City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. Francisco, would you please begin interpretation of the meeting? For those just joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. If you are on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly, and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Claudia, will you please restate this in Spanish? Yes. Can you hear me okay?

Hello? Yes. We can. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Back to you.

Thank you, mayor.

Welcome, everyone. The time is 12:05, and we'll call this meeting in order. Thank you all for coming out. I will point out there are there are plenty of open seats down here in the front for those of you who wanna move closer. That's at your discretion. Madam city clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, mayor. Councilmember Rogers? Present. Councilmember Mcdonald?

Here.

Councilmember Fleming? Council member Banuelos? Here. Council member Alvarez? Present. Vice mayor Krepke?

Aloha.

Mayor Stepp? Here. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming.

Thank you. And I believe mister Krepke would would like to explain why he's remote today.

I'm remote because this is scheduled. So do I have to do a disclosure?

Oh, it's a good question. Do we have to is there a statement that needs to be No. Needs to be read? No.

There's not a statement that needs to be read. There's agenda posted at the location where council member Okrepki is appearing.

Perfect. So for those of you on Maui, is it Jeff?

Yes.

Alright. You've got your chance to to participate over there. We'll move on then to, let's see, our our main show for the day, our study session. Thank you. Thank you again all or thank you again for coming out. I'm gonna turn it over to our city manager for, for an introduction and the, the introduction of the item.

Thank you. Good afternoon, mayor Stapp and honorable council members. Today, we will have a review of the fiscal year twenty twenty six twenty seven operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. The finance department today will recommend that the council hold a study session intended to provide city council with the opportunity to receive information and ask questions related to the city's overall financial stability and the proposed fiscal year twenty six twenty seven operations and maintenance budget and the capital improvement program budget. The item is intended for council's information and no action is required and the has no impact on the current fiscal year budget.

And now that I've introduced the item, I just wanted to make a few brief remarks. As you know, today, I'm pleased to present to you the city manager's proposed budget for the city of Santa Rosa for the fiscal year 2627, which begins on 07/21/2026. While the discussion that we'll have will be over the next two days, it represents a months long effort to address a book of business for this municipal corporation, which is what a city is, that on an all funds basis, general fund and all enterprises combined is a $575,000,000 operation across all city departments, all city operations, programs, and functions. And so let me set the table. The presentation today will be a more streamlined presentation focusing on the major changes and recommendations for the budget than we've had in the past.

Department accomplishments and descriptions will be contained in our in our, very voluminous budget book It will be available to counsel and also to the public before the June 16, potential adoption. But for the next two days, we'll be focusing purely on budget recommendations, major additions, and deletions to help in your decision making, and to have a more focused conversation so that you can provide staff direction on the budget that you would like for us to present to

you in

June. As mentioned in previous, study sessions, including an April 26 conversation, a main challenge that we're facing is a 17 and a half million dollar projected deficit in the general fund. Today's presentation will contain a two year strategy to address the shortfall as we've discussed, but the budget also does reflect prior tough decisions and cost cutting measures that have been adopted by this council in the past. As you know, the budget is a representation of our priorities and our commitment to our residents and businesses of maintaining high quality public services and the quality of life that our community enjoys. It's our intention that this budget is a reflection of our commitment to many of our essential programs, including public safety, despite having a deficit.

To that end, the budget that will be presented to you today dedicates 64.5%, almost two thirds of its general fund spending to public safety. It also reduces the table of organization to become more efficient in operating expenses. It realigns the budget back to its general fund core staffing levels due to the elimination or reduction of county and state grants, but it also enhances cost recovery and employs a multipronged approach to reduce the deficit. And lastly, I just wanted to thank the city council for your leadership leading up to this point. As you know, our budget process is iterative, and there's a foundation that was built, previous to my arrival and this budget being presented to you.

So thank you for making very tough decisions last year that helped to reduce the deficit that we would be facing for this next, coming fiscal year. So thank you for your leadership in making those tough decisions. I also wanted to thank the executive team of the city who's worked with me closely over the past several months to bring together a budget proposal to you that we think achieves, many of our goals. I wanted to thank our employee associations. They've been great partners since I've been here.

We've had many conversations between labor and management, some of their concerns, and some of our challenges. And working through those together, it's been a very transparent process, and I'm hoping that, you know, they have received a lot of information along the way about the recommendations and why we'll be making specific recommendations today in different areas. And then but most of all, want to thank our finance director and our budget manager. And so Scott Wagner, Veronica Connor, mean, just fantastic individuals, so incredibly responsible and dedicated, have spent countless hours working on this, working with the departments. They have an incredible team.

Mike Jose and, I believe, Trish have also worked on this budget from an analyst standpoint with their leads, and so this is really the culmination of their efforts as well. They are a stellar team. I can say that having worked in many different cities. And so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Scott Wagner, our finance director.

Thank you, city manager Farrell. Won't echo, the the points just brought up by city manager, but there was one missing thank you that I'll point out and I would like to thank city manager Farrell for her work over the past really since day one of of this budget process. And and I will share that her dedication, her commitment to collaboration and communication has been truly inspiring over the past six months. So I just wanna express that that note of thanks here that led us to today in our proposed budget. So with that, as Lorianne mentioned briefly, this is a a slight change in in formatting of this meeting, and what we hope to do today is present a meeting that is efficient, thorough, and detailed of our city's budgets.

This is gonna be a slight change in that we're not gonna have department heads come down to present each department. Myself and Veronica will be running through that. I've got a big thing of hot tea right here and some water, so I'm gonna do my best to to power through. Memorizing a $500,000,000 budget is tough. I have my phone of friends here in the office as we get as as we get stumped, but I'm also gonna take a little bit extra look at my notes here as we go through them.

So with that said, we've got a lot of slides, and we will jump right in. So for the order of today, we're gonna be primarily focused on general fund departments and general fund operating that we're gonna do a quick overview of the city as a whole. We're gonna talk about the budgets individually by department and also break down what the changes are, what are the big movers and expenditures to give everyone an idea of what really has changed within our departments and especially any staffing changes that have been proposed. Where we are on the timeline is right over there at May. This is our standard budget study sessions that last two days.

We'll be coming back tomorrow morning to finish our presentation around CIP and water enterprise funds primarily. But today, we'll really cap the city manager's proposed budget and recommendations for changes. The next step in our budget process will be submitting a draft of our budget book at the City Manager's Office to the to the public on June 2, ultimately leading us to a 06/16/2026 adoption of the fiscal year 2627 budget beginning on July 1. Our process this year began with what we call as a base budget development. Instructions went out to the departments to have a what we call a status quo budget.

And what that means is for them to not increase service or decrease service or increase employees or decrease employees, but to budget out what would be required to maintain the level of services and employees by the departments. As this was done, we had an initial look at where our deficit was, which landed at 17 and a half million dollars. Included within the 17 and a half million dollars is many uncontrollable costs that the city incurs, such as increases to CalPERS retirement benefit or costs, professional services contracts that go up that we'll be discussing at length as we review each department's budget. The city manager's budget review began right away. In January, we'll be talking about our strategies and proposed, reductions along with the analysis that was done to develop our proposed strategy that we're bringing forward today.

But, ultimately, the the framework of what we were talking about with the base budget was presented to council on April 21. As part of that step in the city manager's guidance to departments was for to develop a 13% reduction list. This was to target around one quarter of the overall deficit of 17 and a half million dollars. Through an additional multipronged approach developed by the city manager and finance department, we are additionally attacking our our deficit through multiple other ways. We are programming in a onetime use of strategic amount of our reserves of $7,600,000 that is to match the proposed deficit within the general fund.

We're looking to adjust grant funded positions where the grant funding has either expired or decreased, and we'll be talking about that more in a moment. We had a focus on the vacancies of the city and really narrowing down where do we currently have empty positions. This is to help mitigate service impacts to the community, but also to mitigate impacts to our employees that may be currently held within a position. We've been able to be successful in using innovative financing approaches that we talked about on April 21 with a pension cost savings program that council gave the go ahead to continue, pursuing. We intend to bring that forward to council in June for adoption.

Additionally, we looked at the city's fleet, which is a very large expense for us, and we are feel comfortable bringing forward a $1,000,000 improvement towards our funding, to how we fund a large major apparatus purchases. And, ultimately, we had a targeted cost recovery improvements across many of the areas, which you'll see throughout different departments is really a look at how can we maximize the amount of recovery that we can get against restricted funds outside of the general fund. So our first table with with a lot of numbers on it, and what you'll see is that overall, our city proposed budget is $535,000,000. What's important to me within that number is that we are a full service city. We offer many services to the public, whether that's a wastewater treatment plant that the entire region uses, police, fire within our general fund, public works, a housing authority.

We do many, many things here at the city, which is exciting for us. We'll talk about in a moment the big changes over here from a revenue perspective, but our biggest fund is our general fund where the majority of our most known services live, whether that's police, fire, public works, or planning and economic development. And what you'll see is we have a four and a half percent growth rate or 9,600,000 worth of additional revenue for the next coming year. When we juxtapose that against expenditures, we're seeing a 6.6% increase in expenditures. So we still have this snowball going downhill that we've been discussing as a city, and we still maintain a structural deficit.

Now these numbers that we'll be presenting today are much improved from the ones we presented on April 21, and they are very, very improved from where we started this conversation two years ago. Overall, one note I would bring up as well is is this is a little shout out to our accounting department, but we've narrowed down all the funds of the city into these major categories, but we have 128 active funds at the city that are restricted for different purposes. It is a a a massive undertaking to ensure that that's done properly, and we're very proud of the job we do in finance to do so. Our split of expenditures by fund, again, the the general fund being the major fund in the city of our operating fund. Additionally, we have an enterprise fund, and and as we all know, Santa Rosa not only provides water and wastewater services for the city of Santa Rosa, but we have our wastewater treatment plant that our subregional partners use as well.

We have a very large water enterprise here at the city. So now we'll move on to a focus for the general fund. And this first slide shows what we'll be talking about over the next couple of days as a multiyear, multipronged strategy, and that strategic use of reserves, will point out at the very bottom being 7.6% or $7,600,000. We'll be breaking down the differences in our revenues and transfers and expenditures in in detail later, but this is to show how we approached our two year strategy to address our current year, fiscal year twenty six, twenty seven, and also that we're have not fully solved a deficit even though our total for this year is zero. And with that, I'll pass it over to Veronica to help us go over revenue changes.

Thank you, Scott. So as Scott mentioned, we are now focusing in on our general fund revenue sources. These are all of our resources to run our general fund operations. Our top two bullet points are gonna cover well, all these bullet points are going to be covering what we'll see in the next few slides. The top two focus on our main resources coming into the general fund, which are property tax and sales tax.

Property tax this year, first twenty six twenty seven, we are projecting a five and a half percent growth, which is consistent with our three and five year averages of what we see in this category. Sales tax, on the other hand, we are only projecting a one and a half percent growth per recent performance, which adds about $1,100,000 to our general fund for next year. UUTs, utility users tax, this has many different, inroads, and we're seeing increases in gas and electric. However, this is being offset by decreases in telephone and cable. So there's kind of two factors happening here, but overall, we're projecting an increase of $700,000.

Our other taxes category is a big category. It contains a lot of different items containing real property transfer tax, cannabis industry tax, TOT. You'll see a large increase on the next slide, and that is mostly due to our business tax, thanks to the ballot measure that went through last year. Permit costs are trending at lower cost per permit. We're starting to see a slight downturn in this area, so we're projecting a decrease of $400,000 in that category.

Recreation revenues, on the other hand, are maintaining very strong growth. We're seeing over a 14% growth in enrollment as well as, council approved fee increases back in January. We're projecting over $800,000 worth of growth in this category next year. And then finally, we're able to determine a revenue offset of $350,000 to fund our EMS fire captain that was formerly funded by in response. So this table just recaps everything we talked about on the previous slide.

You can see property tax growing at five and a half percent on the top line followed by sales tax. I touched on the main items. Anything else missed? Our vehicle license fees shows a 7.2% growth. This typically grows with property tax, but we determined last year's budget was a little low, so that accounts for some of the year over year swings.

The bottom line, intergovernmental interest and other, that contains that growth for the EMS fire captain, which contributes to some larger growth. But overall, our revenue, as, CFO Wagner mentioned a couple slides back, is growing at four and a half percent year over year in our general fund. And this pie chart is just a visual of what we saw in the previous table. Sales tax and property tax make up 51% of our general fund resources, so these are definitely the two categories that we pay close attention to. And a word about these two categories.

This picture, the top part, the dollar bill, this is a visual depiction of our property tax here in Santa Rosa. So for every dollar spent on property tax within city limits, the city of Santa Rosa gets that red box, 11.7%. That's how much comes back to our city. The remainder of it goes to Sonoma County, Sonoma County Schools, other, etcetera. So the dime on the bottom represents our sales tax. The sales tax in Santa Rosa is 10%. That's the tax rate. So for every dollar spent here within city limits, you spend a dime in sales tax. Santa Rosa actually receives 1.75¢ of that dime. 2.25¢ goes to Sonoma County, and the state receives $6.10 cents.

So I'd like to add a a few notes on this slide because it's it's very important, and we'll start with property tax. So the city receives that 11.7% that Veronica broke down, but a critical understanding of how property tax works in the state of California is that agencies have all different numbers for that. 11.7% is very low. We retain much less property tax than other agencies do. For example, there is an agency within Sonoma County that keeps 20% of their property taxes.

That difference, let's say, we were collecting 20% of our property taxes, would be over $20,000,000 worth of annual funding. And the two questions I always get off of that is why, and the why is the same answer to most whys in the state of California is prop 13. And before prop 13, agencies set their own property tax. And so what happened was agencies like ours that in the seventies had very explosive growth in revenue, had very low property taxes because that was their financial reality back then, and it got locked in. And so the second question I get is, well, how do we change that?

That is, I don't know the answer to that one, and that's my, diplomatic way of saying that it's hard to impossible to do. Prop 13 is still very, very popular. It pulls at the exact same levels that it did when it passed. That is frustrating for us as a as an agency, though, the reality and the disparity that it creates within our revenue collection. What that means is that we are more dependent on sales tax than the average agency is.

As Veronica mentioned, out of 10¢ or a dollar worth of of sales taxable sales within the city of Santa Rosa, we keep 1.75%. The majority of sales tax goes to the state along with Sonoma County, through Sonoma County's specific sales tax measures, which are eight. One more note on property tax that I always like to bring up, and and this came up recently, is that we love growth in the city of Santa Rosa. Myself as a finance person very much recognizes that growth is absolutely critical to your financial sustainability. Where that sometimes where the rubber hits the road, though, is with big projects.

So I'll use an example. If we had a $50,000,000 project come online at the city, it'll often get asked to me, well, that's gonna mean so much more money for the city through property taxes. The reality is a $50,000,000 project at the city of Santa Rosa is gonna bring in around $60,000 a year worth of additional property taxes, and that comes from that breakdown above. So there's a reality with our revenue that is outside of decision making. It's outside of anything.

It is it is structural. And that is part of our challenge that we're in today is that sales tax has been so stagnant based on behaviors of consumers and and how we are all stressed personally that that we are we are up against that reality.

So this slide breaks down our transfers into the general fund. Transfers in are also resources that are used for the general fund's operations, but they're different from revenue because this is not revenue earned within our general fund. They are earned in other funds or recognized in other funds and then transferred to the general fund for our use. The top line is our to date, it's been our typical highest point of transfers in which comes from our special revenue funds, and this is mostly from our gas tax funds. We have an allocation that we are allowed to use for administrative purposes.

So our special revenue funds transfer in 2 and a half million dollars in 2627. Our pension funds is the new item that we're seeing this year, and this is related to our new pension strategy that was brought to council back on April 21. And we're seeing a $5,600,000 transfer in from a pension fund that will be used to help offset our pension costs in 2627.

Moving on to expenditures. First, I'll cover some major highlights and and major increases that we're seeing across departments. This is the last year of our three year MOU with our labor unions. We see a $4,900,000 increase across our departments associated with the contractually agreed on compensation increases for that contract. You'll additionally see when we get to the police and fire departments that we've made an adjustment within our budget to match actuals around overtime to what is budgeted.

Briefly, and we'll talk about this more much more later, and both the chiefs will join to give an overview of this item, but I will really stress that this is to match what's actually happening in our budget versus providing what I would describe as additional funding. These are the realities that we're seeing in our budget, and it's critical for us as an owner organization given the amount of reductions that we made that we've made to make sure that all of our line items in the city are as accurate as possible, and this is an adjustment that we're proposing to make to correct it. We see a fixed increase in our health insurance and retirement benefits of $1,300,000. Within our professional services, we see contractual increases of around $1,000,000 given, that most contracts we have at the city have adjustment for inflation each year for the services that we require outside assistance for. This is an election year budget, so we'll see a bump at $550,000 for election costs.

One additional outlier is that we're seeing a $450,000 increase from our animal control and shelter contract. This is an item the city manager's office and the finance department going forward are very focused on, and we'll be collaborating with our county leaders to help try to address these increases, which frankly we've been seeing now for a five or six year period, which is unsustainable. Major decreases will be going through at length in a moment, but $4,900,000 worth of departmental reductions is ultimately what is being proposed to move forward. $3,800,000 worth of net savings from our pension strategy, a $1,000,000 savings from our fire apparatus lease savings, and, property insurance decreased. This is a blip on the radar.

Last year was a little high because we needed to shore up the reserve. This year, really, it it bounces back down. This is a return to normal is what I would say from the prior year's bump. Overall, after the reductions to staffing, we see a $5,300,000 increase for expenditures. Overall, like I mentioned earlier, a 6.6% growth within our expenditures versus that four and a half percent revenue line, as I mentioned.

Other major movers in here, which which we'll talk about in the departments at more at length a little bit later. We always show this pie chart, and I always mention that we are an organization that provides our services through people. At the end of the day, 76% of our overall budget is made up of salaries and benefits. Now we're taking a look at our expenditures broken down on a function level. What you'll see is that overall administration increased 1.5%.

Administration includes city council, city attorney, finance department, HR. I'm probably forgetting one off the top of my head, but but it's it's all of us administrative folks. And as we go through the administrative departments, we'll break that down. Our nondepartmental is roughly flat. This includes the increase of funding increase of expenses for our general for our pension stabilization strategy along with decreases in our general fund overhead that goes out to departments, making it mostly flat.

The rest of these departments we'll be talking through at length a little bit later. Overall, the city, as our city manager mentioned earlier, is roughly 65% public safety. This is how that shakes out amongst the general fund by department. General fund transfers out. So each year, we talk about transfers in and transfers out.

And one way you could think of transfers in is kinda just like revenue. Transfer's out is kinda just like expenditures, But governmental accounting standards make us account for them a little bit differently and call them a transfer out. The major changes for the transfer out this year is you'll note that we've maintained a half $1,000,000 worth of, additional funding for Bennett Valley Golf Course that has not changed. Our CIP funds, we have two major CIP fundings from our general fund on an annual basis. That is $1,200,000 worth of what we call the ADA settlement.

It's for the city to fund ADA projects throughout the city. I I frankly will describe that as not optional. We we need to do that per our settlement. And then there's an additional $650,000 worth of funding from the county that flows into the general fund and goes out to CIP as part of the Roseland annexation agreement. Of note is that this will be the last year of receiving that funding.

That funding has already been appropriated as part of the CIP projects that director Hennessy has been bringing forward for pavement rehabilitation and maintenance within Roseland. Overall, the rest of our, transfers out remain steady year to year, including homeless services. Through the what we call PSAP or we used to call it measure o, but the additional quarter cent TUT that the city has for public safety and prevention. As part of that calculation, we need to ensure that the general fund is properly funding our public safety departments at the level of when that sales tax was adopted. We are still doing so.

This is our way of showing that we are not, below our funding level level for these departments. So we will shift gears and start moving on to our multiyear budget strategy. As I do in in these moments, I I think it's very critical to talk about the actions that have been taken because our recent history helps inform us of of what this required next from the city and what our next steps are. As part of the last year, it's been a focus of the finance department and the city manager's office to have proper and an expanded budget engagement. This has included monthly meetings with our labor groups where the labor groups drove the agenda of those meetings.

Included in those meetings was a complete review of the city's investment portfolio, where the city's independent outside auditor came to actually break down our investment portfolio line by line and how that tied back to our audited financials. Our investment adviser was there as well to talk about how the city's investment portfolio works. We talked about Caliper's pension expenses and how it's a strain on the city and, ultimately, what we ended up proposing to do to fix it or to help alleviate some of the problems were not were not fixed. CIP funding. We talked about how the city's robust CIP funded program is mostly from restricted sources that we can't leverage to into the general fund to alleviate our structural problems.

We went through all the assumptions of the city's long range finance financial forecast and the assumptions that we make on our revenue growth and expenditure growth. As Veronica and myself frequently talk about, we neither try to be aggressive or conservative within our projections. We try to be accurate. We can never be 100% accurate, but the assumptions that we put in there are the best with the information we have and, frankly, never reflect a recession. Additionally, we formed a budget, city manager budget working group with community members that we've been meeting with monthly, including a couple weeks ago.

This has been a great way for us to hear back directly from members of the community to help understand what the prior what their priorities are and help share information with our challenges. We spent over twelve hours with the LTFPA finance subcommittee reviewing budgets line by line by department. This was one of the more rewarding activities that I've been part of here at the city and just being able to sit back and frankly listen to our departments, explain what they do, how do they develop their budget, and all of the programs that that happened from them. Eventually, it got to the point where I started to we started describing all the programs they do as as a Cheesecake Factory menu. There's so much that they do that we had to color code it against all the mandated things they're required to do either through the federal government, state government, local governments, etcetera, to boil down to what's left over.

Frankly, there isn't anything left over that's fluff at this point at our budget. There really never was fluff from my opinion since the great recession, but it was powerful to show our budget subcommittee how really large budgets boil down into very, very small discretionary spending. This next slide shows a summary of of the reductions on an ongoing basis that have been made over the last couple years. We started at this time last year with a $19,300,000 deficit that eventually got reduced down to 8,400,000. Like any time there's budget reductions, it is spread amongst departments, but not evenly.

This has given council and the city manager's office an opportunity over the past year to adjust the departments that felt the impact of services versus other ones. This is how that has been up until today. When this budget reduction period began, for us, it was four years ago, but really started two and a half to three years ago. We said to ourselves, this is probably gonna take us four or five years. And I really see everything that's happened prior to this adoption as phase one.

And a lot happened in phase one. There was $15,200,000 worth of ongoing reductions. There was 54 employees removed from our general fund and positions removed. There was $10,200,000 worth of onetime funding that was reallocated away from projects to shore up reserves. We additionally had voters approved tax measures, e e and f f, to affect our transient occupancy tax and business licenses.

Importantly, I'll bring up that we had no midyear reduction as part of this last year. This has led us to where this process started for the current year in that really started for us with scenario analysis. When we looked at our 17 and a half million dollars to us, it was separated into two buckets. It was a $13,900,000 ongoing deficit within our operations, and it was $3,600,000 worth of grant funding that has gone away, either through elimination through a federal safer grant or one time or a one time grant through county measure o funds that have been reduced. And we're gonna talk about those grants at much more length in a moment.

The city's proposed budget will need to balance maintaining core services versus abrupt changes. The first discussion at council regarding our budget reduction strategy multiple years ago, the way we described it is we needed to be mindful of not doing too much too fast. We knew that this would be a multiyear effort to try to dig our way out of this structural deficit. The flip side of that conversation could be, well, instead of doing this and dragging it out over multiple year multiple years, make one fell swoop and fix our budget. To that, I would just say that we need to be mindful of the services we provide for the community, and we also need to be mindful of how quickly we can change the organization.

Large structural change takes time for ours for our departments to be able to effectively implement. We believe that we are accomplishing those goals. It's often challenging given the size of our budget, whether that's $500,000,000 within total city funds or $230,000,000 worth of general fund. These numbers can get a little lost because they're very big. So what the next few slides do is they attempt to try to give a scale of our budget problem.

None of the scenarios that I'll be talking to you over this next few slides are proposed. They are really to help everyone understand the size of the issue we are dealing with and why we are bringing forward the strategy that we are bringing forward today. But a 17 and a half million dollar deficit spread amongst all of our departments, we would expect to have to reduce roughly 90 employees from our general fund. We have some slides later on in the presentation that really illustrate how challenging that would be from a historic perspective to be able to accomplish that level of reduction. This analysis is fairly simple, though.

It it assumes that the only thing we would reduce is employees. That's not how we would do it. But as we mentioned earlier, 77% of our overall expenses are employees. And so is this number very far off? It's not.

That's the reality of the structure of our budget. If we were to just exclude public safety from from from these reductions, which is a comment that that we we we often can receive, we would only reach $7,000,000 worth of reductions. The next slide shows that. So if we were to spread that same 17 and a half million dollars and not impact our public safety departments, we would actually have to reduce an additional 19 employees. So we go up from 90 employees to around a 109 employees that we have to reduce.

So the other departments feel that impact more. I mentioned this on the twenty first, but but it's, I think, so illustrative in that public works is on top there with 48 employees. Director Hennessy gives a great breakdown of the reality of public works is that he has 250 employees within this department, but only 85 of them are truly general fund. This would be reducing public works by more than half. The next couple of slides, again, are for illustration and and they are to give some, like, some needed context for how we could just cut entire programs or entire departments, and do we still solve our deficit issue that way?

So within the first one, what we did is we started with a 17 and a half million dollar deficit. The city is very proud, and and we are very proud of our robust recreation programs. It's very popular within the community. It provides great service in many dynamic ways. And so if we just got rid of all of recreation, after we factor out the revenue it brings in, 3.2 is less than the number we're gonna be talking about later for their department, but they bring in revenue.

We would really only squeeze about 3,800,000 out of that action. We would lose 32 employees, but also profoundly, would lose Jack, five four temporary employees? Four? 452 temporary employees. The temporary employees make a big impact as well.

That's a that's a profound job creation and training program that we run here in the city that I think often doesn't get the recognition of the impact it has. So it's not just 32 employees. It's it's that large amount of temporary employees we have as well. Another comment we will get is, will you just stop spending money on homeless services? We have a $3,400,000 homeless service budget. That includes running Sam Jones Hall, a critical homeless shelter for for us here in Santa Rosa. Frankly, I believe we legally couldn't do that, but but that's up for debate. Maybe not it's not up for debate. We could not do that. Four additional employees.

We have a robust CIP program. So what if we reduce all the general fund funding for CIP? That's that $1,200,000 worth of ADA funds once we factor out the Roseland maintenance. And for those of us math people, you're still $9,100,000 short. Fundamentally at the city, we have an operating issue within our structural deficit. This next slide is to do the same, but looking at it from an administrative focus. So 17 and a half million dollar deficit, I'll I'll be the first first one to go. So if we if we get rid of the finance department, this is the classic. The messenger is the problem. Let's start there.

We can do that. We'll put a big pile of money in Courthouse Square and and no more finance department. We'll save 606 and a half million dollars. We'll lose 32,600,000 32.6 employees. Again, these department totals are less than the totals you'll see later because the finance department actually is a revenue generator for the general fund. Because Veronica is not just the budget manager of the general fund, she's the budget manager of the water fund. She's the budget manager of the say CIP fund. All those other outside funding sources help pay ultimately for our salaries. So you don't get all the savings there making cuts that you might think. Same idea for HR department sorry, HR, $3,400,000 and 13 employees.

We'll go down the list. No more city attorney's office. No more city manager's office. Don't worry. We did not put council up here. We are still $2,100,000 short. Okay? Again, coming back to my prior comment, we we fundamentally are structural deficit as an has an operating impact. So those are solutions and strategies that we are not proposing. What we are approaching proposing is what we'll describe as a multipronged solution approach.

And that started with what strategies are we going to consider. First, we wanted to start with making sure that the positions we're looking at had we wanna look at the vacant positions first. Ultimately, a vacant position isn't providing service at that moment to the community. It's less visible in

the moment

or less impact to the moment of services. It's also less impact to our employees, is ultimately good. Major apparatus lease leasing. I wanna bring up a couple of points here on this one because it's in for important. The strategy that we're bringing forward to lower our amounts by a million dollars will still deliver every fire engine on order, which is eight to nine.

It will not impact future impacts. So in other words, the next time we need to go by when there's funding still within our budget for that, we are not making the replacement schedule go longer, so we're not kicking the can. It's not saying, well, we wanted to replace it in ten years. Let's replace it in twenty. We don't do any of that.

What it does is it still addresses the core issue of where this problem started and that we maintain funding for fire apparatus going forward for when they need to be replaced. That is an issue that this council solved by enacting a replacement program in fire. That program is still in place. So this is just fixing our payments to match them towards when we're using the equipment. This is just sound finance.

The pension or the use of reserves, again, as we mentioned, $7,600,000. Reserves is a fancy way for government speak of savings account. And the I I don't wanna breeze over that because some folks we it's just more complicated than it is. It's just our savings account. And at our core, just like within your own personal budget, if every single month you're going into a savings account, that's a problem.

That is our problem at the city, is each year here over the last few years, we're going into our savings account. Our pension savings strategy, we discussed at length on April 21. We're we're very proud, and, we've been surprised that at the level of notoriety this has received and and very happy about it. This is just us moving something along better that we're excited, a, is gonna save the city a lot of a lot of money over the long term, almost $38,000,000. It's not just the savings this year.

It's through the life of the program. It means that we're gonna pay off our debt with CalPERS earlier, which our employees should appreciate as well. This is just checks all the boxes of of good finance. We looked at flex programming for our expiring grants, which we'll be talking about more during our public safety portion of the presentation. Ultimately, we have two departments where we're doing a consolidation work to align our departments with their, core missions and what they're trying to do.

With some use of technology as we move forward and as the city always has, if if we find a technological solution to something that that we haven't had before, we wanna take advantage of it, specifically in the depart police department has a great example this year. The alignment of budget to actual spending. As we mentioned, it's critical for us given a budget that's been pared down and to ensure that our budgeting is as accurate as possible. The specific area that we're addressing this year is with public safety over time. Enhanced cost recoveries.

So you'll see within the department budgets that outside funding sources, whether they be special revenues or passing along, some expenses to some specific areas, we've really tried to narrow those down. The city has been doing this for a couple years now of enhancing our revenues either through planning fees or coming back with recreation fee improvements, but we're continuing to do so and continuing to drill down on additional areas where we can improve this. I mentioned that. Credit card convenience fees. The I'll mention this now and that this is not a, one size fits all to all transactions at the city.

But what's becoming common in in most areas is that if you're transacting for large transactions or many times you'll see a convenience fee if you wanna use your credit card. We are proposing to do the same thing here at the city for specific fees associated with the city. This is already in effect with our water department when you pay your bill each month with the water department. What we are not proposing to do is start charging a credit card convenience fee for showing up for lap swim. So recreation small recreation amounts are not on here.

Recreation is not on here. We're not gonna charge a credit card convenience fee when someone inserts their credit card at a parking meter downtown. But what we will be doing is planning fees where there those are large amounts that come with large convenient fees. We are looking to pass those along, to the folks that are paying them if they choose to pay with credit card. Now, of course, especially with those large items, paying with a check means you will not have to do that.

We looked at how the general fund is supporting some minor capital support items, and we're actually just shifting that. It's not going away necessarily as how I describe it. And then instead of having an ongoing every single year small budget budget item for minor capital projects within downtown or within the city, we're gonna move towards just paying for it within the larger CIP program. So it's a shift. So what we've been able to develop is just under $10,000,000 worth of what we'll call solutions.

That includes the enhancements to revenue. It includes our pension strategy. It includes reductions across the city. We'll be shifting gears and moving into department budget highlights going forward. What I wanna do is provide a big or top level overview of some of the major things that you'll see going forward as we start getting into our departments.

That's gonna include two consolidations. One being that the CRO department will be, becoming part of the city manager's office to align, city manager and CRO department who work so closely together to align those two tasks. The additional one will be a transfer of the parking division from finance to planning and economic development to align the program and maximize efficiencies. I would describe this latter one in a couple of different ways. This is a recognition from the finance department that the finance department, especially over the past four years and going into the future, is to remain focused on the our core mission, which is the fiscal sustainability of the city.

But more importantly is that there is alignment with parking and planning of how our downtown because I think of parking as a downtown function, and I think of so much of the work that our planning department does as a downtown focus that there's alignment there. But what's exciting too is the economic development alignment as well. And, I like to think I'm really creative, but frankly, our economic development folks are they're more creative than than I am. I'm a little better at finance than they are, so it's even. But I'm excited really excited to see what comes out of this.

And even just in the first few meetings, they've been really fascinating to see that different approach. I've often talked about what an amazing value our parking fund is and the way that they've been able to express this through the amazing opportunity for folks to develop within our downtown and utilize our parking and how that equals dollars. They've been able to so effectively do that. So I'm I'm really looking forward to that alignment. So the staffing modifications you'll see is the elimination of 18 funded positions through grants.

That's through our in response and safer grant. We'll be proposing moving 12 FTE firefighters from those expired grants into vacant positions within our general fund and measure h. That will mean that we will not be, laying off any of those 12 firefighters. We'll be able to retain one fire captain through increasing our EMS contract recovery fee. So the one fire captain that's associated with these programs, we've been able to increase our cost recovery to make it a net zero against the general fund.

We additionally will be proposing eliminating three vacant single role paramedics within the in response program and three filled single role paramedics from the, in response grant program as that grant funded as funding has gone away. This leaves us overall with 10 FTEs proposed to be, eliminated across the remaining various departments within the general fund and city. We're gonna align three classifications. What that really means is, changing the titles to reflect where they are currently budgetarily fitting in. At the end of the day, we are net 28 FTE positions eliminated.

This is across all funds, not just the general fund. And with that, I'll let Veronica kick off our department review with city council.

Thank you, Scott.

For the

first look at our department budgets, city council's budget does show one major variation. And as our CFO mentioned a few slides back, we have an election year coming up in November, so we have $600,000 budgeted for both professional services and print services related to that election or the ballot measures coming up in November. The administration line item has stayed pretty flat. We're seeing a slight reduction due to benefit elections chosen with council members, but other than that, no significant changes.

Next slide, please.

In our city attorney's office, we also have no significant changes, despite the many efforts to reduce our budget and met this many strategies that our CFO talked about. Our city attorney's office has remained intact. Staffing is constant. The only slight increases here that we see at point 8% is related to contractual salary increases and IT costs. And our city manager's office does see some major variations due to the department consolidation of moving CRO into CMO as was mentioned in previous slides.

So our city manager's office is growing by seven FTEs. That's just bringing the two departments together. And our general administration line item sees a slight increase again for contractual increases with salaries and IT costs, but no other major changes, no other major reductions, or anything of that nature here.

Thank you, Veronica. So I I stole my thunder on the finance department with our parking, but but that's the major change. There there's one other item on here that's a little complex. There's a $500,000 increase in our business tax contract that that is mostly offset with increased revenue. This is some accounting correction, to be to be blunt, and that we were we were accounting for the fees associated with our business tax collection against our revenue, and this is really us correcting that on an accounting basis to make sure we're properly showing the amount of expense we have with our vendor to administer business taxes.

The city, a few years ago, eliminated our revenue division, and that moved us towards an outside vendor concept, which is, again, the reason why we have high cost in that area. Overall, our high cost in that area, though, is still less than what our revenue division was when it was here as a city. Parking, we already talked about that and moved it. And overall, we see contractual increases. This will go through all the slides, and and we don't need to keep saying it each time, but our contractually agreed upon increases for salaries and IT costs go each up each year.

The next slide shows our recreation department. Last year, we adopted the change to break out recreation in parks between HCS and public works. Unfortunately, when we do these changes, it takes a couple years for our slides to flush out. So those big big changes, whether it's capital improvement or Bennett Valley Golf Course or any of those areas, those are really just showing that those changes coming through. I'll bring up a couple of items to note on on recreation.

I don't have an extra slide. So the recreation department transferred 37.55 FTEs from park rec and parks to recreation. This current proposed budget eliminates one point o FTE of a program lead within the general fund that we anticipate being vacant. It includes the elimination of two vacant FTEs within our PSAP fund or violence prevention, and special tax, our measure o, along with I'm not gonna say it again, increases in salaries and overtime. I I don't not do that.

But, yeah, those are the big changes for our HCS recreation. The the the community outreach specialist position has been vacant now at the city for for quite a while, so we don't anticipate a a actual operating impact from that removal. As we look at overall recreations budget, some areas that we do see movement that I'll point out is chemicals continue to go up at a pace higher than inflation for our pools. That that was a a sizable increase for us. A a good increase that I liked is that with now the launching of the splash pad over in Findlay, that'll come with some increased costs.

But, frankly, we expect the increased revenue from that that great facility over there to to help more than offset it. So our planning and economic development fund, you'll see that the general fund over our overall net increase of 3.6%. So is the increases to our salaries and savings has been, helped helped offset by the downgrading of a senior planner to an underfilled city planner. Reductions in services supplies are increasing time to special revenue funds. So there's been a shift in focus of staff away from, where they were currently working.

There's gonna be some additional support going out to some of our special revenue funds to increase some of the cost. But overall, a negligible increase of our ped of our ped department, the general fund by 3.6%. So major changes within transit and public works. What you'll note is that materials engineering has the large largest increase of a $109,000, along with general admin administration of only 5,200,000. One item that we saw a large increase for in the last year is asphalt.

This is because our fortunately, our our streets crews have been able to focus more in the last year on delivering pothole maintenance, etcetera, to the city. Those are great things, so we will continue to buy them as much asphalt as they need to keep them busy. This again was a shift of focus on areas that that team was working on into their core service of street maintenance. Facilities includes an increase within security, doors, plumbing, HVAC. An important note with Transit and Public Works overall budget is that they house a lot of uncontrollable costs.

They pay for the utilities of the entire city. They pay for a lot of fuel costs for their for their employees. When we really look at their department's budgets, they're extremely lean. And, again, it's because the majority of that $37,000,000 number, a lot of it is just uncontrollable. So net changes from the department includes a reduction of a one point o vacant administrative secretary.

We are reducing, the surveyors by three employees, a reduction of that $100,000 in minor capital support that we mentioned earlier, and a 1,300,000 increase to field services. Again, like I mentioned, we're spending a lot more on asphalt than we used to. That's a that's a positive. Nondepartmental. Nondepartmental is a bit of a catchall within the city for things that don't neatly fit into our our our programs. A couple of things I'd bring up here is it includes the city's debt service funds. We really only have one general fund debt issuance at the city. That is for Courthouse Square. That's at the bottom. That's the $730,000 that's remaining flat.

The citywide general fund insurance, we're seeing a decrease corresponding with that, decrease in in in in insurance that I talked about a moment ago given our earthquake and property insurance. The general fund administrative cost plan, this credit is an offset against, the debit or the the the positives that go out to the departments that show their share of general fund administration, whether that be police, fire, or public works. As Veronica mentioned earlier, we see a $1,800,000 increase because what we've done is we've included the increase of our pension strategy here. So what she showed earlier was around a $5,300,000 transfer into the general fund. We are that is to offset the $1,800,000 increase here within nondepartmental.

Our overall savings in the current year from our pension strategy is $3,800,000. The 450,000 animal control and shelter contract I mentioned earlier and as well as our general fund administration costs have decreased by $1,500,000 that went out to our departments this year showing that variance. And with that, I'll let Veronica run us through homeless services.

Our homeless services budget for fiscal year twenty six twenty seven is about 3,850,000. We are proposing to reduce one vacant housing and community services technician in the homeless services fund. This is funded by general fund dollars, so results in a net savings to the general fund. Of this budget, 1,100,000 of it is funded by real property transfer tax per council policy, and about one about $2,000,000 comes from the general fund on top of that, just regular general fund dollars, not per any policy. There are other funding sources within this fund that come from other agencies and, private party contributions, etcetera.

But overall, we're seeing a decrease of about 220,000 or 5.4%. And we will pause here for any questions from council on general fund and operational departments before we move into the next section.

Thank you Mr. Wagner and Ms. Connor. Looking to counsel for questions. Ms. McDonald.

Thank you for the presentation and for stopping at slide 50 something so I can get through some of my questions for you. So I appreciate that. Just to start sort of at the beginning, I've gone a couple of slide by slides. On slide number six, could you tell me on the outside contracts that we have in the city? Have we done any, type of RFPs or looking at what we could bring back in house because you're seeing those increases in contracts year over year over year.

And I think you showed, one of them was, like, an increase of $500,000 from finance because we have an outside source for doing that revenue. Was it one person that we reduced that used to do that, or have we looked at some of these that are increasing, quite frankly, at an a massive amount?

Thank you for your question. We we do an analysis with with every contract on a cost basis to understand the impacts of of any potential increases. At the end of the day, every outside contract at the city over our threshold goes through an RFP process. It goes through some competitive bid process for every contract. So we know that structurally, we are being competitive within our marketplace.

To your to your second question, yes. It it is challenging when you reduce an entire department. You ultimately end of day are gonna experience greater outside service cost. That that's just the reality of that situation. Part of the $500,000 is a net zero because we made we we were offsetting that with more revenue.

So if there was an actual delta there of around $200,000, we more than doubled our our our recovery from those those those revenues. So we would expect it to go up accordingly. To the back half of the question of your question, which was an important though important one though, our revenue division at the city at one time was over 20 people. So it was a large function that went away, and they they did a lot of different things outside of what this specific contract was. But as we move forward, it'll continue to be important for us to do an analysis on whether or not it's less expensive for an in house job or an out of house job.

What very much reflects that though is when we talk about staffing later in the presentation is that our staff are ultimately at this moment doing more with less. And our analysis of breakeven for bringing new employees on that we've been doing over the past couple years, none of them have merited and had a delta of a positive return for the city at the moment, which is deeply challenging given given our overall staffing levels.

And perhaps a finance, one was a poor example of, because there was some revenue, but just looking at the increase cost of outside contractors, We know that that's kind of a high cost and when we look at doing in house, think that's just something that we should be mindful of. I know that that's not something we can turn on a dime either, which is apparently less than what we get, but I thought that was something to note. I know I I talk about it, I think, every single year at budget, but the importance of looking at how we can bring back staff, and there's a lot to it, think, is more around building our bench of future leaders in the city by having enough staff in different levels, and and I think that that's kind of critical when I look at the building of a business. So on slide 13, we talked about recreation, and you talked about, I think, in another slide, and I just wanna be clear. What we charge in services, we still result in about a 3,400,000, general fund contribution.

And when we looked at raising our fees last year, where are we at on market rate on those recreation fees, and can the market tolerate another increase so we can try to get more to a flat budget in rec?

Yes. So while while Megan joins or while director Passenger joins us, the current numbers that are being that are currently with within our system are based off of actuals. We actually anticipate things probably going a little bit better than what they are right now. So so we should see additional recovery, but Megan can see or director Basinger can speak of it more broadly.

Good afternoon. I'm Megan Basinger, director of housing and community services. Thank you for your question. As you'll remember in January actually, sorry, in October, we came forward with increases to recreation fees that were implemented January 1. Across the board, they were relatively modest, although some did increase a fair percentage like 25% in some areas.

But when you have a dollar increase on a relatively low fee, that does make a a large percentage increase. We are trying to keep our fees in line with the marketplace, so we're looking at other jurisdictions in Sonoma County to make sure that we are not pricing out our customers out of those services. But where we can increase those fees, are doing so, and we will continue to evaluate them going forward. Additionally, as we noted back in October, we do have a scholarship fund, so we wanna make sure that we're not pricing the community out of the programs and services we offer. Great.

Thank you. Thanks for your explanation on that. Moving to slide 19, you brought up animal control. If I if memory serves, last year, I thought we had about a $100,000 increase from animal control, and now this year, another half of $1,000,000. One, who sets that rate and gives is it I'm I'm expecting it's attributed to raises that are going to those departments, then it's passed off onto us. Could you give me a little bit more history on that and what you're seeing it time over time?

Thank you, councilmember Mcdonald. Jason Nutt, assistant city manager. Our animal service contract is based on the calls for service within the jurisdiction. Over the course of the last couple of years, we've seen a steady increase in the number of service service requests being provided, the number of animals being sheltered, cared for, and and recovered. And the cost to our organization on an annual basis is specifically based on that formula. So as the number of calls, the number of service, the number of animals increases, so increases the cost of the jurisdiction. So that's what's resulting in the $450,000 delta this year.

Great. Thank you for that explanation. Going back to prop prop 13, I think that's on slide 16, and you brought it up. And I think this is pretty critical for not just me to understand, but the rest of the community of how that breakdown goes. So you broke it down really well.

I appreciate the visual. At what point triggers us to get a higher rate? Are we locked in permanently to that and it would take legislation and an amendment to proposition 13 that would have to go out to voters in the state, I believe, to repeal what it currently is. Because in 1978, I would suggest that the county probably needed more money because most of Santa Rosa was county. That's when when I lived here in Santa Rosa, you know, I still do, but as a child, we were in the county but in the city of Santa Rosa.

And now it feels like so much of that has been annexed in, but the shift in the cost of what we get has never been adjusted. So when do we get our fair share?

I I would I would describe the challenge exactly how you did. So the to the first part of your question of how does that change, that's a little above the level of expertise that I could give at the moment on how to change prop 13. I'm I'm being a little diplomatic, but it it it is a reality and a stark reality of our of our circumstance. To the point you auditionally brought up, this was a very different I wasn't born yet, but it was a very different city in 1978 when we just look at the growth of the city. Right?

When you when you have that level of growth of what was happening in the late seventies and early seventies in the city of Santa Rosa, there was no need for them to have a very high property tax level. And you had you know, this is the way the world used to work. I mean, I I used to live in a state with a different property tax concept. Right? You you would look at different communities and go, well, what's the property tax rate there?

Right? So there was an advantageous aspect to keeping your property tax low. The unfortunate thing is when prop 13 happened, it locked us into that concept forever. So even though the city changed, our allocation did not change, and it will not change unless there is a grander fix in how this works. I think part of this concept though and and why I want to to shed daylight on it is that it should be a critical understanding point for us as a local jurisdiction and and to have meaningful, discourse with our partners within the county.

That's a nice way to put that. On slide 25, because it does feel that way when I look at, like, one of the slides we talked about was measure o and the reduction in money that's coming in from that. But when I look at, 22¢ versus 11¢ or whatever their contribution is. And maybe that's just a question that came up. What do we currently get, from the county to backfill our general fund? Just a round number if you have that off the top of your head.

We we can provide that. We can

we can provide a

with specific with the county specific tax measures, what the city's direct funding from those is. That that's a number we can provide. Let us let us do that math. But but I'll also add from a direct funding, you know, general fund to general fund, I outside of the annexation agreement for Roseland, I I I can't think of one.

Great. That's helpful to know. Thank you. On slide 25, it shows that we backfilled the parking fund, which is an enterprise fund. And I think we we do that with a couple of our different enterprise funds either at a very small level, but I know we've done it through the golf course and now parking fund. Is part of the strategy of moving parking over to ped to reduce what we contribute from general fund into the enterprise fund?

Thank you for your question. The what this table shows is the transfer out to the parking from from the general fund that is specifically to pay for parking enforcement. All of the parking enforcement revenue goes to the general fund, and this is the accounting on how the general fund pays for the cost of parking enforcement. I will say that there is not a direct subsidy to the parking fund from the general fund. What has happened in recent years is that the the enforcement revenue has not been high enough to offset the cost for the past couple of years.

So I would say that there's been an indirect subsidy. We've developed a strategy within the parking fund to address this over the next year and how we can be more efficient. But what I would say is that the move from the parking fund from the finance department to planning and economic development is not a, purely financial transaction, meaning that there is no proposed reductions of parking staff. There is no proposed reduction of staffing within either finance or ped to make this happen in the parking fund. With the increases in rate revenue that they've been able to bring forward, we anticipate the parking fund remaining solid financially.

Great. Thank you. And I know that was recently brought to us, so I appreciate that. On we talked about Sam Jones Hall and what we contribute to that. Can you tell me how many cities or jurisdictions we know that run their own homeless services place like a Sam Jones Hall, are those normally owned by a jurisdiction or are those privately owned typically?

Thank you again for your question. So part of it we'll need to get back to with a much more detailed geographic answer. But within Sonoma County, Sam Jones Hall is the largest shelter. We have 213 beds. The second largest shelter is located in Petaluma, and that is the Mary Isaac Center that is owned by Cotts. So within Santa Rosa, the city of Santa Rosa owns the Sam Jones Hall homeless shelter, and we contract with Catholic charities for its operation.

So, we're the only jurisdiction that actually owns or operates

The only

thing with

okay. To confirm that.

Alright. Thank you so much. I think that would be something I'd be interested in. Same with, like, parking garages. You hear about San Francisco or other jurisdictions. They don't run their own parking garages. They're usually owned by an outside source, so I'm not sure if that's ever been looked at from a budget perspective.

Thank you for that question regarding parking. The the challenge with our garages moving a concept like that forward is that they were built with the parking district fund downtown. That that doesn't preclude them from being sold, certainly, but, yeah, it also fits into the larger construct of how downtown is getting developed.

Thank you. On slide 41, you have the elimination of the vacant positions at about a half of $1,000,000, savings for us. But when I looked at how many positions you're eliminating without the, with the vacant FTEs, that number can you tell me how that number penciled out? It would seem that it would be much higher with that many that we're just not gonna fill.

Thank you for your question. The, line item there that shows eliminate vacant positions, that is not the total savings of eliminating 22 general fund positions. Some of that is contained in the line item that says flexing staffing levels consistent with grant funding. That line item indicates the cost savings of our expiring safer grant and our expiring in response funding and eliminating the vacant positions that will result from us moving those grant funded positions into other existing vacancies.

Great. Thank you. That really helps. I I knew the grant funding, but I was like, well, where's that money? It seemed like it should be more to me. Let's see. I already asked that question in a different way. Got that one done. Thank you for being patient with me. On slide 52 we talk about what we pay for the and I think this has been brought up in past years, The Santa Rosa Tourism and the Tourism and BIA fund.

So this year, we paid them $721,000, and now I thought that our budget last year was at at a half $1,000,000. Why was there an increase last year, and then how come that's going back flat, or how do we maintain that? Or in fact, is there any plans to look at what we currently pay for that?

The funding level in fiscal year twenty five twenty six did include some onetime appropriations of fund reserves. $500,000 is the standard amount of revenue we expect to bring in during the year, so we appropriate the subsequent expenditures also, which is why we see the decrease year over year.

And thank you for the question, council member Gabe Osborne, director of planning and academic development. To just tee off of what Veronica said, ultimately, of the dollar amounts received to the city that come out of the business improvement area, there is a total dollar amount, and that is allocated two ways. It has retained a certain amount within the planning and economic development department, and then that is programmed for essentially supporting staff as well as programs. So there's physical infrastructure studies. It supports those costs.

There is also a certain amount of that total BIA that comes in that goes out through a contract to the Metro Chamber, which I know has been discussed through budget hearings in the past. We are currently working closely with the Metro Chamber on the use of those funds to better understand how they support tourism in the area. We're looking at master planning processes to efficiently use those funds. So currently, there is quite a bit of effort to ensure that those are actually having a return on the investment because those funds should be going into tourism. They should be returning TOT and more funds back in through increasing hotel stays. So there's quite a bit of effort this year, and, we'll continue in the future to use those in the most efficient way possible that focuses on the return on investment.

Thank you. That's very helpful to hear and I'm glad we're doing a cost benefit analysis of what we're putting out versus what we're getting back in on our on our revenues. So thank you for doing that and focusing on that. I know it has been a conversation the last few years. I think with that, that's all my questions leading up to that slide.

Thank you, miss McDonald. Other questions? Miss Benuelos.

Thank you, mayor. Thank you so much for the presentation so far. It's, been really enlightening as usual. First of all, I really want to, I guess, give you all a shout out for the general fund solutions. I don't remember those last year, and I really think that those are you know, it's it's one thing to talk about cuts and jobs, but it's wonderful to look at possible ways to bring in new revenue streams.

So I really, really appreciate that. So thank you for that. And if I could just I just have one question around that page really quickly. I was really curious at the bottom where it says the use of technology, twenty one thousand. What what are what does that look like, if you know?

I believe that one is a cost savings in our police department. There was a professional services contract that our police department was able to shift their technology uses to be able to eliminate that expense, that contract that we would not need to use anymore.

Ah, okay. Okay. Great. I was I was hoping it wasn't AI, so so, you know, some entwined somewhere. Not that I'm against AI. I use it every day, but I just wanted to make sure it was not that, just that. So thank you for that. Let's see. The the other question I had was about the 28 FTEs. I think you broke it down. I can't remember which slide it was. 45, there is this kind of a breakdown, the 10 vacant positions, or is that the breakdown there? And then I think you mentioned that the is it the other the remainder positions are not general fund positions? Is that how that works?

So in total, in fiscal year 2627, we're going to be we proposed to eliminate 28 positions.

Two of them

are non general fund. Two of them are from our PSAP fund. 26 of them are in the general fund. However, of those 26, four of them have no general fund impact, so we are not quoting them as a reduction for budget savings. Three are the CIP surveyor positions that we mentioned.

These are

funded by our CIP programs.

One of

them lives in the general fund, but is funded by our how, our housing authority, not our homeless services. That one does result in general fund savings. So there are really 22 positions as we count backwards that are contributing towards general fund savings, and that consists of the total of the positions we're eliminating from our expiring grants as well as vacant positions that we've identified that can be eliminated. And we do have a pretty comprehensive staffing summary coming up in future slides as well.

Thank you. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. And then I just had one last question. I have more for the rest of the the remainder of of your presentation, but I was curious, also just following up on, council member McDonald's question about animal control.

Maybe that's you, assistant manager. I was curious because you mentioned some of the services that they provide. Does that also include the tickets that folks were getting out in Doyle Park, that we were getting lots of complaints about? I just wondered because you said that services had increased, and we got a lot of complaints as you as you may recall about, in their opinion, how overzealous the officers were. So I just wondered if that was included in this number.

Yeah. Thank you, council member Ivan Wallace. The the increased cost to the city doesn't does not include the actual serviced or ticketed products. There is a component that Animal Services collects at the request of the city, which is the standard fee schedule that the city adopts on a regular basis. In fact, I think they'll be coming back in in the next couple of months to look for the city to reaffirm certain, fees that are part of that schedule.

But that is not that's not specifically part of the charge that comes to the city. That relates to to statistical numbers of contacts, animals in the shelter, animals they pick up on the street that may be, injured or deceased, and that's the service that they're providing.

Alright. Thank you.

And the question is miss Rogers. So

I know that we have wonderful experts working on the budget, so thank you very much. Director Osborne, I'm gonna ask you to come back because I know you answered the question, but it didn't answer the question that Diana that council member McDonald asked. And I'm trying to so the question was why was you know, it's going back to the 500,000 when we look at Santa Rosa Tourism BIA fund. I bring this up every time we do budget. I was trying not to bring it up this time because I bring it up every single time.

The answer you provided is what I've been asking for for multiple years, so I know we've been working on that. My question is the 221,000 is almost half of what we contractually are supposed to give to them. So why this past year was it almost half? I know what we're working towards, but why was it why was that the increase? I didn't get it if you said it.

So the total dollar amount of SRTBIA is typically higher than what you see in the department budget. So what happens is those dollars come in through the finance team. Those dollars really split off between the planning and economic development department and the metro chamber, and that is typically to the tune of 30% to the planning and economic development department, 70% to the metro chamber. So what as we budget that expenditure moving forward, there's a few different pieces with SRTBIA. It's been fairly consistent, but there has been times in which the total dollar amount has dropped, and that has been COVID and in the Tubbs fire.

Outside of that, it's been fairly consistent. So what we really try to manage because we are charging out our staff time to that for tourism related efforts, And that can increase or decrease year to year based on how we're deploying the staff, based on the fund balance. So I think the important point that as you see adjustments, you're really seeing adjustments to the 30%. The 70% that goes to the chamber is through annual reporting processes of SRTBIA. It's really the Visit Santa Rosa initiative, the Welcome Center.

Those are sort of those components where that 70% is programmed. Once again, that 70% can be inconsistent because the revenue is slightly inconsistent year to year. So I think it's really important to note that we are programming the 30. The 30 predominantly goes to supporting staff time. By doing that, we're removing some of the reliance of the economic development team on the general fund so it offsets that expenditure.

But we also hold back some of that money essentially as a reserve in years where it can come down lower so we can support the staff time or it can go into program initiatives. So there's that dollar amount as well. So, hopefully, that answers the question. I think the important point is the total SRTBIA bucket is much bigger than what the council normally sees in this effort because it is simply focusing on that 30% amount that goes to the planning and economic development department.

Thank you.

Mister Alvarez.

Thank you, mayor. We talked about proposition 13. We're not gonna go in great detail, but I wanna create a scenario where you're either gonna nod your head or shake your head. If some of our past mayors have been elected to the supervision of seats that they now hold and out of the good graces of their hearts, we're willing to have and entertain the conversation, There's nothing that precludes them lowering the amount that Sonoma County collects in proposition 13, is there?

I wanna nod. So thank you, council member. I'll I'll add a little bit more than a nod. While the the county administration can't change prop 13, I think it's important for us to include this aspect into that conversation around overall county and how the county delivers services to the city of Santa Rosa. Right? They are a they are a partner in what we are to provide for our community, and partnership often comes back to who has a share of revenue from my experience building partnerships. I think this is a critical data point for that conversation going forward. Does that help?

It truly does. And you just brought up a great conversations piece. When we talk about being partners in the shared goal of providing services to our community And we look at the population of Santa Rosa being around a 180 and whatever the population of Sonoma County is is which is about 400 and something, if I'm not mistaken, 450. And I'm I won't do the math because I can't do the math that quick. But nonetheless though, if we're looking at 450,000 compared to a 180,000, do the breakdowns match that population of the 22 I'm sorry, 30% to the 11%.

And and I don't know if you're that quick at math but it's simple nodding of the head or shaking the head would suffice. The answer is no. Alright. Thank you, sir. My second question. In regards to parking fees and going back to the slide of, page 16, if you could break down in the same fashion that you did the property taxes, who do we share the parking fee revenue with?

I'm I'm sorry. Councilmember, can you can you state your question again? Is it slide 16?

Slide 16.

Got it. And I

really appreciate how you were able to break down the shared revenue of property taxes, and I'm wondering if you could do the same for our parking, fee revenue. So

for parking, the parking fee revenue lives solely within the city's parking fund. So so all of the fees associated with, buying a ticket at our garage or or buying a a parking space in our garage or, the quarters you may put in a parking meter, all of that goes directly back to the parking fund, not the general fund. The only catch to that is our parking enforcement or our parking violation revenue goes to the general fund.

And

The general fund pays for the parking enforcement officers to write that ticket.

And do we contract with anyone to do that?

No. Not currently.

Perfect. Thank you, sir.

Are there questions from council? Miss Rogers?

Sorry. Council member Alvarez made me think about this. So when we have an event that is on the streets and you have to block off the street, who is paying who are we paying, and where does that money go? And at any point, were we over that?

Taking a quick look for my parking manager, but I I can I can answer this one? So whenever we dedicate parking spaces to another use, typically, that revenue is gonna come back to the parking fund. So for example, if they have to pay to red bag a parking meter, which is how we describe, like, okay. No parking here today. That revenue for the red bag for that person to pay is gonna come back to the parking fund, not the general fund. Now that is not to say that every time there is a city event

Mhmm.

That parking meters are red bag, they are frequently not. But the core of your question is, well, who gets the revenue from a red bag? It's the parking fund.

Not necessarily, like, a a run. Like, if we do a run, I've been receiving feedback that the fees are crazy. Where does that money go? Who's the company that's doing it?

So, Dana, the state transportation public works director, that is negotiated between us and the event organizer. Sometimes we take on that burden. Sometimes we do not have capacity, and either we are paying overtime and we will transfer the invoice for those costs back to the event organizer, or we will direct them to hire a private firm that meets our standards.

So it is so it's between us and a private firm.

Yeah. We have all sorts of scenarios where we'll handle all of it. We'll provide some materials, some resources, but that event organizer is gonna pay us to do it, or we direct them to contract privately.

And how do we determine I know what you just said, but how do we really determine? Like, is there a a chart for staff, or is it did what side of the bed? Like, how do we determine?

I plead with staff to determine if there's capacity, who's available, and what our other resources are, and just depends on how much of a pain I wanna be on that day in terms of direction to staff.

To to I'll provide it slightly more technical. We we do have what we call billable rates for every single employee in the city. So that's something that we know how much our folks will put out for a billable rate to any anyone outside the city to provide ancillary service.

Okay. Awesome. I I wasn't quite sure how to explain that to, the public when they come to me like, oh, well, this this person did that, and it's an outside company, and then it's the staff that's doing that. And so the money goes back into your budget, whether or not it's outside or you.

Yeah. I'll admit that there's some inconsistency in how we deliver that, but, yes, that gets paid back to us, if we provide those services and and invoice outside, organizers.

Perfect. Thank you.

Mister Alvarez. Don't move, dad.

Seeing that you came down, you just saved me an email. And and I wanna pick your brain. I I understand that right now when it comes to annexation of Roseland. We're we're no longer seeing the funds for payment improvement. And my question to you later was gonna be through email actually. Was gonna be what what other sources are you seeing coming down the pike that you wanna, look into? So it's really a general question for you, but now that I have you here.

Yeah. Our, payment maintenance funds are essentially and and all transportation public works capital improvements are basically funded through development impact fees, gas taxes, and local and regional measures. Most predominantly the Gosanoma measure that, kicked off this year. Those have been stable over the last few years, increasingly stable, and I mean stable as in flat, not corresponding with inflation. So I think the last three budgets we've had have been within a million dollars of each other, which is good in terms of, planning for the future.

Outside of that, we are begging everybody who's got a grant application available to us for funding and, and frankly, trying to align our, our needs with those different programs. You'll hear more tomorrow when we talk about capital improvement projects that this will be the, I think, the third capital improvement budget that I've brought to you. And, in that time, I have brought two new projects in three years. Right? The the last three years have been about finishing stuff that has been on the books forever.

We're gonna do that this year, and so next year is really gonna be about what's next and and how to kick things off and and, you know, get back to the principles of those capital improvement discussions that we had last summer, and even last winter when we were kinda reorienting ourselves. So, yeah, there haven't really been a lot of decisions to be made other than finish what's been planned for three, five, ten years.

And with that said, thank you for making me look great in the community because I I hear about how much Roseland is improving and how beautiful we are looking. So thank you and your team for making that happen. Thank

you. Other questions? Miss McDonald?

Can you go back to the investment you were saying when we made, I think, a $50,000,000 investment? Was that towards infrastructure, annexation, and then we were getting about a $60,000 return. I think you I don't even remember what slide it was, but after mister Hennessy came down and talking about some of that, I just like a little more clarification on that, please.

Yeah. No. Thank thank you for asking a clarifying question on that one. And and it was it was this slide. It was the property tax slide.

And and what I was trying to do, and fumbling my way through was was talking about if there was a $50,000,000, let's call it a, I don't know, a warehouse. A $50,000,000 warehouse appeared out of the ground in the city of Santa Rosa, and now there is $50,000,000 more of assessed value in the city of Santa Rosa. Well, how much does the city of Santa Rosa gonna get annually from that $50,000,000 warehouse on a property tax basis? It's a little less than $60,000 a year. And the reason why I bring this example up is because freak what has happened, especially recently, we've had a lot of great projects here in the city of Santa Rosa.

And I think each one of them will get cited to me on, well, the the the deficit is solved because this building just got built, and you all are gonna have so much property taxes you won't know what to deal with to do with it. And just that's not the math. The the math doesn't work that way because, again, we only keep 11.7% of 1% assessed value.

That's very, very helpful, and I think it does still go back to the conversation about annexation and bringing more in so that we know when we're, investing and making sure there's proper housing for everyone, which has other impacts on our economic, in our economy. But it's also important to know where we're at as far as what's going out versus what's coming back in for general funds. So thank you for that, explanation. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Any other questions from council? Let no one question the bravery of our finance team or our or our council. According to my notes, we have issued a direct broadside against Prop 13. We've taken on the dogs off leash city council relations.

My hope is that we have pickleball waiting for us in the slides to come and perhaps beekeeping. So thank you thank you for those very, very transparent discussions. I'm gonna ask a a much simpler question just because I think it's I think it's helpful for the public and for any press Democrat reporters who might be who might be watching. You you went through you went through our budget very clearly. It is the limited areas where we have discretion to cut that came through quite clearly. As you know, we often get questions about why can't we cut in non personnel areas. Could you provide some some examples of what what is a non personnel cost in terms of heat, electricity, etcetera, and why why it's very difficult to find significant savings there?

Yes. Thank thank you for that question. A great example is our police department. And when we came to the finance subcommittee, we did exactly that. They have probably the largest professional services budget at the city. But they're ultimately, the services that we provide to the police department are very dependent. That happens through vehicles. It happens through fuel. Those are very expensive things. So you take that amount off the top.

They also are involved in consortiums with throughout other agencies to provide additional policing services. You take another $2,000,000 off the top for that. So they're very large $7,000,000 professional services budget. By the time we whittled it down, I think we got to around $15,000, which is, again, a very strained amount versus all of the things that they need to do as a department. The reality of our organization is we are 77% salaries and benefits.

And when we look at the remaining 23%, we as a government entity are forced to do many mandated, activities. My budget and finance, I need to pay a very large amount for an outside auditor to come in and audit the city's financial statements. There's no way for well, first of all, we should definitely do that. Second of all, we don't have a choice. And third of all, that's an expensive service to do.

We we can't cut that as a finance department. And and that example is really through all of our departments. And the way we talked about it at the finance subcommittee was chunk budgeting is really happening at the city. You start with a larger number of professional services. You take away the top four to five things that a department does, there's nothing left. And there's very little left for the training that's needed for our employees to ensure we have a well trained city.

Thank you for that. Alright. Switching topics. Now that you've become a, a, much desired media presence, could you talk a little bit about the pension the pension saving strategy and why other cities are coming to us asking for information about that? Sing sing your sing your department's praises a bit here. I mean, the press democrat did to some extent, but that's not the only that's not the only, organization paying attention right now.

Thank you, mayor. We are very proud as a city to have received the feedback that we've gotten regarding our pension strategy. Core to that pension strategy is one, it it it does not impact the benefits of our employees, our retirees for what they've earned. Frankly, it's gonna pay off our debt with CalPERS quicker. What we've been able to do and move forward was innovative in the way of really pairing two different concepts together to make it work, where that hasn't worked in the past.

And, really, we're taking advantage of a specific moment to make that happen. Later on in today's presentation, we're gonna show the impact of that change, not just within the current year, but how it plays out on our five year forecast. Because part of the key of our strategy was to not just impact this year, but the life of this program over the next fifteen years and impact especially our next five. We will save close to $30,000,000 over the next five years. I'm while I'm the last person that wants any recognition and lights from these, we're we're happy to have folks reach out to us to talk about this program because we're proud of it.

And what I would say is we as a city are are proud to bring something forward to get recognition in the right way. This is good news at the city of Santa Rosa, and it's been awesome to see good news make the news.

It's it's fantastic, and you should, we're grateful for the creativity that you showed along with city manager Farrell and along with, the, the firm that helped us put together that strategy. It's making as anybody who's watched this this part of the presentation, it's making a huge difference in our our ability to come up with a glide path over the next few years to to gradually bring ourselves into line. I'm not gonna ask any other questions right now. I know we've got I know we've got good slides to come, some of the some of the highlights. So I will save my comment or I'll save my questions for the for until later.

I will just I do I did want to highlight the the department reorganization though. This has been a consistent theme in recent years. We obviously did our we had a a reorganization with Parks and Rec last year. Now we're talking Siro, now we're talking what's the the other the parking. I was blanked for a moment.

This is an it is important for the public to see this, to realize that we are being as creative as it's possible for us to be, really looking at the way that we're conducting our organizations or or staffing our organization. So I'm glad that you highlighted those points because again, it testifies to the the kinds of thinking that the city thinking and planning that the city is going through. So with that, I'll hold the remainder of my questions, seeing none from the from council. Let's take a and seeing also that we've we've been at this for about two hours, let's take a five minute break. We'll recess for five minutes and come back.

We'll make it ten, actually. We'll come back at 02:00. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I see folks making their way back to the dais.

I hear revelry in the back, the traditional sounds of a budget hearing. Alright. The time is is 02:03. Let's reconvene. Madam city clerk?

Thank you, mayor. Council member Rogers? Present. Council member McDonald?

Here.

Council member Fleming? Council member Ben Wellos? Here. Council member Alvarez?

Present.

Vice mayor Krebke? Mayor Stapp?

Here.

Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of vice mayor Okrepki and council member Fleming.

Thank you very much. Alright. We'll continue with our budget discussion. Mister Wagner, the floor is yours.

Thank you, mayor. We'll begin our public safety review with the police department. So what you'll see from the police department is the proposed budget maintains police response and delivery with minor reductions. Overall, $51,000 for vehicle efficiency in the use of technologies. What we see across the police department is much of what we've talked about here today.

Some increases in IT costs, an overall increase in salaries due to the contractually agreed upon compensation adjustments. Additionally, though, as I mentioned in the beginning of the presentation, there is a $1,000,000 increase in the budgeted amount for police overtime. Chief Cregan is gonna discuss that analysis and some efforts that have been underway from the police department to mitigate overtime costs. But as I mentioned earlier, what we see in the police department and fire department is a disconnect and a misalignment of actuals versus budget. And what we would do propose to do here today is to correct that.

There's an a $123,000 increase of opioid settlement funds for police for a police wellness program. The city is part of a very large class action lawsuit against opioid manufacturers, which results in annual funding, for programs like this one, which here we are programming in the police wellness fund. Overall, there are no changes to FTEs within the police department. That includes our sworn police officers and our civilian administrative staff. When we look at the police budget by fund, it is not only the general fund that provides funding, but also our PSAP fund.

That is our quarter cent transaction use tax of, $5,300,000, which again remains flat as well. Vacancies have resulted in the PSAP fund having available fund balance. What we are doing right now is keeping the FTEs flat within our PSAP fund for the next year. But, frankly, we are keeping a close eye on that with our stagnant sales tax growth and our increases in uncontrollable costs. We are making sure that that we don't cut staff at the moment, but the next year without enhancements in revenue overall as a city, I would anticipate us needing to revisit our PSAP fund to make some changes.

Overall, police by program, we see an increase in administration. This is tied to that same variance we saw in nondepartmental for our general fund overhead. Field services saw a 420,000 increase from our IT department. Tomorrow, Brian Tickner, our chief information officer, will be here to talk about all the changes within our IT department. We see a $580,000 increase in overtime from our investigations unit.

And then o and m projects is the $170,000 for the wellness program. Also, an increase from crime mitigation funds going to this area to fund one time projects. Police does receive numerous types of different outside funding sources, including crime mitigation funds that they program in this way consistently. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to chief Kreegan to talk about overtime within the police department.

Hello. I'm John Kreegan, our chief of police, and I wanna overview there's two primary factors that contribute to how we're using our overtime and our ongoing work to reduce that overtime. One is our minimum staffing standards. We have eight different patrol teams spread throughout the weekdays and weekends at different hours, and we really have used historic data to be able to look at what are the minimum staffing guidelines on that, work with our labor groups, have an agreement that's existed for years with the city of Santa Rosa with it. For us, it evolves throughout the day.

When our day shift starts in the morning, there's 10 police officers working with us a lot when you're spread out over 42 square miles of our city. It peaks over the noon into the afternoon and evening hours at a minimum of 15 officers, and then goes down throughout the early morning hours all the way down to seven officers. That that's just seven officers working for the entire city of Santa Rosa. But that's what our established minimum staffing guidelines are. So we work to continually fill those, and we see that with officers being called away to court, sick, hurt, all these other factors to be able to do that.

But that certainly that controls what we're doing, and we have to end of the day always have to have those officers that are available to go to those emergency calls, respond to the 911 emergencies, and be there. Another one that makes it very difficult for us, and it's actually as you saw some of the overtime increase with our investigations team, is the unpredictable, overtime with it. And the reality is most homicides aren't occurring on Monday morning at eight in the morning, when the detectives are working. The reality is they're Friday night at two in the morning. So we're calling in detectives.

We're calling in field and evidence technicians, calling in supervisors and other support to be able to work through those investigations, whether it be the 12 homicides that we had here in the city of Santa Rosa last year. We also see it with our vehicular homicides and with also collision. We had nine fatal collisions in the city of Santa Rosa last year. All those take a complex investigation with a lot of resources, but we're really proud of the work that we're able to do here for the city of Santa Rosa. And last year, you saw through the incredible work of our investigators, all 12 homicide, incidents resulted in arrest, and that brings closure to the family of those victims with it, and but it comes at a cost, for us to be able to do those things with it too.

Another thing that we've seen with some of the changes at the federal level is we've seen many more protests here in the city of Santa Rosa with it too, and for us, we've been very blessed that we haven't seen violent protests in our community, but we have a duty to be able to make sure that those are safe protests for everyone involved of using their First Amendment rights to be here and speaking their voice loudly with it too, but we see significant impacts to traffic. We've seen counter protesters. We've seen threats across the state and across the country, and we need to make sure that we have the staff prepared that if we were to have vehicles driving through a crowd or, god forbid, an active shooter at one of these incidents with it, that we have the resources to respond. But what we've seen is significant overtime that's, resulted from some of those incidents as well. So those are some of the things that really keeping in mind of the minimum staffing levels, with it and what we're doing with it, with the unpredictable overtime.

Some of the things that we're doing, and we're working to see how long this can be sustainable, is currently I'm actually rotating two detectives a week that leave their detective assignments and don't work in an investigations but work patrol, and that's to fill some of our vacancies in patrol and to drive down some of that overtime. There's a cause and effect, though. Now there's not a detective who's investigating those cases. They're already, see a significant amount of caseload on those with it too. We're holding some vacancies in some of our investigation teams, but we're just not feeling those, so we can put the priority on patrol where the overtime is coming from with it too.

What we've also done is generated where we have a monthly review with my whole entire command staff team, our lieutenants, our captains, our ASO, where we're dissecting the overtime that we're spending. We're looking at what are some of the controllable costs. What are ways that we can be able to change that with it? We're utilizing civilian staff when we can who are coming out, and whether it be community engagements events. We have a great team of field and evidence technicians, a community service officer.

And each one of those things, as the next next slide is gonna show, is that we're seeing a consistent trend about what we're doing is working, that we're seeing some reduction with it and the overtime with it. And I I took over as cheap four years ago this month, with it too. And 2022, when you see year after year that we're seeing a reduction in the overtime hours with it, The first year of of just over thirty six hundred hours of overtime reduced, followed by the next year with an impressive thirty seven hundred hours with it. This year, we're trending to end up almost even. We're gonna be about two hundred and eighty six hours.

The year before in the 2122, we were down nineteen hundred hours. So looking at a five year snapshot, the police department had has reduced our overtime hours by ninety six hundred hours. I'm proud of the work. That didn't come easy. That came with not feeling beat sometimes.

That came with operational concerns with it too. But at the end of the day, even with all the work that we're doing, we're not be able to stay within the overtime budget that had been allotted. So we're working very closely with the city manager, with our CFO team to build an overtime, budget that reflects the needs of our community and our department so we can focus on the core operations to make sure that we're able to put the resources into the homicides, the fatal collisions, so the 911 calls, and make sure that our community is able to know that when you call 911, a police officer is gonna be there, and we're not seeing big gapping holes in the coverage throughout our city. And this is gonna allow us now to be able to stay within the budget that we have with it and make sure that we're delivering the best service to our community.

So I will Mister Weidner, what's your what's your preference as far as questions with the with the public safety departments? Do we wanna run through the the whole or the public safety deck, or do we wanna pause Yeah. After each one?

Our preference would be to continue our public safety deck and then take questions at the end if that's okay with the mayor. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. And then so next, I wanna start and and give an overview of our in response mental health support team and and give some history and some context towards the proposed, changes that we're we're bringing forward today to the program.

But the in response program was launched in the January 2022. The program includes six FTE single role paramedics that is the only area of that classification within the city, three of which currently are filled, three of which are vacant, and it additionally includes a one fire captain currently filled. I mentioned earlier that the city is going to, increase its EMS revenue recouped for that fire captain. Contracts additionally are entered into with two nonprofit agencies to maintain this team through Bucklew programs and Catholic Charities. Those expenses for those contracts live within the fire the police department's budget.

The people live within the fire department's budget. This is an example of a program that has both a police and fire aspect to it. There frankly, there's not a lot of programs at the city that I can even think of that have a interdepartmental. They're they're combined this way. The program extended to a twenty four seven coverage model to address mental health crisis across our city with a licensed mental health professional. The city when the city launched this program in January 22, we we did not have a dedicated mental health response team within the city at that time or ever had before. Future measure o funds will be

greatly

reduced as part of the conversations with the county from, cut in half. So, basically, that we will be remaining with 1,600,000 worth of funding in 2627 and only 1.5 in 2728. So we've had our funding reduced. As I mentioned earlier, this program was begun with one time federal monies through ARPA. ARPA was the, federal stimulus package from president Biden post or during the COVID crisis.

We, at that time, dedicated almost $4,000,000 to the launch of this program with one time funds. At that time, it was recognized how challenging this was gonna be going forward because when we launch a program with one time monies, eventually, one time monies go away. At that time, we discussed how we were gonna need to find additional revenue sources or find additional funding to be able to maintain the program. After the ARPA funds ran out, the county measure o, which is the county sales tax measure for mental health response, was used to fund the program from from July 2022 to today, which where we have received over five around $5,100,000 worth of funding. Going forward, we anticipate that reduction I mentioned a moment ago of a $1,500,000 cut to the program from the previously provided measure o funding.

Therefore, as, we would describe it as ultimately programs like this is what we describe as a flex program. You flex up when you have funding, and, unfortunately, you need to flex down when that funding is either decreased or eliminated. We have an ability to flex the program down so that we're able to maintain a mental health response unit within the city, which, again, historically, did not have before. But to be able to maintain that team, it will require the reduction of the fire of the, of the single role paramedic within those roles. So overall, six employees being reduced from the program.

With that, I'll move on to the fire department. Thank you, chief Kriegan. So within the fire department, this these changes, especially to in response and to safer, will impact our numbers as you see her going forward. Again, as I mentioned, flex program flex programming, we would describe a federal safer grant as a flex programming issue as well. The core for the Santa Rosa fire department's budget is that we will be maintaining the core and ongoing general fund fire response and service delivery that has historically been provided by the city.

We see contractual increases within our salaries and benefits in association with our agreed upon MOUs. We see an increase of $2,500,000 for fire overtime with chief which chief Reshrove will talk about in detail in a moment. We also see a $1,000,000 increase or decrease for the fire vehicle apparatus, major apparatus change that we've talked about earlier. At the end of the day, what we are proposing is a 19 FTE reduction to the fire department through those one time funding and elimination of grant funded positions, which is six the six in response positions that we just spoke about a moment ago, one vacant, FTE, which is a community outreach specialist, and the 12 FTE SAFR grant positions. I mentioned in the first part of our presentation that the 12 impacted employees all have landing spots through either the general fund vacancies or vacancies within measure h.

We will not be issuing layoffs to any of those 12 firefighters. So this is a breakdown of those changes by fund. What you'll see is that the PSAP measure within fire has an increase. Unlike police unlike the police department where PSAP is focused on personnel, the fire department's PSAP measure is more focused on capital replacement. So we're not seeing the structural issue at the moment within the fire department's PSAP fund that we're seeing within, the police department.

You'll note a $462,000 increase in our measure h, countywide fire prevention measure. The chief and I will will break down some changes with measure h here in a moment. I wanna provide some additional context on the SAFR grant. So in August 2023, council approved the SAFR grant accepting $7,100,000 worth of federal funding to hire 12 firefighter FTEs that would create two paramedic squads. I will note that this is not the first time that the city had a safer program, and safer programs have their challenges.

They have multiple challenges. One of which being is that I will cover that on the next slide. But the core of where we are as a city right now with the SAFR program is that it is a requirement of the program that we cannot lay off the employees that were hired to the SAFR grant. We've been able to accomplish that to the vacancies that we have available. We've secured outside funding for the, fire captain EMS for, for that. And we're ultimately I'll I'll pass it over to chief Westrop to talk about additionally those impacts.

Thank you, Scott. So, good afternoon, council. Scott Westrop, fire chief, city of Santa Rosa. So as Scott talked about, we brought this to council in August '23. And at its core, we knew SAFR had some issues going into the application process. Some of the issues are there's costs that aren't allowable under SAFR. When you apply for SAFR, the resources that you deploy become part of your minimum daily staffing, which we'll talk a lot more about later. But when they become part of your minimum daily staffing, you have to staff those resources. You can't just not fill those seats. And so things like overtime are not covered under SAFR and so that becomes a general fund obligation.

Things like the equipment, things like the PPE and all the other ancillary things that come along with those funding opportunities are not covered. So essentially there's a period of performance that goes along with the grant, but what we found is we went through those funds faster than the period performance. So the fire department was looking at the period performance. Finance was looking at how how fast we were moving through those funds. So at the end of the day, we were going to have this conversation at some point of what we were gonna do with these positions.

It was either the general fund was gonna have to pick up the the tab on the the on the squads, which we knew in August '23 was not going to happen. We looked at alternative funding sources. We could not find an alternative funding source that had $3,000,000 of ongoing revenue or we were going to have to absorb these employees by attrition. So we were going to have this conversation. It's just been moved up till now.

So, what we're recommending is based on the fact that we have these vacancies available, through the elimination of the SAFR grant is, absorbing six of the FTEs into the general fund. We have those vacancies that we have intentionally left vacant looking at this and moving six of the FTEs into the major H vacancies which we'll talk about in upcoming slides. So what the result is is that there is no layoffs coming to the firefighter rank. We're just moving those vacancies, moving those people around from SAFR into either the general fund or Measure H, and we're at a negative loss on people. Anything to add on that?

Okay. You want me jump on this one? Okay. So talking about measure h, and you've all heard a lot about this. You were all there during the campaign, getting it out on ballot, getting it passed.

And then last year, in talking about last fiscal year, what council approved was 20 FTEs for Measure H. That included the addition of the personnel that we needed to staff engine nine which went into service, the personnel necessary for battalion two, and the two vegetation management inspectors, and the debt service for fire station nine. All of that's been implemented. What we also intentionally did last fiscal year, the fiscal year that we're in right now, was we left six vacant FTEs, but they were approved by council as six vacant firefighter FTEs. Because it was such a big change in what we were going through and we were implementing the squads, we had a lot going on.

We said, hey. Let's kinda let this sales tax work its work itself out. Let's see what the revenue is. Let's see what the expenditures are and give us time to settle in with all of this. And then we're going to figure out what to do with these six vacancies and that's where we're at now. And so what we're recommending is going into this upcoming fiscal year is to fill those vacancies with the positions being eliminated from SAFR as we referenced in the previous slides. We'll be filling those positions. What we're going to show you in the next slide is what we're recommending. We're just sort of giving you a preview of what we're looking at. This is sort of operational in the sense that this is what the command staff of the fire department has planned.

This could certainly change. This could flex. This could this could be considered a pilot in some regard, but what we're looking at is, showing you sort of what we anticipate happening with the future implementation of these positions and how we see it rolling out as a courtesy to you because of all the work that you did with Measure h. And so I sort of gave our command staff at the fire department sort of an impossible task. And I said, hey.

Listen. We have six firefighters that we're gonna fill. We need the most effective and efficient deployment model possible considering the budget, considering the current and future needs of the community and the organization, considering any potential future annexations, our strategic plans and deployment analysis, our ISO rating, unit two input, and the value of the rescue program for county and regional or regional organizations. And so, you know, our command staff got in the room and figured it out, and this is what they came back with. And I give them all the credit because I have not touched this.

So on the left side of the screen, you'll see what we currently have deployed, is engine nine currently working out of Station 1. We have a second battalion chief, and we have a vegetation management inspectors. This is to keep mayor Stapp happy is the GOATs versus another red vehicle, but it's a vegetation management inspectors. On the right side is what we see deploying in the future out of Fire Station 9 and and that is moving those employees from Engine 9 onto the heavy rescue that we currently possess. It's not our vehicle.

It's an operational area vehicle. This was something that was in the original Measure H implementation plan that was supposed to be on the East Side, but there is a county wide regional heavy rescue plan that we are going to be the lead, we want to be the leaders of and putting this unit into service is very important. So this technical rescue vehicle has the ability to handle technical rescue capabilities such as if there is a structural collapse or if there is a trench collapse or a high rise or I'm sorry, a high angle rescue. That's what this specialty vehicle can do. So it'd be staffing the heavy rescue and then with those six vacant being filled, we would put them back onto a new squad.

And so we would only be net losing one squad, losing the safer squad. We would reinstitute a squad out of Measure H. They would work independently of each other, so we would have a force multiplier working out of Station 9. So they would both go to all in all risk incidents, but then together, they would respond to medium and high risk events such as vehicle accidents, structure fires, technical rescues. They would respond together as what we call a light task force.

So it would be a five person resource deploying to these, you know, high risk, low frequency events. So it's something we've never had before that is definitely enhancement to service that we would see in the community. And then we would not change battalion two or the vegetation management inspectors. The only addition that we're seeing to this is because of the change that we're looking at here and because of the reduction that we've seen in staffing over the years, particularly in our command staff is what we've taken the risk on is adding a FTE fire captain on a forty hour position to to oversee special operations, to to oversee the implementation of, the technical rescue program. So that's what we see right now is working out as the implementation plan.

In station nine, just to make sure that everybody understands, we will still have a fire engine with pumping capability. So if we see a a red flag event or an event that we feel that we need to cross staff or get onto a fire engine, we will still have that pumping capability out of Station 9.

And

then, wanna touch briefly on our overtime history and our overtime. It's a little bit different than the police department. And so just some quick history. We've covered this before, and I and I just wanna sort of really nail this down. So by policy, the fire department has minimum daily staffing.

And you'll hear me use that term a lot, but what it means is we have to have 47 right now, we have to have 47 seats filled every day. There are 47 riding positions that we have to have filled on our battalion chiefs, fire engines, lighter trucks, and squads every day. Obviously, that number's gonna change with how we're gonna change things around with the elimination of SAFR and the addition of the measure h or the change in the measure h resources. But we have a a certain number of seats we have to fill. If somebody is on vacation or somebody is sick or somebody is injured, we can't just leave that seat vacant.

We have to fill it. So that is filled with overtime. It's unlike if, you know, if I call in sick or if I get hurt and my desk is empty, it doesn't matter. It's just it's not filled. We have to fill these seats. One of the things we'll talk about a little bit later is we had relief positions And when I I just wanna explain what relief positions are. Essentially, if we have 47 riding positions that we have filled, we carried 49 personnel on the roster for a while. So those two extra people that were carried on the roster would fill those holes instead of overtime positions. But those were eliminated. We lost four of those midyear fiscal year 2425, and the other two, in the 2526 budget.

Next slide, please. So this is really the the context of what our problem is. And what this graph shows is the light green line shows our budgeted overtime, which you can see has remained flat. Our budgeted non contract overtime has remained flat where our actual actual expenditures have changed and been higher than our budget over the course of time. When we talk about noncontract overtime, just to be clear, we have two overtime lines.

Noncontract overtime is nonreimbursable overtime. So this is vacation, sick, industrial leave, bereavement leave. It's your typical overtime. Contract overtime is time that is overtime that's reimbursed by the state or federal government for strike teams and things like that or deployments that are reimbursed. So this is the day to day overtime that's created.

So we did you know, and I'll talk about what we've looked at as far as overtime goes, but really what this analysis shows, and I give credit to my team and particularly our our admin analysts, Sarah Roberts, for this and the finance team, is what we've seen is we've had an increase in FTE count, particularly in '24 with the safer positions, and we've had an increase in costs. You know, our salaries have just by the nature of having employees, our our salaries have gone up, but we have not seen a commensurate increase in our overtime budget. So by the nature of doing business, we've seen an increase in contract salaries, but we have not seen an increase in contract in the in the contract of our overtime line going up. So it's nothing that's anybody done has done wrong, but what I've been talking to the CFO and city manager's office about is there is a there's a policy issue in there that's not a council policy, but there's a policy issue in negotiating that we need to look at how we cost things out to make sure that we're that we're raising all of our costs commensurate to what the cost of a contract really is.

So, and I just want to double down on what Mr. Wagner said earlier. This is not creating additional opportunity. This is not creating additional, ability to earn. This is a true up. This is just making sure that our budgets and actuals are aligned and this needs to be an ongoing process. So that's all this is. This is not somebody making more money. This is just making our line items correct.

Double down. Thank thank you, chief, and and I'll I'll double down on the point that the chief just made so well. The light green line is a critical data point here in that you can just see it doesn't increase each year at all. It just has remained flat. And from a budgeting perspective, again, there's there's just misalignment here that's growing each year from that. That that is what we are addressing. We're not providing additional funding. We we're trying to correct something. And at chief's point, that is something that the city needs to correct on an ongoing basis to holding a budget flat does not stop savings. It needs to come with action. And so this is a corrective action.

And then on the last slide here, just to make sure that we're not just saying we just need more money. These are the things that we have done over the course of time to to try to solve this issue. One of the things is we talked about the relief positions, and the problem we ran into with the relief positions is, first, we weren't allowed to fill them for a long time. We had them on position control. We weren't allowed to fill them.

Once we were allowed to fill them, we couldn't keep them filled. We looked back and historically we had one or two of them filled for a little bit of time but it would just trickle up into our normal roster so we just couldn't keep the positions filled and then they were eliminated. We've worked with risk management over the course of the years to really reduce our injury rates and reduce the time off that our employees have when they're hurt. We've worked with risk management on our workers' comp adjusters, our workers' comp provider, and our occupational health provider to increase the speed of return for those employees who can. We've worked with human resources, one of the issues we had, and it was just one of those things that nobody really identified until we it was taking, you know, four, five, six months to get somebody hired and we have that now down to about six weeks, thanks to thanks to the director and her team.

So, we've shortened the time it takes to get people hired. And this is a misprint. It's my fault, but we actually have a 2019 staffing study that some of you were here for. And this was a staffing study that looked at lot of different ways we could staff the fire department. And one of the things it looked at particularly was the FTE versus overtime part of it.

And what it showed at the time was we would need to hire 23 additional firefighters on top of our current roster to make the overtime problem minimized or go away completely. So that's sort of the risk benefit that it would take. On top of the current 161 employees that we have right now, we'd have to hire 23 more and take on the pension liability and all those things to make the overtime problem go away. It also looked at three alternative staffing models that were modeled very much like you would see in the police department and all of those models show that with the way that the fire department works, they were all much more expensive at their base core than what we currently have. So the model that we currently have actually is the least expensive way to do business.

So the last thing is we we've come down to we've ran through all these scenarios. We've ran through all these little fixes, and now we're at the point where we need to right size the the budget to match the actuals. And so, what we've worked through with the city manager's office and the finance team is recommending adding $2,500,000 to the fire department overtime budget in order to meet the minimum daily staffing needs of the fire department.

Thank you, chief. And so I will move on to our recap and reductions, and then we'll move on to questions. But I'm gonna provide a a a fairly well, none of this has been brief today. I'll I'll try to be brief, of a recap of of all that we've covered here over the past almost three hours. So overall, that where we started with a 17 deficit if no action was to be taken, we've we've gotten down to a $7,600,000 proposed deficit for the next coming fiscal year that will be offsetting with the onetime use of reserves.

Additional department reductions or increased revenues will be needed to be explored over the next twelve months to close this remaining gap. Expenditure growth continues to outspace outpace revenues. The city the city still remains in a structural deficit. I will add that that we are very proud of of today's proposed budget and the debate, the ability that we've had to mitigate impact to our organization and to the community, but the reality of our sales situation is still stark and sobering going forward. When we look at this on a numbers basis, this is where we started this conversation on April 21 of our long range financial forecast on a five year basis.

That reached $33,000,000 by 2930 and and $42,000,000 by the year after that. And what we wanted to show is the impact that the proposed budget would make on these numbers. What you'll notice here is that they are they are very much improved. Still at the end of the day, a 13 or $22,000,000 deficit is not sustainable for the city, but we've made significant improvement that we summarize here. What you'll notice is that we're starting to really see the fruit in these numbers, especially of the pension policy.

Because as we talked about when we reviewed that, it wasn't just the $3,800,000 this year. It grew to $7,000,000 worth of savings in 2829. So our our savings and our reductions really create a snowball effect in the opposite direction to make our situation better. Of note, you'll see that the fiscal year thirty thirty one jumps from 13,800,000 to 22,400,000, and that's a function of our current measure q half cent sales tax measure falling off halfway in between that year. So we have not factored in that half a year worth of sales tax adjustment into there.

We are looking at this current deficit as a $13,800,000 ongoing structural deficit, but what's critical for that understanding is that we would not consider this budget to be a fully burdened budget against the services and infrastructure that the community expects and should receive. We still have significant funding issues around infrastructure, which this budget does not propose to fix, or overall the sustainability of our staffing model here. We are at historic all time lows. For posterity, we've included a risk list of all reductions. I just did a quick inventory of of, I think, everything on here we've covered in detail as part of our specific department information.

The one that I I did not mention as part of Siro and city manager was aligning the position title of the current chief communications and intergovernmental rental relations officer to the communications and intergovernmental manager position. That change is is was classified as one of those classification or alignment issues that meets the current filled position at the city. But the rest of these, we we all talked about during the previous slides. That leads us to our reserves spend down versus these proposed actions. We present this information with each budget presentation.

This is a way for us of showing how our reserves get spent down or our savings account gets spent down. The last time we showed this slide on April 21, what it showed is that our upcoming budgeted adoption year was going to be below our mandated reserves amount if no actions were taken. What we see here now is what we've shown over the past three years and what we're trying to accomplish is ensuring that on a two year basis, our projections do not fall below our main council mandated reserve number. And what you'll see is that by the end of fiscal year 2028, we would expect to be right about where our council mandated reserve number is. I think that's a $50,000,000 is probably where we we end up by the end of fiscal year 2028.

To remind us all of why that's so important is that our reserves or the city's savings account, the function function of that is to maintain continuity versus macroeconomic, crises that arise or a a a risk in other words, a recession or, you know, impacts like the twenty seventeen wildfires. We know that through, for example, the great recession or through the twenty seventeen wildfire that we need to maintain a certain amount in of these funds in this area. But what's also, again, good for us to note is that by the end of fiscal year thirty, we would be down to $14,000,000 of a reserve, which is something that we we can't move forward. That's far, far, far too below our mandated reserve amount. I wanna provide an overview of the staffing summary and all these changes.

Council member Ben Wallace mentioned earlier of it's hard to follow slide by slide, so we wanted to include just an overall summary, which which I'm not gonna read through, but I'll mention some of the larger things that we've talked about already. I mentioned a moment ago the change in Siro of changing that title for the the for the comms officer, city manager or excuse me, city planner, any project manager we are proposing as additions to our budget. Those come with one of those is a cleanup, and one of those is vacant. So overall, we have three total additions to our general fund, that, again, two of these are are just moving from one pot into another. It's a net zero.

This is where we break down the reductions. This includes just general fund. And so we have 29 overall general fund reductions, three additions on the last side, so a net impact to the general fund of 26. This includes the firefighter positions within measure h that we are moving to vacant positions within the general fund. And excuse me, the decrease of firefighters is associated with our SAFR grant.

They are moving to measure h vacant positions and general fund vacant positions, the reduction of the single role paramedics that are associated with our in response program, and the rest of these we we walked through in detail with our department's reviews. This shows our reorganizations at the bottom. Again, we're we're still a year behind on our rec and parks change along with our parking that we're seeing this year and zero changes. But overall, this is an an increased effort as we've been talking about to gain efficiencies at the city, not just through reductions or increased revenues, but consolidating some of our operations into more efficient efficient and productive ways. So overall, a net general fund decrease of 26.

These are the positions outside of the general fund that we are impacting as well. Again, we mentioned an administrative secretary and a community outreach specialist through our VPP program in measure o or PSAP. This is due to the fact that the the program can no longer, handle those costs associated with these positions. This is a rightsizing the VPP program in PSAP to what its revenue is. So overall, total general fund and non general fund position change is 28 reduction.

This slide is a very important slide. And what this shows is how only our general fund, and I know we've talked about many funds here today, but strictly the general fund, how staffing levels have changed over time. There's only two groups of employees that we did not include in here, one being city council. So the seven FTEs of city council are not included in this number. What's also not included in this number is housing agency employees, because they're really not funded by the general fund.

This gives us a way to do an apples to apples comparison of how staffing has changed over time. Prior to the Great Recession, the general fund had 885 employees. That changed with the Great Recession, and and the Great Recession is the second largest economic crisis in the history of America. At that point in twenty ten, twenty eleven, the general fund reached 705 employees. Where we are after the pro proposed reductions that we've reviewed today would place the general fund at 707 employees.

So two employees more than the bottom of the great recession. We have a very large budget here at the city of Santa Rosa, and we have many complex functions within our general fund. And oftentimes, is too much focus on saving money on pens or saving money on travel or saving. It it can get very confusing. But the fact of the matter is that we overall from before the Great Recession have had a 20% decrease in our FTEs from the general fund, while at the same time our population has increased 12% over that same period of time.

It is an undeniable mathematical fact that our employees within the general fund are doing more with less. And, unfortunately, sometimes they're not doing everything that the community deserves and has a right to see have happen. This is just a stark reality of our staffing mix at the city. With that, I will I will add, as a as a as a member of city staff, I will say I'm deeply proud every day to be a member of the staff, to face the challenges that that we do here and certainly that our staff faces in providing those community services are something that we're all very, very proud of, but our reality in our numbers is this. And with that, we'd welcome any questions that we've gone over as of the second part of this presentation.

Thank you both again. This is an impressive presentation. Turning to counsel for questions. Ms. McDonald, why don't you kick us off?

Thank you for the presentation. I just have a couple of questions and maybe some conversations around direction around the budget. On slide 77, chief, do you mind telling me by policy where that policy comes from for minimum staffing levels for fire? If that is like a recommendation that we follow from the state or how that works?

So the minimum daily staffing and the reason I put by policy, it's in our standing operate standing operating policy. So it's on our lexical policy. So that's developed by management and labor together and agreed upon and then west signed by both entities. So it's agreed upon in policy. It's not in any other document.

Not council policy then. It's it's a internal policy in the fire department.

Correct.

Great. That's really helpful. Thank you for letting me know. That was all the questions I had for fire. CFO Wagner, you talked a lot about the pension benefit, and I know I wasn't there for the April 21, but we met after that. And I think it's a brilliant strategy to reducing our contributions to CalPERS, and I appreciate the work. And I didn't get to commend you and your team and, of course, city manager Farrell on all the work that's gone into that. My question really was around the benefits that we see and the fall off and what we actually are gonna have in that year. I think it was 2047 if going back to those original slides. And the reason I want to bring it up under this is because I know that's coming forward to us.

And I want to say that it was about a $32,000,000 like fall off that we're going to have at that time. And I think what's important and what we've learned on our budgeting is what can we put in place as we bring those changes forward to make sure that we don't ever leave future councils in the position that we've been in with an unfunded liability. And so as we bring that forward, I'm I'm looking for some feedback from finance, but also maybe some suggestions around, do we put a portion of that $30,000,000 in policy now to say we're going to put that towards ongoing CalPERS, sort of like the one fifteen trust, but put that towards that liability, putting another, perhaps 10,000,000 into infrastructure. And one of the things that I've seen that we don't have in the city and still don't have even in this budget is a deferred maintenance budget for our facilities. And that's yet another massive unfunded liability that we don't have if I'm looking at it.

And you it could be unfunded or it's just a straight liability on our buildings. So I'm wondering if there's any interest or if there's a recommendation as we're looking at forecasting for the budget and how we could actually put that in place now for the safety of the future of the city of Santa Rosa. And by 2047, I really hope I'm not on council. So, and don't think I will be. I might even be dead by then, but I I wanna make sure that there's some things put in place now when we're doing these good strategies. So you give me some feedback on that and what we could possibly do as we look forward?

I appreciate the question. So thank you so much for it. And and I'll give a characterization, but these are these are the points of economic cycles where meaningful changes happen for the future. Frankly, this council has had to become financial experts on how the city of Santa Rosa runs. So this council is in a unique position to help future councils understand the pitfalls that can happen structurally from a deficit.

Right? What I would like to do is bring those bring that forward as a future consideration for the city's reserve policy, I would like to do that. That won't happen prior to June of us adopting this pension change, but I would like to have that conversation with council and if at a future date because the actual power of the pension policy being proposed is exactly what you just said, is that, yes, we've reaped such a large benefit today, but the true benefit is gonna happen around 2041 where we've never had an opportunity to address some of our structural funding issues at the city that now future councils will be able to address. I don't plan on being here in 2041 as either. I will hope to be promoted as a strictly community member at that point, but I will come share my opinions at that time.

But, yes, this gives them a chance, and this council is the one doing it. It's it's giving them a chance to make those better. We we do not properly fund infrastructure in the city, whether that's streets, whether that's the city facilities that our public uses and enjoys. We have more than just pensions to address, and I hope that this is part of a longer strategy than just the next sixteen years fifteen years.

Thank you. And then I think one of my final comments would be we talked a little bit about the fair share, not a little bit, a lot. We were gonna address fixing proposition 13, so I'd like to direct you to do that. But, really, I wanna make sure that we're having those open conversations with our partners at the county, on contributions towards things like our homeless services, looking at, in response that that program is going away because of their lack of funding or what they contribute under measure o or is proposed and, really make sure that there's a very clear picture about what we get on the dollar. So I appreciate all of the work that went into this presentation.

I think it's critical not just for council but actually the community because we hear this over and over. So, but I'd like to go back and see if there's any way that they have a better understanding perhaps on their end of how difficult it is for the city currently. Even our public safety, when we look at how much we're contributing to the whole county, about, you know, the percentage of people that live in the county. But even our homeless services, I think we get about 80% of the homeless and unhoused folks that need support. So I don't think we get 80% of the money that goes into the county just under that measure alone.

So I appreciate again for the very transparent and open budget analysis today, and I appreciate all the work that your entire team has done and look forward to a balanced budget in the future.

Thank you. Thank you, councilmember McDonald. For the point of public record, I will say that I I I am not proposing changing prop 13, and I am not cutting pensions. I this is good that but yet, thank you so much.

Thank thank you for those clarifications. Let's go to vice mayor Krepke, who I believe has his hand up.

Yeah. Just have a quick question. We went over staffing levels, but I was wondering if we could carve out public safety because it is such a large portion of that pie. How do our staffing levels now for police and fire compare to historical norms?

Thank you for your question. We'll be happy to bring that back tomorrow. And but generally speaking, the police department, chief chief can

I I I think chief Creegan wants to feel that one right away? Yeah. He he's he's been waiting for you

to get

some information.

Chief chief's got this memorized for sure.

Thank you very much. And, yeah, I I talk about this number quite often in the community, and it's remarkable to see the change that we've seen as the city of Santa Rosa has grown and public safety staffing has not. Some of the main numbers that I look at in 1999, we had a 183 sworn police officers compared to a 175 today. 74 civilians in 1999, which is exactly the same that we saw today. But one remarkable thing is the population was a 136,000.

Then our police department peaked in 2006 with our staffing with it, and we had a 190 sworn, so a 15 more sworn officers than we do today. We had 91 civilians, so that was 17 more civilians that we had. So today, we had our population has increased by another 25,000 from 2006, and we have 32 less staff members at the Santa Rosa Police Department. So when CFO Wagner talked about doing more than less, absolutely, they're doing more than less. As we see, this job has gotten more and more complex with addition of body worn cameras and fleet cameras and so much other technology, but 32 or 32 less staff members, and our population has gone up by at least 25,000 since the 2006.

So it's significant.

Thank you, chief Krieger. And if I did my my math correctly, the the changes since 1999 would have been about a 35% increase in city population, but flat flat levels in terms of police?

Yes. Absolutely.

Alright. Thank thank you. Chief Westrode, did you wanna, chime in on this one?

Thanks for the question, vice mayor. I don't have the specific numbers of employees, but from a from a contextual standpoint, I can you know, in breaking the fire department up and sort of the three funds that were funded by, the general fund employees have not changed from our records since 1982. So the funding has not increased as far as the employee count goes since 1982. Where we've seen the increase is PSAP and so we saw an increase in employee count in PSAP in 2006 and 2007 and then again with Measure Eight, with SAFR, the two SAFR grants in '13 '14, and then the SAFR grant now. We've absorbed those employees by attrition, so we haven't lost those employees, but those have been where we've made the increases.

One thing I will note is that, you know, that's in suppression in operations. Our prevention bureau has not recovered from the great recession, and that's one area that we really, they're still at about half the staffing they were prior to the Great Recession, and our admin team is about the same. They're about half of the size they were. So, so we if we're looking at numbers, know, I think we need to look at the different funds, and I also think we need to look at the department in its entirety. So we can certainly bring those numbers back to you, but I'm just trying to give you sort of a contextual answer from the the point of resources deployed on the road.

Thank you, chief Westrobe. Vice mayor? Yeah.

If sorry. I didn't mean to step on your there.

No. No. Follow ask your follow-up.

No. It wasn't a follow-up. It just a confirmation to to chief Westrobe. So, basically, what you're saying is the general fund obligation towards staffing has not changed since the levels have not changed since I was a toddler, but has increased significantly financially.

Oh, absolutely. It's increased financially, but the the obligation has not changed from our record. From what we can find in records, obviously, in 1982, there's not you know, we can't go back and check files. They were, you know, copies and things like that. But as far as building new, infrastructure and adding equipment, we can't find

any record of that. No.

Alright. Thank

Thank you. Miss Rogers?

If my, recollection is correct, I was one when that changed. So I did have a question. I it's between you and chief. It bounces back and forth. But the first one I'll go with is on slide 87.

It talks about the reduction of three PD vehicles, And the reason why I had a question regarding that, and I'm not questioning why you guys are doing it, it's for my own educational purposes, Was there a story about something happening and there was not enough vehicles for people to go out at one point, and how is that or how will that impact, even us having an extra vehicle if there's a vehicle vehicle down or how many do we use versus how many we have? Do we have spares? What does that look like?

So the police department has a wide array of vehicles from our marked patrol vehicles, our motorcycles, our our detective vehicles, which are unmarked vehicles with it too. I believe what you're talking about before, the union has brought up, concerns before with our marked patrol vehicles about having the availability of those. Really, what that's more rooted is in some of the the long term maintenance issues. Sometimes we have officers getting involved in collisions, and there's a vehicle offline. Sometimes there's, especially we saw through the COVID error, which a lot of these complaints were coming up during that time with long delays for getting parts in with our fleet team.

We've seen some incredible partnership from our internal fleet team here at the city of Santa Rosa. So I think we've seen some streamline, within the speeding up the process of getting vehicles fixed. I'm not gonna say, it's always perfect with all of our cars with it, but we worked really closely. We have a, we have one of our lieutenants as dedicated as our fleet liaison and works with the team, and we're able to identify two underutilized patrol vehicles and one unmarked vehicle with it that we're able to take offline, and that'll be about a $30,000 a year savings that we put in for, like, a vehicle replacement fund and for maintenance on those vehicles. So work closely with the city manager's office and felt like with my team that we'll be able to sustain our mission by losing those three vehicles with it and be able to assist with some general fund reduction.

Okay. And since you're already there, another question I had was about relief staff. I understand from my understanding of what you said, it does not it did not work well for fire. But what about PD? Because how often do you have vacation sticker injured?

All the time, with it too. So we have our goal is to keep 85 officers that are spread and patrol throughout the all the different teams. Right now, we only have 76 in patrol, with it. So where we're seeing sometimes, and I brought up at a recent community meeting, is right now, just through the course of our work, we see more injuries that we have. An officer that got a collarbone broken, fighting with, a suspect who's trying to take into custody, broken elbows, broken wrists, broken hands, with it from a variety of different incidents they're involved in.

But that results out of our hundred and seventy five sworn officers, twenty one of them are not deployable right now due to injuries. They're either on modified work, doing work like an office capacity, with it too, or they're, off getting medical care with it too. We have another seven, officers that are in the academy that are gonna be graduating over the course of this, next year with it too. Then we have three vacant positions. So when you look at that, and we have four who are out on FMLA leave for a family having babies.

But it comes up with 21 out on injury, four on FMLA leave, seven in the academy, three vacancies. So out of our 175 officers, 35 of those positions are not deployable. So that is what impacts some of these things when we look at the minimum staffing, when we see some of the overtime with it. Just like the fire chief talked about, chief Westrop, we're working really closely with our great risk team about how we can mitigate some of the risk and the injuries. Our wellness coordinator that we're using these opioid funds has really been trying to, zero in on some of the causes of the injuries, how we can reduce it. But at the end of the day, this is just a a job where you're faced with a lot of adversity in the field, you're gonna continue to see injuries, and it's gonna continue to impact our staffing.

Yeah. I I ask for multiple reasons, but one of my main reasons for asking, is I understand people always wanna pick up overtime. Right? There's always something to pick up overtime for, but I do worry about the the mental health of our our staff. When they're out there, they have to respond.

They have to make decisions very quickly. And so I just don't want that to be an impact on the services to our community or be very detrimental to any of our community members or visitors that we have within our city. And so to me, there is a balance. We just have to find that balance, and it can't be at the expense, of our staff. And so that is why I asked about that, and so that's something that's very important to me that we find that that balance.

In addition to that, does in response keep a record of services we provide for non Santa Rosa residents? And the reason why I ask is because working within the ED, emergency department, I have heard multiple times when you see a patient for people to say, oh, well, I was told that if I just came into the city limits, then I can get services. So do we keep track of the residency of the people we are providing services?

We break it down in aggregate data that I receive, and it's talking about the ZIP code where we actually met the person with it. I'll have to talk to our end response program manager to determine if actually breaking down the residence they leave in. It's difficult because we have a lot that that are at school here in Santa Rosa, just shopping downtown, and may go in a mental health crisis. I have anecdotally heard stories where in response, is the pride of Sonoma County with a mental health response. I've heard and and and worked closely with the NAMI, board of other community members feeling like, hey.

My my community doesn't have this and has driven to the Santa Rosa. Mom told me that one time that I drove to Santa Rosa Plaza, so my son could be able to get some of the services with it. I don't think it's an overwhelming amount, but we certainly do see it. But that's something the same as with our police and medical and fire services that we're responding to calls from community members from all over Sonoma County regularly that are just happened to be visiting here within our community.

Okay. And then lastly, I just wanted to thank all of the departments that went today. Being on city council is not the easiest job. I know we get paid the most out of everyone, but it is not the easiest job. But you guys definitely are, like, our pride and joy.

Right? Working with the staff, seeing how you guys think out of the box in order to address a lot of the issues that we have in the customer service that you provide to our community members. So not trying to not allow, some of the situations we're in to impact the services that we provide. So thank you for that. And then, lastly, I am always looking for ways that we can make the job easier for our staff.

So if that, equates to technology or, updating a system because these are one time costs versus ongoing costs, and I think that that is worth the investment for me to help the staff get the job done, with less because that is what we're always asking is for them to get the job done with less. So that will conclude my comments. Thank you, mayor.

Thank you. Mister Alvarez?

Thank you, mayor. Chief, this question is for you, sir. I know today's conversation is is mainly about personnel, but I also wanna talk to you about the tools that help make the SRPD successful. One of those tools is Flock, and I've I've been getting a lot of response and a lot of questions regarding the program. And I would like to ask you if you've noticed a increase or decrease in crime since the flock program has been implemented into our our program.

It's a great question. It's certainly been very relevant of, community topics right now and really been working to kinda educate our community and what the flock is and some of the rules and regulations we have here with our city and to the state of California. Undisputed. I was actually meeting with a group of our detectives just recently and saying in my this is twenty seven years for me. I I've been a police officer.

The automated license plate readers have been one of the more revolutionary things at that time of being able to respond in real time to crime, to be able to pinpoint wanted suspects, suspects that are fleeing the scenes of violent crime. And I think it's been truly one of the more transformable actions that we've had technology. With this technology, though, comes great responsibility as as me as chief in our department to make sure that we're using it morally, ethically within our city guidelines and within the, expectations of our community. And that's why really proud of the work that we have and about the rules that we have of making sure that our data is only held for thirty days, that our officers can only access that data, only access it when they're investigating a criminal offense. We put in either a criminal case number or an incident number.

We're doing monthly audits, of our administration to make sure that we're following those guidelines with it. We're making sure that it's only being used for law enforcement legitimate needs with it. So other vehicles may be captured every day when I drive home. My vehicle gets captured multiple times on flat cameras, but I'm not gonna be committing any crime. So I'm not worried about being in my personal vehicles, my family's vehicles being used in there.

What I am thrilled at as chief and as a community member to see how much of a key part it played in our 12 homicides that were solved last year, that we've had reported kidnappings with it, that last year, we had 262 sexual assaults reported in the city of Santa Rosa. 262. It plays a key role in theirs when we don't have much limited information. So what I wanna do is continue to build trust with our community, show them authentically that we're the measures we're taking to make sure that we stay within the confines of our city policy, the law, and the expectations of our community.

And you've definitely answered a lot of my follow-up questions. One of them being, has it assisted in the 12, homicides that that were in the city of San Jose? The answer is yes. It has. The the other question that has, has it, improved response times? Yes. It has. Are we protecting the information? Yes. We are. Legally, as police chief, what are you legally bound and forced to share or with who are you forced to share the information with in regards to other agencies or departments?

We're not forced to share with anyone. So what we are legally prohibited from chair there's two key laws. One is senate bill 54. We've talked a lot about that. It strictly prohibits sharing any immigration and, information with it because that comes up a lot from the community about with the world that we live in today. Could federal resources be accessing our flock data, or are we sharing? Absolutely not. Not only by our city policy, by the department policy, and by state law with senate bill 54. There's another more applicable state law, and that's Senate Bill 34. And Senate Bill 34 particularly talks about that under no circumstances can we share any flock data with any federal resource.

So that would include the FBI, ATF, DEA, certainly Homeland Security and ICE with it. So we're prohibited from sharing from any of those agencies with it. And then we do audits to make sure that there there would be no way for them to access. But if we were to see an officer somehow share with that, we've never seen that in an audit, and I go in regularly and talk to our team briefings about this is an incredibly valuable tool for our operations for the city of Santa Rosa and talk to them about the responsibility of making sure we use it properly within the law, within our policy. And I'm proud that we haven't seen any instances where our data has, whether it be through flock mistakes or through our officers' actions where our data has been misappropriately shared.

And and we you use the word proud, and I have to tell you that I am proud that in the nine years since the annexation of Rosedale into the city of Santa Rosa, I've heard from the community and experiences that I've had have been positive in regards to the interaction with the police department of the city of San Rosa. Not to say anything about the the outside agencies such as sheriffs, but nonetheless from, feedback that I've received, it's definitely more actually I won't compare but I will say that the SRPD is definitely being appreciated the community that it serves. Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Thank you. Miss Benuelos.

Thank you, mayor. I'm glad you're there, chief. I just have a quick question for you. I'm just wondering I'm thinking about, in response, with the, decrease in funding. I'm just wondering what how you see the future of in response, not just this year, but even in the next couple of years.

And we've had a lot of thought. I I wanna say chief Westrop and the fire department have been incredible partners from day one and are a big part of the success of our team. We've been having a lot of conversations about the impacts with it. At the end of the day, what we're gonna be able to do is is realign with some of the tough staffing and financial decisions that we have to make, but we're gonna be focused on the core mission. And the core mission, as it said in the slide, is mental health first and homelessness number two with it.

And and one thing that to focus on as much frustration as there is with the county, we are finalizing a three year agreement that we would have three years funding for in response with a guarantee of it not coming from general fund dollars. We'd be able to sustain it at this new budget. And, and and we're gonna certainly feel the impacts of losing our fire partners, but we're gonna be able to focus on those things. And that's the the small bright spot, on this is that we still, though, have, for three years, we can continue responding to mental health crises within our community and continuing working, with our fire partners out here in the community.

I'm glad to hear that. I didn't know about the three year.

And and that's one thing, CFO Wagner was just bringing up too. We've already started that slow transition since fall of last year. Mhmm. Our former city manager Smith saw that this was a possibility with her work with the county with it, and we froze the the the hiring of the single role medic because we're trying to reduce actual layoffs to the minimum as possible. So since last year, we've been transitioning and have some of the teams that have been operating without a medic now, and that's with our partnership with Buckalew programs and with Catholic Charities.

So now we'll have the new model that's being proposed for consideration is a licensed mental health clinician funded by the county, and then, Buckalew programs also does our system navigation and program management, and then the Catholic charities with our homeless outreach specialist. And another thing for the county, as much as I definitely have been allowed critic in the community about getting more, measure o funds to understand that the county is giving the licensed mental health clinician in kind. So it's a cost of $1,100,000 a year for the six clinicians. That doesn't count the training or the supervision of those clinicians, so that's adding another, the contribution from the county is more realistically the 2.7, million dollars a year that they'll be providing the keep this program. And like I said, we're in the final stages depending upon some of the decisions made here today by counsel and the direction about finalizing a three year agreement with them.

Wonderful. I didn't know that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I had one quick question about fire.

Really, it's just a clarification for the, the 2,500,000 for overtime, and I completely understand, you know, that overtime is just part of the situation. But I was just wondering, because I think you talked earlier about, before you had relief folks and then you lost those positions, and so now you rely on people the existing, employees to fill the all the overtime. So will that 2,500,000 go toward that that same, model, so to speak?

Yeah. It's gonna go towards the overtime model, not the relief position model. Okay. And that number has been calculated by finance, taking into into account the loss of the safer positions. So it's removing those 12 positions and recalculating what, what they believe the overtime cost will be. So it's relying on the overtime model, not the relief position model.

Great. That's all I needed. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Other questions? Miss Rogers?

Sorry. Follow-up. Other chiefs. Sorry. So my question is or I don't know. Maybe chief Westrop could, answer this. The county providing the mental health clinicians, are they able to bill for their services?

We are. We're gonna be the in response is gonna be the first team that's Medi Cal billable certified, so we're just finishing that process now. Meeting, chief Westerop and I have met, repeatedly with, behavioral health director Nolan Sullivan. The goal is from the county is to transition off of measure o funding to be able to get MediCal billable. There's a lot of unknowns right now if if you're with the government nuisance proposed budget is to eliminate that or greatly reduce the Medi Cal billing.

So that's the proposed budget, though, that just when we're getting certified that we're not getting those Medi Cal billable dollars. That hasn't been decided yet, so we're still looking parallel tracks of the three year agreement of using the Measure O funds is where we have and then work toward getting Medi Cal billable and seeing what funds we can get once we finish this certification. But there's just a lot of unknown and uncertainty about the Medi Cal dollars coming in.

Okay. Please keep us posted on that because then that means that, yes, they will be giving us a mental health clinician, but they'll also be receiving the revenue because we wouldn't be receiving the revenue, so it would be a flat

The agreement is that, the way director Sullivan describes it is, like, basically putting it in an escrow account for each team. So I'm working closely with the chiefs from, Katadi, Roaner Park, Sonoma State, and Petaluma for their safe team, with it too, and we're all talking about that. And my point is that in response is going to a much higher call volume, so I wanna make sure that I'm getting my appropriate amount of Medi Cal billable dollars. So that's his agreement right now was that funds received from in response would go in a special account set aside for in response, and the same was safer with it too. Now as we've seen many times with the county, that could change, with it, but that's the proposal at this time is that we would see those dollars set aside.

But huge uncertainty is, are we even gonna receive any dollars, from Medi Cal billable? So these are all projections for years to come. Certainly nothing coming today.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you. A quick follow-up on that, chief Keregan. Can we pan out for a second? There's been lots of discussion about our partnership with the county, specifically in areas of of homeless and mental health services. This has been an area, as everybody in the room knows, of robust conversation, as they say, over the past couple of years.

And Nolan Sullivan and his team there, they've been good partners. Could you talk at a high level about the kinds of conversations that we're having with the county in combination with other cities who are in our same position about the long term thinking? You've given some very concrete examples in in response funding, a multiyear in response funding contract being being one example. But this is a very live issue across the county, not just for us, and the the the conversations have been pretty, pretty extensive behind the scenes. Would you mind just glossing over that?

They have. And we've come together as the chiefs of police. Chief Westrop has joined us too as the only fire representative on these, teams with it, with our city managers from across the county, from those cities with it, and quite honestly, had some pretty spirited conversations, with it, and some frustration was seeped out toward the county of being better partners with it. The county does articulate that they're playing for the crisis stabilization unit here, the Puff Center, which is called as the psych health facility out there by Los Gilaquos, which is a long term facility. Still the mobile support team with it.

So a lot of other resources that are available for Santa Rosa residents that are being attributed to Measure O with it too. But I I think it's something that we as a city, as you heard a theme today, that there's room that we have to work with our county that we're contributing the lion's share from the county comes from the city of Santa Rosa toward Measure O, with it and get our proportionate money back to serve our community here in ways that are greater than basic services, you would argue, of a crisis stabilization unit, a Puff Center, some of those things with it too that we could, be doing more to enhance the mental health services that were being provided. And in response, it's been an incredible enhancement, with it too. But another thing that as we focus this year with the significant cuts with our Santa Rosa school districts that I've met with their team repeatedly and expect additional in response calls to the to the school campuses next year. We continue to see, this last year in 2025, we went to just under 6,000 calls with our end response team, with it too, and I expect those calls to eclipse 7,000 when we see these additional school calls this year.

But that's why it's really important to me to find a path to secure that funding, not coming from general fund and finding a way that we can have a sustainable team that's really having a significant impact on our community.

Thank you very much. And, actually, with with respect to proportional funding, I think the status actually Santa Rosa has about 55% of the homeless in the county. Jenny Lynn, I'm looking at you. 55. Okay. To give everyone just to make sure everyone's clear on on the proportion, 40% of the population. Oh, chief Kriegan, I should I should have stopped you before you got up. I got one more SRPD specific question. But, anyway, thank thank you for having all of those conversations. There's been lots of people involved, including our city manager.

They're happening at the COC, so thank you. Thank you, miss Benuelos. More more to come there, but just to underline how significant those conversations have been. So you give me the perfect segue with the schools. In order to underline the point about how the budget issues that other organizations in the county are having and how they affect our budget. Could you give a rough cost estimate for how, our responses to Santa Rosa City Schools issues over the course of the last year, how much that translates to in dollar terms? I know we've got a a rough estimate that in my mind was somewhere in the $6,650,000 range.

What I can say is the numbers of in 2025, it was just under just over 1,800 calls for service that we had on our schools. So you can break that down by what's the hourly rate of an officer, but it's significant with I don't have that exact number of of I just know the calls where I believe it was eighteen eighty five that we responded to in in calendar year 2025, but it's significant. And then we talk about some of the staffing levels across the city of Santa Rosa. It really diverts resources, with it that aren't available to respond to some of the other areas with it too. And as we see the combination middle schools, high schools, with it too, it adds to the complexity, the number of students that are gonna be on the school campuses with it too.

And our Santa Rosa school district has been an incredible partner to work with us, and I think we've seen improvements over the course of the last year years with that too, but really anticipating an increased need for this next school year that's coming up and gonna work with our team to work with the school district to make sure that we're able to respond to those calls as promptly as possible.

Thank you for that response, and again, there's the there's the the moral aspect of that in terms of the impact on the lives of the students and the parents, but then for us, there's also just the the plain budget impact with what's going on in the school district has an impact on what we're spending here in terms of public safety and that's important for the public to to think about. Alright. One joint question for SRPD and for the fire department. Just so I'm clear, the overtime cost going forward, when we see overtime cost a cost budget to actuals, we're expecting them to be in closer alignment. Is that did did we get that clearly?

Yes. The actions being proposed will address our fundamental alignment issue with our actuals to overtime budget.

Perfect. Thank you. And that's a lot of work, but thank you thank you for working to make that change. Alright. Mister Westrop, just one question for you. Thank you, chief thank you, chief Cregan. Chief, you did a nice job talking about the, the new SR or the the new squad that is being formed with the with the six additional, staff members. And it's with we don't have a precedent for it in in the fire department. When when do we think we'll know whether or not this this new squad is a is a success or whether this is having the impact that we anticipate?

So, excuse me, it's it's not so much the squad. It's the concept of having the heavy rescue and the squad responding together. It'll probably take, you know, a solid year of of data collection and training and it's gonna take us a while to roll the concept out and test it. You know, there's going to be a broad aspect of, you know, the implementation of it here in the city and the implementation of the program throughout the entire county. One of the great benefits of starting this program and making it regional is it really opens up funding mechanisms for us throughout the state.

So once you regionalize something, it really opens up funding mechanisms because it's not just the local jurisdiction asking for dollars. It's it's the region asking asking for it. So, it'll probably take a year to really play it out, and to see where we're headed with it. But, think I it's going be very successful. It's not something that we've had. If we had a major incident right now, we'd be waiting for resources coming from either San Francisco or Oakland. And that can go for, you know, Napa County, Mendocino County, Marin County. So it really does put a resource that is not available right in the heart of the North Bay.

Thank you for that. And thank you for walking us through in detail earlier how you, how that operations change. It really does underline again how the city is being created with its resources. So thank you for that. Thank you.

And my final question, back to you Mr. Wagner. So when we looked at that at the the chart that showed the changes in our mandatory minimum reserves over the course of the next six plus years, that I see if I recall correctly, last year with the cuts that we that we made here on on Ad Council, we gave ourselves another year of guide path guide glide path. Excuse me. Am I reading it correctly that with the changes that we're making this year, we're potentially giving ourselves another year of guide of glide path above the mandatory minimums.

But then importantly for those two years that follow, we're not dipping, we're not we're not dipping into into true deficit. Whereas in the the situation that we're in right now without changes, we we really run entirely out. We run through our reserves entirely in in a in a few years. So we are we are significantly extending our glide path here. Is that accurate?

It is. I I agree with your characterization, Meyer. And and what the numbers show there is that we've been able to maintain the amount of budgetary reduction work that was started. Right? We're not falling farther behind. But at the end of the day, I would characterize exactly how you did. We're creating an additional year glide path, which is what happened last year. When we looked at it last year, it was that two year concept of our reserve. Right? The two year concept of our savings account.

We're not just adopting a a budget within the current year that will withstand that or adopting it on a two year basis to do that. This is gonna be part of the, though, the two year conversation that's gonna move forward tomorrow. And how does that concept and glide path of a year play out against what's gonna be required of us as an organization to actually become fiscally sustainable so that we're don't have this consistent one year glide path. This one year glide path that we've been doing, frankly, we're we're gonna run out of glide path. We we are.

The these fixes that we've come up with this year, they've been innovative. They've they've looked at mitigating impact. We've been successful. That tree now is frankly bear fruit. We we are at an absolute core level that is unsustainable. That's gonna be part of our conversation tomorrow.

We can't we can't cut our way out of this. We have to solve it on the revenue side. Thank you for that. Any other questions from council? Alright. I think we have a little bit more in terms of the presentation. Am I am I remembering correctly?

You know, through the mayor, this is I would I would suggest we're in a good a good stopping point at this point today. We have our additional session tomorrow. So with that, mayor, please move forward.

Perfect. Well, let's, let's open up to public comment right now. Are there any members of the public that wish to comment on, our study session today? Jenny Lynn, welcome as always. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon,

mayor staff and members of the council. My name is Jenny, and I have the opportunity to work at Catholic Charities. I first wanna thank you for your service and, obviously, the difficult decisions you're facing. I recognize the challenges and just appreciate all of the care and thought that has been given to balancing the needs of the community and maintaining Santa Rosa as the beautiful place that it is. As you saw on a much earlier slide, the homeless services department received the largest percentage reduction in last year's budget process, and we know that has resulted in impacts to services, increased visibility, and community concerns.

We have been working to minimize those impacts by doing proactive engagement with downtown businesses alongside chief Krieger and other city departments with monthly downtown outreach sessions and been working closely to see how we can additionally help with economic development efforts. However, the challenge continues that reducing services does not mean that homelessness goes away, and in many cases, it shifts the cost to other systems such as public safety, emergency services, and public works often at a higher overall expense. Now I wanna be very clear. Catholic Charities is not asking to, reverse any of the reductions. We understand the fiscal constraints of the city, and we remain deeply committed to helping with the long term financial sustainability.

We are working diligently to identify and secure alternative funding sources, but, you know, as you know, it can be challenging in this current climate. But I wanna assure you we are not standing still. We are adapting and doing everything possible to preserve and increase critical services. I wanna appreciate the amazingly hard work put into this year's budget plan presented today, and in alignment with that, we respectfully ask that given the magnitude of last year's budget impact that there are no additional reductions to homeless services while we continue to explore options on how we can, increase funding and restore critical services to our community. I wanna also reiterate that we are very committed to being partner.

We, are committed to working together, and as a lifelong Santa Rosen, I commit my time personally and professionally to do all that we can to help as well. Thank you.

Miss miss Holmes, thank you, and thank you for thanks to Catholic Charities for all the work that they do. Is it AJ? Please go ahead.

My name's AJ Trombetta, and I represent a property owner in downtown. I'm also on Railroad Square's board of directors and serve as chair on the business development committee. I wanted to demonstrate how our district has benefited from engagement with the city's economic development department. I've been able to use some of the city's placer.ai marketing analytics data. And with this data, I can communicate to prospective merchants that Railroad Square's visitor median income is on par with Montgomery Village.

I can also tell merchants, hotels, and property owners, and prospective businesses how much foot traffic they can expect and where those visitors are coming from. I can also say that the most visited restaurant and bar in Railroad Square isn't far behind Downtown Petaluma's most visited restaurant. City economic development has given me a tool for my outreach and a goal and our goal of increasing sales tax revenue. I also wanted to communicate how much our merchants, owners, and hotels appreciate the visibility and increased communication with public safety. Railroad Square has one quarter of our city's hotel rooms.

Having public safety visible and responsive in our district increases merchant and visitor confidence. Merchants frequently cite the benefit of in response. We do have a concentration of unhoused population, some with behavioral health challenges. I don't say that to sound negative. It's simply a fact.

We we are also a concentration of tourism, dining, and we are a shop, dine, stay district. We need public safety, homeless services, and mental health response team, and supportive services like safe streets and parking division. I'll reiterate that economic development and public safety umbrella of services are interdependent in the city center. In Railroad Square, we've seen reduced vacancies and renewed enthusiasm. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you, miss Trombetta. You caught our attention with some of those data points. Thank you for, thank you for coming to share today and for all the work in Railroad Square. Are there other members of the public who wish to comment? Alright.

We'll close public comment and bring it back to counsel for any any final thoughts or direction. I think what we have, if I'm sensing the mood correctly, is a lot of things. We started off by talking about how long this conversation has been going on, how many how many years finance and our city manager teams, both now and when when Ms. Smith was here, how long this how long this work has been going on. It's approaching four years now, if I'm not mistaken, all working towards this goal and getting us to where we are right now with a a pretty clear plan over the over the next couple of years and a, a responsible glide path for the city.

So thank you for putting together a presentation, a very difficult presentation that was extremely clear. This is helpful for us on on at at council and for the public, and it is a it is a a good lead in to the conversation we're gonna have tomorrow where we talk again about some some of the cost savings that we're looking for, but also some of the some of the strategies that we wanna put into place on the on the revenue side over the next couple of years. So with that, we we will end this part and we'll end this study session, and we will we will recess about twenty five minutes until we come back at 04:00. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone.

The time is 04:03, and we will, reconvene in open session. Madam city clerk?

Thank you, mayor. Councilmember Rogers? Council member McDonald?

Here.

Council member Fleming? Here. Council member Ben Welles? Here. Council member Alvarez? Present. Vice mayor O'Krebke? Mayor Stapp?

Here.

Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of vice mayor Okrebke and council member Rogers.

Thank you very much. Alright. We're gonna go on to the fun portion of our evening, which is our three proclamations. It seems like some of you were not here for the four hours of budget study session that the rest of us have just just sat through, but welcome nonetheless. Let's move on to item 7.1, our proclamation on bike to work month and day. Mister Alvarez?

Thank you, mayor. Please excuse me as I still haven't got used to wearing glasses but, please bear with me. City Of Santa Rosa proclamation. Whereas the bicycle is a healthy, convenient, financially, environmentally sound form of transportation and excellent tool for recreation and enjoyment of Santa Rosa's scenic beauty, local attractions, and friendly neighborhoods. And whereas, Santa Rosa Street and trails attract bicyclists each year providing economic health, transportation, tourism, and SYNC benefits.

And whereas, creating a bicycle friendly community has been shown to improve citizens' health, well-being, and quality of life, growing the economy, attracting tourism, improving safety, supporting student learning, and reducing pollution, congestion, and wear and tear on our streets and roads, and whereas. Since 2001, Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition has been promoting bicycling for transportation and recreation through education, encouragement, and advocacy. And whereas, the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, the League of American Bicyclists, and Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and jurisdictions throughout the Bay Area will be promoting bicycling during the month of May 2026. And whereas through the month of May, the residents of Santa Rosa and its visitors can experience the joy of bicycling through free educational programs, challenges, and events organized by these groups. Now, therefore, may it be resolved that our mayor Mark Stapp, mayor of the center city of Santa Rosa, on behalf of this entire city council, in recognition of our community, do hereby proclaim May 2026 as bike to work month and 05/14/2026 as to work day in Santa Rosa and urge all residents to participate in this special observance.

Thank you.

Thank you, mister Alvarez. And miss Weaver, do you have a few words before we do a photo op?

I'll try to keep it to a few.

Take your time.

Mayor and council members, thank you so much for your proclamation, your celebration, your participation, everything that you do to help make cycling here in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County a better thing. Boy, this whole last year has had a lot of big wins, a lot of big projects coming in this city, and that makes us all so happy. And I'm very happy that there are ways in which we have moved from sometimes being adversaries to being more partners and making all of this a a better place because any any social change requires multiple components. We talk about five e's among them, you know, encouragement and education, which is in our wheelhouse, and engineering and enforcement, which is in yours. And all of us working together can make this make this a better place.

We've got, I wanna share with you just a a couple of little things that we have coming coming up during the month.

One of the

other ones I wanna mention is I know that you must get these kind of phone calls from your constituents because I know I get them in email and on the social media is every time we start making progress, we get all of the we call it a by clash or backlash of folks who are unhappy with the improvements. So I'm sure you get those at least as much, as I do, and I, appreciate your standing firm for what goals the city has sent spent, to move forward towards active transportation. We have on May 14 on bike to work day, we have five energizer stations within the city, places where people can stop and get some snacks and swag on their way into work. Two other big new events that we're doing this year, we're doing a bike movie night on the fourteenth that'll be in Sebastopol at the Rialto, three different documentaries about, cycling for different ages, different parts of the world, different communities. And then on the thirty first to wrap up the month, we're having a big bike expo that we're calling PedalFest.

So a lot of fun coming up. Bike to work? No. Bikesonoma.org/btwfor bike to work will get you to all of the list of all the things that we have, coming down the pike. So thank you very much.

Erez, thank you so much, and thank you for everything that the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition does. You've been you've pushed the council in the city along, for many years now, so thank you for that. Before we go to public comment, our city clerk just reminded me that we've got multiple vacancies on the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board. So for those of you who are interested in engaging or have friends who are, committed to the to bicycle and pedestrian issues, this the city has openings on the on the on the board. Madam city clerk, is it two? I mean, two two two vacancies. With that, let's go to public comment. I think we have mister Cal Weeks here. Is that true? Even wearing his bicycle t shirt.

You know, I gotta wrap it. Good evening, mayor and city council. Thank you for issuing this proclamation support of bike to work month. It it really sends a a signal that the city of Santa Rosa values safe, healthy, and sustainable ways for people to get around. At the end of day, mode shift really does matter, not just for individuals, but for the entire community.

When we make biking a safe, practical choice through a connected network of protected bike lanes, we improve public health. We reduce congestion and emissions and ensure our transportation system works for people of all ages and abilities. And these principles really align closely with with what the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition's mission is really trying to realize in in this community. I really also like to thank council and staff for the completion of the protected bike lane on West College Avenue. I personally benefit from that, and I I love it.

Having lived on the West Side of the city for many years, I have, I think, been in Jason's ears a few time about Fulton Fulton Road and also West College and and making it safer, and so it's it's really nice to see that come to fruition. And I'd also really like to to to thank the city because I wasn't able to do this previously. I wasn't able to, unfortunately, be at the Elliot Overpass groundbreaking. But thank you so much for moving forward with, you know, funding that project. I know we had a a massive hole, and and, you know, we we can't control everything in the world.

But you all sticking by that project after all these years of of really talking about this and and finally realizing it, it really means a lot. And I, for one, am thrilled, I can't wait to see it completed. And and just, again, thank you so much for all the work you do. We really appreciate it.

Cal, thank you very much. Are there any other members of the public who'd like to speak? Seeing none, we'll close public comment, and let's do a photo. Harris, you wanna come come on down front? Are we gonna let Cal join us too?

Alright. Thank you again, Arison Cal. Alright. Move on to item 7.2, our proclamation for National Wildfire Awareness Month. Lots of, friendly and familiar pay play or faces here today.

Miss McDonald, do wanna read the proclamation?

Thank you, mayor, and thank you for the opportunity to read this. Whereas between 2017 and 2020, the city of Santa Rosa was threatened and directly impacted by the Tubbs, Nuns, Kinkade, and Glass fires, and whereas the Tubbs Fire was one of the most destructive wildfires in the state history, And whereas according to the National Interagency Fire Center, humans cause an average of 68% of the fires per year in The United States. And whereas in 2024, 8,110 fires burned 1,077,711 acres across California. And whereas Santa Rosa's wildfire ready prevention campaign, community wildfire protection plan, vegetation management ordinance, and grazing are working to reduce the threat of wire wildfires locally. And whereas wildfire preparedness is a year round it is year round and takes all of us to safeguard our lands, our communities, and our livelihoods by reducing hazardous fuels, creating defensible space, implementing home hardening, and taking personal responsibility for our actions in advance of the 2026 fire season locally in the city of Santa Rosa.

Now, therefore, may it be resolved that Mark Stapp, mayor of the city Of Santa Rosa, on behalf of the entire city council in recognition of our community, do hereby proclaim May to be National Wildfire Awareness Month, Encourage everyone to take an active role in preparing for National Wildfire Awareness Month.

Thank you, mister Donald. Do I see we have fire marshal Paul Lowenthal here to to say a few words?

Yeah. Thank you, mayor Stapp, council member McDonald, members of the council, Paul Lowenthal, division chief fire marshal with the fire department. Appreciate the proclamation. Obviously, this month is important not only to us but our community. With what we've experienced here since 2017, there's a lot of effort that goes on, not just during this month, but really year round.

From members of our fire prevention team out there working directly with our community on either helping with defensible space, working on vegetation management prog programs, helping to implement, the pile burning ordinance. A lot of efforts that not only, aren't, being worked on by our staff and members of the community, but really, ultimately, what we appreciate is the support that we've had from council, whether it's adopting the community wildfire protection plan, allocating money from PG and E settlement to implement our grazing program, a lot of efforts that really truly are helping to mitigate the risks and making Santa Rosa a more wildfire ready and safer community to live in. So with that, obviously, you know I can talk a lot, but you've had a long day and, appreciate all the support and the efforts that are ongoing in our community and look forward to what we hope is another, safe and healthy fire season here locally in the city of Santa Rosa.

Paul, thank you very much. And we've we've, taken every opportunity to sing the praises of our fire department in recent weeks, including today. In fact, I'll open it up to council. Any any thoughts other than just gratitude, please, miss Mcdonald?

Yeah. I wanna also thank the communities, and I know Oakmont, in particular, has quite a a wildfire readiness campaign going on out there. Many people have been certified on how to make sure that they go out and help members of the community, specifically in Oakmont because they've been hit twice by wildfires with how to harden their homes. So I just wanna do a shout out to them, and I know that the fire department and maybe you could talk about this, Paul. If if any community has interest in learning about how they can do better to, harden their homes or or where they can access those, those, resources, could you maybe share that with us?

Yeah. Thank you for the question and the comments. Our department works very closely with Fire Safety Sonoma, which is the county's, fire safe council. We support them through allowing them office space to thrive in our community, but really work closely with the members that are here from our fire prevention team. And you're right.

Oakmont is a great example of a firewise community, and we've really seen those communities blossom throughout Santa Rosa based on our experience, based on lessons learned, and based on what they've seen from the successes in the Oakmont area. You look at Sky Farm. You look at the OSMA in Fountain Grove, the Altavist area. We've got a lot of communities that are coming together that have obviously gotten a lot stronger and then have the support from members of our team that are funded by Measure H, which has implemented a couple of our inspectors, as well as just the overall support of our community. We do have two websites that we typically point people to.

One is srcity.org/wildfireready, and the other one is srcity.org/readysr. Those two websites are the landing pages for our community, and have become very popular pages, especially around this time of the year where the community can, obtain those resources and also, essentially, in some cases, book an appointment, with our staff to come out and meet with them one on one in the field. In addition to a lot of the proactive work that we're doing, we're physically getting into the community and averaging anywhere from about 300 to 400 contacts a month right now with actual defensible space inspections with our staff.

Thank you. Alright. Let's open it up to public comment. Are there members of the public here that would like to, shower our fire department with thanks and praise? We know they're out there. We'll close public comment. Paul, can you and the team come down and let's do a let's do a quick photo? Or is it perhaps it's easier with this many if we stage it there. Assistant city manager Nutt, can we borrow your your seat for a moment? Sorry about that.

Alright. Thanks again to our fire department. We are going to hold on item seven point seven point three for the moment. We're waiting for a few more folks to arrive. Let's move on to item 8.1, our community empowerment plan update. Is it miss Wood filling in for miss Horta? Misty, thank you in advance.

You're very welcome. Thank you for that, mayor. My name is Misty Wood. I'm the communications and intergovernmental relations officer. And as mayor kindly pointed out, filling out for Anna, miss Orto while she is out of the office. So we are in the spring sprint right now. We have a lot going on. Today is Cinco de Mayo, I think, as everybody knows. So there's a fantastic Cinco de Mayo festival happening right now until 09:00 at night over in Roseland at 650 Sebastopol Road. This is a family friendly event, and we invite everybody to attend who's available after this meeting.

On May 14, we know that it is Bike to Wherever Day as we just heard from the proclamation and from Eris Weaver. We invite everybody who is participating in Bike to Wherever Day to join us at our Energizer Station along the Prince Memorial Greenway at Prince Gateway Park. That will be May 14 from 06:30 a. M. To 09:30 a.

M, and the Energizer Station will have sweet treats and bike swag and a chance to refill your water bottle while you're on your way to wherever you're biking that day. On May 14 and May 30, the Santa Rosa Police Department is hosting its second and third, community traffic safety meetings. The May 14 meeting will be held at Santa Rosa Bible Church located at 4575 Badger Road from 05:30 to seven p. M. The May 30 meeting will take place at the City Of Santa Rosa Utility Field's Operations Building, fondly called the UFO Building, at 35 Stony Point Road from 10:30 a.

M. To noon. And these meetings are designed to provide community members with an opportunity to share their traffic related safety concerns with police staff. That could include speeding, roadway safety, neighborhood traffic patterns, anything along those lines. We invite anybody who is interested in that issue or has concerns to please attend one of those meetings. On May 16, we have the South Park Resource Fair, and several city departments will be attending that, hosted by the South Park Coalition at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, and that is from eleven a. M. To one p. M.

On the sixteenth. This fair will bring together more than 30 community partners to share resources with our community members and a really fun afternoon with games and music and food, and it's really a good community building event. This event is free, and it's open to everybody. On Saturday, May 16, the city invites families to celebrate kids to parks day with a special scavenger hunt at Howarth Park. This is 11AM to 2PM.

Participants can pick up self guided scavenger hunt instructions near the Howarth Park snack bar and help explore the park to uncover clues, activities, and treats, and at the end, there is a secret prize. So this scavenger hunt is designed for children ages six to 12, although younger participants certainly can join in on that with a little help from their older friends or family members. Finally, just an update along the lines of community empowerment. The Santa Rosa Police Department violence prevention partnership, Parks Department code enforcement, and the community engagement team recently met with Roseland residents to discuss ongoing concerns as part of their neighbourhood engagement and education efforts focused on the recent community violence, really trying to help empower our community members and make them aware of the resources that we have available for them. They received information about local programs, youth and gang prevention services, graffiti related support, and ways to report concerns and really get involved so that everybody can have a safer neighborhood.

That concludes this month's community empowerment plan. I'm available for any questions the council may have.

Miss Steve, thank you so much. Looking to council for questions? Just one for me. Did I did I hear a let's talk Santa Rosa update? Did I miss You

did not, but I anticipated you might ask about Thank you. You're welcome. We are still doing our Let's Talk Santa Rosa community engagement campaign, so this is a survey and outreach campaign to solicit feedback from our community members about what their service priorities are as the council continues to have conversations about budget. We just heard about, you know, kind of what we're facing this year, and we're gonna be hearing about year two tomorrow. It's really important that we hear from the public about what those service priorities are for them because we are in the business, of course, of providing services.

So far, we've collected approximately eighteen forty responses, and those can be submitted online at srcity.org/talk. You can also email us at feedback@srcity.org if you'd like a presentation to your community group, business group, HOA, etcetera, we're happy to get out there. And the more folks we engage with, the better this the better this effort will be. Thank you for asking.

Thank you for highlighting that, and thank you for plugging tomorrow's budget discussion. If by chance you missed the four hours today, you have the chance to come back for several hours of more discussion tomorrow morning. We will look for you there, and you'll have a chance to make public comment and weigh in on the priorities of the city. Let's open up to public comment. Would any members of the public like to comment on the community empowerment plan? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Misty, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

And we will move on to our city manager and city attorney's reports. Madam city manager, any oh, did I did I forget something?

No. Misty will

be providing the report. Double duty. Alright. Miss Wood, back to you.

Double duty tonight. Thank you, mayor. We have a few items to report out tonight. On May 20, we invite everybody to attend the Santa Rosa City Works Festival. This is a free family friendly event held in collaboration with our Wednesday night market downtown.

The festival will take place along 4th Street between Mendocino And D Streets from five to 08:30PM, This is a really hands on event and a chance for all participants of all ages to really understand about the essential works that keep Santa Rosa running. They can climb aboard big equipment, which is always very popular with our younger crowd for sure, participate in an infrastructure scavenger hunt, win prizes, and meet some of the dedicated folks who work here at the city. More information on that is available at srcity.org/yourcityworks. We do have an opportunity for folks to activate one of Santa Rosa's historic properties. Our De Turk Round Barn is being marketed right now to being leased out.

This is located at 819 Donahue Street. This was built in 1891. It's a really stunning 8,000 square foot historic facility, and it really offers a special opportunity for creative community focused uses. We are seeking proposals right now that honor that building's history and while bringing new energy and community benefit to the Downtown Santa Rosa and Railroad Square area. There is an optional site walkthrough tomorrow, May 6, from eleven a.

M. To one p. M, and proposals are due by June 22. So folks who are interested in submitting a proposal can learn more at srcity.orgdaturkrfp. On the recreation front, we are looking for community members to help mentor some young folks as part of our Junior Giants baseball program.

This program is a free, noncompetitive coed baseball program for underserved youth from age five to 18, and it really is more than just baseball. This is about teamwork and confidence and respect and life skills that the children can carry with them throughout their life. So we need folks to step up, hopefully, to volunteer as coaches, assistant coaches, and teen parents for this eight week program that kicks off mid next month. If you're interested or you know somebody who might be interested, please direct them to srcity.org/juniorgiants. Let's see.

I referenced the Santa Rosa Wednesday night market. That starts up again this Wednesday I'm sorry, next Wednesday, May 13 from five to 9PM at Courthouse Square. This is also a free and family friendly event and is well attended and well loved with local music I'm sorry, local food, live music, small businesses, and activities for children. It's a great way to come out and build community and meet your neighbors and have a good time as well. So again, that starts at May 13, and it runs every single Wednesday.

And then last but certainly not least, we are approaching our twenty fifth annual senior expo on July 11 at the Findlay Center in the person Senior Wing, and right now we are looking for vendors. So we are looking for any community group or business that offers services, activities, or products for older adults so you can connect with your customers and really help them understand what sort of services or activities you can provide. It's a great way to connect with our senior community. Exhibitors can sign up by May 8 for early bird pricing with a final deadline of June 12. And so if you are interested, you can go to srcity.org/seniorexpo to learn more.

And this concludes the city manager's report out this evening. I'm available for any questions you may have.

Thank you both. Any any questions? Miss Banuelos?

Thank you, mayor. Misty, just a quick question about the RFP for Deter because I got a lot of calls from the West End folks because I I didn't know. And so, what I'm wondering is so are we we're looking for someone to and I don't know if you or or, you know, interim city manager might wanna answer this better, but just wanna know if it are we looking for a long term leasing partner? Is and what and and I guess the concerns that they're raising are, you know, what what will that look like? Because, you know, it's just it's surrounded by and this is not for you to worry about, but it's surrounded by folks, you know, residents, you know, and all that.

So they're just really concerned about how that's how that's gonna develop. So Thank

you for that input. I'll, get back with our staff and determine what we think is a good, time period for a proposal. I think the effort there was to to activate the space and generate some revenue, meet some community needs, but we'll take a look and make sure that we have specific policies in place and whatever contract is approved for a good neighbor, friendly neighbor policy and strategy so that it's not a major disruption.

Thank you. Any other questions? Moving on then to, our city attorney, Autumn.

Good evening, mayor. There is, no report from the city attorney's office tonight.

Thank you. We'll open it up to public comment. Would any members of the public like to comment on either the city manager or city attorney's reports? Seeing none, we'll close public comment, and we'll go on to item 10, statements of abstention or accusable by council by council members. Any any, statements of essential abstention or accusable this evening? Seeing none, on to item 11, mayor and council members reports. We've got thirty minutes to kill folks, so have at it. Let's hear about what you've been up to. Miss Benuelos.

Oh my goodness. Well, I'm not gonna take that long, but, I have a report from the last, Sonoma County homeless coalition. Let's see. The board approved for fiscal year twenty six twenty seven homeless service services allocations with approximately 11% reductions, down from 15% previously reported by staff, and elimination of two projects that fell below the $30,000 threshold, that were, COTS, Kids First Family Shelter, and Labath Landing. We, and that means the city, will be reaching out to Catholic charities to better understand the impacts to Samuel Jones, and the city funded programs, Caritas drop in center and the family center.

At the next meeting, is coming up on May 27, the staff will present recommendations for the COC, renewal funding, approximately 4,000,000 in federal funding for permanent supportive housing and coordinated entry as well as HMIS. So there's a lot going on there, and I just want to add to that that many members of the coalition are very concerned about the impacts that are gonna be coming down from the federal government and how it's going to affect homeless services. So they'll be probably reporting out on more of that in the next couple of months, But, really, what we're worried about is more people are gonna end up on the streets as a result of all the cuts. And so when, Jenny Lynn Holmes was speaking earlier about cuts, any cuts that we make, I think that's something that we have to be aware of because I see it already affecting people personally, in terms of trying to make ends meet right now, and so many people are working two jobs, three jobs. And, so I just wanna, you know, not to to, be the bearer of bad news, but just that things are not looking well.

And I I know we wanna be positive, but, you know, I have to be real about this because I hear it every month. So there's that. On a better note, though, I do wanna talk about Cinco de Mayo for a minute. Yes. Today is Cinco de Mayo. Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone. As you know, it's not officially Mexican Independence Day, but there's a lot of reasons and there's a lot of history for why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo over in Sebastopol Road. And so please know that you're all invited. Please come out. It's for everyone.

There's music, lots of good food, all kinds of food, and information. The city of Santa Rosa is out there as well as the county. Our our fire folks are out there, and it's just a lot of fun. And it's just one day out of the year that we wanna celebrate, all cultures. So I hope that you all, if you have time oh, and by the way, there's not a lot of parking, but there is ADA parking at Exchange Bank, and Rosie the Trolley is taking folks from the mall over by the old Sears Building to the festival.

So if you are worried about driving there or anything like that, it it's very safe. Rosie the Trolley is part of the city, so, I encourage you. I usually try to ride it at least once just to see how everything's going and see the if the driver's feeling good about how things are going. So so, I think that's all I have.

Thank you. Miss McDonald?

Thank you, mayor. Just a couple of quick updates. I attended the, ECA dinner, which is the engineering and contracts dinner this past weekend. Just wanted to say thank you to them for hosting the elected nights, but really, congratulations to I guess this sounds so narcissistic to ourselves, the city of Santa Rosa. But we received the Bridge Award for all of the work, and I just want to do a shout out to all the staff that did the work on the Hearne Avenue hub, that connectivity from west to east and what that's done for the community and thank them for, acknowledging the amount of time and work and really with the partners that we worked with and the collaboration between all of our partnerships on that project, it was really great to see and so congratulations.

Know Assistant City Manager had a lot to do with that project and I want to say thank you to him and director Hennessy for all their work and and the rest of the staff, engineers, and everyone else that was there that evening to receive that award. Just congratulations to the whole team. And I also wanna do a shout out. I met the new Sonoma State president, and there was a event hosted at Exchange Bank this week, and it was exciting to hear what he wanted to do to partner with the city and, the JC to make sure that students have a pathway to get through a four year university if they choose, but also some of the conversations that he had around career technical education and pathways, particularly certifications in the city of Santa Rosa and how we might be able to partner better. So I look forward to, hearing about those conversations and anything we can do with our great resource of having Sonoma State here in Sonoma County.

Miss Ben Whalison, I appreciate the Sonoma State shout out. Thank thank you very much. Miss Rogers?