exercise where we try to plan out a little a lot further out that we typically do what kinds of needs we think the communities is in this county are going to have Sort of interesting effort and I probably have other reports, but I can't remember them at the moment. And I think we've all been here long enough. So I'll just answer questions if you have any perfect.

Thank you. All right. Council initiated business. Anyone have anything

I know that a group of downtown businesses have spoken to Council Member Brown. I know that they've reached out to me, and I'm sure that they've talked to you, Sean, as well. And they want to do different events down there in the plaza and not close down Fifth Street, as far as I understand, because I asked about that. But they're asking if we could waive city fees or whatever. So I just wanted to put that out there so we can have a conversation about it.

So we are waiving the street closure fees for their event. Okay. And their event is actually not requesting the use of the plaza is my understanding that the road in that area coming forward to request use of the plaza. And if they have a request to waive fees, that's something that we can discuss. Although we don't necessarily do.

I thought they were to a farmer's market. Yeah.

It's a farmer's market.

I thought that they were using the plaza.

Yeah, now that they're going to use a shutdown version, you know, F or

Yeah, they're primarily restricting it to my understanding. They did meet with the special events committee this morning, and I haven't had a chance to loop back around to staff, so I'll have a better report for you next time.

More broadly, though, one of the things that at some point soon that I think is reasonable and ripe for the city council to discuss is how you want to deal with the waivers. Some of that authority can be given to... to us to to identify um what when something might make sense we have a very strict sort of uh we want to make sure that when we're doing that we're being very consistent with our with our residents because everybody has a really great reason why they shouldn't recharge anything um but uh and and they're all re you know look i'd give everything could but um i do think that it's probably worthwhile for council to decide whether you think that there should be a little bit more there should be a set of standards that you could help us with where we could evaluate those requests and have a little bit of flexibility to help projects or or events like that and then talk a little bit about what the downsides of that might be i think it's totally reasonable

And it is helpful, I think, to note that the fees are only to cover the cost of providing the service.

Right.

And that often when we have street closures or the pipping and use, that that is staff coming in either overtime or on call or off shift to perform those functions, which has additional payroll costs to the city that And when we're charging that, that includes just their fully burdened rate, which isn't necessarily an overtime rate. It is a wrapped up rate of their total costs and pension and all of that.

I totally get that. Maybe we could do a workshop on that.

It would be really helpful because there are times when we're like, is this a true public benefit?

Is there a reason that we can do this? Right. Thank you. This will be a good discussion. It will be a great discussion.

And Mayor, I apologize. There's one item that I know you're going to want me to have mentioned, which is rebar. And the rebar situation, huge thank you to Public Works, huge thank you to Engineering, huge thank you to FIRE, all of whom got together, we figured out a way the rebar has now been removed from the ditch area. That hazard no longer exists. We've communicated that to some of the members of the public that are most concerned about that. There's this news story in the Gold Country Media that ran earlier last friday that that was a little behind the actual detail of it being solved at that point so fortunately our mayor was able to get the um the writers of those stories to give me a call or contact me so i could share that we've actually cured that issue at the moment we're going to figure out longer term what the solution to the ditch is but just as a psa um It is not advisable for members of the public to be walking along private property and especially along a bank that may have a large ditch to one side. If you're walking in that neighborhood. I know it's a pain walk across the street to the sidewalk that exists on the other side of joiner and continue your route, which way, whichever way you may be going Matt and his team are putting together some signs where we're going to say that this area is blocked off so that people don't just walk there anyway. But for the time being, it seems that most of the concerns are taken care of at the moment.

So huge thanks to those guys. Just a side note to that, because I did reach out to Matt Medill, our public works director today, to say, what exactly was the timeline? And it turns out that a member of the community approached public works, I think it was on a Sunday, Monday, the team was already figuring out what to do. A couple of days later, the caps were on. A couple of weeks after that, until we had to find out because it's private property, what we can do. The fire department went in there, bent it back, and now everything is gone. So, I mean, so when the, when the actually, by the time the story came out, the problem was solved. So anyway.

So. I'm going to borrow one that Holly forgot. When is the skate park breaking ground?

That's what I thought you were going to ask. Then help me out.

We just, we just met on this and I don't remember what you told me.

Well, the good news is that, you know, when the project was advertised, we, we got a very favorable response. The challenge is that we ran into some PG&E issues with some unforeseen site conditions being gas lines. And staff has been coordinating with PG&E who has been responsive in allowing the project to move forward. But in order for that to happen, the contractor has to protect those gas facilities And they have, so it's taken them a little longer to mobilize. And there will be some additional change order costs that we're working with them on. But our goal is to move the project forward. And our engineering manager, Araceli, and I will be meeting with the contractor to try to push things forward.

Ben, do you have a new ETA? Approximate.

We're working on it. We're working to get them to have be breaking ground before the end of summer.

Yes. Got it. Okay. Perfect. All right. Thank you. Okay. Good. Okay. So we're done with that. Yeah.

A couple of questions. Do we have any updates on toll bridges here? College stuff like from county.

Yeah. There was another accident there today.

The latest we heard was that they were taking a draft of the agreement back to their legal counsel and we're waiting to get that back that draft back in our possession, so that we could route it for our legal counsel review so right now it's it's in the agreement development stage.

And then, uh, last question was, uh, is there any update on the add on tower to the, uh, 12 bridges? Yeah. Kind of Dara, uh, cell tower.

Um, so, uh, Jen, uh, we're pretty much, through the bones of design at this point. The next step that we wanted to make sure we teed up was that we needed to start having conversations with carriers to to lock in who's going to be there so it wouldn't do us we were worried that it wouldn't do us any good we build this whole thing we don't have deals with anybody in place and they're like hey there's a tower that only helps us it doesn't help your cell phone coverage at all the good news is is that jen told me the other day that verizon and at&t and probably some other carriers are very interested so i don't think that's going to be a problem And we're working through that. Our city attorney's office actually weirdly has a lot of experience with this kind of thing. And so they've been helping us with the agreements and how we set that up. And then do you have a timeframe, Jen, of when we're going to bring that for approval? I forget what we talked about.

I'm waiting for final design drawings and then I'll be routing that through our engineering. And then as soon as that's done, I will be putting that out for bid and then bringing that forward when I get bids back. So probably, I mean, hopefully by the end of the summer, two wireless carriers are very interested and ready to go. So it's as soon as we can get things going.

Do you think maybe construction would be end of summer or would already be constructed, agreed, and utilized?

We'll have to ask the folks that put together our bid docs what they kind of think a reasonable timeline is, but this is not a super complex project. We're talking about a pad to anchor the the tower and then the lattice tower. So it's not something like one of our park builds, for example, that could take a year. This is more of a matter of months.

They told me six months. So like from construction to complete, it is six months.

And the idea would be that we have all agreements in place and those carriers are ready to throw up their technology as soon as that thing is finaled.

Okay, great. to pull over to finish my phone call again today.

Okay, thanks. Okay, committee reports.

I just have one. Last weekend, I was at the GSEC retreat. And actually, the week before, I went to West Sacramento, they did a huge press conference. And then they presented on it again, at the retreat, and something that they called the Sacramento pitch. And so as everybody knows, the Sacramento A's, which were the Oakland A's are in West Sacramento right now at the Sutter Health Park, but their plan is to go to Las Vegas, boo. But Sacramento is partnering, or the GSEC is partnering with multiple investors with the United Auburn Indian community, and also the Miwok tribe from Shingle Springs and several other investors. And they're looking for one very large investor, but they have launched a bid for an expansion team in Sacramento. And so it's very exciting. We think we'll get it. um but so it's something that they're they're working on so that was a big focus of um the presentation and there was other things uh too but nothing earth shattering for us but anyway so i will keep you updated on sacramento because you know it's great for sports tourism but it's also great for jobs and let's let's not let's knock that one out of the park yes there you go mayor very good okay yes thank you yeah just pull that out of there winnie

I have, okay, so tomorrow for EDC, I will not be there. I have to go early to LAFCO. We're hiring a new EO. So we've got our interview process all morning before our commission tomorrow evening. Hopefully we can, it sounds like we have some really great candidates to hopefully to hire. And we had PCWA and we got an update from them.

Going to Hellhole.

Then we're going to Hell Hole Reservoir, which is, I just don't like saying that, but that's what it's called. And it is, it's not very hellish, but yeah, we're going to be participating in that retreat. We'll hopefully, well, I'm sure that we'll have some really good information to bring back. from that and we're armed to contribute to the conversation geared towards the future of placer county and their general plan that's their 2020 2050 general plan. And I. I think that's it. Can you think of the highlight of our PCWA meeting?

Except that we had a very long and detailed discussion on the availability of water going forward. And everyone, the plans are there that the water is there for us to have. And that the big point of failure, which is the one major pipe coming in, there are backup solutions being driven towards that, towards a redundancy. But that's a very expensive fix. But something will happen about that in the future.

Is that, as a follow-up from our last meeting, are they second pipe from Ophir or they'll loop to like Rockland and Placer One?

John, I think it's from Ophir, right?

Are you talking about the transmission line?

Well, the redundancy for the main water supply. Either coming, looping into Placer One.

Yeah, super briefly, it's very interesting. There's a line that exists that connects to Rockland that Lincoln actually used to use as a primary water delivery source that we no longer need or use. But that line is not inactive. In fact, it still serves some of Rockland. So in a pinch, they were explaining that they could open that line and deliver water to us. There are the other ones, River Arc and other possibilities that are a little bit further out. But the most important thing is that one of their engineers explained he crushed some misconceptions about the pipe. The pipe is a steel mortar encased construction material that is about as hefty as you can really put in the ground. And if it has points of failure, it's on small service laterals that serve little small county developments all the way up the hill. And so is it possible that one of those rusts and we have a leak and need to repair it? Yes, that could happen. But he explained that that would be like a day or day and a half at the most, not the end of the world. He said, but, you know, look, if we have a 10.0 earthquake in this county, all bets are off. And it's a good point because if we have a 10.0 earthquake, we're going to have many other problems other than just that.

I mean, it would be useful to add that to future questions. Because I think people just think it's a pipe. Yeah, I agree. Add some context around that when we talk about water in the future.

I didn't even really understand how sturdy it was. He even explained that that kind of pipe has a useful lifespan of 80 or 90 years, and it's only 25 years old. It's a teenager in pipe terms.

Good. I've got Air Pollution Control District tomorrow. Next week is Pioneer and the Airport Committee. That's it.

i'll report after that john uh parks and rec our parks and rec met last um wednesday one thing to highlight that was kind of very unique is a developer built park in village one it's uh kind of a neighborhood pocket park that they kind of moved it to be adjacent to a sort of a traditional regional park but what's really neat about it is it's not going to be a park like you'd normally expect it's making high use of the rock and terrain of the area because it's Very unique huge rocks and boulders and different elevations it's really neat. More like basically capturing some of the open space and sticking it right in the middle of the Community was really kind of any concept so. I think the plans are in the agenda, I encourage you to take a look at it, because it's not a traditional park it's right next to one where you'll see the play sets and all the other stuff, but it was kind of a neat. neat add on for that part of the village one here but oh yeah and.

Oh, we have our Western plus or two by two on Friday, this Friday.

Yeah. Those will be upcoming.

All right, good. Anything else with the good to the order? Okay.

Thank you.