City Council - Regular Meeting

good evening everyone and welcome to the special meeting of the madera city council wednesday july 22nd 2026 i call this meeting order at 6 00 p.m city clerk gonzalez the city council meetings are open to the public the meeting may also be viewed and accessed remotely by using the link located

Members of the public may provide comments on agenda items in person through Zoom or by phone at 669-900-6833 using meeting ID 813-4109-5672, followed by the pound key or by email at citycouncilpubliccomment at madera.gov. To comment by phone, press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute when called upon. Written comments may also be submitted by email, I'm sorry, by mail to 205 West 4th Street, Madeira, California, 93637. A recording of the meeting will be posted on the city's YouTube channel as soon as practicable following the conclusion of the meeting. We'd also like to remind attendees that Wordly is available for translation services.

Thank you for that. Roll call, please.

Mayor Gallegos.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Zachariah. Here. Council Member Rodriguez. Here. Council Member Montes.

Here.

Council Member Evans is absent. Council Member Mejia is absent. Council Member Villegas.

Oh, here.

Thank you if I could have everyone please stand for the invocation done by mayor pro, Tim Zachariah and the pledge of allegiance.

Thank you father God, we just always give you thanks and praise. We just ask for your continued guidance. And just leading this meeting, and let us do the goodwill of the city. We always ask this in your name. Amen.

Ready salute.

Thank you for that. Moving right along, I would bring it to my colleagues for any questions or comments on approval of our agenda. I see none. I open it up for public comment. No one in the chamber. Anyone online or on Zoom?

We have none, Mayor.

I will close public comment at this time and bring it back to my colleagues for a motion and a second.

Second.

I have a motion and a second. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion passes unanimously. No presentations and next item.

Public comment, members of the public shall have an opportunity to address the city council regarding matters on this agenda. At the time the agenda is called, speakers should limit their comments to three minutes. Thank you for that.

And then we will move to public comment. Anyone in the chamber? Anyone online or on Zoom?

We have none, Mayor.

Okay. I will close public comment and move on to our next item.

Section A, Petitions, Bids, Resolutions, Ordinances, and Agreements, A1, Rotary Park Baseball Courts. All right. I'm sorry, Basketball Courts.

Woo, it's a heat. That will be presented by our Parks and Rec Director, Abra. Welcome. Yay.

Good evening. Good to be back.

Yes.

so i uh yeah joe a bear parks director presenting item a1 rotary parks basketball court um i uh normally go last so i petitioned so i could be first and last this evening so we'll go ahead and move right in So, so background for this, the city was awarded 938,981 dollars of COVID funds in program year 2020 and 2021 to support a micro enterprise and rent utility projects intended to offset the impacts of COVID 19. THE CITY ALLOCATED FUNDS TO FOUR NONPROFIT AGENCIES, APPROXIMATELY 256 REMAIN UNSPENT WITH THE DEADLINE TO EXPEND SAID FUNDS IN SEPTEMBER 2026. MARCH 4TH, 2026, THE COUNCIL APPROVED THE REALLOCATIONS OF FUNDS TO BE USED TO CONSTRUCT BASKETBALL COURTS AT ROTARY PARK, WHICH WAS UNDER RESOLUTION NUMBER 26-25. FOR ROTARY PARK, INITIALLY THE SCOPE Initially, the project scope consisted of the installation of one high school-sized court with a pedestrian connection to the existing walkway near the Xero Gravity Skate Park. The design and technical specifications were to mirror the basketball courts at McNally Park, which you all remember, including striping and hoops. The associated scope of work items would include limited turf patching as may result from construction, as well as irrigation modifications or retrofitting around the new court and walkway. Why basketball courts, you ask? And so I just want to add a little bit to this. One of the things that when we did put up the McNally basketball courts, when I first started here five years ago, the number one call center was McNally Park. And I'm telling you, I got lots of calls. I want to say at least, I don't know, for four or five times a week, something going on at McNally Park, whether it's graffiti or what have you. Since we put in the basketball courts, I can tell you the, and I use the soccer term, those calls have pretty much gone nil. And I'm not saying that nothing happens there, but the frequency has gone down quite a bit. So This was kind of an aha for me. So that's one of the reasons that we think basketball courts are a benefit to the city. And as my boss says, there's a low entry point for basketball courts, as there are for other things that you'll see later in the presentation. But we think basketball courts is a good addition to the city. The city right now has a lack of outdoor, readily accessible courts. Right now we have only three outdoor courts. Pan Am has a single court. McNally has three nonstandard courts that were in poor condition. We upgraded those. Now we have two standard courts out there, and they're heavily used. Madeira High School removed their courts as part of the stadium reconstruction. The city has three indoor courts at John Wells Youth Center, Pan American Community Center, and Sunrise Rotary Sports Complex gymnasium. The court at Pan Am was recently re-striped. And actually, we learned a lot. So that was a learning experience for me, learning how to re-stripe all that goes into restriping a basketball court. It's a lot more involved than you would think. It's not just, and I think the reason that we restriped it was because somebody thought it was an easy job and they did it like it was an easy job. And so it was actually, I think somebody came to one of the council meetings and talked about how poorly the lines were there. So now we're, I think we've got good lines there now. And what we found is that these courts, these public courts, the Nets, we routinely replace those as well. We're going to have future basketball courts. We're going to do a half court at Tabard Park. We'll have a half court at Tozer Park. And like I said, all the courts have been well received based on the number of players. And like I said, these courts are heavily used, especially at McNally. And we're actively seeking opportunities to provide additional courts wherever we can when we get the funding. This slide right here will show the two sites where the McNally and Pan Am, you'll see the stars there. So that's where the two outdoor courts are right now. The next slide shows where the existing interior courts are, John Wells, Millview, and Pan Am. The next slide has all the above, and that'll show you where Talbert Park will be. And the next one is the Rotary Park site that we're talking about today. And this final one should be Tozer Park. And so we began discussions, began work with Westwood Professional Services, utilizing the on-call agreement that we have in place. Westwood, as you know, has worked on several city projects, including James Tower, Tozer, and McNally Park. Uh, they've helped, uh, the city prepare and finalize, uh, design plans and technical technical specifications for the McNally basketball court project. And, like I said, that was completed back in 2024. uh, this project, uh, that project in particular consisted of the redesign and reconstruction of 2 high school size, full basketball courts. Um, the court location that we're talking about is going to be minimal disruption to existing features. We're not going to remove any trees. There'll be a northerly southerly orient orientation and minimize glaze during sunlight hours. And I think the basketball players will appreciate that. Uh, I don't want to get any calls. So they put it in the wrong place. So we, we did take that into account. Uh, and trust me, people will call and let us know. So it is proximate to a parking lot. And ideally, what we're thinking is that the neighborhood skate park would provide lighting for the new basketball court. Currently, none of our courts have lighting available after dark. However, although this specific project doesn't include lighting, we'll continue to seek funding for it as appropriate. So we do think there's a need to have lighting, but that's down the road. Again, this is the site that we're looking at right next to the skate park some of you know that area here's the design drawing you can see the features to basketball court side by side. We did we had a kickoff meeting back in April April 15 and at that time the we decided to do, we were originally going to do one court and we decided to go ahead and do two rather than the one. I think we can, you know, basketball courts, I think we could do that. The topographic and geotechnical assessments were completed in early May. A concept plan was submitted on May 20th, a 90% submittal package was on May 29th, and the 100% submittal package on June 1st. Plan check was requested and submitted on June 2nd and approved on June 25th. On June 29th, the city released an invitation for bids with the bid due date of July 13th of this year. To ensure a 14-day public notice period of the IFB, addendum number one, revise the bid due date to July 14th at 2 p.m. On the 14th, we got nine bids. And so which was and I think somebody stood here two weeks ago and talked about how we seem to be getting a lot more bids. And so nine is a good number to work with. You can see that out of the nine bidders, the low bidder was Harris Development Corporation at $285,248.70, well within the engineering estimates of $330,340. Again, Harris submitted the lowest responsible bid. they're a licensed general engineering contractor based in Clovis and they specialize in public works and parks improvement projects across the central valley they have an active contractor state license and an active department of industrial relation relations registration as confirmed by staff the CDBG grant award for this project was $256,050 we'll show a table that'll show you the CBDG breakdown. I think that was in your package as well. So here's the 256. These are the amounts that we've spent so far out of the 256. We have a total balance remaining of 198,717. And so you probably say, well, where's the, where's all this? The next we don't have enough money. And so, uh, we thought of that. So, um, so with that balance, uh, there's a difference of 86,531 dollars and we even taken into account the 10% contingency, which is, uh, 28,000 and some change. 115 of the total funding is still required to fully fund the project. We're proposing using development impact fees to fund the monies to cover the difference. Currently, the parks diff fund has a fund balance of approximately $3.9 million in it. The commitments that we have to date are we've got to pay for Tozer Park. which there's a 50% match. And it's anticipated that we probably are going to need more than what's available as part of the grant. Just as prices go up, we're noticing, I think, Councilman Rodriguez, we've had discussions about price creep over the last year. Just things have happened. The James Talbert bids, they came in higher than budgeted. So we're using, we expect to use 303 thousand three hundred eighty nine of diff funds for this project sunset Park is being designed at this point and it's anticipated to be a hundred percent of the diff and the final payment for Rancho Santa Fe Park remains unpaid at this point but the funds are we still have the funds set aside for that you can see see what I was just talking about so sunset Park Tozer Park James Talbert Park and Rancho Santa Fe those are the numbers If I minus all the encumbered amounts, we expect we still have about a healthy balance of about 1.8Million dollars remaining. So you all think that we're just twiddling our thumbs over in parks doing 4th of July events and having fun and all this other stuff. But we have a number of projects that are actually coming up. And again, I started this by saying that we're trying to find things that are low entry for the community. One of the things that is on our radar, we haven't lost sight of it, and I think the community won't let us, but we are working on revamping the pool, the Centennial Park pool complex. Again, Tozer Park and Sunset Park. And one of the things, I don't know that I've talked about this to you all, but we are adding child soccer fields at three locations, one at Town and Country Park, one at Rancho Santa Fe, and another one at the John Wells Youth Center. And we have one out already, and it's been well received by the community right now. So I think, again, another low entry point for the community to engage in activity outdoors. My recommendation at this time is adopt a resolution Construction agreement under invitation for bid 202526-28 for the Rotary Park basketball courts in the amount of 285,248 to Harris Development Corporation with a construction contingency of 10%, 28,524, which is the contingency and adopting a CEQA class 1 exception for existing facilities for this project. And that concludes my presentation. I'm open for any questions.

All right, thank you. I'll bring it back to my colleagues for any questions or concern. Council Member, Mayor Pro Tem Zachariah.

Just as I guess a quick You know, just looking at the map and more of just a question of why there's no facilities West of the 99. it seems like. East of the 99 is fully dotted with basketball facilities, but, um. The West side doesn't really see even 1. I know we don't have maybe as many parks and town country may not be ideal, but is there just. Is there a reason why we don't see 1 on the West side?

So, uh. So, again, it's all a matter of funding. Uh, so again, this is grant funding. A lot of our grants, uh, don't on the West side don't really qualify on that side because of the social economic status there. So, again, when you're chasing dollars, it's, uh, that that's 1 of the 1 of the things that we see as an impediment, you know, but. Yeah, go ahead.

Uh, thank you, um, for the record or an older Rodriguez, a couple of things to highlight. That's something, um, that's why I wanted to add to the maps. It is to highlight that that West is woefully short of basketball courts, considering there's not a single basketball court. I think historically. benefited from Thomas Jefferson basketball courts and Madera High School. As Council is aware, Madera High School recently removed the basketball courts along all of us, part of their stadium reconstruction project. As we move forward, those are things that are near and dear to me. is adding additional amenities to some of the existing park spaces. And as we're adding park facilities, for example, sunset park has space to do potentially half a basketball court. If you follow the historic north south orientation to go to the east west or space, the problem though is if you're a basketball player, you want to go north south, not east west because of the sun and the glare. Um, I think sunset park will more than likely have at least 1 half basketball court and potentially if space allows in budget. And if this council approves it, potentially having a child's basketball court, the city does not have a single child's basketball court. 1 of the benefits of rental Santa Fe is that. That there is a good amount of space while we're adding a, a child's soccer, um, um, feel there something that Joe and I talked about as recently as. Monday, if I recall, it could have been yesterday, is adding a basketball court there as well. Madeira is short on low barrier activities, basketball courts, soccer fields. So that's something that we definitely want to add. I'm hyper sensitive to it. And as we're looking at adding amenities and improving the limited park space we have, those are things we're going to be looking at. And so we, we, we definitely want to do that. And as future parks come online online, the last handful that we've added have not had a lot of amenities and some of that had had to do with budgetary constraints but now we are actively going back in into those parks and we're trying to we're slowly trying to add some amenities and so far on the park was our first attempt I think it's been extremely well received I know the few times that I've passed by I've seen a good number of people there not every time but but there's been a few times I've gone in it's been it appears to be very well received Um, we, we have not advertised it significantly. Uh, but as we're adding 3 more here in the near future. We'll be sure that we promote that to the community. The neighborhoods, I think are very well aware of it, but. I think the map does illustrate that that our city, um, historically, we've had. 3 basketball courts, and now that we're starting to add some and expand to them. Um, we definitely want to look at some additional opportunities. Thank you.

And I guess there's a question. I mean, is there, is there, um, issues of, like, uh, proximity to, like, housing? Like, I mean, is people usually not want a basketball court, for instance, across the street from them? Do they prefer that? And all the reason I'm asking, because we have the westward development happening. And is there is there I know typically we don't put in, like, our recommendations for how they build out their parks if they choose to, but is that something. that we can maybe advocate for as these newer housing developments tend to have a park element to them that maybe these low barrier type, instead of just building a field of grass, like, you know, basketball court maybe.

We most definitely can, and as we're going forward, when some of these parks started being added, I think one of the challenges we're struggling with is we didn't have a good handle of how much money the DIF had and what was committed. Now that we have spreadsheets that we maintain and we actively meet as a team, we have a very good handle of what we have and what we owe. When I initially got here, we did not have a good handle on that. and so now as park space is coming online i think staff has much more of a comfort level of asking developers of what we want um and and i think that we're in a place now where we could potentially go back and start retrofitting some of these spots to identify some of those areas. I'm biased. I think that people do want basketball courts. And I think the evidence of that, if you go into neighborhoods, you see a lot of basketball rims on driveways and you see a lot of them on the sidewalk. And that alone tells me that there's a need for basketball courts, especially if you go into newer communities where there's a lot of children, where they're brand new homes, you see a lot of basketball courts kind of peppering the roadway. And that tells me that there's definitely a desire to have basketball courts.

Because I mean, I mean, I agree that too. I mean, with Joe's thing, I mean, it's a low barrier to entry, but it's also a low barrier for maintenance. I mean, absolutely. Build it. You change the nets a couple of dollars, probably, you know, every so often. Then you're not mowing, you're not watering, you're not, you know, so I just would see what it would like to see a little bit more push for stuff like that. I agree. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Council Member Rodriguez.

Thank you, Mayor. And along those lines of Council Member Zachariah, I first I wanted to say thank you Joe for your presentation appreciate your leadership and and always looking out for the amenities whether they're low entry or not just to have more facilities to for our community I know our city manager I mentioned that there's a shortage of facilities but I beg to differ because we we are surrounded by schools and they share some of biggest green spaces surrounding our city limits and also have quite a few basketball courts tennis courts and what have you and the frustrating thing for me is that somehow um we share the space but yet we can't share the amenities and that's unfortunate because it really serves all of our community i mean people that pay property taxes a good 50 of that goes back into they go it goes back to the schools and and yet um have no access to it so i i'm not frustrated with our city i'm just frustrated that we're not able to share and these overlapping facilities because you know we're going to build a basketball court but yet there's one across the street that has a fence over it and i'll use me as a prime example i i try not to let councilman want to see me but i i'll be driving by his house down roberts when i come around to thomas jefferson in the back and just to try to play tennis and i I have to jump the fence just like everybody else does and I hate to say that okay uh well unfortunately I mean it's never really it's closed it's not a gates not open maybe due to construction what have you but um I wish we could have a better partnership and if I could ask this council is to seek some type of communication to see how we can work with them um so that we're not always chasing the same dollars for the same facilities that we already have here that's that's what i'm saying and but again i appreciate it because mcnally did need those parks i'm glad we're having them at rotary i look forward to someday having them here at town and country um i play i'm very active and i'd love to see those courts because i see a lot of people they want to just jump and have somewhere to go and unfortunately this side of the 99 you hardly see any of those but the schools have them that's all i have to say thank you

Thank you council member rodriguez um at this time open it for public comment I see no one in the chamber anyone online or in zoom city clerk and so we have we have none mayor thank you I will close public comment and bring it back to my colleagues for a motion in a second so I could have a motion in a second all those in favor say aye aye those opposed motion passes unanimously Thank you, Parks Director Aber. And with that, I will adjourn this meeting at 6.24 and see everyone back Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. Thank you, everyone. Have a great evening.