City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. We're going to go ahead and reconvene from our special meeting. Any final action this evening?

Nothing to report out. Thank you.

All right. With that, we're going to go ahead and call to order the regular meeting for Tuesday, May 26. Please call the roll and establish a quorum.

Okay. Council Member Zorba? Here. Aquino? Here. Kozlowski?

Here.

Leary? Here. And Rathel?

Here. If you'll all please stand with me for the Pledge of Allegiance. 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 and do we have any agenda updates this evening

Yes, Mayor, we have three pieces of additional material on our old business item, the charter review item. And they have been provided to the council, and there are also copies on the back table for members of the public.

Thank you so much. And that takes us to business from the floor. Do we have any speakers this evening?

Yes, we do have two requests to speak under this business from the floor this evening. So I'm going to go ahead and call your name if you go ahead and approach the podium when you hear your name. Sherry Richter and Peggy Plett.

And while they make their way up, if there's anybody here not familiar with the process, you can fill out a blue card in the back. This is business from the floor. You're welcome to bring it up right over here to the side of the dais and we'll give you three minutes to speak. And if you want to speak on an agendized item, you can also fill out that same card and just note which agenda item you want to speak to the council on this evening. Good evening.

Good soggy, rainy, wet feet evening. Sherry and I are here to invite each and every one of you and the public in general to Black Bear Awareness Weekend coming up June 6th and June 7th. That's what your card is for, and if you flip it, we've got Honey Bee Day coming up in August. That's also a day that can be very fun. For Black Bear Awareness Week, there will be some real fun things going on at the zoo in the bear exhibits. Staff will be setting up some pseudo campsites, and we'll invite our bears to come see and visit those campsites and see if bear-proof equipment is really bear-proof and what some of the hazards are that campers, picnickers, and day trippers run into when they're in bear territory. So we hope to see all of you there. It should be a berry fun day.

You're so good. Thank you very much.

Thank you, appreciate you coming out tonight.

Okay, the next speaker under this item is Armando and Donovan Russo. You could go ahead and approach the podium.

I will go ahead and tee this up while they're coming down. As you know, last year, Folsom celebrated 25 years of friendship with our sister city, Pieva del Grappa. And at the farmer's market last September, I met Donovan Rizzo and his father, Hermano. And Donovan shared that he wanted to live and study in the United States, but he needed a family to stay with. And so I said, well, you can come live with my husband and me. I told him, as long as you don't smoke and as long as you know, I don't cook dinner every night. I'll make sure you have food, but I won't necessarily be the one preparing it. So anyway, John and I have had the pleasure of hosting Donovan in our home since January 1st. He has been an absolute delight. I think the sister city relationship has been strengthened and just wanted to invite Donovan and his dad here tonight to just say a little bit. Donovan, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much for the introduction, Lynn. I would like to start by obviously thanking the amazing people that are Sarah Aquino and John Aquino for this one-of-a-lifetime experience that I will carry for the rest of my life in my baggage, and I hope, you know, eventually in the future also my kids will be able to do such an experience. My time in the U.S. has been truly amazing, especially for the people. I say the people is the most impactful thing that... I have seen the difference. Well, I'm not the best at making speeches.

Donner, tell them that you're going to graduate on Friday.

I'm graduating on Friday at Visellago. So, yeah, I will bring the diploma back to Italy. So that's that's an excitement. I've already been attending council meetings in the town hall of Crespano del Grappa, the sister cityship. So. I hope that I will continue in the future and I hope that we are able to strengthen the relationship with this town even more. As I see that the people here are absolutely amazing.

So just, yeah, very good. I will say that the students at Vista Del Lago really took Donovan under their wing. They've made sure that he's had a great experience. He's been to a monster truck show at Golden One Arena. He's been hiking in the Marin Headlands. And the very first day of school in January, they picked him up after school and they took him to Costco. That was his welcome to America initiation. So, Hermano, you want to say a few words? Sure. We're hoping some of us will be able to go to Pieve del Grappa and see all of you.

Actually, the town hall of Pieve del Grappa is trying to arrange to get a student or something. As I came here, it's only fair that somebody from Folsom is able to come to Italy and experience our culture as well, as you shared yours.

I came here a couple of days ago and before coming here I was talking to the mayor of Crespano, another name changed, it's Pieve, Pieve del Grappa. We locals still like to call it Crespano. So I spoke to the mayor, Annalisa Rampin, and also to the councilor that takes care of culture. The name is Andreatta, Daniel Andreatta. And they told me, oh, send greetings and hugs to the mayor, to the councilor, and to the citizens of Folsom. We Italians are warm-hearted, so they told me send hugs. We are like this. One thing they told me is to improve the connections between Folsom and Pieve del Grappa in the sense that we have three sister cities. One is Folsom, the other one is in Argentina, and the third one is in Germany. So with Germany it's very easy because it's nearby. It's just maybe five hours drive. We have a lot of connections. With Argentina and Folsom, obviously because of the distance, it's quite difficult. So they told me, try to improve the relationship. Like when you come to Europe, come to visit Crespano. We will welcome you with our heart. Venice is nearby. It's just one hour drive. So they told me, tell them to come visit. When you come visit in Europe, come visit. Last thing is there is a program with the schools and it's going very well with the middle school with kids between 10 and 13 year old. But at the moment they're trying to establish connections with the mail, letters and so on with elementary school. So for kids between five and 10 year old, so they told me try to find the teacher that is available. There are problems because of the nine hour differences, but when in Italy it's in the afternoon, here it's morning, so it's possible. So they told me I try to find a teacher for elementary school. I also want to thank Sarah and John and everybody for the beautiful experience for my son. And we would like to welcome high school students from Folsom to our town. There is a place to stay for the school year. We arrange everything with the bureaucracy. Italian bureaucracy is terrible, but we know how to deal with and we arrange everything. Also, if there are students in the age of university, it's possible to do a one-month experience or two or three at the place called the Philippine. They speak English. The course is in English. And they can have the credits with the American school system. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I told them they're welcome to stay for the whole meeting, but if they want to leave at any time during the meeting, you will not offend this.

Sarah, did you put Donovan up to running for mayor of the Abdel Grafa?

I think he has to make a stop in Argentina next. It sounds like he has to do the tour of all of the sister cities. All right. That takes us to our consent calendar this evening. Any items to pull this evening? Do we have any public comment?

You do not have any requests to speak this evening.

I can move adoption of the consent calendar. Second.

Please call the roll.

Okay, Council Member Zorba. Yes. Aquino. Yes. Kozlowski. Yes. Leary. Yes. And Riefel.

Yes. That takes us to public hearing. Please call the next item.

Okay, the public hearing item number 12, a presentation by staff in compliance with Assembly Bill 2561, Government Code Section 3502.3, regarding city vacancies, recruitment, and retention efforts.

That was my walk-up song.

Thanks, Dean.

All right. Good evening, Mayor, members of the Council, Alison Garcia, your Human Resources Director. Tonight's item is in response to AB 2561 and requires a presentation to the Council on vacancies, recruitment, and retention. In September 2024, AB 2561 was passed with an effective date of January 1st, 2025. City Council received a similar presentation this time last year with data from 2024. This bill requires a public agency to conduct at least one public hearing per fiscal year prior to the adoption of the next year's budget, presenting the status of vacancies and recruitment and retention efforts, and entitles the recognized employee organizations to present at the hearing. In accordance with this regulation, all bargaining units were notified of the public hearing, and the public hearing notice was published in the Folsom Telegraph. In response, Jamison Larson, president of the Folsom Middle Management Group, We'll be speaking on this item after my presentation. The bill further states that if the number of job vacancies within a single bargaining unit meets or exceeds 20% of the total number of authorized full-time positions, the bill requires the public agency upon request of the bargaining unit to include specific information during the public hearing. Fortunately, this does not apply to our bargaining units. The legislature recognizes that widespread job vacancies in local government are a significant issue affecting service delivery, employee well-being, and labor relations. Ensuring transparency of effort and adequate staffing across public agencies is a matter of statewide concern. The bill does not specify what the look back period must be. In order to provide a full year of data, we captured calendar year 2025 since we have all data for the complete year. This data set, however, spanned two fiscal years. In fiscal year 24-25, there were 505.5 FTE budgeted. At the start of fiscal year 25-26, there were 513.5 FTE budgeted. Due to citywide reorg and planned layoffs, the budgeted number of FTE reduced to 495.5. These budgeted positions cover public services from all departments listed here. So how do we determine the vacancy rate? We took the information based at the start of each month in the look-back period. We took the citywide vacancies and divided it by the number of budgeted FTEs and end up with a percentage of vacancies. The average citywide vacancy rate in calendar year 25 was 6%. For comparison, City of Sacramento had a vacancy rate of 22%, City of Roseville had a 7% vacancy rate, and City of Elk Road had a 6% vacancy rate. We also analyzed vacancy rates by labor groups. The group with the highest vacancy rate was Folsom Middle Management Group, FMMG, and the Unrepresented and Confidential Employee Group, both at 12%. FMMG includes supervisors, managers, and advanced journey level positions. Unrepresented and confidential positions are primarily in HR and finance. FMMG represents a significant portion of our workforce. with deep institutional knowledge and technical expertise. Many individuals in this group are late career professionals, and as a result, we're beginning to see a wave of retirements that is contributing to a higher vacancy rate within this group. Again, these are not entry-level roles. Many require specialized skills, certifications, or years of experience, which make them even more challenging and time-consuming to fill. The retirements not only create immediate vacancies, but also increase the urgency to recruit and train successors who can step into leadership roles and maintain continuity in service delivery. This trend reflects a broader challenge across the public sector where long-tendered employees are exiting the workforce, leaving behind a gap that requires strategic succession planning and competitive recruitment efforts. Like many organizations, we're experiencing a smaller applicant pool and increased competition for qualified candidates. Over the course of the reporting period, we made solid progress in filling vacancies across the organization. Of the 86 vacancies, 47 were filled by new recruitments, while 39 were filled through internal promotions, helping us retain institutional knowledge and reward employee growth. This reflects our continued investment in employee development and our commitment to promoting from within. Our average time to hire was 100 days. The city's HR team conducted a comprehensive review of our policies, procedures, and recruitment efforts to better understand the challenges we face and the opportunities we can pursue in attracting and retaining top-tier talent. Like many public agencies, we're facing increased competition from both the private sector and neighboring jurisdictions. Our hiring processes, while thorough, can be lengthy sometimes, taking significantly longer than those in the private sector. This extended timeline can limit our ability to quickly secure top candidates. We're also seeing the impact of rigid position requirements such as specific education, certifications, or experience that can narrow our applicant pool. All these challenges are amplified by an approaching retirement wave, which is expected to further strain our ability to replace seasoned professionals. High attrition not only reduces operational efficiency, but also carries a steep financial burden. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost to hire a new employee is $4,700, not including indirect costs like leadership time spent on hiring or the elevated costs of recruiting hard to fill positions. In response, our team has identified solutions to address these obstacles, including elevating our employer brand, using bold and authentic messaging to highlight what makes Folsom a great place to work, and converting job seekers into applicants, improving candidate communication, setting clear expectations and timelines to reduce uncertainty in the hiring process, and collaborating with departments and unions to reassess minimum qualifications and identify where flexibility is appropriate. In summary, while recruitment and retention challenges persist, the City of Folsom is actively addressing them through internal promotions, streamlined hiring practices, and stronger outreach efforts. AB 2561 has helped us take a closer look at workforce trends, and we remain committed to building a strong, future-ready team. With that, I'd like to introduce Jamison Larson, President of Folsom Management Group.

Good evening, Mayor, members of the Council. I'm Jamison Larson, president of the Folsom Middle Management Group. I didn't get to see Allison's presentation before she gave it, but it's a lot of the same points I have here. So first, I would like to thank Allison and her team for the collaboration during the negotiations for MOU this past year. The FMMG vacancy rate has improved from 17 to 12, 13% this past year. While that progress is encouraging, there still is important work ahead. So the members of FMMG are your project managers, engineers, planners, supervisors, and operational leaders. Nearly every project completed, program implemented, and item brought before the council has been guided, managed, or delivered by members of this group. Strong retention of members in this bargaining unit is key to improving institutional knowledge, which results in greater operational efficiencies for city departments. When vacancies remain high within middle management, the city's ability to sustain services becomes increasingly strained. FMG looks forward to continuing meaningful discussions with human resources to improve retention and recruitment, including exploring non-financial incentives that support and retain a dedicated and highly skilled workforce. And thank you for your time.

That concludes the presentation. Are there any questions? Thank you.

Thank you. All right, so we need to go ahead and open the public hearing.

You do not have any requests to speak under this item.

All right, we'll go ahead and close the public hearing, and we'll call the next item.

Okay, your next public hearing item this evening is item number 13, City of Folsom Community Facility District number 24, Elder Creek West. You do have four resolutions before you tonight. Resolution number 11625, resolution of the City Council of the City of Folsom to form a community facilities district. Resolution number 11626, resolution of the City Council of the City of Folsom deeming it necessary to incur bonded indebtedness. Resolution number 11627, a resolution of the City Council of the City of Folsom calling a special ballot election. And resolution number 11626, resolution of the city council, the city of Folsom declaring election results. And also, you do have an ordinance number 1370, an uncredified ordinance levying special taxes for fiscal year 2026-27, following fiscal year solely within and relating to the city of Folsom facility district number 24, Elder Creek West, introduction and first reading this evening. Thank you.

Thank you, Jennifer. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. Stacey Tamani, Chief Financial Officer. This item tonight is on the formation of Community Facilities District Number 24, Alder Creek West. The formation of this CFD has been requested by landowners within the Folsom Plan Area and is being formed in accordance with the Melrose Act and also in accordance with city policies. The proposed CFD 24 includes four improvement areas. They'll be known as Improvement Area 1, 2A, 2B, and 3. The CFD will generate special tax revenue to fund backbone infrastructure and ongoing services. These include transportation, water, recycled water, wastewater and drainage improvements, parks, parkway and open space, and also the payment of specific plant infrastructure fee program obligations. In addition, the CFD funds ongoing maintenance and public services such as landscape corridors and open space, street lighting, medians and entry features, stormwater management, long-term repair and replacement, and a portion of police, fire, and emergency services. This slide here is on the structure of the special tax. There are two primary components. We have the facility special tax, levied through fiscal year 2085-86. It increases annually by 2%, and the special tax ranges from approximately $2,500 to $5,700 per residential unit. The second component is the services special tax, levied and collected until the transition event occurs. And I'll go over what that transition event means on the next slide. It adjusts annually based on the CPI with a range of a minimum of 2%, not to exceed 4%. And the services special tax ranges from approximately 400 to $977 per residential unit. As mentioned on the previous slide, the CFD will have a transition event. Once all the bonds are repaid and administrative costs are satisfied, both the facilities special tax and the services special tax levies that we just reviewed on the previous slide will cease, and what will be called a transition services special tax will replace the prior funding. The new transition services special tax will be in an amount equal to 50% of the facility special tax plus the services special tax. And the reason for this approach of implementing a transition event is to provide some funding in the future, in addition to any pay-as-you-go funds that we might have, for replacement and rehabilitation of infrastructure that will then be 30-plus years old. So this combined tax will then increase by the CPI a minimum of 2% each year and a max of 4%. The proposed development plan for each improvement area within CFD number 24 includes the following. For improvement area one, a total of 276 units. For 2A, a total of 329 units. For 2B, 428 units. And for improvement area three, 391 units. And here are the four improvement areas shown on the boundary map. This is on the west side of the Folsom Plan area, bordering Prairie City Road. On April 14th of 2026, this council approved resolution number 11581. That approved the proposed boundary map, declared the intention to form the CFD, identified the territory proposed for annexation, and levied special taxes. The council also approved resolution 11582, declaring the necessity for incurring bought-in indebtedness and calling for a public hearing. So the recommended city council action tonight is to conduct conduct the public hearing, approve resolution number 11625 forming the CFD, approve resolution number 11626 deeming it necessary to incur bonded indebtedness, approve resolution number 11627 calling for the special mail ballot election, approve resolution 11628 declaring the results of that special mail ballot election, and then introduce and conduct the first reading of the ordinance levying the special tax. That's ordinance number 1370. And that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Any questions for our finance director this evening?

All right. Thank you, Stacey.

All right I have a bit of a script here to follow so it is time to hold the public hearing on the formation of the city of Folsom community facilities district number twenty four alder creek west designation of four separate improvement areas there in and related matters madam clerk has notice of this hearing been given in accordance with applicable laws.

Yes, notice of the hearing was published once in the Folsom Telegraph on May 15, 2026, and notice was mailed to the landowner within the district on May 8, 2026.

The public hearing is now opened. At this time, all interested persons or potential special taxpayers may approach the podium and testify orally or in writing for or against the aforementioned items. Going once, going twice. All right, we're going to go ahead and close the public hearing. Madam Clerk, does a majority protest exist in any improvement area?

No written protests have been received. Therefore, a majority protest does not exist for any improvement area.

At this time, because a majority protest does not exist, it is appropriate for the City Council to consider resolutions to form the district to declare the necessity to incur bonded indebtedness within the district and to call special elections within the district for each improvement area. I'm happy to entertain a motion for the first resolution.

Mr. Mayor, I'll move that we approve resolution number 11625. Second.

I have a motion and a second. Please call the roll.

Okay. Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski? Yes. Leary? Yes. And Rethel?

Yes.

I can move adoption of resolution number 11626. Second.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski? Yes. Leary? Yes. And Riethal?

Yes.

I'll move Resolution Number 11627, Resolution City Council Calling Special Mailed Ballot Election in the City of Folsom Community Facilities, District Number 24. Second.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski?

Yes.

Leary? Yes. And Riethal?

Yes. Pursuant to the resolution calling a special mailed ballot election within the district, each separate election is now open and the clerk may conduct the election. Madam Clerk, have you received the ballots from the landowner in each separate improvement area?

I have received the ballot for each improvement area and finding that all ballots in the elections have been submitted, do declare the elections closed.

Could the clerk proceed to canvass the ballots?

The canvas of ballots for each of the four improvement areas is as follows. For improvement area number one, 87 of 87 votes were cast in support of the measure and zero votes were in cast of opposition to the measure. Therefore, the measure was approved with 100% vote in favor. For improvement area number 2A, 42 of 42 votes were cast in support of the measure and zero votes were cast in opposition to the measure. Therefore, the measure was approved with 100% vote in favor. For improvement area number 2B, 86 of 86 votes were cast in support of the measure and zero votes were cast in opposition to the measure. Therefore, the measure was approved with 100% vote in favor. For improvement area number 3, 235 of 235 votes were cast in support of the measure and zero votes were cast in opposition to the measure. Therefore, the measure was approved with 100% vote in favor.

I will move adoption of resolution number 11628. Second.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Zorba. Yes. Aquino. Yes. Kozlowski.

Yes.

Leary. Yes. And Rethel.

Yes. Mr. Mayor, I'll move the introduction and first reading of ordinance number 1370.

Second.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Zorba. Yes. Aquino. Yes. Kozlowski. Yes. Leary. Yes. And Rethel.

Yes. All right, that takes us to old business. Please call the next item.

Okay, old business item number 14, resolution number 11622, a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute an amendment to the agreement with the Folsom Tourism Business or Bureau related, sorry, Bureau related to the Folsom Tourism Business Improvement District and approving two city council members to serve on the Folsom T-Bid Capital Improvement Committee.

Great. Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council. As we've had the opportunity over the last few months to discuss this item, this, if approved tonight, would be the final stage in implementing the modifications to the TBID assessment. And so what's needed tonight is approval for amendment number one to the agreement between the City of Folsom and the Folsom Tourism Bureau relative to the Folsom Tourism Business Improvement District. And just to talk a little bit about what that would do, as was discussed previously, the agreement would allow the additional assessment to be assessed. And so some of the requirements to make this possible is that one, the. TBID Owners Association shall establish the TBID Capital Improvement Committee, a committee of representatives from Assessed Hotels, TedCorp, and the city that directs use of the additional revenue from the supplemental 4% assessment in conformity with the terms of the governance policy. Existing agreement between the city and the owners association shall be amended to incorporate requirements that the owners association established the committee and conform operations of the T bid in the governance policy with respect to the increased assessment and Then the increased assessment shall not be levied until the committee has been established in the contract amendment described above has been effective and The resolution authorizes the city manager to execute an amendment to the existing agreement with the owners association to implement the requirements 1 and 3 that I just mentioned. So, the action tonight is for the council to approve that amendment or authorize the city manager to execute that amendment. And then at the pleasure of the council, we're asking that you appoint select 2 individuals on the council to serve on that committee. And that concludes my report.

Thank you so much.

Questions for staff this evening on this item?

All right. I think I just had one concern. I know the staff report said it was Council Member Aquino and Council Member Leary. In my recollection, A number of us said we'd be happy to serve if we wanted to, but in my recollection, it was Vice Mayor Rohrabach and Council Member Leary. And I just want to put it out there, if we have this, we have an appointee right now to Ted Corp, which is the overseeing board. And so having a subcommittee where we have two members serve, they give a recommendation, and then we have another person that's there, it's almost like we've got a Brown Act violation kind of set up there. So since it's really a subcommittee of TedCorp, I would like to see Vice Mayor Rorbaugh serve there. So it goes from the subcommittee to the committee. And so we don't have three council members that are involved before there.

And if I recall the discussion, I think Barbara wanted to do it for sure, and then I think you and I felt the same, so.

Yeah, I said I was happy to do it, but was willing to defer, so I'm happy to support Council Member Leary and Vice Mayor Rohrabach for it. That's fine.

Perfect.

That's easy. I just have one question about that. Yeah. And that is, since this is a subcommittee for TebCorp, if a person is voting at one level for the TBID Committee, and then is there a violation for them voting again at the head court level if the decisions from this committee go there for ratification?

So my understanding is is that the hotel members could serve on both the subcommittee and that Ted Corp committee along with the Chamber or tourism members that are there they could serve it both So I think having the city be the only member of that that doesn't have that it kind of puts the city at a little bit of a disadvantage and

I just want to make sure this is all aired in public so people don't bring up questions that I can't answer. Later date.

That is my understanding, is I'd rather have us have the same standing as the other members to where, you know, as it goes up to TedCorp for approval, I want our advocate to be there that's sitting on the subcommittee, just like the hotels will have their advocate and tourism would have their advocate. Because right now, if we had two that were there, they can't talk to the third to kind of brief them to be the advocate because that would create a Brown Act violation. That was where my concern was really coming from.

And so I think this is really governed by the governance policy that was created in association with this issue. It's attached to the staff report as attachment number three. And I didn't see anything in there that would prevent the city council representative from also voting on the Ted court board. Okay.

Thank you.

And then in the future, I think this is probably worth discussing too. Uh, we're going to make our appointments now, but. How do we want to do this in the future? Uh, right now it's the mayor's prerogative, but we tend to have this for other for regional boards and assignments. Do we want to roll this into. Hey, each time we change the mayor, they kind of. Figure it out, we have a public meeting and we appoint people to that or is. Do we want to do it a different way? Do we want to have this brought back on a regular basis to the council to decide?

I think the governing document says we will do it the way we do other things, right? I mean, ideally we...

The other boards, you mean?

Yeah, the way we do the other boards and stuff.

Is it called out in there?

Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, I think we all recognize that we like to have continuity on these boards, so...

at least half of the appointments will theoretically be based on who's our representative to Ted court. So it's really just the selection of the other person. Yeah.

That's how I like that. That makes sense to me. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's good. Okay. And so I think just the first appointment may be a little shorter than the others because typically it would be a one year, at least potentially a one year appointment. But because of where we are in the cycle this year, I think the council will hear the general appointments next January. And so this one would just be a little shorter.

Potentially so you just need a motion. Yep Item 14, thank you. I move resolution number one one six two two Can you name your appointment with the appointment of Barbara Leary and Anna Rohrabach as the representatives second?

Please call the roll

Okay, Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski?

Yes.

Leary? Yes. And Rathel?

Yes. Please call the next item.

Okay, and the next item under old business this evening is item number 15, consideration of potential ballot measure measures amending the city charter and or the Folsom Municipal Code for the 2026 general municipal election and direction to staff.

Okay, if I could ask a quick, Stacey, would you mind, I put some slides together related to some of the election costs that we'll get into, if you could show those real quick. It's just listed election costs. So, Mayor and members of the council, this item is in some ways the culmination of the efforts that have been made to review the charter, the city's charter, and at the last meeting that the council held at the beginning on May 12th, Uh, the council direct to staff to return for further consideration of whether to submit to the voters at the November 3rd, 2026 election, any of the following amendments recommended by the committee. There were 3 items. The 1st was section 4.03. And this relates to the city attorney to change how the city attorney is appointed from the current system in which the city manager points, the city attorney to a system in which the city council appoints the city attorney and related procedural and structural changes the sex and the next item. Was a section four point zero seven boards and commissions to strike language that all city boards and commissions are only advisory to the council, allowing the council to set the powers and duties of the commissions and committees by ordinance clarifying that committee members must be residents and registered voters of the city. And then the 3rd, potential ballot measure would relate to municipal code 2.48.030 campaign contribution limits to increase the campaign contribution limit and support or opposition to any candidate from 150 dollars to a higher limit to be determined. So it's been an interesting process as we started this and as we anticipated kind of the election costs. And so I thought I would kind of highlight what we were basing our information off of and then what we received recently. So, Stacey, if you could go to the next slide. So this is kind of the invoice from December of twenty twenty four. And you can see it shows the two council district elections. And then you have Measure G. And then the total cost was about $56,000. And then if you look, this is... For me, I couldn't see the other one, so I just zoomed in. OK, so the next one is just to see what was provided us. This is May seventh. So just days before we presented this to the council, the charter amendments, we got some information that was kind of surprising. And so at the meeting, we weren't necessarily sure. What this all meant, because it wasn't as clear as the last process in 2024. So, when we kind of assess this and began our conversation, we expected the election cost to be significantly lower than what was ultimately presented. And so we have had communications back and forth with the elections office. And in some ways, we have this total that includes the three different districts for council districts. And then it has a first ballot measure cost. And you can see that it is the differences. You have the total elected votes. registered voters in the district. So you have one, or district one, district three, district five, and you can see the number of registered voters, and then you factor that into whatever the per voter cost is, and then you get the cost of that election. And then, for whatever reason, they have a 1st measure. Cost, which is based on the total number of registered voters, which is 50 feet. It looks like 55,622 and then it's multiplied, but you have a base set up fee of 2400 and then a dollar 41. For each register voter, and that's where you get the 78,000 cost that we were completely shocked by. So we continue to have that conversation. So the election costs with these ballot measures could range in the staff report. I think we referenced 115,000 dollars up to. Maybe a 153 if you total the other. Things on the ballot which would include the district elections so we apologize that the numbers have changed but that's what has been a look at the previous election one more time yes. Can we do the zoomed in one let's see.

So the so the rate per voter actually went down. So measure G is for the for the candidate elections. It looks like they've made both the same.

It appears so. And then you can just see since it's a citywide election, we were assuming that it would be treated the same way as measure G, which is, you know, 11 cents and about 3 cents per voter. And then if you can go back. it went up significantly, if you can go one more, please, to... $1.42. Yeah, $1.41. So we're still working with them.

Did it, though? Because if you average, now you don't have to figure out what the average is. The average is $1.4199, right? Sure. In the previous example, it was smaller for the ballot measure and at least 50% higher for candidate elections. So in total, asking the three questions So, anyway, we're pretty close to a 41 per voter.

Yeah, we just wanted to make sure that, you know, the city council and the members of the community were aware of. This is some of the information that we're working through and why the numbers kind of varied with what we had talked to the charter review committee in the beginning versus what we ultimately received.

And you said you can't make 1st contact twice. You were clear with, like, because basically we're getting charged for everybody. We're making first contact. For everybody who lives in District 1, we're paying a first contact.

Well, we haven't confirmed that yet. Got it. Okay. Right. I mean, so that's something that we're working through, and that's why we kind of now have like a range of figures. So as the council considers this option, we wanted to make sure that we at least had the best information available. So that concludes my section of the report. Thank you.

All right, so we have the three items, I think, to discuss tonight. And do we have any questions for staff or any discussion before we go into public comment? All right, I think we only have this one request to speak tonight.

Yes, that is correct. So we do have one request under this item. Tom Acetuno, wanna go ahead and approach the podium.

I think Tom's got some slides tonight. He's got a little bit of history with the city. For those that don't know, he served on the Charter Review Commission. He's a former council member, and he was actually behind the original campaign contribution limit that the voters passed in 1994. Good evening.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Again, I'm Tommy Satunel. I was a member of the Ad Hoc Charter Review Commission, and I was the person who brought up the issue of campaign contribution limit here in the city. Excuse me, Tom.

It hasn't toggled over to your presentation yet, so if you could give us...

I haven't got to my first slide yet.

We don't think we have you on the right presentation, so we need to double check that. Sorry about that.

There you go.

All right. Thanks. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Again, I wanna start by just thanking Mayor Rathel for putting me on the commission in the first place. I think he didn't exactly know what he was getting into when he put me on it. We had some lively debates, shall we say, along the way, but I think we reached a point of mutual respect, and even though we disagreed on a few matters, we agreed on others, hopefully including this one. I wanted to answer a question I know came up from Councilmember Aquino at the last meeting, and that was how did this come up in the context of the Charter? I brought it up because one of the discussion items that was on the agenda was whether or not Folsom should have an at-large elected mayor, which would be a change from the current policy. I felt, as one member of the Commission, that before I could make a decision on that, I wanted to make sure that there was a level playing field in our politics if we moved to an at-large mayor election. And the rest of the committee members went along with that. And so that's how we got to this particular proposal. Again, I want to say at the very outset, I've been proposing and promoting a change in the contribution limit for individuals and individual campaign committees. I'm not doing that because of any concern about corruption in the city of Folsom. I know there's lots of issues surrounding how our campaigns have been funded in the past. I just am concerned about what I call a level playing field between those people who decide to run for office and have to rely on their friends and neighbors to raise their money, and those who are fortunate enough to have some fairly large political action committees who end up supporting or opposing them. When the original initiative came up in 1994, and again, I was one of the original sponsors of that initiative, this was before the Supreme Court weighed in on the Citizens United case. People by and large are overwhelmingly in favor of limiting campaign contributions. There's too much money in politics, as far as most people are concerned. And so when we did the initiative initially, this all made sense. It was a relatively modest restriction. It provided some leverage for the candidates. And we thought it was going to work fairly well, and it did for a while. But then certain people at the Supreme Court came across the Citizens United case and effectively changed the system forever. What it did was While limits on individual contributions directly to candidates still seems to be legal, and I'll underline that, what they clearly said was you couldn't restrict political action committees and their expenditures, their independent expenditures. So that changed the game. And nobody that I know thinks it's going to change back anytime soon. So the question is, where does that leave individuals who run for office? Do they have a chance running against or in a system that is largely dominated by political action committees? And that's what we were trying to address. In 2018, the city council at that time brought forth another proposal, and this time it was a change from the current $150 limit to a $500 limit. To be honest about it, I didn't even know I was involved in that. That was 18 years after I left the council. I had to go back and listen to the entire meeting, which was over three hours, by the way, until I discovered that I actually appeared and supported changing the limit up to $500. I actually discovered that Ms. Leary also supported the idea. And to my surprise, I discovered a young strapping politician named Justin Rathel who appeared on that item as well. So that refreshed my recollection about what happened and how the proposal did get approved by the council and it went to the voters. Unfortunately, the voters in the original initiative passed with about 81% approval. The follow-up measure in 2018 failed by approximately 1%. It was 49.31 to 50.69. So it was just barely defeated. I don't remember that there was much of a campaign. I don't know exactly what happened. But all I know is it failed at that time. So what I wanted to do is bring it up again and encourage this council, if you go forward with ballot measures, and I certainly don't want this to be the only ballot measure you put up there because of that cost, but if you go forward, I want you to have an educated background on why we should increase the campaign contribution limit to some number, 500, the committee recommended 750. I know you folks have debated other numbers as well in the past. So I took the liberty of going through an awful lot of campaign finance reports. All of these are public record in the city clerk's office. They do a wonderful job. It's all available. You can go through every single line item and figure out who contributed how much to what campaigns. And so that's what I did. So I'm going to try and go through this fairly quickly. But I want you to have this background. OK, in the 2022 elections. And you'll notice I use district numbers rather than names because I don't want this to be about people. I want it to be about the offices and the elections that were held. Okay, so in the 2022 campaign, on committee contributions, you'll see the names in bold are all people that won. Every single one of them raised a lot more money than the person who came in second in all three instances. But in that same year, the political action committees contributed the amounts that are shown here. And in two of the three cases, the political action committees spent significantly more than what had been raised by the individuals. There is one exception, and that was District 5, where you'll note that the winner only had $1,451 contributed on their behalf by a political action committee, whereas that person's opponent received over $35,000 in support through an independent expenditure. That's an outlier. 2024 was a very similar kind of result. In District 2, I just wanted to point this out only because while the winner in that district raised over $30,000, there were actually two other candidates who raised a significant amount of money. As you can see, there are 18,000 in one case and 34,000 in another. To me, that's a lot of money for individuals to raise. I was actually kind of surprised to see those numbers. The District 4 campaign had a similar result, where the winning candidate raised $22,000, but two other candidates in that race also raised a significant amount of money, including the second-place person, who raised over $24,000. But then again, compare that to political action committees. The political action committee in District Two, the independent expenditures reported in that case were over $84,000, including another $18,000 spent on an opposition piece against a certain candidate. Compare that to just $15,000 that was spent by a PAC in favor of one other candidate. District Four, Again, this is an unusual result. In District 4, no money was spent as an independent expenditure for the candidate who won, but $101,000 was raised and spent in support of the other candidate in that race. That's an astounding number. So the bottom line is in 2022, individual candidates raised a little over $48,000. Political action committees raised $78,000. In 2024, individual candidates raised $156,000. The political action committees raised $210,000. So that gives you the basic background. If I can figure out how to do this correctly. How do I go to the next page? You just scroll down. Oh, just scroll. It's not scrolling. I'm not a techie, as you can tell.

I like your slides, by the way.

Okay, here's what I consider the most important part of this whole discussion. When an individual writes a check, for as much as $150 and handed it to a candidate. They need a whole lot of their friends and neighbors to match that to get to a significant number. You wanna raise $15,000? You gotta get 100 people to contribute to you. This is a chart of the 2022 and 2024 elections showing you in the political action committees how their money was raised. In 2022, Just one donor contributed $40,000. Another contributor donated $40,000. And a third one donated $9,100. That's $89,000 from just three people. Do you know how many people would have to be in this room to pay $150 a piece to get to $89,000? We'd need a bigger room. 2024 was similar. In that case, there was one donor who contributed $30,000, another one contributed 10. There were six donors total that contributed $40,000. Now, these are all just donors who contributed more than $5,000, by the way. There were others who contributed less than that amount of money. And I want to note there were two reports that failed to indicate who they were supporting or opposing with their money. So this is just to summarize the candidate versus PAC summary. In District 1, for example, again, that was the winner, raised $9,700 of their own money. but the PACs also spent 23,000. So you can make those comparisons as you go along. But in almost every case, with the two exceptions, three of the five, the PAC money, when added to the individual money, became large enough and they won. There were two exceptions where the PAC money, even though it was large, didn't seem to make a difference. Keep that in mind when we go through the rest of the discussion. I want to throw a couple more facts at you, if you will, just because I want you to have this background. How big a problem is this? It's a big problem with total dollars. But I have to admit, when you go back and look, how many people actually wrote a $150 check? so that they might be willing to write a bigger check. It really wasn't very stunning. In 2022, there were literally only 26 individuals who wrote a $150 check. 12 of those are for one candidate. In 2024, again, only 26 individuals wrote a $150 check. 13 of those are for one candidate. Now, the reason I point that out is if we raise the limit, You know, those are the kind of people that might be inclined to write a bigger check. So I wanted you to have an idea of what's out there in terms of the potential fundraising for candidates in the future. And then lastly, I know people like to compare the cost of living. What's a $150 limit from 1994 worth today? Well, according to chat GPT, it's $337. Do with that whatever you will. Okay. So when you add up the score, these are my conclusions. PAC money usually or generally dominates. You can see the numbers there. Usually PAC money exceeds the amount that individuals raise. PAC money, at least in the last two elections, have supported the winner three times. But PAC money supported the loser two times. So what do you make of that? I'll leave that up to you. I do want to, again, stress, though, that the PAC money is raised in big checks. Four donators contributed over $5,000, 40,000 of them from one donation. So for me, the question is now what do we do? OK. There are two things I want to stress here. One is a lot of people don't understand this distinction. When you raise money as an individual candidate, you can decide how it's spent. You can decide if you want to do nothing with positive commercials and flyers. You can decide if you want to send out hit pieces. It's your campaign. It's your money to use in your campaign. Independent expenditures are not. Number one, according to the law, and we hope everybody's abiding by the law, they cannot, by law, coordinate with the candidate. It has to be independent. So what's the result? Well, you see all those nasty ads on TV all the time? Most of those negative ads you see, if you look at the bottom, they're not supported by candidates. They're supported by the PACs. That's why, because they get to go out and do all the dirty work, all right? So I think it's better that candidate contributions be direct to the candidate so that you can hold the candidate responsible. Whether or not we'll ever get there is something we'll see in the future, but I think it's an important distinction. So the bottom line to me is, after going through all of this for 25 years now, individual campaign contributions are really obsolete. I'm surprised, frankly, it hasn't been ruled unconstitutional, but it is still legal, but it's not useful. Really, if I had my way, it would be eliminated. Unfortunately, because we've written it by initiative, we can't just eliminate it unless the voters approve. And I don't think the voters would approve of that. So I do think it's important to raise the limit and to raise it to a reasonable level. and try and explain this a little bit better to the voters in November so they understand why it's necessary, why individuals right now are suffering from a disadvantage because of this campaign contribution limit. The last point, which I made at the beginning, is because of those numbers of the cost that the city manager was showing you, even I would recommend you do it as a standalone item. If it's part of a package, go ahead and do it. But it's probably not worth $80,000 doing it. Today, there are other elections in the future. But if you do put other things on the ballot, then I strongly recommend that you agree on an increase to the limit and move it forward. So, are there any questions?

Thanks, Tom. I appreciate the history lesson, and I appreciate the data you put together. I appreciate the extra time, by the way. Oh, absolutely. I felt like it was important. You had shared some of this with me, and I felt like it was important for the council to hear it. So, Council Member Kozlowski.

So Tom, first of all, thank you very much for spraying sunshine on this. I really appreciate that. And it's illuminating to see how it all stacks up. Is the premise that you're working under that a candidate who can't marshal as much PAC funding, if they're enterprising, would at least be able to raise a larger amount of money from individual contributions and thus level the field in some way, because it doesn't feel like if we change the contribution limit, which I go back and forth on, right, based on all the rest of the spending that happens from PACs, it feels like that won't change at all. That's going to continue apace.

Yes, let me correct one thing. The candidates do not create PACs. Candidates create their own candidate committee. I wasn't suggesting that they do. I'm saying the independent expenditures. So independent expenditures and political action committees are here to stay. There's no way we can change that, certainly not at this level. So yeah, my underlying premise is not only will that stay, but it will continue to grow. Sure. If you look at the history of the two elections, it just keeps going up and up and up, depending on what's the issues at stake in any given election.

Gotcha. I think your time timing of this is really interesting, given what Hawaii's bill to try and make it make an attempt to neuter Citizens United. So that's kind of interesting timing. that they just passed that.

I'm sure there are probably going to be other attempts to do that.

Sure, sure, sure. Thank you.

Anything else? Another question?

Council Member Leary, did you have something?

Yeah, no, thank you for putting all of that information together and being one of the candidates that raised my own money and put my campaign together. It is daunting as a candidate to know that others in your race are receiving PAC contributions, which can be unlimited. essentially unlimited, right? And what this gets down to, it sounds like somebody's buying your vote and it's actually increasing the name recognition for candidates when people that have the PACs working in their favor are able to send out mailer after mailer or buy hundreds of lawn signs or put ads in the newspaper or on Facebook all the time. And in a small town, which we're kind of growing away from, name recognition is a really important factor in getting enough votes to win. So I really believe that we need to try to level a playing field. And yeah, hardly anybody donates $150. It's a very low number of people that do that. People will give you $5. $50, whatever, and rarely donate more than once. The hit pieces are literally devastating to some candidates and are put together to, garner suspicion amongst the public about certain candidates that the PACs are putting money towards. And I'm not saying a candidate can't afford to do that, but most candidates working through this on their own and raising the amounts that we have raised, aren't able to respond to those and don't have a big team and big dollars coming in to counter some of the accusations. So, And I think the public really needs to understand this information, so I'm really glad that you brought it here. I think there was an article in Today's Bee kind of going over this. So, you know, if we're going to raise the campaign limit, which I agree with, we have to be thoughtful about doing that, but we also need to be sure that we're educating the public about about why that's necessary for individual campaign contributions is to help candidate be more viable. I would say I probably earned as much money in footsteps walking through town for 30 years as I might have garnered from a PAC if one had supported me. So 30 years of worth of work kind of overcame that need to obtain name recognition, but not everybody wants to wait 20 or 30 years working for the public good to be able to run and defeat the amount of spending that goes on during these campaigns.

Right. For those who know Folsom's history, you know that, first of all, I didn't put actual names, but there are not that many PACs, clinical action committees, that play in Folsom politics. It's a relatively small number, and it's pretty easy to identify what their interest is. Anybody who wants to figure that out, go look at the reports. But I do have to admit that they don't, and again, I mentioned this earlier, they don't always win. Large money doesn't always win. Often does, generally does. But we have a cherished history in this town that goes back 30-something years I've been involved, of having individuals who've managed to overcome that disadvantage. I was outspent eight to one in one of my races. I know you were outspent. I know Ernie Sheldon was outspent. So we have this history where we can do it, but it takes a lot of legwork. District elections is helping, I think. But campaign contribution limits, by increasing them, you're sending a message to the community that we want the community to support the candidates, not just the people that are coming to town. We want the community to contribute to those individuals and put them up front and help them succeed. And if they do that, then I think we'll have the level playing field that I'd like to see us have.

Well, and that was one of my questions you answered. And that was how many PACs actually put money into the campaigns locally. And it's not just Folsom, you know, it's the other cities in the region. And so my final question for you is, are you going to be able to make this information available to the public somehow? You know, if people want to do more education in their smaller groups or whatever, who... who have an interest in electing a candidate that they feel will support their interests.

I'm happy to share it with anybody who wants to reach out for me. I'm not sure I have another way of putting it out there, but I'm not hard to find on the internet. Let's put it that way. I have an email address. It's pretty easy. So anybody who wants it, let me know. We'll share it.

And Council Member Leary, it will be attached with the staff report on the website within a couple of days.

Okay, great. Thank you.

All right, any other questions for Tom?

Not necessarily a question, but it doesn't change the premise, which I think is correct, but I do dispute some of this data. If you go back to the page that says that only, are you saying that in 2022, of all the candidates who ran, only 26 donors gave $150? I can tell you Unequivocally that that is not true.

I I believe it's true because I went through every report that the city clerk has on their website for those two election years and and I Literally went through page by page to count how many $150 donations there were. If I missed a few, I'm sorry, but there were like some hundreds, 110, 120 as well. I was only looking for those who were right at the limit. And that number surprised me too.

Okay, well, yeah, I don't believe that's true. I'll do my own research. And then also the other one, like in 2022, I know for certain that there is a PAC in this town who did door hangers and signs for my opponent. One of my opponents, but you don't have any dollar figure there.

If I don't, it's because it's not on a report. I mean, believe me, I went through every report.

Did you go through the County of Sacramento reports also?

No, I went through the city clerks.

Okay, all right.

Which I believe has them all.

Okay, so we may just have to have an asterisk that, you know, this is not the city's information. This is presented from private citizens.

The gist seems to be accurate, though.

Yes, I think so.

Yeah, I mean, it may not be a precise number.

And I think as all... I mean, as a candidate, yes, I'd rather put out my own message only and have nobody messaging for me, you know. But unfortunately, that's not the system we have.

I will say that there are definitely candidates in the race who, even though they got a lot of support from PACs, probably didn't really need it. Because some of us now and in the past had their own base. And I'm looking at several of them up here. So don't be shy about that. I mean, if you have a base, you have a base. That's great. you know, tap into it as much as you can. That's what it's all about, is getting your friends and neighbors to contribute to your election so that the accountability is direct between you and the people who supported you and the rest of the voters.

Thank you so much, Tom. I appreciate you coming out and advocating for Folsom's residents.

Thank you for your time, for the extra time, Mr. Mayor.

All right, and I think that was our only public comment.

Yes, that's correct.

All right.

So we have three items in order to discuss. I think the first one was city attorney, second one, advisory boards, and the third one, the campaign contribution limits. I think I have those in the right order. If it's okay with you guys, I'd rather just kind of take them one by one and see where we're at. Maybe we should start with a general discussion, but I think if we go How about I'm going to switch the order up a little bit? How about we start with the advisory boards? Because I think that one, to me, somewhat is the crux of whether we put things on the ballot or not. So how about we start with the advisory boards, and then we'll talk about the other two. Would anybody like to kick us off on advisory boards?

I would by maybe asking the city attorneys a couple questions. So... Well, first of all, so at this time right now, we're treating the historic district commission as. All their decisions are only advisory to the council and then those items, same items are coming to the council. Correct?

Correct.

Okay. But we're not doing that with the planning commission.

Correct.

Okay. So, assuming that we want to keep the planning commission, the historic district commission in place. Um. what are our options in terms of if we decided not to spend the money to put something on the ballot? For example, could we say that maybe through an ordinance that yes, all commissions are advisory to the council, but basically we're going to accept their recommendations unless someone appeals or unless one or two or whatever number we decide, council member, wants to hear an item.

Right. So obviously the council has various options available to it, including that one. I think ultimately with that particular issue, it comes down to risk tolerance of the council. So particularly with respect to the Historic District Commission, based on the case that we had where the judge did say that our system violated the charter, at least with respect to that particular project, I think we could anticipate that the As soon as we pass that ordinance, most likely the very next project on which, let's just say some project was approved by the Historic District Commission, there was no appeal, so under the terms of this ordinance that you're talking about, it would basically be deemed approved by the council. I think we could anticipate, more likely than not, we would get a legal challenge, and then we would find ourselves in front of, you know, the court defending the validity of that ordinance and whether that ordinance did in fact violate the charter or not. And so we could make arguments for and against that. So I think ultimately the council does have that option just whether you know what the risk tolerance is with that.

Are there other options? I mean obviously getting rid of the Planning Commission or the historic, let's just say the Historic District Commission, and bringing everything to the Council is an option. Correct.

Well, everything could go to the Planning Commission.

Oh, that's true. Everything could go to the Planning Commission. That was another option. Yes.

Potentially.

What you mean is then the option would be to get rid of the Historic District Commission

And I would yeah, I'm just trying to understand all of our options should we decide not to put money on? You spend the money to put something on the ballot What are what are our options?

So I think option one is maintain the current status quo where everything all of the Commission's that exists now retain their authority but for the historic district commission that would mean that they don't have final decision making authority so just like what's been happening for the last roughly six months everything comes to the council on consent for planning commission and potentially parks commission and others there there may be an appeal there will be an appeal available if someone is unhappy with whatever final decision is made so that's one option status quo another option is to amend the Folsom municipal code to limit potentially eliminate the historic district commission and then everything would go to the planning commission there are options with what the makeup of the commission might look like other other options to address some concerns related to the sensitivity of the historic district and then another option would be an amendment to the ordinance similar to what you just recommended

So, okay, so if you talk about option 2, so in the charter, you've got a specific paragraph about the planning commission. You've got a specific paragraph about parks and recreation. And then you have the 3rd paragraph that talks about all other boards and commissions that the council can establish. And the sentence, the problematic sentence is in that paragraph. Correct. I can't remember what the judge ruled. So is there no concern that that sentence about all boards and commissions only are advisory, that that does not apply to Parks and Rec and Planning?

So legal opinions on that differ. Okay. And so I am, legal opinions on that differ. Okay, okay, all right.

Could the Historic District Commission Act advisory to the Planning Commission so that we could preserve an appeals process within the city operation. Because the effective change that we've made to the Historic District Commission operation is that they can't actually approve anything. The City Council can only approve those projects that would normally go to them. And then that means that there is no low-cost appeal to that decision. There's only a legal challenge in the court as an option if you want to appeal it. But if they were advisory to the Planning Commission, could the Planning Commission then approve a project that

they could that that is an option but but in my opinion that doesn't resolve the concern because the language says all boards and commissions only shall be advisory to the council not advisory to for instance the planning commission if the charter if we if we did create that arrangement then the charter would be silent on what its responsibility is right well uh it it

It does say- Because we'd create a third category.

Well, so all of these sections in the charter say that the powers, duties, qualifications, removal, and compensation of any of the commissions shall be set by ordinance. And that includes, the language is slightly different for planning commission, parks and rec, and all others. But basically what it would mean is the council would have the authority to set the powers and duties of any commission or committee by ordinance. Okay. which it has done just now. There's a conflict between the charter language and the ordinance.

So I think for public consumption, you know, this is kind of gets a little muddy and confusing. But one of the reasons that we wanted to address this is because our our process is not Lining up with what our charter is saying right and so we are being sued And have been continually and seems like it'll keep happening by a resident in the historic district so that is why this is essential at this moment because we can't see a pathway where where this becomes streamlined Simpler it's only going to become more complicated and more costly for the city. I That's how I see it. So I see it as like one of two things. We either clean up the language and so our processes matches our policy, which is what the person suing us had originally wanted, or we do away with a historic district commission, which I don't think would be a public, would be supported by the public because we can't afford to get sued as much as we seem like it's happening. That's how I see it.

Yeah, I would agree with you and I also don't see that this stops if we fold the historic commission into the planning commission. I think it's just. Those who are going to spend more money on other lawsuits. So, unfortunately, I would love to find a way that we don't have to put it on the ballot, but I don't really see an option. It's been tested in court and we lost. And so now we need to adjust our charter. in order to make that happen, or we have to hear all of the items here. And even then, I think we end up back in court until we put this on the ballot. So my preference would be to not spend the next two years in court, learning our same lesson that we've already learned, and to move forward.

I have a couple of questions. How consistent... was our previous process with the other cities in the area, like Citrus Heights or Rancho Cordova, that have planning commissions, do their planning commission decisions, or I know they don't have historic district commissions, but do they have to have their decisions ratified by the city council?

So state law now requires each city to have a planning commission or some body that can render final decisions on planning related matters. But to Council Member Aquino's point, there are high variability because not all cities in the region are charter cities and not all cities in the region have a historic district. And if they do, they don't have the same type of setup with respect to their historic district. Like Sacramento, even though it's such a different place, it does have Old Sac. And they do have a version of, I forget the name of the commission, but they do have a commission that deals with that. But it's not... It's not apples to apples in terms of the roles and responsibilities. But in terms of planning commissions in the region, yes, the process is very consistent. And Pam might be able to weigh in if there's additional.

They all make the decision at that level and it doesn't have to go to the city council.

except for certain things like subdivision maps and and other things which by by state law do have to go but but otherwise correct and pam can confirm yeah planning and zoning laws laid out pretty clearly the legislative acts that are final at the city council are recommended by the commissions to the council but um like uh uh changed the land use a rezone or a general plan amendment and then the the Commission has final decision-making authority on what is called quasi judicial decisions like Design review or you know parcel maps things like that So it's it's pretty clearly laid out in in planning and zoning laws and pretty consistently applied And that's consistently how we've been doing it previously.

I guess one of my concerns is that this is you know, it sounded really unclear about whether this wording, you know, that was challenged in court would apply to the other commissions, like the Parks Commission and the Planning Commission, and that could potentially create another scenario where the city is sued again over that same language.

That's true. So that particular issue did not come up in the most recent litigation. The most recent litigation specifically related to the authority of the Historic District Commission, and it didn't go beyond that. So to Councilmember Aquino's earlier question, we can read the language. It's pretty clear cut. And so we're left to make an assessment of risk based on what we're comfortable, what the council's comfortable with moving forward.

OK, thank you. I have one other question for the city attorney. So it's my understanding that the decisions of trial court judges are not precedent setting, correct? So if I'm understanding this correctly, it means that if we were to get sued again on a different project, they couldn't use the decision from this one? Is that? That's true. OK.

That's true. So basically, in general, the trial court decision in that case, it was the 603 Sutter CEQA case. It also had a cause of action for declaratory relief where the petitioners ask the court, court, answer this question. My question is, essentially, is the power that the city council purported to give to the HDC via ordinance in violation of the charter. And the court said, yes, but I'm only rendering that decision with respect to the 603 Sutter project. So it doesn't go beyond that. But when it comes to the risk, comfortableness with risk for the council, we could anticipate that if we made no change, there would be a high likelihood of getting sued on the next project where we would again have to defend ourselves. So that's sort of where it lands. Because the language, of course, there are different interpretations, the old saying of ask two lawyers and you'll get five answers. That is the normal par for the course. But this particular language is straightforward enough that most attorneys would have the same interpretation.

And Mr. Mayor, did you say that if we were to have everything come to the council, you think we would still get sued?

If we were to have everything come to council, no, I'm saying if we have everything go through the planning commission and come together, that that would be fine. Right? But if we had everything go to the planning commission, uh, I think we would still get sued. Like, if we get rid of the historic district commission, and we bring everything to the planning commission, because of that 1 sentence is so problematic because the 1 sentence is problematic and, uh. You know, just a pattern of lawsuits, they tend to be in the historic district from somebody who. you would be surprised, but actually supports the Historic District Commission. And so we roll that into the Planning Commission. It's an activist resident that has sued us. And so this is really our response. I don't think his goal is just to get rid of the Historic Commission. So you think if we roll it into the Planning Commission and then approve a project he doesn't like, we're not gonna get sued? Hard to believe.

I mean, we didn't get sued over this particular thing. The question was asked in conjunction with a suit about a CEQA approval, right? CEQA exemption?

Correct, but he added a cause of action for declaratory relief, but yes.

But it was secondary to the initial reason for the...

Correct. He did raise this concern on the appeal to the council of the project approval when it came forward. So he was talking about it the whole time. But yes, CEQA was the main heading.

So to cure the thing that the trial judge identified as ambiguous language, we only really have two choices, and that's to strengthen or fix the language so that we can strengthen the Historic District Commission's position. or eliminate the Historic District Commission to absolutely resolve that problem, right?

Those are the two safest courses of action. Yes.

Can I ask a clarifying question? It doesn't necessarily strengthen the historic district commission's position. What it does is by ordinance the council can then strengthen it or take powers away. We can give powers and take powers away by ordinance to commissions and boards. It gives flexibility.

Yeah, but then to resolve the underlying problem, we would devolve onto the historic district commission the same responsibility we gave to the planning commission. Right. Right.

Right and it is that is how the ordinance reads today We are just operating in a more restrictive manner more cautious manner based on the the ruling so So I'm for moving this forward I Don't know how if you want to take kind of do a straw poll each.

I don't know if we're done discussing Seems like we're kind of yeah seems like we're at a place unless there's other questions or I wanted to have this one first because I do think, you know, there is a discussion to be had of do we place anything on the ballot? To me, this is driving putting things on the ballot. You know, if the other two, while nice to have, are not as immediately pressing to me. And so that's why I wanted to have this discussion first.

I would move to place this on the ballot. Section 4.07.

I'll second it. All right. We have a motion and a second any further discussion.

Well, let's talk about the others. Maybe that's going to turn to the question for each.

Yeah. All right. The next 1 is a city attorney. Uh, I can. Kick this 1 off this is 1 that was particularly important to me. Uh, I pulled up the last language from the league of California cities and just kind of wanted to. because I had made reference to it before that it's us and Shafter are the two cities where the city manager appoints the city attorney. So, city councils directly appoint the city attorney and four hundred and sixty nine out of California's four hundred and eighty two incorporated cities. This report was back in two thousand is back a few years ago. So there might be a few other cities that are there nowadays. Of those approximately two thirds are contract city attorneys from outside firms. The remaining one third are hired as in house city attorneys. Voters directly elect their city attorney in 10 charter cities. I list the names, but they're typically pretty large cities. Long Beach, LA, Oakland, Redondo Beach, San Diego, San Francisco, San Rafael, Compton, Chula Vista, and Huntington Beach. And city managers appoint the city attorney into charter cities, Folsom and Shafter. So, after some questions of how do I visit the town of Shafter? Many people did not know how to visit the booming metropolis of Shafter, or even possibly where it would be located in the state of California. Um, I did a little bit of research unfortunately, the mayor's number and email are not listed on the city website because I was going to reach out to him and see, but I think I got my information that I needed. They are a city of just under 20,000 people, and they are Northwest of Bakersfield about 18 miles. They became a charter city in 1995. They have actually had a little bit of charter drama over the last year because one of the council members, I guess, gave some direction to staff and upset the city manager, upset some of his fellow council members. And so they've had their own bit of charter discussion, primarily around something that exists in a lot of cities and is not relevant to this topic, but just kind of wanted to share that if you go out and and look at chapter, they've had their own charter discussions. One of the things that they do have is they have a contract city attorney. And so what happens is when that contract is up for renewal, of course it is above the city manager authority level. And so they are a contract, they have a contract city attorney, and so the council has the option whether to approve or not approve that contract going forward. And so, while they also have this provision in their charter that the city manager points, the city attorney, or they really, they just said in their charter, I look through it, their city manager. They say all the department heads report to the city manager. Oh, and then they create the different departments. So that's kind of how their charters right? And it's not like this is a separate called out office. It's just kind of by default. The city attorney falls into all the other ones. But what they do have is different than us. Like, most cities, they have contract city attorneys and so the city council does get to regularly weigh in on whether that city attorney is responsive to their needs or to the city and residents needs. And so I would argue that we might be. even more of an outlier. Instead of two cities out of the 482 cities, I would say that we are the one city out of 482 cities that is doing it in our current methodology where the council you know, has informal input, but no formal process in having or ensuring the city attorney is representing the city and the residents of Folsom as much as it is representing the city manager and the staff. So that's why this one is particularly important to me. I do think the city attorney needs to be responsive to everybody and needs to be looking out for the interests of the city as a whole. It's not the city council's attorney, it's not the city manager's attorney, it is the city of Folsom's attorney. And that's what I would like to see if we update the charter in order to reflect that.

One tiny clarification. The responsibility of the city attorney to represent the residents of Folsom is not exactly what they do. They represent the city collectively, our operations, and the ongoing entity that is the city of Folsom Corporation.

Fair, fair.

That's a good distinction.

Okay. I could have that a lot, but I agree with this, changing the language, changing how they report and how they're hired, and for all the reasons that you stated. Ditto.

I have a question and that would be. And it sounds like the standard method of operation for most of the cities to have the. either the in-house attorney hired by the council or the contracting attorneys, but how would these interviews take place or how would these assessments be made to include all of the council members in the decision-making process? I think that's really important because people do have different opinions about the opinions we get from our city attorneys. And I don't know, Mr. Whitemeyer, did you ever have any experience with that in your prior?

Sure. You know, to echo some of the points, this is the first city, since it's the one or two, that only has this. I've always worked under An arrangement where the city council had hired either by contract or appointed that position. And so I could see a process where it's similar to the hiring of a city manager where you would either work through the HR department to coordinate that, you know, the council could. You know, um, you know, direct a member of the council to kind of oversee that process and answer questions. Um, and then, or they could hire a head hunter for search firm, executive search firm, and it would be similar to the city managers process where they would screen candidates. And then the council would meet in closed session to interview those candidates. And then ultimately, when they select a candidate, they would. put forward in public session, a public council meeting, what the agreement was and it would be approved in that setting.

Thank you. And then it's not exactly addressing this particular issue, but if you're talking about doing in-house versus contracting with somebody, the availability of the attorneys may vary depending on who you contracted with or... You know, whether they're whether you have a contracted person in house.

Sure. And ultimately, that would be at the discretion of the council as they kind of. Determine what the expectations were how many so in my previous jurisdiction? We had a contract city attorney, and we had you know set office hours They were expected to come to the meetings. You know for cities such as this that you know you may have There's they're just assigned to us full-time But that that is up to negotiation for sure Okay, thank you.

We rely a lot on the city attorney at most of these meetings, so Thanks for the answer

Honestly, I mean, it might be good to clarify that. I mean, how the public would see our city attorney isn't really going to change, right? I mean, they still work for the city. They work very closely with the city manager. I mean, the public is not really – it really shouldn't change too much dynamic-wise. Just the accountability is the council's.

Yeah, I think that's a fair statement. I don't – let's just say Magic Wand – You know, it happened, you know, the relationship and the communication that I have with the city attorney wouldn't change. You know, I don't think it would change really for the councils. I don't think you'd really notice, but and with the team we have in place, I don't think you'd have any issue. But I think what we've seen in other jurisdictions is if issues do arise, then the council does have the authority to intervene.

All right. Sounds like we don't have any other questions. I'd be happy to move to include this on the ballot.

Do you want to go back and revisit whether we're including the other things we've discussed on the ballot? Or do you want to do these one by one?

I think we took a motion on the first one and a second. We didn't call for a vote. But I was just going to see if we had support to kind of list them all out. And then we can go back and have votes. Because we still have the campaign contribution limits to discuss.

I mean, I would second this. I second this. Thanks.

Uh, so now the last 1, we've got the increase the campaign contribution limit. Uh, we got to hear, uh, former council members to know, uh, talk quite a bit about that. I know we've had a number of discussions about it, but I'll just open up the floor if anyone wants to kick us off.

I'll say a few things. I think Tom made really good points. He was on the committee with me too, so I had heard him before. I do think $150 is way too low. It puts candidates, new candidates, at a disadvantage, as was stated earlier. I think the recommendation from the committee was $750, and I definitely think that's too high, too far of a jump. I would like to be about $500. And I do want to clarify, because someone reached out to me after the last meeting, that that doesn't mean anyone that wants to contribute to a candidate during a campaign season has to do 500. If that's the level, it just means they can go up two. So it gives a candidate a little bit more options as far as like having events and people could donate a couple times during the year During the campaign season $100 at one event $50 at another It's just a little bit more flexibility and a little bit more control into the campaign candidate candidates campaign versus Pax so that's why I'm in favor. I'm comfortable at 500 But I'm interested to hear what anyone else has to say, too

No, I actually liked the $750 idea, but I could guarantee you that very few people are going to go to that limit as an individual. And I think people already understand the process that, you know, the cap is $150. As I pointed out, some people give you $10, $25. You know, they can continue to... to donate throughout the campaign. So I would agree on the 500 number, and I think it's reasonable to proceed. And again, we're gonna need to do an education campaign around this.

Was that what was on the ballot?

In 2018, it was on the ballot. It was like pretty, very minimal. I don't remember really any educational campaign. I didn't remember showing up to testify or to make public comment on it either. So maybe I don't remember very clearly, but it was, I think it was about a hundred votes. There was, there was, You say four? Four votes? 400 votes? Okay, there's 400 votes. It was like 49.7% versus 50.3%. It was about half of the folks. It just barely lost in 2018 with very little educational campaign. Not saying that things are the same as they were in 2018, but I think about half the voters supported it last time.

I will recall one statement made by a council member in 2018 about that, and it was, we don't want to make these elections about money.

Was that my comment?

Pardon?

Was that my comment?

You weren't on the council in 2018, were you? I don't remember. Oh, no, I thought you meant in public comment. I don't remember who was sitting in your seat.

Oh, okay. For the record, none of us were.

That brings up a question I do have for the city attorney. So because I will say I don't necessarily disagree with any of these recommendations from the Charter Review Committee. But the question to me is, do we want to spend the money to put these on the ballot? That's the only thing I'm considering. And You know, the city cannot advocate for things. We can educate, right? But so you'd be putting, or the council would be voting to put a question on the ballot for one or more of these. And then typically you can have kind of a statement about why you would vote for this or why you would not vote for this. Can the city author, can the council author those statements or how does that, what are we allowed to do or not do?

I believe we can because these measures are being proposed by the council. So if the council wanted to move forward at the June 23rd meeting, we would bring forward the actual language, which will largely track what we have in the staff report here with any changes that the council directs tonight. But then at a subsequent meeting, I believe it's the July 14th meeting, we will bring resolutions directing us to put items on the ballot. And very closely following that, we will have a bunch of deadlines related to the city attorney would draft the proposed ballot question, which has some specific you know starting language which you guys have seen before and then after that's done the next step is creating the the arguments and I believe when it is a measure put forth by the city the city council has the option to kind of jump to the head of the line because members of the public are allowed to do Arguments in favor or against but the council can can do it first and there's timelines Associated with that that we will work closely with the clerk's office on to make sure that we meet those.

Okay. Thank you. I Did want to bring up one other thing and are there additional costs for the ballot arguments? I'm quite sure there are so these the cost estimates that we have right now Don't include those ballot arguments as I recall. I

I think you're correct. I think it's a flat fee, so I don't think it would be a huge cost increase more than what we've already seen.

Candidates always have to pay for their own ballot statements, and if the city's advocating or opposing something, I think it depends.

I think I might have seen on the quote that it said something like up to four pages, but we can get that information back to the council. Okay, thank you.

If I can comment. So I wasn't here for the first pass of sifting through the recommendations from the ad hoc committee, and I'd like to thank my colleagues for landing on these three. They were ones that I felt were worthwhile and maybe not all hills to die on, but definitely worth this additional scrutiny and discussion. But I do think that the repair or whatever you want to call it to the language in the duties of our commissions is worth the money that has been discussed. And the other two are worthwhile upgrades if we're already paying that money because the cost of one more lawsuit will easily exceed. whatever we spend on these ballot measures. So if it if it protects us in some way against future challenges, at least on that particular account, absolutely worthwhile. Um, you know, it's hard to go out and, you know, spend, you know, what's going to end up being, you know, more than $100,000 on ballot language. But Once we contract directly with SARE, it's going to cost us a fortune to have her work on things. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So, anyway. So, I support all of what has been suggested, and I think 500 is a reasonable cap on the contributions. Okay.

We can just make an attempt to make a motion for all three with clarifying language and see where we land.

Sounds good.

Okay, so I'll make a motion to move forward section 4.03, section 4.07 as written, and then the municipal code 2.48.030 with a $500 limit. I'll second that. All right, we have a motion to second. Any further comments? Please call the roll.

Okay, Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? No. Kozlowski?

Yes.

Leary? Yes. And Rathel?

Yes. All right, that takes us to new business. Please call the next item.

Okay, our new business item number 16, resolution number 11620, a resolution approving the master development plan for Jackrabbit Hill Park.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Council Members. I'm Brad Nelson, Park Planning Manager. This evening, I'm gonna be presenting the Jackrabbit Hill Master Development Plan. I'll go over brief background, I'll talk about our community engagement that we conducted, then I'll review the master development plan, I'm gonna talk a little bit about theming of the park, and then I'll end with the recommendation. So a few of the project milestones dates, so we're currently in the community engagement phase, which hopefully that will be concluded tonight with the approval of the master plan by the city council. Then we move on to design and engineering bidding in the early next year. Then in the spring, we'd start construction. We're anticipating construction about a year-long process. And then the park opening would be in July of 2028. A little bit about the community engagement that we've conducted to date. We had a community workshop followed by an online survey. We had a second community workshop followed by a second online survey. We met with the Planning and Development Subcommittee of the Park and Recreation Commission in April, and then in May, the Park and Recreation Commission forwarded a recommendation to the City Council to approve the plan, which is where we're at this evening. A little bit about the location. So this will be the second park in the Folsom Plan area. Just to orient you, it's Highway 50, East Bidwell, Prospector Park, which was the first park is there. And then this is Jackrabbit Hill Park there, which is on Mangini. The 2015 Parks and Recreation Master Plan provides a list of amenities, and that's sort of a starting point for the park planning process. So these are the amenities that were originally listed in that. During the process, that master plan is really intended to be flexible, and it's an evolving document, and so the amenities that we include in the park plan are more based on the community needs and current trends. As part of that, we also have developed some park design principles which have been shared with the Park and Recreation Commission and we'll be bringing those forward to the City Council at a future date for consideration. What that does is it sort of sets the tone for what is in neighborhood parks and what's in community parks. So it provides equity across the neighborhoods It provides us with more neighborhood-focused amenities in our neighborhood parks. So instead of building large sports complexes at our neighborhood parks, we're gonna move those to our community parks where there's less of an impact to the immediate neighborhood. It also allows us to be more fiscally responsible, particularly with the limited funding that we have to build out the park system in the plan area. So in those park design principles, these are some of the items that we consider for neighborhood parks, of which Jackrabbit Hill is a neighborhood park. So we have separate playgrounds, we have non-programmed grass fields, typically one to two sport courts, so that would be basketball or pickleball, things like that. A group picnic area with shade, walking trails with adult fitness stations, site furnishings, and security lighting. So there's no parking lot in a neighborhood park unless the amenities, and it's necessary to support the amenities, and there's also no restroom unless it's necessary to support the other amenities. A little bit about the project funding for this project. So the master plan I'm presenting tonight has a cost estimate of 7.1 million. That includes the 10% construction contingency. Our estimated soft costs for this project are about 900,000. And then the overall project contingency is 700,000. So that estimated total is 8.7 million. Ongoing maintenance costs, we're seeing about $10,000 per acre, so this is about an 11-acre site, so that's about $110,000 a year in maintenance costs. Overview of our community engagement. So the first community workshop was held in January. We had about 45, 50 people. It was a pretty good turnout. We provided an overview of the park, the park design principles, and then we broke out into five groups. That was our design charrette process. And then each of those groups had templates at their tables. So these are pictures from that first community meeting. So the groups had... Templates and they were able to place them on plans and they were the templates were to scale so we had There was soccer field there was parking lots there was pickleball courts or tennis courts basketball things like that and then at the end each of the groups made a presentation to the larger group and So we took those, we followed that by an online survey, and some of the results from that, the active programmed elements, so there was an indication that folks wanted a multipurpose rectangular field that received 66% of the votes. Active non-programmed facilities included playgrounds at 81% vote and pickleball court at 64% and a basketball court at 53%. Passive uses included the shaded group picnic area, a walking loop, flexible use open space, and seating areas as well. Also, there was a pretty high percentage of folks that wanted a restroom as well as a parking lot. We did have other feedback that we got. We received a survey that was conducted by a local HOA down there, and the survey results pretty much mirrored exactly what our survey results were. And we also received an email from a community member encouraging us to provide as much of accessibility in the playgrounds as we could, going beyond just what is the basic requirement in terms of accessibility. The second workshop, we reviewed all of those five plans and we saw some patterns that were showing up. So we came up with two plans from those five plans and we took those two plans to the community at the second workshop. So these are those two plans and I can, I'll just briefly go through them. So they both have a parking lot off of Rock Springs Ranch Drive. This one has basketball and pickleball kind of up on the hill closer to the school site. This one has basketball and pickleball down closer to Rock Springs Ranch Road. This one has the play area and the group picnic all kind of consolidated almost in the heart of the park. This one has more closer to the parking lot and closer to the intersection. This one has a bit of a larger turf footprint for larger fields. This one has a smaller multi-use field layout. So we put that out to a vote then, and we had a total of 108 survey responses, and the overwhelming response there was for the master plan option one, and we included a couple extra questions, and that was if folks wanted pickleball court lighting, which was a yes, and basketball court lighting, which also a yes. So those commission meetings then we took it to the option one to the planning development subcommittee who supported the plan and then again May 5th to the Parks and Recreation Commission and they forwarded an approval to the city council. So now I'm going to go through the master development plan that we came up with that. So a little bit about the neighborhood itself. This is Rock Springs Ranch Drive, Mangini Parkway along there, and Empire Ranch Road. Our neighbor on this side is the school site. We have neighbors here. These houses front on to this...

Sorry about that.

This... These houses front onto this street here. Then there's an open space corridor with a trail here. These neighbors, their backs, the back of the houses are onto Mangini Parkway, so the front of the houses are on this residential street here. There's a... An open space corridor here, and then on our neighbors on this side is just a rather large open space corridor with a class one trail. There also is on this corner down here, there is a very nice small private park, which is grass, a beautiful tree and some seating area. So I'll walk you through the park. We have a parking lot off of Rock Springs Ranch Drive. In the parking lot, we have a dumpster area. Right off the parking lot, we have a restroom building and some storage facilities for our maintenance team. So they're right off the parking lot for ease of access for our maintenance team. Coming in off of the parking lot, the main pedestrian entry, we have a... what we're calling a group, a shaded group plaza area. So we have, there's a bosque of trees that are in a grid pattern, and then we have picnic tables between those trees, and we have a stage area or platform, I should say, not really a stage, We're including that because we saw the use of Prospector Park is a little bit different than some of our other parks. And so we're trying to respond to what the residents, how the residents use the park down there. We're seeing multi-generational households that are using these parks. So we have small children all the way up to grandparents that are using the park. The parks are used solidly. Prospector Park is used all day long with a lot of these different age groups. So this... This gathering area here really becomes sort of that third place where people, they're walking around the trails in the morning, they're meeting their friends in the morning, they're meeting their friends in the afternoon, in the evening. That third place, you have your house, your home, and then you have your place of work. And then that third place could be like a coffee shop, or in this case, it could be a park. So that's where you're meeting your friends, the third place. And that's what this is really intended to be here. We have a larger 5 to 12 playground here with some shade over it. We have a smaller 2 to 5 play area here also with shade. And in between those, we have a large group picnic area here. Wrapping around the trail here, we have four pickleball courts. and then we have a basketball court here. We're also showing, it's a little hard to see, we have a pedestrian access that connects to the future school site here, very similar to the pedestrian access that we have at Prospector next to Mangini Ranch Elementary. So the walkway then loops around, we have one of those fitness stations here, and with an access to Empire Ranch Road, continues around another fitness station. On this corner here, we have, which we're calling a nature area, so that's going to be native plants, drought tolerant plants, plants that are pollinators, a lot more color, and just sort of brightens up that color and provides some interest. and then we'll have a walkway through the middle of that. Continuing around, there's benches located on the trail and it drops around here. So this is an unprogrammed passive open space. We also have some benches that are here. There's some good views that are provided off of this corner here. It's elevated from the road. So we really wanted to capture those views and sort of create more of a passive green space there. And in this corner, again, we sort of have a repeat of the nature area that's on this corner over here using drought-tolerant and pollinator-friendly plants. Hey, Brad.

Yes. The meandering trail that's got a 17 on it there on the upper right, is it meandering in order to enjoy nature or because you have a grade change that's significant right there? Both. Okay, thank you.

So we're taking advantage of the grade change by having a graceful walk.

Roughly what is that elevation change from the loop trail down to the street?

I think, I want to say it's about 20 feet or so. So it's a pretty interesting site. You can, these lines here, those are the contour lines.

I can kind of see them, yeah. And they're tight down there in the corner. Okay. Very good, thank you.

And then in the middle, we have a large natural turf area. And so that's a flexible space.

And we have, that's intended...

There's a U12 field shown, which is this larger outline here in the north-south direction, which is the preferred direction. And then we have two smaller fields, the U10 fields, which are overlaid here and over here. So this becomes a multipurpose green space.

While we're talking about grade, I see the post cable fencing called out in a couple of these higher grade areas. I like to roll down hills at high speeds and I know a number of kids that do also. So, how are we deciding where to put the post and cable fencing? And is it necessary?

We feel it's necessary, and where we're locating it is along the edges of these natural areas, and we're responding directly to, again, the uses that we saw at Prospector Park, where we had the drainage area that's in the middle of the park, and it sort of became an interim bike park. So we're trying to avoid that. But these aren't drainage areas.

These look like green areas, right? They are green areas, yes. But we don't want people inside of them. We stay out of the green areas. We don't want e-bikes or... They're not lawns. So there is the intention to post and cable fence around the entire thing, or is it just kind of like at the top?

Our intention was to just kind of just to do it at the top. Just at the top. Okay.

So if people wanted to access their nature and go hug a tree, they could.

Yes. Right. And you could hop over the posting cable too. Touch grass. Thank you. So just some quick pictures of what some of those amenities might look like. On the left, there's one of those multipurpose rectangular fields. We have a basketball court in the middle, pickleball on the right, and then the outdoor fitness stations on the bottom. These are some ideas for the play areas, two to five play structures being lower, smaller to the ground. The middle one there provides as a cozy cocoon in case there's too much noise. It's a place to get away from kids. And there was a lot of requests for swings and all the feedback that we got. So we really want to incorporate swings this time. Support amenities, there's a restroom there on the left and parking lot on the right, which you've never seen before. I'm sure these are some shaded group picnic areas. The 1 on the left is a broader the other 1 night and the right is has a sort of swooping roof structure with picnic tables under it. This is that plaza space that I was talking about. Some images of what that might look like with picnic tables under a bosque of trees. So the trees sort of create a room that you sit in. More of the passive amenities, which is on the corner there, provides a place for reflection and wellness. It's sort of a sitting area so you can enjoy that nature area. More passive areas, flexible use open space for yoga, Frisbee, or parent groups. A little bit about the park theming. So the theme for this park is obviously inspired by the name, Jackrabbit Hill Park, and really the character of the surrounding landscape and the terrain of the site itself. The theming helps create a cohesive, more memorable park experience. And you see that coming through in the play features and the materials and the colors that are specified and some of the landscaping elements and the signage and wayfinding and then in our gathering and seating spaces. So all those combine to really create sort of a unified park experience. So these are just some inspirational images utilizing that Jackrabbit Hill theme. So there's opportunity for educational signage, habitat and pollinator planting. These are kind of cool. This is a play structures and the theme of animals that are actually also climbing structures. This is where you see the theming coming through and some of the hardscape elements on the left is a concrete seat wall, and that's designed to reflect the layers, the different layers of soil that are present. In this one here, there's a leaf that's stamped into the concrete and some bird prints in the concrete there. This is a created stream bed, sort of, and this is that rubberized, poured-in-place surfacing. So with that, staff recommends and the Park Commission recommends a resolution 11620, a resolution approving the master development plan for Jackrabbit Hill Park. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thanks, Brad.

Council Member Aquino, questions?

I don't have questions. I do think it looks great. I participated in both of the community meetings. It is a fact of life these days that when we plan parks, we have to do it with e-bikes in mind because kids will ride down as we see at Prospector Park. They like that. But they're also going to use this, what we're calling a walking path. I mean, they will be doing laps on there. So, you know, it just kind of is what it is. But hopefully, sooner rather than later, we can give them a designated place south of 50 to ride their bikes. So, thank you, Brad.

Maybe a whole state park for motorized vehicles. We can connect them right to it.

Council Member Leary?

You know where that park is, Mike.

What park? No, I'm kidding. Yeah.

Anyway, I just had a couple of questions, and that's an elementary school?

Yes, it is.

Okay. And I have a concern about the shade, which I love, having the trees where there can be benches and all that. So I just want to know if you're consulting with a city arborist to get something in there that has a faster growth rate for the tree, so that they actually cover the benches, and that they make sure that there's adequate tree well to plant those trees in.

Right, we will be working with the city arborist on that.

Yeah, because that's been a problem in some of the older parks. You know, there's not a big enough tree well, or the selection was something that didn't grow very well, so there's still no shade. And I have a bit of a concern about the stamped concrete, depending on how you do it, because as you noted, you're gonna have people of all ages in there, so... If you have seniors or disabled people in there that are using walking sticks or, like walkers or, I guess maybe kids in little strollers with the little tiny wheels. If those things are too deep, it creates a real difficulty in getting through the park for people that, if those stamped concrete areas are where it's too deep. So maybe just something along the edges rather than down the middle of those walkways. I've had that experience having had to use walking sticks before and taking grandkids down the park trails. That's it though, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Vice Mayor? I don't have any questions, just a couple comments. I really appreciate your adaptation, you saying that you were looking at Prospector and what's being used there. I love the idea of that concept of the third place and just making sure that you brought that in here. I really don't believe that every park has to be everything to everyone. So what I also appreciated, you showed that little pink cocoon that we were trying to get at Castle Park. Because of budget reasons, right? So, you know, putting it in a new park, being conscious of sensory overload for some people, you know, I just really appreciate all your work on this. So, thank you. Thank you.

Council Member Kozlowski.

No questions.

All right. I got a couple. About the name. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. With option one and option two, I feel like the parking lot was smaller, and I was just curious when it went to design, did the parking lot grow, or is that just my eyes?

It did. No, it was good eyes.

Could you explain why that was...

Sure. So we did a parking analysis, and so it's based on the increase in parking. So right now we're at about 70 stalls. For comparison, Prospector is 119, I think. Economy is like 126. The driving... Amenity on on jackrabbit hill is the pickleball court. So that's what bumped up our, our parking lot. So, with option 1, we hadn't we hadn't. Determined exactly what was going in at that time. We didn't want to spend too much time determining what the parking count would be. So we're right at about 70, 75 stalls. The parking analysis for the pickleball courts, so pickleball users generally drive themselves. So you have four players per court. So you have 16 players at one time, plus another 16 players waiting. So that's 32 parking stalls right there. So that's what bumped up the parking stall count.

And is there any, like, the school district site's right there, right? So would you envision some, like, reciprocal parking? I just, economy I get somewhat. We have the turf field, and that's when it's really, really, I'm just kind of thinking of the parks where I'm at. So did you guys look at reciprocal parking with that school site at all?

Yes, and we've talked to them, the school district, and I know that we've used the, like at Mangini Ranch Elementary, we've used their parking lot for, like, the grand opening, things like that.

Okay. Yeah, I'm comfortable with it. I just kind of wanted to understand where it was coming from. The other thing that I'm not used to, and maybe this is just next to old parks is dumpsters. Oh, and do we have vandalism issues? Is that an actual dumpster that's there for collecting everything?

That's okay.

I will say that I prospect your part too. I felt like it was like, twice the amount of trash cans as Disneyland. Oh, so are we putting in the same? Is that why I was driving the dumpster? It's like, you can literally. Throw away stuff every 10 feet. I feel like a prospector. So. It's curious.

So that's driving it. We, um, the increased in, in dumps or in trash cans and recycling at prospector was a result of our trash cans constantly being fold in our park maintenance to constantly having to. empty them. So that's why we put in quite a few more, and it seems to be successful. They don't seem to, from my experience, they aren't overflowing that much. And then the dumpster itself is a request from our maintenance team. It's just in terms of making things easier on them. Okay, so that would be something new at 1 at our park facilities too. We don't have a dumpster at our at our other neighborhood parks.

Yeah, typically I see the truck, you know, being filled up and driven off. So, uh, any concerns about, uh. You know, it's it's now a facility that's going to be there overnight and. Vandalism concerns, I would imagine it's going to be set up kind of like a company dumpster.

It would be out with locking doors like that.

Okay. And then my last question, and I'm sure you're going to love this one, is two and a half years is a long time to wait if you have a house that's across the street. So is there any way that we can improve that timeline, get the construction window down? I just look at it and go, if I was there waiting for two years, I know I've already been waiting. It seems like a long time.

I agree, it does seem like a long time, and it's part of the process. So we're looking, we have, I believe, We have some internal accelerated schedules that we're working with our consultant on, which aren't reflected here. So I didn't want to overpromise. But we're looking at being ready to go out to bid really in January of this year. Awesome.

I'm sure the residents around there would really appreciate that. So if there is any way to reduce the timeline, I know you'd find support amongst this crew if we could help you out in any way. Perfect, thanks so much Brad.

Can I, you brought up something with a dumpster which a request that I've gotten multiple times from residents south of 50 is a place to recycle their cardboard and I don't know if a park is a place to do it and yes you worry about people recycling things that are not you know what's intended but you've got people in new homes you know ordering a lot of things online, getting a lot of cardboard boxes, and there's really, you know, they'd have to go to Folsom Middle School or somewhere north of the freeway to dispose of their cardboard. So I don't know if that could be incorporated as part of that, or if we just have another place where we can maybe fit something like that.

If I could just comment on that I I don't know that's necessarily something that we want to incorporate in this But I appreciate the comment that we probably should spend some time thinking about how we can better serve that yeah, okay?

Thank you. We've considered that For that exact same reason and locating that at the community park where it's a little bit larger, okay? About the new Corp yard

Or the fire station down there. Was there any public comment? Otherwise, I can move the item.

We do not have any public comment.

That is correct. Okay, then I'll move adoption of resolution number 11620. Second.

Please call the roll.

Okay, Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski? Yes. Leary? Yes. And Racel?

Yes. Please call the next item.

The next item under new business is item number 17 resolution number 1, 1, 6, 2, 9, a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute a consultant and professional services agreement with Griffin structures for the corporation yard site planning and environmental assessment. And the amount of $335,000 from the corporation yard capital fund for the new corporation yard project and appropriation of funds.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Great to see you guys. Public Works Director Rebecca Neves, and I'm here to present the new corporation item, new corporation yard item for Council's consideration listed as item 17. So a little bit of background on the corporation yard itself. So the existing corporation yard has been in place since about the 1960s and has served as a home base for equipment and materials for the city's public works, utilities, and parks department, and in years prior, transit operations. I've included a map of the annexation history of the city to better illustrate how the current corporation yard has not kept up with the growing needs of Folsom and has reached the end of its useful service life. In 2008, a needs assessment was completed that looked at city services, community needs, and facility demands. That assessment served as the framework for the scope of the request for proposals that led to the effort of this item this evening. In 2018, the Folsom Plan Area Specific Plan further clarified the need for new corporation yard and a proposed site was annexed into the city located at the intersection of Prairie City Road and White Rock Road. As part of that effort, proportional costs were calculated to support standalone impact fees included in the city's public facilities financing plan. So for a little further context, the existing corporation yard consists of 14 acres, and with the adoption of the River District Vision Plan, its location was identified as a key redevelopment site, prime for reimagining into a welcoming space for the community. As far as the new corporation yard goes, it's located south of White Rock Road, and the new corporation yard site is approximately 36 acres in total, and will assess space needs for all current operations, including consideration of new legislature that has come about since the 2008 study was completed for items such as advanced clean fleet requirements, diverse and equitable facilities for staff, and current operations. For example, in 2008, Folsom provided transit services and has since ceased and can repurpose the previously allocated space for its current services. While this site is located at the southernmost area of the city, staff is also looking at potential options that will still allow an operational foothold located on north of 50, apart from the existing corporation yard site. The City Public Works team put out a request for proposals that was accessed by multiple firms, and yet we received one proposal from Griffin Structures. After calling all references and discussing the needs of the study and environmental documentation, the City team felt comfortable proceeding with a contract, which is the item before you this evening. Should this item be approved tonight, the project schedule carries out with planning and environmental assessment progressing over the next year and circulation of the environmental document next summer. At that point, the city would proceed with final design and seek construction funding. With an initial project estimate of approximately 50 million, a significant funding shortfall exists for funding construction. The impact fees collected to date, found in fund 459 for the corporation yard, fully fund the environmental clearance and design, but grants or other funding sources will be needed once the project is shovel ready in spring of 2028. Arriving at that state of readiness for the project makes it a great candidate for outside funding sources. So with that, staff's recommendation does include one minor grammatical correction to the resolution as noted under the sixth whereas statement and as shown on the screen.

Thank you to Council Member Aquino for finding that.

Staff recommends City Council approve Resolution 11629, authorizing the city manager to execute a consultant and professional services agreement with Griffin Structures for the Corporation Yard site planning and environmental assessment in the amount of $335,000 from the Corporation Yard Capital Fund, Fund 459, for the new Corporation Yard project and appropriation of funds. That concludes my presentation. Happy to answer any questions you have.

Thank you, Rebecca. Council Member Kozlowski, you want to start us off?

I am extremely delighted to have this on our agenda at long last, and I have no questions. Wow. I'm going to move it the moment you guys are done talking.

All right. Vice Mayor. Council Member Leary. Council Member Aquino. I am shocked that there are no questions. All right. I don't think we have any public comment.

There is no public comment.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to move that we approve Resolution 11-629, please.

Second.

Please call the roll.

Okay, Councilmember Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski? Yes. Leary? Yes. And Raisa?

Yes.

The next item under new business is item number 18 resolution number 1 1 6 3 0 a resolution adopting a list of projects for fiscal year 20 26 27 to be funded by Senate bill 1 the road repair and accountability act Good evening See

Good evening, Council. Mayor Rathel, wherever you went. Ryan Chance, Street Operations Manager for the Public Works Department. The item for you tonight is a requirement from the California Transportation Commission. Every year, we receive SB1 gas tax money for road maintenance and general maintenance money for our infrastructure. And as part of that, we have to pass a yearly resolution listing the projects that we plan to use those funds on. So this will be the 10th year that we've been doing this. SB 1 passed in 2017. And every year we bring a list very similar. to this to council for approval. Just a little bit of what we're spending this current fiscal year money on is a project that we just opened bids on today. It's gonna be a pavement resurfacing project. It's gonna include Glen Drive from Folsom Boulevard to Sibley and Coolidge, Park Shore and Plaza Drive behind Winco and next to the Toyota Service Center. also pavement resurfacing including slurry, you know crack asphalt repair crack ceiling and slurry seal to Empire Ranch Road pretty much the entirety of it in the city limits as well as all those green residential areas that you see on the map our city crews have already gone through and crack sealed and for lack of a better word, warn the residents that we're coming. So they know we're coming now. So this project, like I said, we opened bids today. It came in. We got a really good price. Our engineer's estimate was 3.7. We got it for 2.8. with nine different bidders, and it was what we consider a successful bid. So this is just an example of us putting our money to use from this gas tax that everybody can see. So our project list for this next fiscal year coming up, 26, 27, is we have three different projects. Project one here is a Greenback Lane culvert and paving project. This is an existing culvert that conveys Hinkle Creek underneath Greenback. Unfortunately, it's kind of reaching the end of its useful life. It has some issues. It's two different types of pipe, corrugated metal and concrete box. And both of them are, you know. They need some work, we'll just put it that way. So we have some prices up there depending on what the final solution is. The next step will be to go into design and then into construction. And I also will say that these three projects are the THE THREE PROJECTS THAT WE HAVE IN THE PROPOSED 2627 BUDGET TO USE SB1 FUNDS. SO WHAT YOU SEE IN THE BUDGET TO USE THIS MONEY IS WHAT YOU'LL BE SEEING TONIGHT AS WELL. SO WE HAVE THE GREENBACK LANE COLBERT PROJECT, WHICH SHOULD BE FUN TRAFFIC CONTROL WISE. We have a bridge preventative maintenance project, which Caltrans, for anybody who doesn't know, inspects all of our bridges every year and gives us a report of their maintenance recommendations. It can be anything from Concrete spalling repair, that's pieces of concrete that have got moisture in them and expanded and broke off. Could be abutment, erosion protection, deck treatment, methacrylate deck treatments to keep them a little more watertight. So this project is still in the final scoping phase, but we did want to assign some monies toward it because it is important to keep our bridges in good shape. And the last project is the Central Business District storm drain phase one realignment project. Most of you are probably familiar with Folsom Lake Bowl. You can see the blue line there going through the parking lot is existing. It needs to be relocated for a couple different reasons. One, it's a very old system, not in the best shape. There's some development happening there as well as lack of an easement and just not good practice to have our City water conveyed through the middle of somebody's parking lot. So, you can see there we have that's in design currently we have a rough. Construction costs of 1.4Million, and we're proposing to. Utilize 400,000 from.

Well, that 1 end up requiring an easement from both landowners.

I believe it's just going to require an easement from this property here. Yeah, we're keeping it. on one side of the property line.

Got it, thank you.

Yeah, so those are the three projects. SP1s have been a great program for us. We always need more money, but it's been a great injection into our maintenance capital. So with that, yeah, that's the resolution in front of you tonight to approve the list of projects that we then send to the California Transportation Commission and they check the box off and send us our money. So with that, that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to take any questions. Thanks, Ryan. Questions?

Council Member Leary?

No, unless there's any other questions, I was going to move. I do have a question.

Are there other utility upgrades that we should do while we have the road open right there and the sidewalk torn up?

in front of Folsom Bowl?

Yeah, just so we don't have to go back into the ground right there.

Yeah, so there are several projects that are on our collective radars. There's a potential trunk main replacement for sewer that Utilities is pursuing, but that isn't going to go out to construction until I believe 28, 29. Public works is coordinating with that effort as long in addition to being included as part of the central business district revitalization project, which is a proposed project under this coming fiscal year's budget. But there are other projects in that corridor that we're combining in that effort. But this particular project really has minimal amount of impact into the right of way itself, like the travel way. It will probably take a lane or shoulder closures, but most of the improvements is contained on the private parcel.

Oh, okay, gotcha.

Thank you, that was all. All right, and we have no public comment.

We do not have any public comment.

Interesting, thank you very much.

So I'll remove this resolution 11630.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Zorba? Yes. Aquino? Yes. Kozlowski? Yes. Leary? Yes. And Rathel?

Yes. And please call item number 19.

Okay, item number 19 under new business, presentation of the City Manager's Fiscal Year 2026-27 proposed operating capital budgets for the City of Folsom. This is the Sunstar Agency, the Folsom Public Financing Authority, and the Folsom Ranch Public Financing Authority.

Great. Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council. It's my privilege to kick this item off. But before I begin, I just want to thank the entire City of Folsom team that participated in this effort to bring forward to you this budget. In particular, Stacey Tamani, our finance director, and Adam Devlin with the finance department as well, as they've helped lead that finance team to bring forward what we're presenting today. So I have some slides we're going to go over. I'll turn the time over to Stacey after that to kind of go over the meat of the budget. And then following her remarks, we're going to hear from our Parks and Recreation Director, Kelly Gonzalez, to talk a little bit about some of the review and assessments that we've done as it relates to our Parks and Recreation Program and have conversations about that. But if we could go to the first slide. Um, just a reminder about our annual budget process. Uh, this is kind of our opportunity to present the preliminary budget for the fiscal year, starting July 1st of the next year. So this will be the 2627 fiscal year budget. Uh, we bring that before you in May and June of each year, and then for fiscal year 20252026, we'll have a close out update and a fiscal year 20262027. 1st quarter update will be presented to the city council in October or November of each year. And then we have our mid year budget review that is reviewed and approved by the city council in February of each year. So this is just a reminder of the process that we. Basically implemented last year that we're intending to follow this year And then for this this is our introduction To the budget so we are going to make presentations. We're not expecting any formal action today But we do want questions from the public from the council and direction going forward then we will have our public hearing on June 9th and Uh, where we will receive public input, um, the council, if they so desire could adopt the budget at that time. Uh, or if needed, we can continue the public hearing to the June 23rd or, uh, the June 23rd meeting. Um, if needed. Just as a reminder, the annual operating budget for the City Folsom includes over 170 separate fund accounts. Many of these fund accounts have special rules and requirements that dictate how the funds can be spent. It's actually the four largest fund accounts are the General Fund, Sewer Fund, Water Fund and Solid Waste Funds. The general fund in particular accounts for all general revenues of the city, not specifically levied or collected for other city funds and the related expenditures. The general fund accounts for all financial resources of the city, which are not accounted for in other funds. For example, police, fire, park, street, street maintenance, senior center, animal control, facility maintenance, and the zoo are examples of general fund expenditures. Some highlights for the proposed budget. Staff is projecting that the general fund revenues will exceed expenditures by about $51,000. Revenues in the general fund are estimated at $118 million plus transfers in of about $6 million for total estimated revenues of $124,353,860. And our proposed expenditures are $123,421,517 with transfers out of Uh, 880,000 dollars for total expenditures of, um, just over 124,000,000, the general fund. Any balance will remain as projected just over 20% and will comply with the city council's reserve policy. And with that, I'll turn it over to Stacy.

Thank you, and good evening again, Mayor and Council Members. Stacey Tamani, Chief Financial Officer. Tonight I'm happy to present more of the details of the City Manager's proposed fiscal year 26-27 budget. So we began this year's budget preparation similar to years past. We start on the revenue side, projecting total general fund revenues. So this slide has the fiscal year 25-26 revenue budget, and then the projected figures for fiscal year 26-27. So for fiscal year 25-26, we had projected $119.9 million, and for fiscal year 26-27, we are proposing $124.4 million. So an increase of about $4.4 million year over year. But what's going to go back to that one. Go through the categories there of property taxes are expected to increase over the prior year budget by about 1.3 million dollars that increases primarily from development in the Folsom plan area the growth in that area has been factored into the general fund projections and all of the presentations that we've given in recent years. So no real surprise there. But what we are seeing is a flattening in property tax growth in other areas of the city, as we just aren't having the turnover that we had in previous years. For sales tax, we're estimating that at about $28.3 million, pretty much flat compared to fiscal year 25-26. As we go down the list, we have transient occupancy tax that comes from our hotels. It's projected at 2.56 million for fiscal year 26-27, so a little bit of growth year over year, and that's mostly related to the revenue that we're seeing from our short-term rentals. Licenses and permits category is proposed at 4.4 million, a slight increase over the prior year, and that's related to business licenses and building permits. We have intergovernmental revenue that's primarily made up of our vehicle license fee revenue. We're expecting a slight increase there year over year, up by about $500,000. We got $10.8 million this year, and we're projecting about 11.3 for next year. We'll also are proposing to use the remaining $700,000 that we have in ARPA revenue, and it'll be recognized in this category as it is spent. So that makes up the remaining $1.2 million an increase that we see there for intergovernmental revenue. Charges for services are proposed at just under $18 million. That increase over the prior years related to ambulance revenue from the fire department, community development revenue, and parks and recreation program revenue, and also cost recovery for labor and benefits within the parks and recreation department. All other revenue is down slightly from fiscal year 25-26, mostly due to the loss of about $400,000 in cable TV franchise fees that the city will not be receiving in fiscal year 26-27. And then transfers in from other funds are up about $500,000 to account for the allocation of overhead costs from funds outside of the general fund. So these charges get transferred into the general fund to cover a portion of the cost of the administrative departments. So now on to this slide of appropriations. This slide displays the general fund appropriations and the net expenditures for both fiscal year 25-26 and fiscal year 26-27, and then compares those two years in that last column. So I'll just kind of take you across the chart here. As we go across, the first column is the fiscal year 25-26 approved budget. That was $123 million. The second column is the estimated 25-26 direct program revenues that are attributable to specific departments. And so you'll see them there. Next to each department the 3rd column is the estimated net expenditures after you take into account those direct revenues for 50 for fiscal year 2526 so that left us with net expenditures of 100.7M dollars for fiscal year 2526. As we move along the 4th column. It's now for fiscal year twenty six twenty seven proposed budget we're bringing you tonight that's totally one hundred and twenty four point three million the fifth column is the estimated twenty six twenty seven direct program revenues for each department and then that last column is the estimated net expenditures for fiscal year twenty six twenty seven after taking into account those direct revenues throughout about one hundred and one million dollars. As we go through each department, I'll be comparing that last column, or talking about the last column there, the net expenditures in contrast of 2526 to 2627. So for the fire department, they're down by about $864,000 from the prior year budget when you compare net expenditures to net expenditures. And there's a few parts to this. Total costs went down because of the positions that were reduced in the mid-year budget efforts last fall. But then that decrease was mostly offset by salary benefit and increased insurance costs for fiscal year 26-27, and also cost increases related to CPI and contract escalations related to operating costs. But added into that is a projected increase in ambulance fee revenue of about $600,000, leaving you with that net decrease of about $865,000. For police, we're projecting them to be up about a million dollars year over year. Again, several parts to that. The total cost went down because of the positions that were reduced in the mid-year budget, but that decrease was offset by the new MOU agreements, and then insurance cost increased as well. They also have operating cost increases related to CPI and contract escalations. Community development has a slight decrease there at the $169,000 mostly related to certain staff costs that were moved out of the general fund to special revenue funds. I will note that we estimate revenues conservatively in community development because of the unpredictability of development activity. So they usually in the year a little bit above those projections. For public works, we're down $800,000 compared to the prior year, primarily related to staff costs being moved out of the general fund to special revenue funds during the mid-year budget adjustments.

For fleet, we're up $200,000.

This is related just to the regular salary, benefit, and insurance cost increases within that division. General government is next and this is all of your administrative departments, including the city council budget it's up for some operating cost increases related to CPI and contract escalations and then we have the regular salary benefit and insurance cost increases for all the departments that are included in that category. IT is down about $254,000 year over year. Again, several parts to that. The total cost went down because of the positions that were eliminated in the mid-year budget, but then that decrease was partially offset by contract agreements, salary benefit, and insurance cost increases for the remaining staff. And then they also have operating cost increases related to contract escalations. For the Parks and Recreation Department, when you compare net expenditures to net expenditures, Parks and Recreation is down about $152,000 from the prior year. Again, several reasons for this. We are estimating a slight increase in program revenue overall. And then during the mid-year, additional staff was approved to work on delivering capital projects. And those staff costs will be partially or fully reimbursed from project funds outside of the general fund. So we have an estimated increase in their direct revenue related to those employees about $400,000. They also worked on increasing cost recovery overall, particularly in the municipal landscape services division. So that added another $500,000 in recoverable costs coming into the general fund. Those increases in revenue are then partially offset by increased operating costs. Again, related to CPI increases, contract escalations, and then their regular salary benefit and insurance cost increases that we've seen in the other departments. The library is up about $3,000. Again, two parts to this one. We did go down initially because of the reduced positions in the mid-year budget, but then that decrease was offset by the salary benefit and insurance costs and the operating costs increases. Facilities is down about $151,000, and this is mostly related to one-time costs that were included in the prior year and weren't carried forward to this proposed budget. Non-departmental costs are up about 1.5 million. And this is related to adding back in the general fund share of a $500,000 transfer to the Retiree Health Trust Fund that was eliminated out of the budget last year. So it's now in here again. And it also includes increases for the annual costs for our Retiree Health Program. Also included in these expenditures just overall for non-departmental is your $1.2 million for contingency items during the year, your tax sharing agreement for the Palladio, FTB ID payments, and payments to Sacramento County for property tax administration. So those are the major expenses that we have in non-departmental. And then last, we have transfers out of $880,000. That's made up of $700,000 of ARPA funding that will be transferred out into Fund 602 to be used to paint the city hall facility and also fire station facilities. $100,000 to the IT capital fund, fund 603, and then about $80,000 set aside to implement a new library book locker in the Folsom plan area. Just wanted to call out salary and benefits a little bit of what happened between last year and this year. So this slide shows the changes in salary and benefits starting with fiscal year 25-26 original budget at $88.8 million and Then the effects of the mid-year adjustments had us going down to 84.9 million. So that was with the staff reductions and moving costs out of the general fund to our special revenue funds. But now we're back up at the 88.6 million for this proposed budget due to the impacts of MOU agreements and salary and benefit increases. Throughout the descriptions of each department, on the previous slide, I mentioned that they had operating costs that were included in the department budgets. And these were those contract escalations and other operating increases. And this is to cover costs of services that were already performing. So in total, it's $828,000 of annual cost increase requests. And we did include all of these in the department budgets. Aside from this operating costs increases there are only a few more items included in this proposal for the police department, the reclass of a permanent part-time records technician to a full-time status for the library implementation of a book locker program in the Folsom plan area for the fire department, a services contract related to data consultant and for the city clerk and increase to account for the election costs for this year. In the previous fiscal year, we've set up several equipment replacement, renovation, and maintenance funds. We call those the 600 funds. And this slide shows the capital expenditures from those funds we're proposing for fiscal year 26-27. So from fund 601, our fleet fund, about $125,000 to purchase non-safety fleet vehicles. From fund 602, our facilities and rehab fund, we're proposing $700,000 in total to paint the exterior of the city hall campus and the fire stations, and that will come from ARPA funding. And $178,000 for electrical and lighting upgrades for the rodeo grounds, $150,000 for a waterside tower replacement at the aquatic center, and just over $89,000 for the city park restroom door auto lock system. 89.7 is being allocated towards this project, and they'll do as many of those as they can with that funding. We're proposing to spend the balance of Fund 603, which is about $381,000 on essential information system equipment upgrades this year. In Fund 607, proposing $300,000 for police vehicles. In Fund 608, our Fire Vehicle and Equipment Fund, $144,000 for portable radios and $7,500 for rope rescue equipment. And then from Fund 609, our Park Trail Maintenance and Rehabilitation Fund, $925,000 for trail renovations. Here you have the chart of your authorized positions. This chart compares the total position count for fiscal year 26-27 to the 25-26 count after the mid-year budget adjustments. For 26-27, this budget proposes one and a half new positions in the general fund. The half is related to the police department reclass of the permanent and part-time records technician to a full-time position. And then the other is one senior HR analyst that is paid for by risk management funding, Fund 606. This budget also proposes one solid waste management analyst funded from the Solid Waste Fund, Fund 540, for a total authorized position count of 498. This chart here shows the trends of our major tax revenues. Property taxes are in the blue, moving upward at a fairly consistent pace for the last several years as more properties in the Folsom Plan area have been paying property tax. But we have seen a flattening of that trend lately due to properties north of Highway 50 turning over at a slower rate. Sales tax in the red is showing that flat growth that we've been reporting for many years now. And as we move forward into fiscal year 27 and beyond, we expect that flat trend to continue. The slide reflects the property tax growth broken down by area north of 50 is in the blue and the Folsom plan areas in the red. And you can see that for the past 10 years property tax from Folsom plan area has gone from being about 2% of property tax collected back in fiscal year 18 up to about 27% of property tax projected for fiscal year 2627 not totals 13.4 million. And this chart here reflects the city's unassigned fund balance by year in those dark blue columns. And then the unassigned fund balance as a percentage of expenditures displayed by the red line. And we can kind of focus on the right side of the chart here, the last three years, and then the proposal for fiscal year 26-27, where we see the unassigned fund balance staying right around the $25 million line. For fiscal year 25-26, we were able to keep this level of reserve due to the reductions that were made mid-year. And then the red line here shows the unassigned fund balance as a percentage of expenditures. It's been kept at that 20% mark for the last three years with any available unassigned fund balance at the end of the fiscal year being moved to the renovation replacement funds per the city council's policy. And so this year we are proposing that fund balance at about 25 million and the 20% again. Now moving on to the enterprise fund budgets will go over the projected revenues and proposed appropriations for water wastewater and solid waste funds. The proposed budget for the water enterprise funds includes a 22.5 million dollars of program revenue that you see on the top of the right hand column and the proposed appropriation for operating expenses totals 19.5 million and 7 million dollars for capital expenses. The proposed budget for the wastewater enterprise fund as 13.4 million dollars of program revenue proposed appropriations at 7.5 million for operations and 4 million dollars for capital expenses. And then for your solid waste enterprise find it includes 29.4 million dollars program revenues proposed appropriations are 24.4 million in total for operations and 2.6 million dollars for capital expenses for vehicle replacements. So now we have a section on the proposed capital improvement plan for fiscal year 26-27. The budget book that you have before you this year does include a section for CIP, similar to what we were able to provide in the previous budget format, and it's also been included online. So here we have an overview of the major projects that have current budget requests this year. This isn't everything in the plan. It just captures most of the major projects. This list is in alphabetical order. As the columns go across, the first column is the project budget that was previously approved prior to fiscal year 26-27. The second column is the current budget request. So these amounts are either adding to an existing project or proposing a new one, and then you have your total project budget on the right. The funding for these projects is primarily impact fees, enterprise funds or grants, or special revenue funds. Some of the projects, I can read through them. Basin 4 sewer phase 2, we have bridge preventative maintenance, Empire Ranch Road interchange, water system rehab project number 5, the Folsom Plan Area and Neighborhood Park number 2, Jackrabbit Hill Park, Paving the way for fiscal year twenty six twenty seven riley street sidewalk the southeast connector class one trail trail renovations wastewater system communications hardware upgrade project water system communications hardware upgrade and the water system we have project number three. And this chart here just shows the funding sources for all of the projects that are included in the cip plan. including the major projects that we just looked at on the prior slide. And you'll be able to see these expenses within your budget book, within the funds that are listed in that left-hand column. The last table that I have for you here is the proposed appropriations by fund type in total for all city funds. This includes the operating budget and the capital cost. So our total proposed budget includes $124.3 million for the general fund, with an additional $242,000 in our general grants and SPIF fee funds that are usually included with the general fund for reporting purposes. Special revenue funds at $22 million, debt service funds at $17 million, capital project funds at $25.9 million, your enterprise funds at $66.6 million, internal service funds at $27.9 million, and fiduciary funds at $23.6 million for total appropriations of 307, 684, 472. As far as next steps, Brian already went over this slide. So this was the presentation of the proposed budget. June 9th will be that public hearing. We'll receive public input, and you could approve at that meeting. And then June 23rd will be your final chance to approve. And just a reminder, per the municipal code, the budget does need to be approved by the last working day of the fiscal year, which is June 30th. And with that, I'll turn it back over to our city manager. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Stacey. So I guess I would pose a question to the City Council. We've gone over a lot of information, and Kelly will go over some more information specifically related to the Parks and Recreation Department and some of the things that they've been reviewing. Would you prefer to have a conversation about what's been presented or hear from Kelly first? Okay.

Is that okay with everyone?

Okay, Kelly, come on up, thank you. And while they're setting up, I mean, I think what I would highlight related to the budget that's being presented tonight is SAS recommended budget shows a budget that shows operating expenses slightly below our projected revenues, which is good. But we also have had conversations about our Assets and the need over time to invest more into those assets, whether it be our trails, our park facilities, um, our sports fields, uh, our, um, facilities that the, uh. Uh, city hall complex, our fire stations, our police building and so those are all adding up. And so, with that in mind, when we're dealing with precious amounts of general fund dollars, are there ways are there things that we're currently doing that would be better if we weren't doing and then taking funds from those services that we no longer provide and then investing those into our assets. And so that was kind of the premise for this conversation in this this, um, exercises looking specifically at our parks and recreation programs. Are there programs that we may be subsidizing through general fund dollars? That would be better to stop doing. So that we could then invest those funds into the actual physical asset. And 1 of the things that I would contend is we're at risk if we choose to continue to offer some of those services, you could ultimately be heading towards a decision point where you've eliminated both. The service and the asset, so that's some, you know, that's going to be kind of a theme as we move forward is what should be our focus. And so this kind of starts that discussion. So, thank you Kelly.

Thank you, Brian. Good evening, Mayor Rathal, city council members, Kelly Gonzalez, Parks and Recreation Director, Tonight's presentation, I've done a version of this presentation with Brian to our Parks and Recreation Commission, and last week we also presented our direction moving forward to the Folsom Athletic Association. So our department values, our decisions are guided and aligned with our essential services and used to guide our decision making through our values of integrity, health and wellness, and service to our community. Our budget goals, like Brian said, our priority is looking at our infrastructure. What are new ways that we can invest in our infrastructure? Continued service to the community to ensure that we are meeting the recreational needs in this growing community. We are strengthening our partnerships, which I'll talk about a little bit later, to help enhance our delivery of our facilities, programs, and services, and reducing our reliance on the general fund. And we're improving our long-term sustainability through park design, as you heard Brad talk about earlier, departmental financial policies, and operational efficiencies. And of course, we want to continue to invest in our employees. We want to train and retain high-performing workforces. So Stacey talked a little bit earlier. So we wanted to make sure as we had rising costs within the Parks and Recreation Department, how are we continuing to offset those rising costs? So in 26-27, you will see that we increased some of our program revenues related to the zoo and recreation and community service fees. We offset some of the cost recovery for municipal landscape. We're also looking at our cost recovery levels for our parks and trails staff. And then we also are charging park maintenance fees as appropriate for Prospector Park. And so these are new ways to have less reliance on the general fund that we're implementing this fiscal year. In addition, areas that we've increased efficiencies or reduced our reliance on general fund, our park maintenance, most of our maintenance to our parks and our open space is done on contract. We have very few full-time employees to deliver that service, and we're at the very basic service. Our recreation services, we offer 80% of our programs are done by independent contractors. We also partner with many non-profits offer those recreation services. We partner with over 130 nonprofits and business organizations that help invest into our programs through donations, partnerships, and in-kind support annually. We've tracked to date for this fiscal year volunteer hours that have invested or are equal to saving our department $1.73 million. We restructured our department this past year to focus on delivery of capital projects, both for park planning, trails and facilities. As you saw in the presentation last year, we increased our partnerships with utilities, community development and public works on how we're developing program services and infrastructure projects. And this past year, for the first time, We increased the amount of general fund subsidy to park maintenance. That was a strategic goal to increase our deferred maintenance and investing in our parks and our trails. The other items that we did this past fiscal year, we did the outreach for the Natoma Station, which passed at 71.8%. We actively and strategically partnered with two nonprofit organizations in delivering service maintenance, including Fat Track and Friends of Folsom Parkway has been doing an outstanding job with the Adopt-A-Trail initiative. as well as helping us with ladder fuel reduction. Pickleball courts, the Pickleball Club just recently invested in the resurfacing and maintenance of the pickleball courts. Tom is gonna talk a little bit later, but he'll go into depth of the reduction of programs that we've done this past year and reduction of facility hours, and we'll continue to take a look at every single program next fiscal year. We eliminated a skate park attendant, an art gallery curator, and a full-time recreation coordinator position this year as another way to reduce our dependence on the general fund. Last year, City Council approved new fees for the first time related to community facilities, and then also approved fee increases for the zoo entry, as well as we developed a book of fees, so every fee within our department It is documented the day that it's increased so that we can evaluate that to make sure that every fee continues to be increased annually. So we increased fees in January 2025. Previous to that, it was 2011 when those fees were looked at, and we increased fees again in 2026. And then we've been working closely with the Friends of the Folsom Zoo. They've been successful in a capital campaign to find funding for a vet trailer and have also partnered with our leadership Folsom on getting funding for signage at the zoo. And those are both items that previously we were looking at our general fund to subsidize. One of the big success this year, or what we're proposing for next year, you'll see within the seven divisions of the Parks and Recreation Department, the two divisions that require the most general fund subsidy are facilities and park maintenance, which is the gold bar. If you see the red line, that's what we're proposing in the next budget year. So we increased our general fund subsidy to facilities and park maintenance, which is the direction, the city manager, that's his vision. increased it from 47% of our department budget to 52%. And we continue to want to move in that direction, evaluating our services so that general fund can move to take care of our infrastructure. The other thing, working closely with our city manager and working with our Parks and Recreation Commission, we were asked to do a deeper dive of all of our recreation and community services programs. We're going to talk a little bit about that methodology, and I want to give kudos. Jamison Larson, our senior management analyst, has spent several hours looking at every single program area. So he's going to talk a little bit about the methodology and reviewing of the recreation and community services programs.

Good evening, council. So we're going to be looking at the cost recovery methodology for the Recreation and Community Services Division. Right now, our cost recovery policy is nearly 20 years old. It is outdated, and I don't believe it aligns with our values as a department or a city. And so we are working on a financial sustainability plan that we will be workshopping with the commission this fall and then bringing to you if you're blessing as well later in the year.

So just the methodology.

So cost recovery is the degree to which direct and indirect costs are paid by user fees or other funding versus tax subsidy. And then when looking at that, you have your direct and your indirect costs. So your direct costs are those costs can be directly attributed to the service and the indirect costs. They have a benefit to the system as a whole, but are not easily traceable directly to a an individual service or program. And the purposes of cost recovery is having a policy tool for aligning recreation pricing with community values and financial sustainability. It answers the following questions. What services should be subsidized? Who should have access to the services and how our tax dollars used to benefit the community? There was a recent study done nationally, and 26% of operating expenditures was the average nationwide for parks and recreation for cost recovery. And then this first slide here, we're looking at the recreation community services division as a whole. So that includes community and cultural services, community facilities, sports and aquatics. You can see that their budgeted cost recovery since 2023 has been exceeded with their actual cost recovery. that is partially due to the fact that we are very conservative on our revenues to make sure that we Bring all of those in and meet that target and then the new policy new direction is that additional revenues over the City Council's policy will be then dumped into those capital funds to Do that deferred maintenance that we so desperately need? so the Recreation, community services, divisions in total have a budgeted cost recovery in this current budget that you're reviewing of 58% for a total subsidy of 2.9 million, 3 million. And then when looking at cost recovery on individual level, so CCS, CF, that stands for Community Cultural Services and Community Facilities, up to this year, those were separated within the budget and the revenue for community facilities was shown in one line, but none of the expenses were shown there. So this year we've intentionally broke those apart and assigned all of the appropriate expenses to community facilities and built out that budget. So you can actually see directly on the same page what the costs are versus the revenues. Same thing with sports. So sports, they were in a situation where they had all of their costs shown within one budget, but they had a large chunk of revenue shown within a separate budget. They had indoor sports and outdoor sports. This year, we have combined those two community sports. And so all of your revenues and all of your expenses will show on the same page. So that way you can easily follow the story there. And so this just shows what the cost recovery policy is based off of our 2007 fee policies. And we are within the range for the majority of these. Aquatics has been a little bit of trouble due to the fact that we have so much capital within the aquatics between the building maintenance and the facilities maintenance of the aquatic center. And so that one has been a little more variable than the others. And then this is just showing that conservative revenue, the budgeted is the gold boxes, and then the red line is the actual revenue for those years that we have actuals. And so you can see that there is a gap between there where we are realizing more revenue than what is budgeted annually. And then this here is just a an example of what our current model. We have a cost recovery model. I switched it over to show what the subsidy was, because I think that's more what we're looking to know. And so Tom will get into a little more detail on what is a community benefit versus an individual or specialized benefit. But just looking at this model, you can see that we have some specialized services that have a very high level of subsidy. And those are those areas that we want to try and correct and bring that subsidy down so we can provide that subsidy, ideally to either deferred maintenance or a program that should have that type of subsidy. Open access to parks and open spaces are the types of things that benefit the community as a whole. So with that, I will pass it over to Tom Hellman.

In Council Tom Hellman recreation community services manager so continuing with. Cost recovery and some of the analysis we've done a big thanks to Jameson for being our data analyst I'm here to talk a little bit more of the why and the house and what these numbers really are kind of articulating to you tonight. So in community and cultural services, which also includes all of our community facilities, for fiscal year 24-25, we finished at 54% cost recovery. What you see there are two columns, one of them showing the cost recovery for all of the direct services that are going towards that service. So direct services, think any part-time staffing that would be going towards that, any supplies and equipment that would be going towards those programs that you see there on the left. When we apply the indirect, I want to throw a big asterisk here at you all. So, as Jameson, and I were discussing this, we took all of the expenditures within the community cultural services and community facilities expense line item, and we just threw it at it. And then we broke it up by percentages to get an indirect costs associated to it. For the record, that is not the way that we should be doing that. We wanna move it in a different way as Jameson and Kelly have articulated as we're developing this financial sustainability policy. But within this time period, we did this just to kind of show, okay, this is what we could apply for all of these indirect costs to see what the new cost recovery level would be. So obviously you see them decrease quite a bit from the direct costs. Some of them are still holding within our current cost recovery policy. But then you see some that obviously don't have a cost recovery policy associated to them, like the gallery or special events or contract services and our nonprofits. And so this is just articulating how we move from direct to indirect and then in our financial sustainability policy. how we choose and what we choose to throw at in an indirect category to start to capture some of these costs if we see opportunity for a rise in fees or a decrease in the expenditure or a divest from the service as a whole. So could you just use as an example the gallery?

What are the direct costs that you're talking about in the first column? And then what are the indirect costs that change that number?

Sure. So Gallery 48 is an art gallery that's next door, roughly five exhibits a year thus far. Some of those direct costs are some limited part-time staffing and supplies and materials that go to the hanging of that. And or if there's any contracts needed for artists, we've had some touring shows that have come through in the past of where those would also come through. The indirect would be some of that building space. That was applied in that very small percentage to get to where we saw that.

So for so maintenance of the building, a little bit of a little bit of utility expenses.

Yes.

I gotcha. Thank you. Yes.

So I also ask, is this our special events or is this other special events on here?

This is any special event that our department is responsible for.

Got it. And then what's an example of the contracted services and nonprofits?

Sure. So we have a large portfolio of contracted or independent contractors that provide some level of recreation service that when you flip through any of our three guides that come out, you're going to probably find something is going to say underneath that title provided by and it might say Skyhawks. Might say a national association of athletics and might say an actual person's name, because they are an independent contractor or a small business. And so all of those are independent contractors where we go into an agreement with them to provide a service. We either host them at a facility, or they host it at their facility and then it's a split on the on the revenue taken in from those program registration fees. The nonprofit side of the thing is where we apply to where working with either nonprofits to provide that same level of service and then doing the same thing in a contract relationship or to look at various services to maybe assume responsibility for one of these services. Thank you. You bet. So with community and cultural service and community facilities for fiscal year 24, 25, you see that we had a total subsidy there of just over 1.1 million. So moving on to community sports, as Jameson alluded to, we have both indoor and outdoor sports. We're just collapsing that to make it just very simple and holistic. Again, tracking all revenues on all expenditures related to community sports. Here you have some major categories of the various community sports again a very high cost recovery when you're looking at the direct services being provided examples of some use sports that maybe you've you've seen or maybe been a part of or know of would be our youth NFL flag football program or youth indoor soccer leagues that are very popular servicing probably well over 1700 kids. Um, again, same thing with contracted services, their marital, um, again, some organizations, independent contractors that we provide to in this case, the nonprofit groups would be related to our community use sports leagues. So all the various use sports organizations that pay us a per player fee, and there gets and for that, we then give them or work to get scheduling accessibility on our park fields or spaces for them to conduct that recreational league. And then outdoor facility rentals is the use of those field spaces so that's a scheduling those that's us activating those or making sure that they were not activated for general use. And then the sports complex is everything that's inside the sports complex that you can just come and do from batting cages to table tennis to playing basketball anything on a day to day basis there. Again, you take the total expenditures of community sports, you throw it into there for an indirect kind of feel, and you start to see those cost recovery numbers dip down because it's not completely accurate. Some of those youth sports things never touch what's happening inside the sports complex, but they got tied to some of the expenditures there. So in our updated financial sustainability policy, we want to go through a really thorough cost analysis of each of these before we just start throwing various indirect costs at it.

Excuse me, Tom, if I could just interrupt. One of the things I'd like to share with this is, one, I just want to thank Tom, you know, Jameson, the entire Parks and Recreation team to put this together, because this is uncomfortable, right? I mean, because we're basically peeling off all the layers. And so, in some ways, we're showing the community, we're showing the council at the beginning stages of our analysis. So these percentages, we're just sharing you, these are methodologies that we started, but this is probably not where we're going to end up. So when I see this, I don't want our people renting our facilities say, oh my gosh, we're balancing the budget on our expenses because some of the things that I would point out related to outdoor rentals and others that I would factor in is, I don't think we're charging for the renewal and replacement of many of our facilities. And when you factor in all of our outdoor facilities that are in some need of repair, That this is part of a replenishing fund, so we're just showing you the raw information, but this is just the start of going into all of those different levels and then adequately identifying what resources resources. And assets are tied to these, and then we can actually put a real number to what the direct and indirect costs are. So just wanted to highlight that.

So in that fiscal year, sports was subsidized $372,000 to make them whole because they have a very high cost recovery in that particular year. Uh, moving on to aquatics, which includes the Steve Nicholas aquatic center in that year, they were at a 54% cost recovery. What we have found and what I will state have operating many aquatic centers is you will find that most aquatic centers of this caliber are going to fall in that 50 to 60% cost recovery category. Just reached out to a friend in Roseville. Where are they? 54%. And they're very similar to our makeup as a center as well. But in here, we did it a little bit different than the previous two sections. So let me tell you what it is and why. So what you're looking at here is a cost recovery that includes direct and indirect, because the way we took this was based off of total programming hours that we have at the aquatic center in a given year. We have roughly over fifty five thousand programming hours. Keep in mind that from the hours of roughly ten p.m. to six a.m., there's no programming hours, but there's something running at that pool. And so you just have a constant little operation that's happening there over the night with no opportunity for return on that investment. And so what you're seeing here is the various big program areas, recreation, swim, showing at 52%, and obviously providing a safe access, accessible place for folks and families to recreate in. We have a couple different things here in line items, so I just want to kind of group them together for you. So we have two swim teams that utilize our facility. You have the Sierra Marlins and the Folsom Sea Otters. You kind of see them in four different areas as practices and swim meets. So, if you could, you can kind of collaborate them all up, but see orders are a recreation based summertime team. So they're in the water now from until July and the Sierra Marlins are a United States swim team that operate year round and they're in the water all year round. They have a lot more programming hours and use than the fulsome sea orders. Therefore, there's also more opportunity for them to be in the water and being charged. But there's also an opportunity here to look at the use of our water in relation to the expenditure of our water. And so those are big analysis that we're talking about right now as far as we can't keep doing what we've always done. We have to look at new ways. And 1 of those news ways that I can tell you that using water in the summer does not cost the same as using water in the winter. And so that might be one methodology we have to look at as far as when we're using the water and who's using the water and at what time of year, because it does change operationally and dollar wise as far as what that water eventually costs. Aquasize program is a very well and loved program. I would say doing very well doing that. We also have a diving program that utilizes the pool, minimal amount of time compared to the swim teams. And then our Sea Squad Swim School, which is our learn to swim lesson program, high cost recovery, 96%. A lot of that is due to volume of people. We are pretty much maxed out the way the Steve Michael's aquatic center set up. Obviously, you have a 50 meter pool, very little shallow water in that pool. You have a 3 lane instructional pool, a lot of shallow water. So we maximize that pool for swim lessons. We really don't have growth to spill over into the deeper part of the 50 meter pool. And so we're kind of maxed where we are, if you will dare, I say, kind of land locked into the instructional pool there. Um, but high popularity very well brand recognized and people love it and they keep returning. So we're excited to kick that program off next week. Um, the last or sorry fiscal twenty four twenty five aquatic center was subsidized one point one million as Jameson alluded to some of the bigger issues that we see when we see a rise in an expenditure for either aquatics. And our community cultural services and facilities, and our sports has generally been due to a building situation, not a programming situation. So, you know, those are things that we're looking at as we're maintaining these facilities within our operational budget that we start to see that we have to make adjustments for. And so Jamison showed you what our current policy is, but then switched it on you to show your subsidy. This is a draft of showing kind of where we want to go and what it means. And so on the bottom left, you have in the continuum, what we refer to as the common good. And these are the essential community-wide impacts for universal value. So these are all the things that people should have access to, and we should make it accessible too. So you think about the access to park spaces, to the trail system to maybe the open spaces right those are open access as you know you're subsidizing them 100 there's no entry fee there's no parking fees nothing like that in the city of folsom they just get to go use it so that's of common good for the community therefore we're going to subsidize it at 100 You go to the far end of that continuum and you go into individualized or specialized services. These are things that are typically referred to as discretionary or very interested, self-interested by a person. They can have some common good or community benefit, but largely they're very individualized or specialized. And so you're going to have a very low subsidy value to that. We use a range of 0 to 20, and please don't get fixated on these ranges. They're not absolute. They're just to kind of show that the continuum moves this way, and as you move up, your subsidy level starts to drop. And so those are the specialized services that you might think about that are very individualized, maybe like think advanced level or maybe even adult-based at some points that we're not going to subsidize a whole lot, if any, and very little, and we're expecting a large return on that cost. And then you're going to fall in the middle there with various different other activities or program areas, and you're going to move from the common or community benefit all the way through the individualized pendulum there, where you slowly move into kind of a mixture of middle, half common, half individualized. Then you're going to shift towards more individualized with less common good benefit there. So this is a graphical illustration to show where we're thinking about moving towards versus talking about cost recovery in the terms of percentage and what costs you're trying to recover. So I kind of talked about a little bit of common good already, but these are our safe spaces, our open spaces that people have, our social infrastructure spaces, our maybe impactful places where we need to make sure that teens have an access to do something and to retreat to a safe place when school is not in session, our ability to provide youth development for our youngest of children before they get to the elementary program, and also when their school is not in session. and then recreation sports and access to safe water for folks to learn to swim and enjoy water. Um, some of those individual or specialized services that you'll see are some of those adult classes, like I mentioned, or sports a lot of the specialty camps that people might be interested in a lot of the competitive sports programs that you'll see within the community that we're responsible for helping to facilitate and or find space for our art gallery, some special events and our rental program that you'll see at our various community facilities. I'm gonna pause there, turn it back over to Kelly to finish out what our next steps are going to be.

All right, thank you, Tom. So what we have planned as we're looking at ways to increase our cost recovery and decrease our subsidies, so we'll be working with our Parks and Recreation Commission, which I should point out are in the audience today. So if you have any questions, they're here to help, but working with them to develop our financial sustainability policy. looking at our community's values. We'll be updating based on that policy. We'll be looking at all of our market conditions and updating our fees in January, 2027. Again, we have goals to maximize all of our special revenue funds. We're looking at ways to improve our energy efficiencies at our facilities. We're looking at items like the solar panels at the aquatic centers, our HVAC systems. our irrigation controllers. We have goals this year. Two of the underfunded districts were looking to begin community outreach starting next month. Tom, looking at some of those individualized and specialized services, our goal in the next two to three years is to increase recreation cost recovery from 64% to 70%, which is a very aggressive goal. That's about $800,000 in less subsidy for recreation services, so that's a pretty lofty goal in a very short timeframe. We're going to continue to strengthen and develop new public-private partnerships, which I'll be bringing back to City Council in a couple of months. We've been spending some great conversations with our health care providers and are looking to enter into some partnerships that we'll be bringing to City Council in the next two months. Again, looking at our long range financial sustainability and really focusing on our deferred maintenance. We have not done maintenance that we should have for the last 15 to 20 years. We have lots of work to do in our parks and our trails. We've started, thanks to our city manager, for the first time we actually have funds so that we can start to try to start maintaining our assets. which is so important to our community and our community identity. And the other item that we're looking at next fiscal year is we're evaluating all of our contracts, especially for park maintenance, as we look to improve customer service, invest in our employees. Are there things that we can do and be more efficient versus our contract. Is there anything that we can do in-house? So we're evaluating that in the next fiscal year, and we'll be bringing that recommendation to our city manager. And then I'd be happy to answer any questions.

So with that, Mayor and members of the Council, we would love to answer any questions about what Parks and Recreation has talked about and the budget in general. As we mentioned, this was kind of our kickoff to start the conversation. So, of course, we fully expected for you guys to memorize the 500 some pages that were presented to you over the weekend, but probably not realistic. So we fully expect to have more conversation and questions throughout, you know, the next couple weeks. But we would like to start wherever you would.

Council Member Aquino, you want to kick us off?

I like the direction of parks and rec my questions are not for you at the moment, so you can relax a bit. These questions are more for Stacey and Brian. Just curious any debt service payments coming out of the general fund Stacey. I thought a couple of years ago we had something that was going to be paid off soon and I was just wondering.

We do. I think we have two payments left, and that comes at a non-departmental. That was for the City Hall facility, so it's almost paid off.

Okay. And then anything regarding kind of pension payment forecasts, and are we, you know, if things kind of peaked, and are they going to start coming down, and...

Yeah, it looks like we were fairly flat for this year. We're starting to see a little bit of a decrease because of PEPRA in the actual payments per employee. But then for the big lump sum payment that we pay for all of the costs from the past, that is still growing. So it's going to depend, again, on how the economy does on June 30th and what PERS ends up getting as their ending rate. But it wasn't a huge jump for this year.

Okay.

And I think, if I remember, the anticipated kind of top was like in the 2030, 2031 period.

Correct. Okay, we're getting close.

Yeah, if I could hop in there, because this was on my list too, we used to have a really nice multi-year comparison that went back to like 2005 and showed when our unfunded liabilities started growing. And then, you know, back then we were... three active employees for every one right retired employee and now it's like the opposite of that you know we have like one for every two i think but i don't know because i have to go and look at the pers report and then i have to scroll through you know 200 pages of actuarial evaluation to pull out those numbers can we update that multi-year comparison worksheet we used to do and just include it in our budget presentation sure thank you

There was a slide in there where you compare property tax from north of 50 versus the Folsom Plan area. Although I think it's really interesting data, I'm kind of wondering why we do that. And for the sake of city unity, I'm not sure that that's a good idea to continue. Rebecca had a slide in her presentation where she showed all of the annexations over the city's history. And we don't do that for Empire Ranch and the Parkway, which was the annexation prior to Folsom Plan Area. We don't do it for Briggs Ranch. You know what I mean? It just seems like why do we continue to separate north of 50 and south of 50? It just seems like it's... Again, maybe for the sake of city unity, we stopped doing that. Just curious about some of the budget numbers for the fire department. Is this taking into account this transition to single role that we're planning, single role paramedics and any information on that or what needs to happen budget-wise in order to bring back that fifth engine?

So, I don't believe this budget actually incorporates all the necessary cost savings that we anticipate in having related to the single role system. Kudos to the fire department. She so lack for the efforts to work with 5 to 2. we're getting closer in in our ability to start recruiting for the single role paramedics. And so our hope is that's the catalyst implementing that, seeing how it works. And that's, in my opinion, one of the keys to us getting that fire engine back in service is, you know, improving our cost recovery, which can also help fund the staffing of that fire engine.

Okay. All right. That's all the questions I have for now. Thank you.

Council Member Leary.

Thank you all for all of your presentations. I'm still working my way through the book, but I've only got about 10% of it memorized at any rate I am I'm concerned about a lot of different areas and getting some answers for this so Brian you had talked about having some More conversations and that would be between this meeting and our meetings in June so What would be the opportunity to do that? Because I have a list of questions and I don't anticipate getting them all answered tonight, but I anticipate having more questions and it would be nice if all of the council members could submit questions and maybe we could all learn from each other's questions rather than all ask the same thing repeatedly of staff.

Well, fair enough. I mean, I guess what I would suggest, if you have questions, if you just want to submit them to me, if you don't mind putting them in an email, that'll make it easier for me to forward to the necessary departments, if that would be acceptable.

Right. I mean, you could kind of maybe sift through that or concatenate the long list of questions so that people, you know, everybody's not going to ask the same questions. But I think we could all benefit from the answers to all of the questions.

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think that that would be really, um, effective in our mind if if the council doesn't mind sending us their questions, we can compile a list and and put together the answers to those questions. And then obviously we'd combine those that are similar. Um. and we would share with the council that works great for us.

I'd just like to make this efficient.

Sure, so do we.

Yeah, I thought that might be a plus. And there were a couple things I had about, we have some contracts where we've lost staff and then we replace them with contracting out. And is there going to be a way to separate that out so that we can see a continued reduction in costs or acknowledge if there are increasing costs for those contracts over time?

Sure. I mean, I guess in some ways we may need a little more detail related to that. So one in particular that I'm thinking of is, you know, as we made changes in our IT services that we're now operating, you know, under an IT services contract. I mean, are there other examples that you can think of, Stacey? Or is that the main one you were thinking of?

Well, that's the one that comes to mind because we sort of had a, I don't know, six-month window for having a contract. Yes.

So if that's your question for that particular service, we can most definitely show that.

Yeah, I was just anticipating there may be other areas where we have contracts that I'm not aware of.

Yeah. And I think, you know, so it's kind of depends on just the expression. I think our goal for part of this conversation and highlighting some of these areas is in some ways to to demonstrate and make the statement that we're not just taking this like breath. of all we have a balanced budget, you know for operations were really looking at it from with a high intensity because it's not just good enough to hey we're able to provide the service for one more year it's how can we look forward and be as efficient as possible so that we can not only provide services but maintain the assets that are tied to those services so our commitment is we're going to keep looking and keep trying to get better so The only 1 that I can think of now, that was part of our kind of reorg change was the it so if it's okay with you, we will prepare information that will show what the cost savings because we're, as was mentioned in the slide earlier, we are demonstrating some cost savings. Although we had reductions in force where it reduced our cost, our added cost by going into the contract is less than what our. previous costs were. Is that fair to say?

Yes, correct. Yeah, I did take a look at that section already and noticed there was a decrease. I was just anticipating how that was going to work out long term. And the other thing I want to bring up is like, you know, partnerships. We've had some public-private partnerships help support the parks. And I'm going to get, you know, back to fire, you know, and talked about the single role. But, you know, there are some cost savings for shared services between fire departments in the region and And I don't think that you know these things maybe can apply to other departments as well, but I want to see how we can improve our Costs and but increase the availability of the necessary things to keep the department going and then on Some of the things that Parks and Rec brought up, I really appreciate. You're looking into the increasing the cost recovery, and I appreciate the list that you put up there, the benefits for the community, and I think that we do have things, probably outside of Parks and Rec as well, where we're not always going to get the cost recovery, but they're important services for the community. community and that should be a discussion that we have about you know focusing on keeping services and facilities available to the public because I think that's one of the things that our residents all really appreciate. And so long term, we need to kind of identify where we're gonna accept that we're not going to have 100% cost recovery and keep the services going. I think that was about it. The other thing I want to take a look at is grants and things, especially for trails, since they're very expensive to build, they're expensive to maintain, and there's no cost recovery for their use. I'm not saying I want to decrease the number of trails, but I think we need to be mindful about how we're building those and how we're maintaining them. Make sure that we're staying within parameters that we can actually support long term.

Thank you. Vice Mayor?

Thank you. Yes, I have a couple. I'll try to go really quick, but I think they're for Stacey or Brian. So page six, I think you kind of answered this already. What is non-departmental? Who's in that? Because that is going up. No, I have to find out. Hold on.

Yeah, I think it went up about $1.5 million. Yep. So non-departmental is anything that's not associated with a department overall, but it is still in the general fund. So your big expenses in there are the retiree healthcare costs. Um, you have, uh, the contingency in there too, at $1.2 million. You have tax sharing agreements that we have.

So what was the big difference?

The big difference was $500,000 for the transfer to the Retiree Health Trust Fund. We didn't have that in last year, so now we have it in this year. And then the increase to the Retiree Health Program. Those two together made up the majority of the increased cost.

Okay, thank you. On page 37 of the document, I think it is, why does this, well I can't find it online so hold on.

Page 37.

I have page 37. Oh yes, page 37. It's 600,000, can you kind of explain why it's such a big difference, why there's such a big fluctuation?

Is that for the interest earned line that you're looking at? Yeah, we have kind of conservative estimate because we do have accounting rules that make us do an adjustment at June 30th based on the value of the investments. So you do see fluctuations depending on how the fiscal year ends. You'll see Back in fiscal year 21, we had $166,000 in interest. 2023 went up to $778,000. Then it went up to about $1.2,000. Then back down to $864,000. So we're just putting a conservative number in there at $600,000 for this year because it could go up or down depending on where the market is on June 30th.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Page 90. Are you going to find it for me again?

I can. No, you can't. That's fine.

It's a temporary, it's 195,000 budgeted this year, and what position is that?

So that, yeah, and maybe Parks and Rec could go into this a little bit more, but they did create that new division community facilities to put the temporary employee costs in there. So you're seeing a reduction from where they were before, and then the addition here. That's why there's no data for previous years. They're just restructuring where these costs are located in the budget.

Okay.

Yeah, and it's so that we can better track going forward kind of to separate things out.

Okay, perfect. That makes sense. Thank you. Page 275. So this is the inclusionary housing fee. Why is there such a big difference between the previous years and what we're budgeting this year? So it went from fiscal year 25 from $3.8 million. Now we're budgeting $300. Just curious what's... Do you see what line I'm talking about?

Yeah, I do see that. I think typically we do just put the $300,000 in there. And if more comes in, then we can go to the city council to appropriate those funds. So for this fund, it's not really impacting any program by having a conservative revenue figure in there. Okay.

Perfect. Thank you. Then I think almost my last one. Page 571, it's the same kind of thing. Why is there such a big difference? The reimbursements, and what is this for? The Employee Health Benefit Trust. You're budgeting $500,000. The 24 was $8.4 million. 25 was $1.7, and I'm just trying to understand. Can you remind me where you're? Page 571.

i wanted to get back to you on that one i don't know that by heart of why we didn't have an adopted budget for twenty six either so i just need to look into what that was oh no i do know what that is sorry that is that so that's a five hundred thousand dollar transfer that we're going to make sure the retiree health trust fund that's why you don't see an amount for the adopted budget for fiscal year twenty six okay perfect great answer

I do want to just double down on what Sarah said with the single-role paramedics. And, you know, it would be kind of nice to maybe have, when are we going to get that engine back? And, you know, public asks every once in a while. I think the numbers that were shared last month, I think it was last month, were quite steady. But What is the outlook and the timeline? Is it gonna be a couple years, we think, to get that engine back? Is it gonna be a year, six months? And a little bit more timeline or information. I know it wouldn't be exact, but that would be helpful maybe sometime after the budget.

Sure and I think what I would recommend is that we implement the single role system and then we look at a quarter of information so we see what the calls are we can see what the cost recovery is you know we can move faster. But in some ways we. On the path that we're on. Until we actually see the, the, uh, the results of that, I've been of the opinion that I rather see the money come in. And then we make the change as opposed to, hey, we've made this change. We anticipate. Cost savings, so obviously we can change that, but that's kind of like our recommendation. I know it's, it's a priority for me and for chief so like, to get that that engine back up. ASAP, we're going to do everything in our power to do so. I mean, in some of the ways, that's why we're looking at these rec programs, right? I mean, so when we talked about cost recovery, you know, I totally agree with council member that there's some things fundamentally that we know as a municipality that we're not going to have cost recovery. When you look at the aquatic center, for example, it's pretty standard at the cities that I've worked at that. You're never going to be able to charge enough. for entrance into the aquatic center to cover the cost, especially when you're trying to provide a service that may be for those that don't have access to pools or whatever it is. The swim lessons are of vital importance. The question was brought up is, should the city subsidize programs during the winter for competitive sports? Right. I mean, I mean, that's something that's different, you know, and so when we factor in some of those things, it's several hundred thousand dollars that could go directly either through cost recovery to charge appropriately for the lane time, the energy use, because most cities that I've been in, you shut the pool down. It operates from May to August, and then you shut it down, you pay the nominal cost to keep it running. But just the heating and everything that goes with it, the wear and tear on our pumps and all those facilities is actually problematic, unless there's appropriate revenue to cover those costs. So it is of primary, really important to me to look at how do we change our structure. And this has been a monumental effort for our Parks and Recreation team because it's difficult Because you can't just look at the expenditures. There's the revenue tide. And it's all been in some ways just kind of mixed together. And so now they're kind of separating it so we can weigh them on their own merits and pose those questions on the individual programmatic level. So all of those things are going. It's not all going to hinge on the single role paramedic. It actually hinges on this body deciding on, hey, do we want to reduce subsidies somewhere else?

So with that thinking, I do want to say I think that the price increases that you've done for the Quetic Center and continuing to look at that, I really do value that. I can look at the cost from, or the actual expenses from 2020, which is in this document, to now, and you can see how you guys are continuing to try to make improvements. The costs haven't gone up drastically at the Aquatic Center, or expenses, I should say, so I do appreciate that, and I think that those revenue adjustments, a policy would be probably the best way to do that, so I appreciated, Tom, your... your presentation very much. Unfortunately, I do have a negative thing, and that goes back to the zoo. When I look at the timeline of the zoo from 2020 in the document, and this is on page five that anyone can see, the expenses, the actual expenses were 1.6 in 2020. They varied throughout the year, but then this year you're budgeting 2.8. Last year it was budgeted at 2.574, so that's an increase of $267,000 that were budgeting for the zoo Last year in the year before we were pretty clear that we wanted to see that gap of what the general fund is subsidizing Decrease not increase why I do appreciate that there were some revenue you mentioned it in your presentation Kelly of just over a hundred thousand Unfortunately the expenses are going up by two point six percent two hundred sixty seven thousand so i while i'm comfortable supporting the zoo and subsidizing the zoo at some level if we continue on this trend we're going to be quickly at three million dollars with probably revenue staying at one million so we're already at one point eight almost one point eight million dollars that the general fund is subsidizing the zoo. And everyone loves the zoo. I'm not comfortable with that increasing at the rate it is. And so I don't think I can support a budget that's going to increase the subsidy or the expenses at 2.8 at this moment. So that's where I would like to see you come back or have discussions. And maybe I'm not supported by the council. But at this rate, if we continue to subsidize at the rate I can see in the last six years, it's just too much for the financial sustainability of our Parks and Rec Department and other departments. So it's really, really affecting what we can do. I know all of us probably had things that we wanted to see reflected in this budget that I'm okay with not seeing because we're kind of just stable and holding the line and the numbers are really reflecting where we are. But you know, I just can't support a budget that's going to increase this by $260,000. I know you understand. So that's where I'm at on that. So it might be a bigger conversation of how we can get those expenses down. And that's it. That's on my.

Council Member Kozlowski.

Well, a lot has been said. Council Member Aquino, I agree with you about the highlighting of south of 50 property taxes is probably trivial at this point. It's part of the whole, unless you're using it as a comparison against how our expenses are growing to provide services specifically there, but then why don't we do that for Empire Ranch, right? So, with you on that, I do want to thank the staff and city manager. This is a tremendous effort and putting this all together and also creating so much more granularity to the analysis I think is welcome and it's obviously a lot of work and thank you for doing that. Stylistically, I have a little trouble with the word subsidy because it sort of has a negative connotation and particularly when we're presenting to the public, I might suggest if I'm sitting in the audience that keeping all the charts in recovery cost recovery Jibes with what our actual City Council policy is which is about cost recovery not about subsidy Even though those obviously mesh with each other. They're the opposite number on the chart, right? So anyway, I think that's that's more a stylistic thing about how we present these things to the public and then I want to give full marks to councilwoman Larry for working in concatenate into her comments today and Increase your word power. That's a great one that we don't hear very often. And you've covered so many questions. I think I'm going to work on this over my next week. Thank you. Thank you.

I just have a couple. Some of them are carryovers from the prior year financial discussion. First off, I want to echo that I do agree with not splitting out north of 50 and south of 50. But one of the things I did notice this year, since we did split it out, is how would our property tax drop in 2027 north of 50? I look at Prop 13 and I go... Almost every house, nobody moves north of 50 and gets reassessed. Most people are going up 2%. So I just, I have a really hard time understanding how north of 50 property tax does not go up by roughly 2% every year.

Yeah, it's going up by about that and that's it. So it's a flattening of the trend, not a decrease in total, but a flattening of the trend.

Maybe, am I reading it wrong on page seven then? Because I see an adopted mid-year budget of 34.3%. It's like our very first revenue line item. And then I show the proposed is 33.6.

That's just a correction of the projection. Uh, we're not certain that property tax north of 50 will come in at the $34.3 million based on what we are seeing so far. So it won't be back to the 2025 level, but it'll probably be a little bit lower than the 34, 4.3. So then it just proposing 33.6 going forward. So just see a flattening trend, but it's not going to be a reduction.

I think in some ways, just from a practical budgetary standard of looking when we come back in October, we'll know more fully, right? Because then we've closed out the year. We know exactly where we're at and then we can make that. So, in some ways, it's following the policy of of not being too aggressive in your revenue projections, you know. Fair point. I mean, it's going to go up, but we don't know if we'll actually the other thing that makes us a little leery is we've had the county has had challenges remitting to us the actual amount they've upgraded their software. And so. Okay. I mean, we don't feel like we have the solid numbers. They keep saying, oh, we're making corrections. And so I think that's more of the point where. If we err on the other side, it can have devastating consequences. So no one's ever yelled at me like, oh, I have an extra... $100 that they've yelled at me the other way.

Yeah. I would think that's like, one of the most stable items that is in our entire budget though, is our property tax for established homes and residences. Right.

Right. And so, so I think in many ways, when you look at, you know, the, uh, 2025 number, which is the 32 million we're basing off, Hey, we know we had that. And even then, when you go up to 33, that's a, a, a reasonable. Increase and so I hope we hit those higher numbers and I think it's just maybe are just. Maybe we're being a little too conservative, but we were a little sensitive because we don't really feel. We hope it works out like we're showing for 2026, but we're not certain. Is that fair?

Yeah, correct. Understood. Uh, my, my 1 from last year, and I'll bring it up again is I'd really like to examine our vehicle replacement policy as far as what we're doing in all departments. I think it kind of came to light last year and we just didn't necessarily have the data at that point in order to to analyze it, or maybe the capacity to do. So, hopefully, we're in a better place this year to where we can look at it and maybe update that for more modern times.

Yeah, and just so you know, we are working on that so that we can come in just for our team and maybe I can try to articulate what you and I have talked about is the goal is to identify vehicles that are going to be replaced. So that we can kind of say, is that the standard or is there an opportunity? Because I totally agree if we can, if you factor in vehicles or assets or whatever it is, if you can get one more year. Right. I mean, if you can make it last one more year, it helps us in the over. It spreads those costs over a longer period of time. So I think that's definitely worthwhile to have a little more longer view at it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

Uh, we've talked about the purrs and the stuff already. I just love to, you know, this is a community discussion. I really like to start having that community discussion. Other municipalities and counties have set aside more money and increase their funding ratio over the years. Whereas we have not. And we need to acknowledge that and have that as part of our budgetary process. We're not getting ahead this year, but I think we do need to acknowledge that there is a significant debt burden that the city of Folsom has on the books. And that should be part of what we're discussing with the community is that we are not going to put any more money into that. And so we will get further in the whole going forward on our unfunded liabilities.

We do have the $500,000 for the OPEB in here.

Yeah, and I totally appreciate that. I'd just like to include basically what's on the balance sheet that we're seeing that's there. If we look at the actuarial report, I'm still kind of waiting on some answers from that. From last time we met, our actuarial report showed a significant increase in our liability on our OPEB. That was actually larger than all the money. It was about the same size as all the money we've set aside so far in decades. Sure.

Mr. Mayor, if I could add one thing to that. That's kind of one of the reasons that I asked about any sort of debt financing that comes out of the general fund. You know, you hear about the debt snowball philosophy, you know, just with personal finance. And that's, you know, I hope that once we pay off, whatever you're saying with this related to the city hall, that we take that money and we put it toward our next lowest debt, right? And just start chipping away at these things.

Absolutely.

And I totally agree. But we have to be consistent because I've also heard, hey, when are we going to add back things? So so we can't have it both ways. Right. I mean, so that's kind of the challenge. This is really, really difficult. You know, so we want to implement all of those things. And so with the magic wand and actually I don't even need a magic wand. It's just if you had a dictatorship type of approval, you just make decisions and then we can make it really easy. But what we know is when we look at the various services that there are certain individuals in actually large segments of the population that really love certain things. And it's hard. So are we ready to really do this thing? Because we can get there if you want to get us there. Right. I've just seen it's been really hard for this community to really want to get there.

Yeah, but if we're not even acknowledging, we need to acknowledge that is part of, you know, when I look at the balance sheet, I go, okay, I need that full balance sheet that's here. I think you've done a great job of highlighting the parks, the deferred maintenance on our parks and facilities. But I think what we have not acknowledged as a community is the significant unfunded liabilities that exist.

Fair enough. And we will be prepared to discuss that. But we have to be careful because when we get into that, are we willing to do something about it? And so I think that's fair enough. And I totally support that in some ways. This may you may get tired of me saying this is we need to get comfortable discussing the uncomfortable. Right. I mean, and so that's the only way you're going to be able to overcome these things. But but just just when we factor in the various things that we're struggling just to get to this point. We're struggling just to get to this point. And so part of that has been, you know, reducing, you know, browning out a fire engine. And so there's that desire, that passion to do that. But that erodes even with the savings of the single role, we could probably incur additional costs. So I'm just saying in my assessment, you know, having been here just over a year is. For us to truly thrive, we're going to have to do something differently. I'm committed to finding a way to maximize our ability to use the dollars we have to put them in the most efficient and prudent way. But the community ultimately is going to find out that we can't do what we need to do with the revenue streams we have. That's just the reality, you know, and so we're I mean, we're on a path. I think we have a really good team that is open to looking at any different option, turning up every stone, every stone. And this is going to be hard. Right. And I really appreciate this council and what we're trying to do, because we're not going to be complacent. And I think that's important to the community. They want to see us fight for that.

All right, next thing I had, I really appreciate the work that the Parks and Rec Department has done. I really appreciate the granularity and getting down into the programs And airing it so the community can have a discussion about what the priorities are. I do want to say that 1 of the things I noticed was like, hey, if it looks like we're running the program, like, use sports, for example, versus the contracted services. You know, based on your initial analysis, it looks like we actually may make a little money. And then I looked at the arrow that was shown and it stops at 0% subsidy. I would argue that there is a potential that that arrow extend a little further and that we actually have programs that make money. We have facilities that make money. and that is used to offset the costs of more of these general community benefit types of things. And so I would just like to encourage that maybe we extend that arrow a little bit further and see where that is, because I know other communities have made significant and strategic investments that generate cash flow that then offset that cost recovery for other programs. Is that fair?

That's something that we're looking at we're looking at all of our percentages for our splits between our contracted instructors. So we're looking at everything so. We, our goal is to increase our total division cost recovery.

Excellent so there are some things that we could put I would imagine they're already out there that we are making money off of after taking into renovation, but.

Yeah, we're definitely looking at the rentals and the individual specialized areas, the area that we can decrease our general fund subsidy.

Mr. Mayor, if I could add, and in some cases, this is why I made my comments earlier about that slide, is are we really making money when you don't factor in, like if you factor in, you're like a prospector park, right? Until, I mean, and we've had this conversation related to the turf fields. When we're not putting in $300,000 a year to replace that field, we're not making money. So we're not making money until we actually reach the ability to invest, put into our savings account $300,000 a year so that we're not always in that perpetual mode of, oh my gosh, I didn't know this was coming. It's kind of like, well, I didn't know I had to empty the garbage every week. So it's going to happen. So so I think that's something that we're showing you as raw as we can as we go through this process. And so we'll be able to kind of modify those numbers and factor in, hey, what is the elements that that service or that contractor uses? And although it may be a positive cash flow, I think it's important for us. Like, what did the community already invest to get us there? And then. Add funds into it, so I think it's we have to be careful, especially in the minutes, especially in the municipal setting that hey we're making money on this. We want to make sure that it is appropriate in in tied to that, but I think it gets us to the goal that you're thinking.

yeah I think so, and I think the things I think of as making money is is like probably our leases right when you when you look at. leases that are on some parks and rec property you know those are going to be making money and that's okay i think the community so here i think some of the things you know councilmember leary mentioned was you know we we built this uh in uh sheldon park in order to help offset the costs of that park right now whether that's played out or not uh the numbers will tell us but i i think those opportunities are out there and then there was even the intention to do that in years past And I will say that I just want to give a shout out to including some trail repair. That's huge. It's much needed in this community. We are distinctive by nature, and so I do appreciate that we're starting to fix up those trails that are out there that desperately need it. And I'll have more questions once I review the other 670 pages that I haven't gotten to. Yeah. Any other comments on the budget? All right. I think that takes us to the city manager's report.

Well, in light of the hour, I have nothing more to add, if that's right.

All right. Council comments?

I have one thing. There are 2,500 high schools roughly in California. All of them, for the most part, have a boys and girls track and field team, which generally has a lot of participants. Track and field's the number one participation sport at the high school level in California. Our section that we're part of for CIF here in Sacramento has about 210 high schools, give or take. Um, something like 20,000 kids participate in track and field in that section about a little more than half or boys. So, give or take 10,000. Okay. Um, 1 athlete from 1 of our full some Cordova school districts. Qualified for the state track meet happens to be on my track team. I'm very proud of him so there's a young man named Colin Lund who is Lives here in Folsom and goes is about to graduate from Vista Del Lago high school He is gonna miss his graduation on Friday so that he can compete in the 400 meter dash So about a six hour drive to Fresno there and back to run for 47 seconds But he's one of the absolute best at it here in California. He qualified with the 10th fastest time and has a good chance of making the final. So I just wanted to give a little shout out to Colin because he, like I said, he's the one track and field athlete from all three high schools in Folsom Cordova that qualified this year.

That's awesome. Thank you. I will say go and enjoy the bike park that's reopened. It's amazing. And I'm going to adjourn as the paddling capital of the West. Nice.