City Council - Regular Meeting

Alright. It's 06:00. I'm gonna look at our city clerk. We have a little bit of a reverb on the It's me on the mic. Okay. It is, 6PM, and I call to order the meeting of the city council of the city of Piedmont of Tuesday, 02/17/2026. And we are going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. So please rise and join me if you are able. Pledge allegiance, Cesar Flagg of The United States Of America,

Caesar Republic for which it stands,

one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Wonderful. Thank you all for being here with us, either in person or on Zoom this evening. We're going to switch up the order and we're actually going to do our presentation next because of some time constraints. We are joined this evening by Kasindi Chao of the Piedmont Asian American Club. Thank you so much for being here with us. And Jean Chen Takazawa from the PHS Affinity Mentorship Program. So thank you so much. I'm gonna go ahead and read the proclamation and then invite you to make remarks if you'd like, and then we can go ahead and take a photo. Wonderful.

Okay. City PMO proclamation. Whereas the lunar calendar is based on a combination of lunar and solar movements, and the lunar cycle is about twenty nine point five days. The second new moon after the winter solstice marks the beginning of the new year and it is determined to occur today, February 17 of this year. So that's very exciting.

Whereas the lunar calendar is made up of a cycle of twelve years, each of them being named after an animal. This year marks the year of the horse, which according to ancient tradition is associated with a host of positive personal qualities such as being energetic, independent, sociable, and ambitious. Individuals born in the year of the horse are also known for their love of freedom and fast paced lifestyles. And whereas in many parts of Asia, New Year celebrations take on a different and richly diverse flavor that despite the differences have one common theme that takes center stage for all and that is family. And whereas Lunar New Year is the time for family reunions, gatherings, reflections, and the reaffirming of bonds.

In that spirit, we seek to highlight the Piedmont Asian American Club's Lunar New Year celebration at the Ellen Driscoll Playhouse on Friday, February 27 of this year and encourage all Piedmonters to attend. Now therefore I, Betsy Smagle Anderson, mayor of the city of Piedmont, do hereby wish happiness, longevity, and good fortune to everyone celebrating. The Lunar New Year, the year of the horse, and I encourage all to recognize the contributions of the Asian American community to the community of Piedmont. Thank you.

Need to push this. Okay. The green was on. Okay. Got it. Good evening.

Thank you for having us today. It is a deep honor to accept this proclamation on behalf of Asians and the Asian American community here in Piedmont. We know that Lunar New Year is more than a holiday. It is a celebration observed across many Asian cultures including Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, as

well as Asian diaspora community around the world. The year of the horse symbolizes strength, courage, movement, and perseverance and those qualities resonate deeply with our immigrant communities and the Asian Americans who have navigated both invisibility and resilience in this country. This proclamation matters. Representation matters. Public recognition matters. When a city names and honors a community's tradition as signals belonging, It tells our children that their cultures are not peripheral and that they are part of the civic fabric of this place. So, with that, I have a deep appreciation and respect. Thank you so much for honoring this holiday.

Wonderful. Thank you.

So of course I knew Jean would have a wonderful, wonderful speech presented. I don't. But I've done this before and I just wanted to say on behalf of Piedmont Asian American Club, thank you so much. I mean, seriously, this has been so nice. The the city has been so welcoming to our community.

You know, PAC has been around for decades and we started the Chinese language program. We've done a lot of events and of course, I really wanted to highlight and invite everybody again to our Lunar New Year event, which is sold out each year, a lot of fun lion dancing. What's nice is it brings young and old together and it really kind of shares our pride in our community, our culture with everybody. And I also want to say thank you for helping us with our Ma Jong Club, which has been sold out. It's wait list only and it's just been more successful than I ever could have thought.

And what was really nice about it was that when people in the community were lonely, it was a nice place for people to come together. And that's been really special. And I just wanted to say thank you to Piedmont so much, so much. And I think we'll have more activities on, and I just wanted to, you know, welcome you guys to the year of the was it the fire horse? So, I always say go bold. This is the year to go bold, and we need to. So, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you for being here with us. And let's go ahead and do a photo. Great.

Alright. Just find a little closer

and kinda curve up. Oh, somebody knows how to

do it. Okay. We got a few cameras.

Okay. So now we are going to turn our attention to public forum. And as our practice, I'm going to read an opening statement for public forum that describes kind of the how this is gonna work. This portion of the meeting is when members of the public can speak to the council on any item that is not on tonight's agenda. If you would like to speak on a matter that is on the agenda, please reserve your comments for when that agenda item is called.

The purpose of public forum is to provide the public with an opportunity to be heard. However, if your comments do not address a topic that is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city or if your comments are disruptive, I will provide a warning. If the warning is not followed, I will direct the clerk, city clerk to cut off the microphone. Each speaker is usually given three minutes. This time may be adjusted at my discretion based on the number of speakers or number of items on the agenda.

If you ask questions during public forum or during public comment with respect to an agenda item, those questions will not be answered during your allotted time. However, a member of the council may, at the conclusion of public comments, direct your questions to staff for a response. Pursuant to state law, the council may not discuss issues brought up at public forum, but council members or staff may provide brief responses to statements made. So I'm looking at our assistant city clerk to see if we have any speakers this evening either in chambers or online for public comment.

Madam mayor, I do not have any speaker cards in the chambers, and I see no hands raised online.

Okay. Public forum is now closed, and we are moving on to our consent calendar. Do we have any items that my colleagues want to pull from the consent calendar?

No? I'll move consent.

Okay. Let's, let's, check with the city clerk to see if we have any public comment.

No public comment for the consent calendar.

Okay. So we're, looking at items one through four. I will make a comment that I watched the meeting because I missed it on February 2, and I just wanna appreciate how amazing my colleagues are. You not only did the vice mayor do a great job running the meeting, but I was really impressed by the insightfulness and quality of comments and questions. And you actually asked and was answered all the questions that I had on the very meaty topics that were discussed.

So I just wanna applaud and commend my colleagues for the very thoughtful review of all the items at our last council meeting. Okay. With that said oh, and I guess I should say I should miss more council meetings because you guys did a great job without me. So alright. So I'll move consent. Vice mayor has moved the consent calendar. Do we have a second? Seconded by council member Long. Let's go ahead and vote. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Consent calendar passes unanimously. We're moving on to our regular agenda item number five, which is a consideration of the fiscal year twenty twenty five, twenty six mid year financial review, as well as our capital improvement program and potential direction to staff..dot.

Thank you, Mayor Anderson. As both Kiran Bawa, our Finance Director and Daniel Gonzalez, our Public Works Director are with us this evening. You're going to receive presentation that encompasses two extremely important topics to the city. One is our mid year report, the other is an introduction to the capital improvement program, a status update on where we are with the twenty fivetwenty six outlook for projects this year and what I hope will be a framework for the look ahead that both takes into account where we stand today relative to future projects and where we are relative to our budget process in the next year. And what I'm hoping is as the city staff look to prepare what is coming forward in the budget year 2026, 2027 that as we look at the April study sessions that we're drafting documents for that we have an opportunity to both check the priorities that have been identified at the staff level for key capital projects and identify needs and priorities for future years.

So we really hope that the framework that we're presenting to you today is helpful in both forecasting the needs in city properties for the next several years and prioritizing those those projects in the near term. So with that, I'm going to hand off to director Bawa to walk through content and of course invite your comments and questions along the way.

Good evening, mayor Sniguel and members of the council. We have for you a financial snapshot of the city at midyear. And I'm just quickly trying to share this screen. So along with that, we'll also provide year end projections, a review, a quick review of the major funds along with the general fund and then some key factors that are on my radar and the city's radar overall as we move ahead with the rest of the fiscal year and planning for the next year's budget. We're saving the best for last.

Review of the city's capital improvement program for the next five years. This is on the demand from council previously. Okay. It's looking funny but that's okay. At midyear, both revenue and expenditures are tracking very close to budget.

Revenues at 50% of budget at $20,600,000 and expenditures at 51% of budget. We're projecting that we will end the revenues at year end with $550,000 over budget, close to a percent of the revenue budget and then expenditures slightly over budget and these are driven by known costs and we'll delve into those details in the next few slides. The general fund balance remains stable at 17% of expenditures at $6,700,000 Overall, the revenues as we saw and then this is a breakdown, are performing as expected at the halfway point in the fiscal year. The left side of the table shows the midyear and then percentage of budget and then the right side shows the year end projections. Taxes which are the first four lines of that table make up almost 75% of the budget.

And there are three categories if you want to see from in the column in the second column to the right, there are three categories that we're projecting are going to perform better than budget. The rest are all kept at budget target. And again, we're going to see more. We do continue to monitor these on a monthly basis for volatility in the regional and our own market sensitivity that impacts us. She raised your hand.

I have a question for one of the lines on this chart. Are you done with this? Sure. Talking about this chart. The line, I think it's the sixth line down where it's 84% use of money on and then it cuts off. Can you explain a little bit what that is and maybe why it's so high above the 50% mark?

Sure. So use of money is the interest earnings and then the facilities rental. So our unreserved, the unassigned fund balance and other capital balances are invested and those earn interest. So when I go further, I'll tell you why we are thinking, why I'm projecting we're going to get 200 more than what we budgeted. But those are the main and then other leases, but it's primarily the interest income that we're looking at that we project.

Revenue highlights, so property related taxes, those are both property and transfer tax, they make up for about 65 percent of the revenue budget and these are the prime cost revenue drivers for us and property taxes came in at 19,700,000.0 or $500,000 over budget. Sorry, they came in at $10,000,000 at December, which is 51% of budget and we're projecting that we're going to end the year at 19,700,000.0 which is 50,000 over budget, less than 1% total. And this is 4% over last fiscal year and about 3.5% over the six month mark and we do get a little bit like the supplementals and some that show up in the second payment more than so it's not exact half at December. Transfer tax, sorry, had this formatted so nicely but somehow it's showing up in font courier over here, so it's looking like all spread all over the place. Pardon me for that.

So transfer tax receipts total 2,450,000.00 or 58% which is over the half year, I mean 50% budget. This is 12% over December year and 8% over our budget target and you'll see in the next next two slides this is as a result of higher value houses on the market and we have more data. So this one, so this chart shows a monthly transfer tax receipts for calendar year, all the even prior to the beginning of the fiscal year, just to get a sense of what twelve months look like. Purple line is the ten year average, the green line is what the actual receipts are and clearly it's a sign of the transit tax receipts are very uneven month to month, especially in the month of August, November and December they're like so and April in the previous fiscal year but far away from the average pattern. And for that reason I'm like projecting that the year end is keep the budget as our year end target not increase it even though November and December have helped rebound the loss in August but here is why the next chart.

The purple line is the average sale price, home sale price and then the bars are the number of home sale and the blue is the half year mark and the orange ones are the full year and for fiscal year '26, the last one, the orange bar is projected based on the average of the first line nine years. So if we see after the COVID boom, like oxymorons but COVID boom, after '22, we've been around 60 to 65 houses selling around December and in 2026 we've gone even below the 65 ish mark, so we are at 59. So fewer houses sold but if you see the purple line, it went far up from 2,800,000.0 to 3,200,000.0 in average sales. So we had two very big large value homes sell, so which it's a temporary increase. When I look at projections for the last ten years, we do see some and again this is another very volatile revenue category for us.

So based on that, I'm projecting we'll keep our to be on the conservative side as well. We'll keep our budget target as our year end projection. This one, let's continue on the revenue highlights. So investment income, we were talking about the use of money and property as you asked in that question has exceeded budget by 81% due to reinvestment timing. So there were maturities that expire there were maturities of our investments in I want to say between August and November that we reinvested and we're getting better interest rates than some of the ones that were that matured because they were either locked in for three or four years and we had lower interest rate on them then.

And then also dividend to some extent dividend payments are not spread evenly across the year, so that could be a partial. But based on the reinvestments, I'm projecting we're going to end the year at least $100,000 over the budget target. Recreation program, revenues are exceeding budget due to the program demands, mainly the contract camps and programs and they came in at 58% of budget as of December and this of course translates into higher costs to run those programs since they are third party program conducted by third party contractors and if the current revenues, I'm sorry, if current trends continue, I'm projecting that we would end the year with 200,000 more in revenues from these programs. Of course, a good chunk of that goes into supporting the cost related, increased cost related. And then the rental income mainly from community hall is ahead of budget at 58%, 58 seems to be a magic number for some of them somehow at 265,000 and so year end projection is adjusted to increase by 100,000 assuming that the trends would continue.

Ambulance charges, the ambulance service charges are trending above expectations and we're projecting the year would end with additional 100,000 in that category. And then building, in building permit and planning fees, it is tracking with budget. Although the last I do want to highlight that in the last two to three months of the six month window, there was a slowdown compared to the first four months and for the six months we're at target but if the two month trend continues, it's kind of a category we need to monitor and so no changes to that as far as the year end projections are concerned for the budget of 2,130,000.00. And then of the 2,600,000.0 in ARPA funds, the federal grant funds 327,000 was the remaining and it was spent on the dispatch center renovation project and with this all the ARPA funds have been fully expended as planned, all 2.6 have been expended. We will report out our last report as of April 1.

So we're like a year ahead of the deadline provided by the Federal Register. So that was good. Shifting to the expenditures now, overall expenditures are tracking closer to the 50% mark at 51%, 20,600,000.0 spent as of December 31. Cost pressures are persistent but manageable at this point. We only have six months of data and then I want to say at a high level variances are concentrated in few departments, one or two and we'll see more of that in the next couple of slides.

And so mainly the overages are driven by the personnel, which I've kind of highlighted 58% and then non departmental, it's offset a little bit by liability but our workers' compensation costs are coming in higher than what we had budgeted. These are partially offset in operating costs and drilling further into the overages, so fire department their overtime is the largest source of overage 500,000 that I'm projecting by year end, they will be over budget. They're experiencing higher overtime costs due to vacancies and then there have been three employees that have been on absence due to workers' compensation and for a good chunk of the six months. So that has contributed to and the year end projection in my opinion would be close to 625 and then offset by some under spending in their operations and maintenance costs and then also the ambulance service charges coming over budget, net of that I think they're projected to overspend by $500,000 Recreation department, we just saw higher demand for their programs, which of course correlates to higher third party contract costs and $150,000 more in their costs for personnel as well as operations. Can you explain the ambulance costs fees that come in?

Can you

just highlight the level of that program?

Sure. So when we were looking at the revenue highlights, it's a surcharge. Oh, you wanna sure. Fire chief can speak.

Yeah. I'm totally fine pausing and having our fire chief talk to us about our ambulance.

Madam Mayor, Thank budget you. I'm Dave Brannigan, the fire chief. So, we charge anytime we transport a patient in our ambulance. If they're a resident, we bill their insurance and collect on that portion of the policy. If they're Medicare or Medi Cal, we can collect that. For residents, we don't bill for any additional costs, co pays, things like that. So, there's no out of pocket cost for our residents. For non residents, they're responsible for the entire bill. And that fee is set by a county rate that we adopt that is used for ambulance service countywide. So, it's completely dependent on how many transports we get and people's ability to pay in their insurance.

And the last one is the non departmental overage of projected of $200,000 due to higher workers' compensation claims. So that's a net overage of 850,000 offset by 700,000 in under spending across some first and foremost under spending across several departments and due to contracts coming under budget for HR vendors and then delay or pushing actually election costs and actuarial assumption study costs to next fiscal year, along with planning and building coming experiencing lower environmental consulting and supplemental planning services costs. And then in public works, there are fewer storms management costs and then true pruning sorry, tree pruning contract has been highly competitive bid and we are projecting that it's gonna come in below the projected cost. And then $200,000 in aquatic subsidy, the general fund subsidy since the pool is going to be opening in the second half of the fiscal year. So we may not meet all the $400,000 as was planned when the budget was done.

So the savings on the tree pruning and storm management, it wasn't a different of any of that. We just had less storms and more and better costs come in for tree pruning.

Absolutely. Yes.

Okay. Good.

I think we'll keep going, but we're good. We can circle back to that.

So moving along to some of the capital projects. Equipment fund is supported by general fund and general fund transfers and those are mainly funded by one time year end balances. No ongoing funds, but overall this fund is in a better shape than most of the other ones you're going to see. No additional transfers is required for this year. And if you see the planned funding in fiscal year 'twenty five, 'twenty six, it's at zero, that green bar in the middle.

We did transfer $8.50 in 'twenty four'twenty five last fiscal year using year end funds. And looking ahead for next another eight years, the fund remains adequately funded for near term.

So can

you expand on on why we have put money in there in the past and why we're not planning to put money into the equipment fund next year. So

if you look at it at the end of 'thirty two, 'thirty three, we end up with 1,200,000.0 as a balance. That's the last ending balance. That's the last column to the far right. Our as you will see in the next few slides, our facilities capital and other funds are in dire need. They don't have money to get us that far along.

So equipment, of course, drives our operations, and we need to make sure that we are funding our operations appropriately. So I feel at this point, we are adequately funded given our plan. We're going to revisit this when we do next year's budget and verify that our needs same as what we looked at last year or has any big need come up? And based on that, we'll figure how far along we are. We did put in this button if you see, it has been last couple of years, like around 800, so we did put eight fifty.

It was just advancing the current year's budget appropriation. In current year we have a budget appropriation of $8.50 to be transferred. So at this point we're assuming and staff will present that at year end that we're not going to make that transfer for this year since we already advanced it using last year's year end funds. Am I confusing too much?

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Yep. I think the the question is, were there some was there some equipment that we were planning to replace? Equipment fund that we didn't actually wind up doing last year.

If you look at the expenditures, I mean I'd have to look at what was the budget planning, but we have been making consistent expenditures and the expenditures in twenty four million twenty five million was $1,000,000 This year we're projecting $1,700,000 So we're pretty much on target unless it was a 3,000,000 expenditure that we were forecasting which is quite not in the budget yet. So it's not in the plan. So is it sort

of a decision to draw down the balance on that account because there's a higher need for other funds in the city?

No. I mean, the fund is adequately funded for the next eight or nine years. We could choose to put in another 2,000,000, but it's just going be

It's just going to sit there.

Sit there, exactly. So we feel it has a better need for our infrastructure or other things, then that's why not wanting like the proposal is not to fund another 850,000 of this.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sure. May I make sure.

One way to think about it is at the next audit period when we're looking at our year end financial statements, we'll have an opportunity to provide you with recommendations if we outperform projections. And at that time, you might see staff come forward with a recommendation to take some portion of those funds, place them into the facilities capital fund, some portion into the equipment. Replacement fund, you'll see a strategy that's recommended and that's how we got to the place where the $850,000 was recommended to backfill 24,025 thousand dollars You wouldn't necessarily hear that in the midyear or at the budget period. You'll hear it when we outperform a budget projection at year end closing, if that helps.

And that's kind of a pattern in practice that the city has engaged in for decades, right, which is if we've had a good year, our revenue beats our expenditures, we think, okay, what can we squirrel away like a little squirrel with acorns like where can we put this money from what do we know is coming up, is it a new roof for the community hall? Is it, you know, weatherproofing somewhere? So so this has always been kind of a look back fill the fund exercise.

Yeah. And you can't actually do that till the end of the fiscal year versus now, which is the midyear report. I guess I'm just confused because it says staff recommends not duplicating this transfer in the current fiscal year. So I thought there was some, I don't know, thing that was informing that statement. But, so that could potentially change based on the actual numbers over the next six months or four months or whatever. Thank you.

Moving along to the street related funds, which is comprised of Measure BB, Alameda County sales tax 1%, Measure F, the vehicle registration fee, gas tax and then the Senate Bill one, which was the gasoline excise tax and vehicle registration surcharge part of that bill. So we are tracking our revenues to be at budget at this time as of December. And as of December 31, have spent $1300000.0.01 $2.08 3 to be exact, in expenditures as of December 31. And the paving plant projects for twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, and also the Moraga Avenue safety improvements are the priority projects along with the sidewalk repair, which is budgeted at 650,000 in the Facilities Maintenance Fund. And I'm gonna move to that fund.

This shows five years review of the facilities maintenance fund, the top section is the revenues and the bottom section is the expenditures. So as of December 25, 125,000 has been spent, which includes a 183,000 on annual maintenance and repairs in this fund. And I do want to note that at year end, we moved 250,000 to this fund, and that has been reflected here. And at the end of fiscal year twenty seven, we'll have a balance of 427. But one thing to note, we're assuming over $1,000,000 in general fund subsidy in each of this year, next year and the following year.

So this is again a fund that is supported by one time year end balances and not any ongoing revenue sources.

Okay. So just to clarify the sidewalk funding 650,000 this year is not coming from Measure BB or any of the it was referenced on the prior slide, but it's not coming from any of the gas tax Coming from the general fund.

From facilities maintenance.

From facilities maintenance, which is being funded by the general fund. Okay.

And I'll the next section is the Facilities Capital Fund and I truncated that one because we have a huge amount of discussion on this towards the end. So what you see on this slide is the actuals for the last two years and current year's budget. As of December 31, have spent 1,350,000 And if we keep up like look at the orange row and you see the ending balance for the fund is $3,000,000 We try to do 4,000,000 to $7,000,000 ish depending on the kind of projects that we have. So it's not enough to last us more than another fiscal year. So as of fiscal year 'twenty seven, we are projected that we're projecting the funds are going to be depleted unless we identify any future funding for ongoing sources from ongoing sources.

Elaborating a little bit more on the facilities capital projects, major projects that are nearing completion include the community pool. The total budget is $34,900,000 and that included $5,400,000 in facilities capital funds. We currently have a balance of about unspent funds about $2,000,000 and if there are going to be any unspent funds once the project is closed, completed and closed, those are going to be returned to the facilities capital fund because all the bond funds have been expended. Dispatch center renovation project budgeted at $3,400,000 of that $900,000 is from facilities capital funds and the project is very close to completion. As of December 31, we have spent $2,900,000 and we will be closing out this project soon as well.

Storm drain system improvements, about little over $40,000 remaining to finish one small element of the project, the Sharon M. New drainage improvements have been completed. And the fire station alerting system has, as of December, spent 192,000 against a budget of $300,000 And then highlighting the projects that we have completed during fiscal year 2026, all within the approved funding levels include the resurfacing of the Linda Beach Pickleball Courts at 270,000 sewer truss pipe project at 500,000 and then 250,000 for green infrastructure at Fairview and Grand Avenue, that project, and another $2.50 for Linda Beach playground improvements. And then Piedmont Park, the pathway replacement project was completed at 134,000. Okay, now the fun stuff, CalPERS.

Sorry, I'm switching back to kind of general fund, but this is something we should really review. So the pension costs continue to increase due to prior year market declines.

So

if you see the bottom line in fiscal year twenty twenty three, the total pension costs were $4,000,000 and they've grown by 35% to $5,400,000 in 2026. Over four years, 35% increase. And that's primarily due to the increases, like about 38% increase, if you see the 16% here and then another 22%. So I don't know why this is not moving. And the unfunded accrued liability payments.

And those rely mainly on the investment portfolio, but they're always delayed. So the decline we haven't still recovered from the decline of 2021 and '21, 'twenty two. So hopefully, we're going to start seeing some relief in the unfunded accrued liability payments in 2027, the coming budget year. May not increase this drastically, but normal cost increases have been more modest. If you see that as the first line, And those are driven mainly by payroll increases, not the market investment.

And for next year, I'm projecting that we're going to see us not as stark increase in unfunded liabilities, accrued liability payment. And here is even more fun stuff. So the green line is the discount CalPERS discount rate and that is a rate that's assumed by them for their investments and then the black line is what the portfolio actually did for them. Highly volatile. It's all over the map with trend, kind of a pattern trend.

So the discount rate has dropped from 8.25%. It shows slightly because the spread is huge on the x axis, but has dropped from 8.25 to 6.8%. So that means we're paying more in cost now to smooth our future pension payments. So that's what the discount rate does for us. And that's exactly what's reflected in the unfunded accrued liability that we saw in the slide before this one.

And the returns are highly volatile. That's one observation we make from here. Then the contribution lags at least like I said in the other slide, they lag at least two to three years to recover. The good years, last year and this year, hopefully will impact the next two years of our unfunded accrued liability payments. And then the recent negative returns, the market maybe we have forgotten, but it was so down that we still haven't recovered from it.

Even though we had two good years, we haven't still not recovered from the decline of 'twenty one and 'twenty two. So this is kind of a delayed impact we see, but interesting. That's like one big takeaway for CalPERS that it takes them couple of years to recover out of the market conditions even though our increase for this year is high despite a nice return on the investments last year.

Have a about that. So if there's another market downturn and we haven't even recovered from the last market downturn, what effect is that going to have on the bottom line? Like how dire is that potential?

It will have an impact. We're going to see a little relief though despite a decline. Because of the lag. Because of the lag. The last two years of peak is going to show some relief and then we're going to see a drop maybe a year or two later.

So they do build when they do the valuations and assumptions for all the next thirty, forty years of the portfolio. They do build all this volatility into it because it's known that we're going to see these fluctuations like last thirty years. So when we do the study valuation for the next planning for the next forty years or so, we assume they the actuaries assume a huge amount of volatility in that as well. Thank you. Sure.

A little bit better topic to discuss trust funds. So they're currently funded at 71% as of June 30 when we closed the last fiscal year and investment returns in 2025 on the calendar, that's the top line of the middle section. They've still been solid, but not as solid as 'twenty three and 'twenty four, so there's some decline you see there. And then the OPEB, the other post employment benefits, we are projecting that we may be able to start making the premium payments using the fund starting in 2029. I'll be working with our actuaries, in fact sorry, the consultants to do a study.

We may be able to do it sooner, but I do want to make sure we're in a solid position before we do that and we're able to handle swing in the market if it were to go negative and not just assume we're going to be doing good. So I don't anticipate we're going to be able to do it before 2029. And until then the pars, the pension rate stabilization fund is we our ten year projections assume we're going to start drawing it down starting next fiscal year for over three years. And once we do make OPEB payments go away that means saving of $300,000 in general fund for other things. I want to wrap up with a few things that we will continue to monitor for the rest of this fiscal year and as we plan for the next year's budget.

Fire labor contract ends on 06/30/2026. So that's going to be moving target for the next few months. Capital funding sustainability is a growing concern. We saw that in the capital project fund. We saw it in the maintenance fund and equipment not immediately, but it's not funded on an ongoing basis.

So at some point that will deplete too. The real estate market continues to influence our revenue projections and then the number of home sales has dropped. The average sales prices are temporarily increased and then the assessed valuation, although it has increased 4% this year over last year's assessed value, our ten year plan assumes a 4.9% increase. So we're not where we want to be even with a 4% increase. The last few charts we saw our pension liabilities, so those are quite significant and it's going to be something we're going to revisit when we do our next year's budget.

The Police and Fire Pension Fund, we know it is not going to fold for another we're to keep it active for another, I want to say, five to seven years. But once that's ready to be closed out, it could assist with OPEB costs or PARS is only going to help for three years, so that's another place we're going to look for assistance as we move along. And with that, that concludes my part of the presentation. And do we do questions all at the end?

Actually, why don't we stop here because that was there's a lot of information in those slides. So see if we have any questions before we turn to our public works director, Daniel Gonzalez, to talk about CIP. I have some questions, but I'm gonna look at my colleagues first to see if there's any questions about presentation, the mid year budget presentation that we just received. Yes. Councilmember Long.

Thank you for this. There's lots of good news, obviously, things to monitor, but but good things happening. And I just wanna start where you kinda ended, which is, I don't know if we wanna call it revenue generating, but there is possibility that when some of these funds reach their maturation, if you will, that any money remaining could be used for other things. That's correct.

I do want to say admissible uses because some of them come with some caveats and there is legal there is going to be legal review of It those

can't be for everything.

For it may not be for discretionary uses. Maybe for some specific needs.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Sure. And then the other sort of thing that I think I'm observing, which is it's not only is this good financial planning, but it seems to be good project management that we're sort of mid year and all of these things are tracking sort of on budget. And I just want to confirm that that's kind of a correct interpretation of what we're hearing.

Wanna say something?

I would say overall, yes.

Okay. Well, that's great news. Congratulations to the team. You know, there's lots of ways this could break out. And so it's nice that, you know, at least for the first half of this fiscal year, we're tracking financially and in terms of our project management. So kudos.

Okay. Councilor Ramsay?

Yes. Thank you. Yeah. And you know you did start out with over 50% through the year, we're 50% on revenue and we're 50% on expenditures. You could have just went, there you go.

That was

a good lead. That was a good lead. I have a question, and I think you're if you could go back to Slide 14, and I think this setup, I often talk about street paving. And I think this is a good example. It shows if you look at the street resurfacing, so that's our funding. And our funding comes from two sources, gas tax and SB-one, state SB-one. And those are funds that we get from the state and the county. Is that correct? Did I get that right?

SB-one the state and then gas taxes

Is the county.

Gas taxes county and measure b b would be another source that has some funding restrictions, but is also used for roadways and that's also a county measure.

Yes. Great. Thank you. So this this puts it this is nice cause I like this, cause it shows where it comes from. So then that dollar and that's 50% of the way through the year, is that right?

Yes. So that determines the scope of our paving. We start with the funding that we're given and then we go, okay, what can we do for that money? So it's a very passive way to say take care of our roads, because we wait until we get the money from the state and the county and then we say, okay, this is how much money we have, what do we do? Instead of prioritizing what needs to be done and planning for it and being proactive, we're reactionary, right, because of the funding. Is that

Well, I mean, I think we have a pavement management system that identifies the streets, that places them in an order for PCI, that then lines them up for a readiness for funding.

But implementing that plan is completely dependent on how much money we get? Yes.

That's correct. We have several funding scenarios in the pavement management plan, but we always come back down. So one principle, and you'll hear me speak about it in just a moment, is that we always look at the available anticipated available funding when we plan to go forward. So unless there's a reason to believe that, say, there'll be like an extra $1,000,000 that will be in here, we are going to plan with what we believe these available revenues are going to be for any given fiscal year. So that's kind of I think that's answering your question.

Right. Yes. So I just want to point that out and make sure that it's looking this way. For instance, like if we would take a look at our streets and say, oh, in order to bring it up to whatever this ranking, we're going to have to spend this much every year. But we can't or the way we're set up, we don't do that because we wait for the money to come in and then we say, okay, how much of this can we do? And we say, okay, well, that's

Just a tough little more into that is that we the county plans, what their budget is going to be, what their revenues are going to be. We get those estimates when we plan next year's budget, and we plan our projects based on those estimates.

Right.

We don't wait till finding out what we're actually going to get. We have a dialogue with them all the time to figure out if they're on track, and we plan we implement as we plan.

Right. Maybe I'm not saying this well enough because I think the way we're doing it is I mean, it's appropriate, but we can't be proactive because if we think our streets need $100 of work every year and or $100 and then more in order to keep it at a certain level, We can't plan going from the scope required backwards to the funding. We plan from the funding available to what we can do for the scope. That's what I mean. And

then the few streets that are within our street system that are eligible for regional funding, which there are very few that generate the number of trips from a larger amount of traffic counts, those are the ones that we compete for outside funding And in the chance that we are given to compete and are successful, then we get awarded and we wait for that year of eligibility when it's allocated, made available. And we have been quite successful in those pursuits, but there's only so many runways within the city that are eligible.

Right.

Right. Yeah.

Can I make a comment on that particular point too just for the benefit of the public? Is that that affects people's perceptions about why are you redoing Highland Ave or Moraga Ave. You just redid that street. My street is terrible or this other street I drive on is terrible. So that's a Right. Will give people an understanding of why some streets get more attention. Maybe Daniel can identify the streets

that Yeah, no, And I'll just add that so the county, the way they are configured, they are looking for large, you know, vehicle volume, but also multimodal, So think bus route, think bike lanes, they want to combine all of those, these complete streets principles. And so Moraga, Grand Avenue, we are mostly restricted to those. That's where we find we're most competitive. That's where we've received funding. And so if you look at the recent, you know, county grant that we have for Moraga Avenue and Grand Avenue, you're looking at 1,300,000.0, 1,200,000.0 in funds that we've received in the last three or four years.

I don't think that we are competitive anywhere else. We just don't have the ability to we do not meet their criteria.

But that is amazing that we have met the criteria and been able to secure grants in that amount over the past three to four years. That's I mean, kudos to staff and everyone working on identifying the grants and applying for them. I mean, that's terrific.

But then it leaves our local streets the same time unaddressed. I think we do recognize as staff that those are the streets also that our residents travel on and that there aren't enough dollars in a given year for a pay as you go type of project completion.

Can I just follow this thread, which would be what would be the alternative strategy to addressing what you're raising?

So I'll start and maybe let our city administrator jump in. So what we have is in our pavement management plan there are several scenarios, and one of the scenarios, I think it was discussed here previously, was having a PCI of 71, which is always again, just for the benefit of those who don't live this like I do or haven't heard it several times, 71 is where you can start to use maintenance treatments as opposed to using expensive rebuilds, reconstructions of roadways. So that's kind of a magic area. Having all of your roadways in that area or above allows you to use very inexpensive maintenance treatments that can just stretch your dollars and keep your roadways in very, very good condition. So that was a target.

How do we get our roadway, our citywide PCI to seventy one? And there's a budget shortfall I think of 850,000. I'm shooting from just memory, but it was 850,000 annually. So that's not insignificant. When you start to look and compare to what these numbers are, it's not insignificant.

I'm doing math off the top of my head, that's dangerous. But you know 20%, 25% additional revenue that's necessary to do that. So the alternative I guess would be to identify, if you wanted to, to read 71, these funding, these revenue sources tend to be very, very stable year to year. Now the one that you have to watch out for is SB1, right, because that does expire. I think it was twenty years, and I think it went into effect around 2015 or so, so, you know, we're past the half life.

We're on the backside of that. That goes away at some point unless it's renewed by voters statewide. The rest of these measures, fairly stable revenues, I mean, every year. Seem to go up about, you know, 3% or so. There's a little bit of variance, but generally that's what you're looking at. So I know for the last ones, you know, we I'm usually able to predict the revenues going 3%, and then they fine tune them at some point. Those numbers come to our finance director, and they'll plug those in in the final budget. But usually they're pretty close. So then you know your delta. You know your budget shortfall.

If you wanted to, say, get to 71, you know you're about 850,000 short, and you have to figure out where does that source of revenue come from. How are you subsidizing this fund, roadway funds essentially, in order to do that? And so there's various scenarios. Again, now, you know, I'm the one who spends the money, and she'll have to talk about where the appropriate source of that money is, but usually it's some type of general fund subsidy. Now I do know also, and this is from other jurisdictions, there are a variety of fees that sometimes are used, right?

So sometimes it comes from permit fees. I'm not suggesting things here that, know, without consulting, but I've been in municipalities before that have had, like for encroachment permits or building permits, there is a fee subsidy, because those construction tends to damage roadways, and it speeds up the degradation of that roadway sufficiently that very often the first thing we get are calls from surrounding neighbors saying, oh, they've really beat up our street. Can you when are going to pave it? And so, you know, you do see that there are certain, sometimes, permit fees, but those are also borne by residents, and so that's something to advised of. Right?

Some of those are paid by, you know, East Bay MUD or by PG and E, but ultimately it goes to the rate payers as well. So these are things that you have to be aware of, but I've seen, you know, scenarios where we've we've had that. I know certainly in my my my previous, you know, municipality, I was part of of putting a fee like that in place, and it did generate hundreds of thousands of us of dollars for us to utilize for roadways specifically every year. So that's one possibility. But beyond that, I think it's general fund subsidy is likely

So what you're looking for super fans of the city council may recall that one of my favorite topics to bring up whenever we get on road degradation is how we could potentially get money from Amazon and UPS and all of these very large trucks that use our little narrow city streets daily, right. I mean the wear and tear from these delivery vehicles has to be quantifiable and they don't pay a thing as far as I know, right. So Do

other municipalities have a fee?

I don't think so and I don't think Piedmont doesn't get a sales tax, the county has a sales tax but we don't necessarily get,

I mean

we get funds from the county obviously goes to county and then comes back to us in some form but I don't know.

I think it's per vehicle, it's not any big vehicle or commercial vehicle, it's not separated. But then we there is always that final option of issuing debt, and it could be in the form of either general obligation or revenue. Since we have revenue stream, we could issue revenue bonds, just like we do for sewer. I mean if we want to accelerate the roadway improvements and get to a better percentage on our PCI on a faster path

citywide with the citywide strategy.

Yes, we traditionally have not done that, but go ahead.

On that topic of maybe having a fee for these larger commercial vehicles that come in, is there any chatter about that from our neighboring jurisdictions? No one's looking at it?

I've seen it incorporated into franchise agreements and as we think about our new trash hauling contract that is, I mean, I've seen a flat fee embedded into a franchise fee agreement.

And we don't have that now in our trash. Those are pretty big trucks.

Okay. But not for all commercial vehicles. I'm not familiar

with that.

Okay. Thank you.

I have a follow-up question on that too. Might be for Director Gonzalez. But if we continue to not bring up that level, what what is it called again? PCI.

Yeah. That's pavement condition index, PCI.

PCI. Does it get worse over time? Like you were saying off the top of your head, 850,000 annually. Is it just gonna stay at 850,000? Or because we're not addressing streets, does it gradually get worse and worse with the same amount of funds put into it?

Yeah, so what our projection shows that it does get worse. It will continue to degrade, I think, into the low 60s, and so that funding delta gets larger proportionally, And I don't know exactly what those numbers will look like. But I think it has grown a little bit in that time and also costs become more expensive. So just with inflation, you expect construction costs that something that might have cost six years ago, you know, 650,000 it might have been a $650,000 delta and just because of inflation, it might be $8.50 now.

Thank you.

Yes. I'd like to

rephrase what I was saying, because I think this conversation helped put it. So we are very strategic, resourceful and thrifty in using these funds to the best and plan for it. You do a great job of that. But the system we have in place doesn't allow us to improve, right? It just allows us to kind of maintain a steady degradation of the roads, right, because we're limited.

So regardless of how strategic, resourceful and thrifty we are in getting these funds, we're kind of we're not improve, we can't improve. Unless something else. Unless we find some other fund for it besides what we get from the state and the county.

And if the increase in costs outpace the increase in revenues, we're actually moving in the other direction, the unwanted, the negative direction.

Okay. That's what I

was trying to

say earlier. Yes.

Well, you've redeemed yourself. You said it very well that time. We're all with you. Yes. That's great. Okay. Any other questions?

I have one other question about the I think it's the general fund balance.

Is that one of the first slides?

It's page six of the agenda report. I don't know if it's in On page six. Yeah. So fund balance there shows 17% of expenditures. And when you look at the as this being the fifth year, we're continually going down. Is that trend gonna continue down and what level I think we've talked about this before, but what what sort of lowest level of that percentage of expenditures are we willing to accept?

So by charter, the highest is 25%. And by industry practice, lowest is 12% is what I've seen, 10% to 12%. 12 if the capital cost and debt is high, it's 12%. Otherwise, it's 10% to 15% normally is on the lower for this floor. And two things I wanna mention here.

One is that this is midyear projections. We're not at year end yet. And and for all municipal budgeting is tends to on the conservative side. So, I mean, I I I don't have the crystal ball, but I've done my due diligence to not over estimate the year end projections. And then the other thing I want to mention is that we did divert $2,600,000 in year end funds last year for the capital projects, capital funds.

So we did not start with the plan $9,000,000 that we had to that and we diverted 2,600,000.0 of that already. So that brought our fund balance to 6,700,000.0 but we'll continue to monitor how the revenues are growing and how our expenses. I mean it's easier to control the expenses. Of course, the big chunk is the staffing cost, but revenues are one we have to monitor more aggressively.

Thank you. Okay,

I have a couple of questions. One, we have talked a lot about unfunded state mandates. So I actually was going to look at our city attorney and ask her just off the top of your head, thinking if I didn't ask you this in advance, but I'm thinking about storm drains runoff. I think there's some compliance with that, right, that's coming up. I think there's we're always looking at ways to improve ADA, that's another sort of state mandate.

And then of course we have the housing element, which we've spent quite a bit of general funds on. Is there any other unfunded state mandates that we need to be sort of thinking about and budgeting for? And I'll just say that's an open ended question, that's just something that as we look at CIP and go forward in this conversation, I do feel like the state is sort of because this state funding and county funding is actually going to get more squeezed over the next years in the near future. So I think there are more I think is going to be put back on the municipalities and the question is kind of anticipating what those what that might be. So anyway, going to just leave that out there.

And then question actually it was for our Building and Planning Director. I noted in the report that Director Bawa said that we have less work or sorry, less coming in from building and planning fees and that trajectory seems to be on downward slope. I remember we had a very robust discussion about right sizing our fees that took effect January 1. And I'm wondering if there's a correlation between changing our fee structure and lack of people applying for permits. I'm just a little, know, head scratchy, like, that just a coincidence or is there something we should be concerned about in terms of noncompliance from our residents?

Like is there less work happening or is there less permitted work happening? Hope that question makes sense.

We are receiving fewer permits during the last couple of months. Planning permits, not building permits. Building permits have been pretty steady. So I think it's really a reflection of the cost of construction overall. The things have been more and more expensive and that's not changing.

I haven't seen any data that correlates our fees to any lack of permit applications or people doing things out of permit. We know we've gotten plenty of appliance, water heater, that kind of thing going on, which is usually what is not done with a permit. Those, we made a flat fee, which was really inclined to match the cost of the service provided to the fee. So, I think we're we still are right sized. I don't think we're seeing anything. I haven't seen any evidence of it.

Okay. So it's coincidence. That's the most correlation.

All right.

Thank you. Okay. I think those are my questions for now. I did say there's another acronym because we all love acronyms so much. So we could talk about the AAF, which is anticipated available funding. And if we wanted to use another acronym.

We should wait that out.

Just now, yeah. We could talk about the AAF. All right. We'll see if it catches on. Alright. So there's another we have another part two. Right? We have public works director Daniel Gonzalez, thank you, talking about CIP. So director Bawa, thank you so much for keeping us on track with that. Really appreciate the midyear review.

We're talk about CIP and then we'll have a more continue to have more robust conversation. This is I'm just going remind us and folks, Tom, this is our really our only agenda item at this stage in the evening, so please ask questions. This is a really good time to kind of dig into these details.

Well, thank you. Madam Mayor, council members, so I will what we just talked about right now was kind of the look back, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the look forward over the next year and then also the next five years. And bear in mind, this is it's kind of a template, it's not necessarily a plan, right? And I think the way I would describe the differences is that one is that these are things that we've identified, that we're aware of, that we know need to be addressed, and they give us a path forward, but it's not set in stone, right? Very often in year five, what becomes a priority five years from now is different than what you're projecting it to be.

So just bear that in mind. There are many things that will shift in that time period, not least of which is we don't have funding to do what is presented here. And so that alone will shift the thinking as we look to prioritize. And I think that's a really important thing, because how we prioritize really determines you know what how we proceed, how we move forward, and there's not necessarily any right or wrongs, there's just trade offs. And so I will walk you through a few of these things.

A lot of these are facility centric, not all of them. Know, of them are in parks, some of them are many are in facilities, some are in our like our median islands and our street spaces. And so the first thing I would do is orient you around, there's a few funds we've talked about already, so facilities maintenance fund, we've talked about. With facilities maintenance, these tend to be very predictable costs. So think the window here has broken and we have to replace the window, right?

Maybe it's broken for a reason that's entirely predictable. And it's a low budget low cost item, low enough that we kind of replace that with everyday maintenance and some of those are planned and some of those things are unplanned. And so we might be planning to replace the carpet in this room and it may cost $10,000 and that might be a choice, something that we're planning to do and that would be planned maintenance. And then you have, you know, things that are totally unplanned, like, you know, for some reason someone walks in here and they tear it apart, and now we have to do it, and it was unplanned, and now we're reactive. So those costs, very, very stable.

You know, Karen just went through some of those funds. We often get asked I get asked about the crossover, it's usually dollar threshold amount, and whether it's foreseen or not foreseen. So now let's get back to the look ahead. So, know, I think the first thing that I would do, you know, and the way I orient myself, is I tend to do it by by fiscal year, and by, you know, how, you know, what what what has been on our our look ahead list, what are what are items that we have had either claims about, or that are issues that have been deferred repeatedly, that we feel we're reaching a kind of a criticality on where we could no longer defer, or we would not recommend deferring any further. And so, know the first thing I would do is I would look at twenty six-twenty seven, which is the year that we have the most control over.

And I would say, you know we did provide a look ahead with costs in several locations. And so some of these items are items that have been talked about and you're aware of, and so I'll start with Piedmont Park irrigation repairs. For those who have I'm sorry, apologies. So this is apologies. Yeah.

So this falls into this would fall into parks. Now, in your packets, there there's additional information where we break out parks by park location. And so Piedmont Park does have some funding that's included, and that funding centers around irrigation repairs. Now I know those of you who have sat on the Park Commission, you've probably heard about these repairs that have been much discussed for maybe about three years. They've been deferred several times over that period.

You know, we have a very antiquated irrigation system. It does not provide proper coverage for the type of planting we have. It was actually designed for very different, ornamental planting, as I would describe it, much more water intensive, that is very difficult to integrate with some of the newer planting that we have, which is more drought tolerant, So, you you are either you're drowning some of your plants, or you're over watering, you know, you're under watering, excuse me, some of your other plants. It's really not configured for what we're doing, and the way you bridge that is by hand watering or by doing, you know, more labor intensive activities, which is what you generally want to avoid. That's the most expensive way to approach it.

The more measured, planned out approach is you modernize your irrigation system. So this is something that's been identified. It's been talked about in our sustainability report, which is still ongoing, and we anticipate concluding in April or May. But I think that this is something again that has been on our radar because it is a real need and we have a defined starting point and we'll likely have to roll it out over several fiscal years. But I think we are excited.

We hope to prioritize that and start moving in that direction. Another item that we have on this list is the turf replacement at Hampton Field. Turf was installed in 2015, I believe. Turf typically has a life of about ten to fifteen years. If it's in regular usage locations, unfortunately out at Hampton, because it's a little league baseball field and soccer field, we've already had several rounds of repair where we have cut out turf and we have had to replace turf.

And what we're seeing is it's wearing faster than anticipated. And so what starts to happen is we start to approach again, I use the term criticality, we are approaching a point where you are looking at either having a field that's not functional for those little league games or you're looking at planning for wholesale replacement of that turf. So we're talking about the infill turf, that's the synthetic turf, not the outfield turf that is natural grass that we actually do reseed, and I think we just likely just reopened it in the last few weeks again. So, that's the outfield and the natural grass turf is something that we are always reseeding annually, but it's the synthetic turf on the infield that we're looking at. That's that's so that's a project that has been prioritized because we want to keep those fields active.

We want to we don't want to take them out of service, if we can help it. Some other projects that have been delayed that have been on this list are the rec building. The repair of the fire escape for those who walk by the rec building, you'll notice that there's a fire escape there that has been covered in orange tape, ESA fencing for a considerable period of time. That has been scheduled for repair. It's been identified.

Currently do not have a functioning fire escape at that location. So we want to make sure that we prioritize that. It has been deferred. We want to get back to making sure we install it. And in addition to that, again, prioritizing fire alarm monitoring system that we have that we currently do not have an active system that's there. And so we do want to get that installed. It has been identified. It's on some of our assessment reports that were done. And it has been on our list to be funded. It's just been deferred for a variety of reasons.

So that's one that we have here listed as a priority. Another thing we have here is some improvements at 801 Magnolia. And I'll stress this, we have two different buckets that so this is where I'll get back into the difference between maintenance and facilities capital. And so we have roof repair that we've identified at 801. We do have leaks every few months over there.

You know, most of those areas we've looked at the roof. We've had several roofing contractors come up and look at our roof. The majority of the roof is in good shape, but there are areas that need repair. The cost threshold is small enough that that goes into a planned maintenance repair. That's how we look at that because you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But one that is in facilities capital and reflected in these numbers are some parking repairs that we've prioritized. So we have some ADA compliant parking repairs. This is part of a continual effort we have to make all of our public spaces compliant with ADA. We think that this is a location where we can control the scope, we can provide compliant parking for this public facility, and it's also in the local vicinity of several other locations in the immediate vicinity of the school and our community pool that would be beneficial. So this is one that we have prioritized and we think this will bring us further into compliance with the requirements that we have.

I'm sorry,

you're just focusing right there on eight zero one Magnolia, ADA

compliance. That is just eight zero one Magnolia. Yeah, that one. And I think it's important to note that the requirements, you know, these requirements are actually fairly complex, and there are people that study just just this stuff, and there are specialists that study ADA compliance. Eighty one Magnolia is unique in that it has an on-site parking area.

There are some parking spaces associated with that, which make it a little bit different than you might for locations that do not have that type of function. So, I think is a very important requirement to differentiate it from some of maybe the other city properties that we have, but because we have on-site parking there, we want to make sure that we provide compliance compliant parking, and that's what we're looking at. Another item that we prioritized, and this one is not inexpensive for the next fiscal year is City Hall window replacement. And I'm bringing this up because at least two times in the last six months, windows have fallen out of the window sills just by people opening them. And so this is a good example of the building degradation reaching a point where we would not recommend, you know, deferring this any further.

Literally, two times in two separate offices, people have opened their windows and the windows have just fallen out. And so there's a significant amount of dry rot in some of these areas. It's been identified previously. You know, we have deferred some of those locations and we do at this point, you know, we're recommending to move forward with that.

And just to be clear, they've fallen onto the roof of another building. So, they haven't fallen onto the street. Thankfully, no one was harmed.

That's correct. Yeah. All of which is to say that part of how these items have ended up and these are some of the larger ticket items in 2026, 2027, but how they've ended up here is because these are items that have been identified. They have been deferred often. There is a component where there is a safety component to most of these.

There is a component of risk and risk assessment to the city as a steward of of these facilities and and and for on behalf of the city trying to determine, you know, how long you can defer something before it becomes a real risk and liability. And and also you you do accrue additional, damage by not resolving some of these things. And you have dry rot and at some point it just gets worse and worse if you're not addressing it. So this is an opportunity for us to do that. So that's just twenty six-twenty seven.

Now I will I'm going to move to 27, 28, and I don't want to, you know, I'm going get bigger and bigger picture as we go. I wanted to go through just the immediate, you know, immediate items we were prioritizing, because I think that really does highlight the train of thought, and then we can delve in, you know, as we get into questions, I think you'll see that many of the answers will come back to some of those same themes. 27, 28, are you know, some of the numbers start to get a little bit larger, And the reason they're getting larger is because some of these improvements are improvements to facilities facility part of facility assessment reports that have been prepared that have identified deficiencies in some of our facilities. And so we're looking at in terms of big picture, looking at how to implement some of those. Some of these could be replaced as part of larger efforts.

So I'll start at our PD, our police building, and our fire police chief, excuse me, is not here. But you know, some of the upgrades that were identified were upgrades to the evidence room, to the armory, to property storage and to the holding areas, all of which have deficiencies, all of which I think are critical for storing things properly and as required by federal law. And so, you know, right now, we wanna make sure that we're getting those items to code, and and that those have been some of the things that have been highest priority and have been identified, by our police and by these reports. These reports tend to identify many things, by the way, some of which are more critical than others. And so the ones that have been identified as being more critical, I think, have a safety component.

For example, the holding area, one of the things identified is the lack of restroom or restroom accessibility. When they are holding someone, if someone has to use the restroom, they take them to the staff restroom. Right? And so that's a practice that's generally frowned upon for obvious reasons, and so this is something they're looking to have addressed in the go forward. And so that is identified.

Now, if there were a different approach to the police building, then obviously some of these things might be shifted or, you know, you approach it differently, but this has been something that has been identified as a real need. And so at this point, we're looking to program it and get that moving forward. In addition to that, it's green infrastructure. I have what is a not insignificant amount of funding for that. For those who've been on this council for most of you, maybe other than Councilmember Plumier, I was very optimistic about two years ago that we had satisfied our county wide green infrastructure requirement.

And so county wide, all municipalities have fallen short of the requirement. And so they have assigned additional green infrastructure to all municipalities. So, our we hit our target, our target moved, and now we have to hit our new target. And, this goes back, know, we just spoke, the mayor was just mentioning unfunded mandates. This is one of those unfunded mandates.

Trash collection is another unfunded mandate with the clean water program. Reporting cost reporting is an unfunded mandate that we have for the clean water program. Green infrastructure very is expensive mandate we have for the clean water program. This is part of our municipal regional permit. These targets and they do call it that.

These targets are assigned to us, which implies that they can change the target at any given point and they have. And so we have more green infrastructure that we are being required to implement by twenty twenty seven-twenty twenty eight, which is why we have it in the twenty twenty seven-twenty twenty eight budget and we're looking at those numbers. So that is unfortunately a requirement of our municipal regional permit and we are not unique in this. I will say that every municipality, if you attend these countywide meetings, every municipality is frustrated that this number has gone up on them, but this is the reality that we have. So that number has been included for that reason, that number being the funding has been included in that fiscal year, that budget year for that reason.

We also have turf replacement at Linda Beach. This is a much larger area than Hampton. It's the cost is proportionately larger. So the numbers that are there at Linda Beach for turf replacement are larger. And I think our estimate we did speak we have what we often do is we speak with vendors about how much it would cost to do this work.

And when we establish these budget numbers, we try to apply a healthy multiplier depending on how far out we think it'll be. If it's a year out, a little bit smaller, if it's two or three years out larger. So Linda Beach has a larger number that's that's been set aside that we're asking for. And that's primarily because the turf there is, I think, over fifteen years at this point. And what we're seeing is the turf itself.

We actually do a very good job quarterly of maintaining it. Nancy Kent is sitting here, but I'll compliment her as if she weren't sitting here that she's very good at that. She has these maintenance contracts lined up, and she does tend to hit the target on it. So every quarter they come out, they rake the turf, they fill it with sand or cork, and do that to keep it functioning at the highest level it possibly can. And with that said, the information we've been given is that it's at the end of its useful life and you can only keep it going so much longer.

And so we think it's lower priority because we do not have tears on Lycampton. It's not tearing at the seams, but what we are getting is it is coming apart. So we're looking to prioritize that. Again, a very highly used in some ways, these are good problems to have. You have this issue because the fields are highly used, they're highly utilized, but because they're highly utilized, we're facing the reality that it does have to be maintained and replaced.

Similarly to some of the city hall windows, the rec building has a very similar issue with its windows. There's a significant amount of dry rot we're going to have to look at, we're going to have to replace. We have actually again, we've done some of the initial assessment work. We've years ago, we brought in an architect to do an evaluation to look at dry rot and prepare some plans. We deferred this work for a variety of reasons, but we're looking at it's lower priority in our minds and some of the city hall window replacement, but it our thought is that it should go that the fiscal year following.

So that's twenty seventwenty eight. Twenty eighttwenty nine, a few things I'd like to highlight again, in some of this, you should keep in mind, could shift. So the PD excuse me, the fire department building, so some of the one of the things that has been identified are some upgrades to sleeping quarters, some modifications that are required. And there's a variety of components to that, what that would involve in terms of ventilation, airflow, actual walls that they have that are soundproof or at least extend all the way up to the ceiling, it gives individuals more privacy. There's a variety of reasons that you would want to have that aside from the comfort of living in that space.

Part of it is the attractiveness of having female firefighters, of having an attractive space that you can go and have some appropriate privacy in your sleeping quarters. So there are several reasons that I'm going to have our fire chief wanted to expand on if there were specific questions there that that that he could do that, I'm sure. But but those are those are numbers that we're looking. I mean, we have included funding in that fiscal year because that has been again identified and long deferred. And so we're now looking to bring that forward.

One of the things that's in there, and it's not a small number, is the Piedmont Park play structure. Again, this is fiscal year twenty twenty eight, twenty twenty nine. And so we do have annual inspections. It's required by law of all of our play structures. And so one of the things that we have become acutely aware of is we have an older wooden structure that is continuously suffering from rot and we are making repairs where there are certain things we can repair with it.

But if the swings have been any indication about the amount of need that we have out there in these playgrounds, I would not want to be without a play structure out there for an extended period. So I think programming funding a few years out is appropriate. If another thing we've learned is that play structures are expensive. They're more expensive than you think. And so, know, you know, when you start looking at the cost, the play structure itself might cost $50,000, but the surfacing and the installation and some of the ADA requirements again that we are required to comply with.

Certainly all of these projects hit a dollar threshold that trigger ADA improvement to be included by code, and so once you hit that level, you're required to make those improvements. Now the more compliant these spaces become, the easier and less expensive those improvements become on the go forward, but you're always going to have some level of cost that takes away from actual installation and equipment to including some ADA improvements that would have to be part of this project as well. So I think we set aside a million dollars for that. Again, keep in mind that the playground at Linda, and this is in dollars from last year, not three years from now, it was $400,000. That was a $400,000 project for the tot lot that we have at Linda.

That's not in terms of scale, that's a much smaller piece of, pieces of play equipment that we have at Linda than what we have at Piedmont Park. So, we would expect that to be more expensive. Those were the those were the big ones in 2829. I will just jump to 2930 because this is a significant one, and it's seismic upgrades that are identified at our fire department. And seismic upgrades are very expensive.

So, in some respects, you can make seismic upgrades without without too much disruption to your upstairs spaces. The ideal time to do it is when you're doing the wholesale remodel of these spaces. So you disrupt one time ideally, maybe it's for an extended time. Many seismic upgrades that are performed on older buildings similar to that are actually exterior, so they're braced frames that are installed on the outside. You see this in San Francisco, you know, on some of these older CM concrete masonry unit buildings that you see, where they have almost like a steel exoskeleton that's built around them.

So, are things that can be done to those buildings to upgrade them, but there is a point, one of the significant items that was identified in our assessment reports that go back to 2017, 2018 is the lack of seismic performance that would occur in a seismic event, and how that would impact the engine bays in particular, right? You know, there's a significant chance excuse me, a significant chance those engine bays would not be operable in the seismic after a seismic event. And so looking to prioritize seismic retrofit becomes something that's very important.

Can I just ask a question on that? So, earlier when we were talking about sort of project planning and financial planning. So for in that example of the seismic upgrade, we wouldn't necessarily bump that up to let's say next year, I would assume there's a lot of planning that goes into that and all of that. So I don't know if you want to just sort of speak to that element of some of these projects where it seems like, hey, this is something that's pretty important, but maybe we're not able to execute on that in the next year or two for whatever reasons?

I think that's a fantastic question, because I think it gets to the essence of what much of this exercise is, which is one of how we prioritize. You know, we there's no shortage of projects. There's no shortage of of risk, right, that we have. And so, one of the reasons why we have deferred some of these harder decisions for these critical, facilities is because, you know, we want to have some time and space to do the planning exercise. I think that's really important.

You know, there there are several different possibilities that we would have. One of them is that this retrofit is the most economical and appropriate way to approach it, and, and there's nothing wrong with that type of approach ultimately. You will spend, you know, in all of these projects, you spend more money than you want, and you might not get everything that you desire, but it might be adequate, and it might be enough. And when you look at it, that might be what the conclusion is. Another might be that if we're gonna spend this money, we wanna have a new facility that gives us even more capability, brings us entirely up to code, but it might be more than you can afford, and and this is what you look at.

Right? Or it might not be. And so that that the planning exercise is very important for that reason. I would never, you know, it's not just because I said across from Kevin, I think that what planners planning is a very important component of this. We want to spend more time thinking about it and planning it than we do building it, right? And that's really critical. So I think that's a really important point. We want to make sure we right size it, we get it right for our budget and for our needs, and ultimately, we end up with a product that suits everyone. So, I think I don't know if that answers your question. We do have some funds pardon me, one last thing, we do have some funds identified in the next fiscal year for a planning exercise.

Again, that's one that we had in the current fiscal year. We deferred, you know, we had ended up deferring that to next fiscal year, but that still included because we do think that' a very important component of what we want to do and that planning exercise can be very significant or it could be much more narrow. We could right size it but we want to make sure we do think it' very important to go through that.

I was just gonna

say thank you. I mean, I think that, you know, I didn't wanna just assume, but I'm I think it's important for people to understand that it's it's not, hey, even if we had all the money in the world, there would still be a time that we would need to scaffold things where we knew we would have the staff to be able to do it and so forth and so on. And so I think thank you for answering.

Yeah, that actually is approaching the end of what my prepared comments were. I will say that, you know, there's this is not unique. We do not have enough funding to do all the things that we've identified and we know we need. And so it does come down to how we prioritize. We do put a lot of thought into it.

We take feedback from council throughout the year. We hear from residents. Thankfully, only a fraction of those make it to you, and we have to answer for, but but you know, we do we do try to account for what we're hearing in in the community, assessing risk, assessing claims. You know, there was a presentation probably six months ago from our claims adjuster and, you know, many of the things they they spoke about were things like sidewalks, you know, potholes and and storm drain. Right?

And these are all things we didn't even speak of storm drain, but, know, we do have funding for storm drains identified in this as well, lower in terms of cost, it's overshadowed quickly by facilities and some of the other things we talked about, but that's in there, and it's in there because that is a significant source of claims. And so, know, we're looking to and it's for those who live near the where the flooding occurs, it's a very significant source of angst for them. And so, you know, we do get emails regularly from those people about about those storm systems and whether they're gonna hold up or they're gonna fail or you're gonna be out here tonight, you know, those types of things. And we wanna get those systems to the point where the the homeowners are not staying up at night worried that they're that they might be flooded. So, I think that's really important.

With that said, we will I welcome any questions. That's all I

just wanna make a couple observations before we go to questions. One observation is this is an amazing amount of information. So, I just wanna applaud you and other staff, city staff, who worked on putting this together. This is as detailed a report as I have seen in my now eight years on council. So I just want to appreciate the level of detail that's being shared with us and I realize it's there's no perfect answer for any of this.

So we're going to it's going to be messy here in the sausage making. But I also wanted to point out that there is only one of you. So in addition to the financial constraints we have, we also have people constraints in terms of just only so many employees to carry out this body of work. So again, there's prioritization not only with the limited dollars, but also with the limited time that we have as a city, as a city staff. So just want to acknowledge that as well.

And this type of planning takes time, so I want to again appreciate that this takes your bandwidth to think about these things and I know we requested this information because we're all sort of wrestling with this atmosphere that we're in where our revenues are not keeping pace with our expenditures and kind of how are we going to deal with that and how are we going deal with this huge list that we have of things that need to be done given our the age of our infrastructure, which we inherited. This is not we didn't create this, this has been passed to us. So one last thing before I sort of get off my little soapbox here, this is so much vastly better than it was when I joined counsel and certainly when Bob McBain joined counsel because it used to be that we just went from, dumpster fire to dumpster fire, like we just kind of went, the city didn't have this type of planning in place and so it was just sort of running from this roof needs to be replaced to this sidewalk needs to be fixed to this. And it wasn't we didn't have the time.

We didn't take the time and the bandwidth to be this methodical in our approach or in our thinking. And so, no, I don't wanna throw any shade on prior, you know, employees or prior councils, but I think they would be very jealous of us having this conversation and, again, having this level of information with which to to try to wrestle with these trade offs. So thank you. Okay, have questions and do want to start?

Yes, I have questions. I'm not going to pile on a whole lot, but I would like to add one pile on to that. So what the mayor said plus one thing. I think I want to acknowledge that it takes a lot of work and effort to take something very complex and put it in one sheet like this for us to understand. So the amount of work that goes into this is really everything, but to you really have to know your subject in order to get it into the summary. So thank you very much. With that, do have you started talking about the seismic upgrades too. Could you just provide a summary on how you came with or how you determine the scope and the dollars that are in here? Just really hot off.

Yeah. So some of this is provided by so the there were several reports that were performed in 2017 to 2019 that the city had commissioned. So that predates me working for the city. And there are some dollar figures that were assigned to that. And so we took some of those numbers.

These are retrofit numbers that we took and we have applied healthy multipliers to those in each fiscal year and we are using those numbers still. And so we think assuming that those numbers are correct let me back up. You never quite know until you get into detailed design what you're going to find and how expansive your scope is going to get. And one thing that we always struggle with is, especially in an old building when you start retrofitting, is that it triggers one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and you really have to struggle and fight to just hone it in and say, this is the problem we came to solve. We know there's lots of other problems.

We'll get to those some other time. That's a hard thing to do because we all want to solve everything, but we do we have to stick within you know, you have to identify your budget, and you have to try to stay within it. And so, you know, that's that's always a challenge. So, you know, one of the things that the exercise, what it will look like when you get into some of these seismic repairs is we did there were structural engineers that were there. They did provide some costs for that component is going to be when we start doing it, they will say, well, if you do this, you can you might as well fix that. And you'll say, we afford it? And they'll say, probably not. You say, okay, well then, no, let's not. Let's do this. And it will always struggle with that.

And I think it's important to note that these are the same materials reviewed by the facilities task force.

So I wanted and so that's a good lead in. I want to acknowledge that those those documents from that task force, they're nine or ten years old. There's no destructive testing. There is no real analysis, and we're using those same numbers, you know, as we should for this high level, you know, now nine or ten years later. So, you know, I would this gives us a good idea, but, you know, we shouldn't consider this a budget, you know, just

flag up. No, I think that's a great point and it's one of the things that you have numbers years out and until you bring people in to do exactly what you described to get into detailed design, you know, it's either there are going to be unknowns and these numbers will shift. You hope they shift. You hope you're using a large enough number that it will shift down, but it's possible that it shifts up. And sometimes it shifts down on some and up on others and it balances, but there are still some unknowns and there's fair amount of projection that goes on with all of these numbers.

So you try your best to make sure you're using healthy multipliers, you're not cutting it too close, you're accounting for things like soft costs that often get overlooked, right? And you are making sure that the numbers that we're using realistic. But until you're in that detailed design, until you open things up, you just don't know what you don't know until you know it.

If I could just do a follow on to Councilman Ramsey. Some of the line items in the more detailed report that we got didn't have dollars assigned at all. So I just want to caution the public that the numbers are not I mean they're not inclusive of all of the things that are on the list because some things in the list just didn't we don't actually have a guesstimate in there. So this is our best guess of the things identified, but not everything identified has a numerical value.

That's right. There are almost there are certainly things that are not included in that, that have not been identified.

Yeah. Or things that identified but not valued. Yeah. Okay. Oh, my goodness. So many layers to this. Okay. Councilmember Ramsay, am I did I Yeah. Do you have an okay.

That was great.

Okay. Thanks.

Councilmember Long?

Yeah. Thank you. I think some of I I don't know if it's kind of called out in the staff report. Oh, it is called out. Like, things like the courtyard or or things related. I assume that those are kinds of things that are in play as we see what happens with our housing development over there.

That's right. So one of the themes is that things can shift, right? And so I mentioned shifting because of changes in approach And one of the real wildcards that we have in this community right now is Moraga Canyon. And how is the courtyard impacted by that? Need a courtyard, you need to lay down space someplace to operate.

Generally, the more convenient it is, better the result you're going to have, the more efficient your crews will be. But there you're absolutely correct that Moraga Canyon could be either the existing courtyard space, depending on the ultimate configuration that could shift. What I can speak to is that some of these costs are more if they fall back in the bucket of deferring and how long can you defer versus the go forward, where you're looking at spaces and saying, five to ten years from now, we know that some of these buildings are leaking, they're older, they have significant rot, we need to replace them. Well, they might be replaced at some point as part of this plan in the next five to ten years. Some things that are identified here, fuel tank I don't know what that was.

Wow, okay.

Our some free things Zoom just expired.

The free Zoom, that's their way of saying I've talked too much, yeah. So so some things like fuel tank replacement at the courtyard are included. So this is where, you know, the the majority of our of our staff, they go and get fuel. Those tanks, we have been they're they're they're every month. That's by law. They are we submit a report to the state every year by law. And what that report states is that we are very fast approaching the end of the useful life of those fuel tanks that are up there, diesel and gasoline.

I love talking about fuel tanks. Let's spend more time talking about fuel tanks.

I'll tell you, are things that you wish you could get topics you wish you could get past, right? And they just keep coming back. So fuel tanks, yes, it's the gift that keeps on giving. But we will have to we do have to program to replace those. What we do not want to have is a fuel tank leak that becomes very expensive. So we want to catch it before it reaches that point. And that's exactly why we inspect it monthly.

I

have a couple of questions. One is about the green infrastructure requirements from the state. Is that like the work that was just done on Grand Fairview? Are there other categories of green infrastructure that are required by state?

That is exactly like what was done at Green Fairview. So I think Green Fairview, we're having to do so what the requirement is that by the counties, you have to treat a certain amount of acreage and there's a calculation they give you to that describes that. So for Fairview Grand, I think the drainage area that drains to that is like 22 acres, believe it or not. It's a large area. It goes up Fairview, it comes around on Grand, some of Oakland Avenue comes down, it makes its way down there.

Some of it gets into inlets along the way, but much of it surface flows in large storm events and reaches that. You only get whether they take the total drainage acreage and they apply a percentage. And they say, okay, you get this like this percent of that is what you are actually cleaning of the storm water system. And so based on that, that is what goes towards this requirement for retrofit of green infrastructure. So it's very prescriptive.

We have to I think that is about 60% now of the requirement. It was the requirement, now the requirement is larger, so we need something almost comparable in size, if you think about it. It has to look it's going to look very similar to that size wise, and we hope drainage area wise. So, it's all drainage related, that particular? It's all drainage related. Now, again, the

I was going ask the following question. As we've been talking about doing something on the Lower Grand, there's a kind of an oddly shaped intersection right there where the wall ends that divides Lower Grand from

Grand Avenue. Absolutely.

Kind of a triangle right there that potentially has some bollards.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So is is that I know you've looked at this before, and we've talked about this before. Is that potentially green infrastructural? I did that.

Yeah. So it is listed that location is listed in 3031.

Okay.

And the reason it's been pushed out is because it is a very challenging location for green infrastructure. It doesn't mean impossible. It's as

good as the location at Fairview, though.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I would say about green infrastructure, and I know this is a bit of a different exercise, but it's stuff I like, so I'll talk about it, is that you generally, wherever it floods is where you want to locate your green infrastructure.

Like my

house. So think so there you go. Put it right in front in Put it your front yard. Yeah. So but that's where you want to have it because what you're really doing is you're creating an engineered swamp. Right? And so that's what it is. And so rather than building an entire swamp where everything drains to it, you'd have to regrade the roadway to get to that low point. What you're looking at is you want to look at areas that flood naturally. And so in some ways, Fairview and Grand was perfect because we have lots of flooding on Grand, and that's what made it so ideal.

Did we just suddenly tell the folks down there that their bollards are going to be there till thirty, thirty one? We did.

Yes. Quite possibly. I mean, well, so that's one of the challenges. I mean, in terms of priority, so this gets back to how we prioritize, right? So, you know, I think one of the things we know is that we have to meet this requirement in the next couple of years, and so it has to have a certain area that it drains. Otherwise, we have to do more of them. It's not enough. And so you're looking at areas with adequate drainage that, you know, and then we have limited funds. And so there's there's nothing that precludes us from doing all of the locations except the lack of available funding. Yeah. We want to make sure wherever we do it is going to meet this requirement so that we checks the box.

Is this follow-up? Yeah. Yes. Is there a local agency or commissioner that that gives these, you know, as you said, we met our we met our green infrastructure target, but now the target's bigger. What group determines what those targets

are?

It's the Regional Water Quality Control Board. And I forget which region we're in, forgive me for that, but I can follow-up with it if you need. But they do meet and they do meet in Oakland and that's We

have the ability to levy monetary fines.

Absolutely.

And that was a threat we had at Beach from that same group, correct?

That's right. Yes. They are a regulatory agency. They do

One more time, do you mind?

The Regional Water Quality Control Board. Okay. And, they're they're a regulatory body. They exist to make sure that municipalities comply with the regional permit, which says how we can discharge storm water to waters of the state and, I guess federal waters ultimately.

But local local community local cities don't have representation on them?

We we do. We do. Well, let me back up. We have staff representation. I do not believe we have any elected representation. The state does appoint representatives, but to serve on that that body. And so I think, you know, that's that's kind of how it loops around, But there's state representatives, so no local representatives.

By region. So each region

has appointees.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Back to the question, because you had another question, right?

I did have another question. It is really broad and maybe we're going to get to this discussion later. But it it is about kicking the can down the road. I mean, similar to what I asked you about the PCI, if I'm getting that acronym correct. Are you doing a financial analysis of how much will it cost us to do these repairs even if we, you know, say we're gonna budget it five years from now versus there are so many repairs, we need to look at a bigger project and do a more comprehensive plan.

You talked about spending 300,000, which sounds like very little money on on coming up with a plan. Is that part of the calculus and how do we get from we're gonna continue to kick the can down the road and Sure. Play whack a mole to let's be strategic about this and make decisions for decades from now instead of five years from now?

So I think part so I think it's an interesting question because philosophically how you approach it depends on the feedback that you receive and expected funding. So a principle, of building out a CIP is that you generally don't budget for things that when you don't anticipate budget will be available. And part of that exercise is that you show it in future years at greater cost, right? So if you said to me, we're going to do this in ten years, tell me what the numbers are, they're going to be much more expensive than they are right now. We're going to apply all those multipliers and it's going to reflect that.

And when we come forward at some point with whatever the final version of this is in whichever year we quote unquote run out of funding, right, we will do that because we are not going to work on things and plan things if we can't pay for it. And so ultimately, the exercise starts to shift where my finance director says, Daniel, you're not doing that work, we don't have funding for it. And so, want you to reflect it to show it when it when it will occur. And I will say, well, when will I have funding? And she'll say, well, you know, this is how much is available, you tell me what we can do. And so, to answer that question, some of it so yes, we that we know we do do that and much of that depends on what the available funding looks like in the go forward.

Sounds very similar to the answer on the street paving index, right? Is,

Yeah. Like, you can spend a little bit of money now and continue to spend a little money and continue to get farther and farther away or spend more money now and end up costing you less money 20 from now. But it's hard to spend that money now because you don't have the money now.

Correct. I like the whack a mole analogy too. Thank you for that. Yes. Council member Wood.

So in terms of, you know, the conversation we had earlier in in budget and planning and where we are, how are we looking we're already into the second half of this year in terms of the projects that we have lined up or are we anticipating that we're going to complete everything that's been budgeted for?

Yes. So we are on target to complete those projects. You know, we're moving forward. We're always a little bit behind. This is the there's like a grain of truth in every joke about, you know, things in government. You can say that we're always a little behind where we wanted to be, but we're getting it done. I mean, it's happening. So the work the work is being completed. You know, the the the way to look at that is we're not expending money as fast as we were planning, but we are expending it. The money that was identified, it will be gone and it will be gone within months of us thinking it was going to originally be gone when we were sitting here nine months ago during the budget prep.

So that's happening.

Thank you.

Okay. Would now be a good time to turn to public comment.

I have no speaker cards in the chambers and I do not see any raised hands online.

Okay. Public comment is closed. Bringing it back to counsel. One observation I would share, again, this is from way back even before I was on counsel. I was on the recreation commission and I served on the CIP committee because we had it at that time.

Before I got involved, I think they had had an annual budget of about $500,000 that then they sort of allocated between projects. By the time I came on to CIP, we had a budget of zero. So what we're doing annually is just basically the work that you've just done here, which is kind of keeping a running list of things that needed to be done along with kind of a guesstimate of how much they might cost and kind of trying to help. We would report to the council and try to help the council prioritize. But anyway, the reason I bring that up is because there was very much the mindset at the time that not everything can be a big rock and I know our so the administrator talks about these big rocks, like the pool is a big rock and police fire is a big rock.

But but there are these kind of quality of life choices that we make for lower dollar amounts every year. And and one of the questions we've wrestled with over this, well, maybe we should stop doing all of those. Maybe we should stop doing, you know, the $200,000 project for the swings or whatever and just save our pennies till we can move one of those big rocks. But the the trade off for that is then your community is looking at, you know, the dirt patch where they want whatever it is, the $200,000 project to be. So I do think there's a balance to be had, I guess all that's to say that it seems like there's a balance to be had between these smaller kind of projects that are improvements, whether it's a traffic circle or a new swing or a tot lot versus these big, big, big capital improvement projects that are going to be years and potentially decades in the making.

Just a thought,

I think we in other words, I think we have to try to plan to do both to the best of our ability.

And is it even possible like we could not do any small projects and put those pennies in the bank and it would never pay for the big project, would it?

No. No. Would yeah.

It's not even close, yeah.

There's there's also a few things that I mean, I understand that some things are reaching their end of life, but not there yet. So they're down the line. But there are some things you mentioned that to me could be life safety issues, like what you're describing in the fire department. So that would move it forward sooner and that is a big ticket item. So so I mean, a fire escape in the rec not having a fire alarm in the rec department is kind of problematic to me. That would be a life safety issue. I mean, I I don't know how we go through these and that seems to that answering that question seems to be helpful to prioritize what happens next.

I think, you know, there's a couple of things and you're correct. I think that's part of how we prioritize as we try to look at that risk. I think it's important to note, and our fire chief is here and you can correct if wrong, that we are compliant with fire code for our building. So that's a very important thing to state. With that said, we want to make sure we are as safe as possible, right? And we put in all the proper enhancements and remedies that need to be in place or that we want to be had to have in place for any facility that's occupied by staff or the public.

And given the shortage of real estate within our city limits to offer programming as we look to activate the building for more activities, we want to ensure that all the measures possible are in place because the building is going to be utilized in a greater way than maybe it is currently and to do so is going to require some upgrades. On the public safety building front though, think if you follow the horizontal line across both the police department building and the fire station building, the question we're going to grapple with as a city is that tipping point. Do we continue to heavily assign and allocate resources into two structures to attempt to meet the requirements associated with essential services buildings or is that tipping point a new building and I think the work of the task force landed into a new building format, which is some of what those planning dollars for Master Planning Light were intended to develop is that next stage of confirming the physical location of a new building, confirming that the footprint would be current location of Veterans Building and police department plus the driveway.

Right. And then I mean, let's say by some miracle we acquire funding to do their projects, then we're going to say, well, now the record department is also a 100 plus years old and building rather. So I just feel like we're never we're never going to run out of these capital projects, right, the the big ones or the small ones. So so really, you know, I kind of want to bring the conversation maybe back to this diminishing returns situation that we're in. And I think the roads are the best analogy that we talked a lot about that and I know that's Councilman Ramsey's favorite topic.

But this idea that we're going to kind of constantly be falling behind with this lack of funding year to year and you know are there let's just I mean if we can take a few minutes as a council and think about that like would we want to stop doing these other projects so that we can allocate 850,000 a year to roads for a period of five years and say we're not doing any park work, we're not doing any anything, just going to focus on roads and sidewalks for the next five years. What does that feel like? Does that feel

What does it look like? What it

What does it look like? Yeah, I mean I without knowing specifically Go ahead. Go ahead. What projects would be deferred? Right. It's hard to make that decision. Right.

I mean I think pretty much everything would have to be different, right?

I think in practice the maintenance needs of properties, there are some that literally could not be ignored on an annual basis given the state of our aged facilities. So to zero out dollars, the availability of resources to address emerging needs, I don't think we could function that way as a city. I think no matter what you would have to assign emergency resources for things like a leaking roof or a window that falls out of a building. Mean

Back to the whack a mole.

But it didn't land on the ground.

Landed on our own roof. On our own roof.

Yes. And were you look I mean, I'm looking at recommendation and I know you're presenting this to us and I know even though it seems somewhat overwhelming, it says provide potential direction to staff. What were you looking for vis a vis this kind of conversation and, you know?

So I think there were two hoped for outcomes of the discussion this evening. The first would be to understand if we're on the right path to looking at next year's set of capital project priorities. That's kind of one hoped for outcome. The other is to better understand if the council might find value in asking the Budget Advisory Committee to take a look at our revenue sources. If for nothing else to help explore whether at the most modest level we might want to think about dollars that the city needs at the most basic level to have available for capital projects in a modest way on a going forward basis.

And I think in order for the Budget Advisory Committee to conduct any research, the council actually has to be the body that directs it. It's not something request of them.

And I feel like the Budget Advisory and Financial Planning Committee has done this before. Didn't they do this as recently as 2019, was that the last time they sort of looked at all the different revenue generating arenas and presented a report to counsel about that.

How long does that process take?

A couple of months.

I am in favor of that.

I I would I would agree. And and at the time, I was non counsel then, I ran in 2020. But my if memory serves, budget advisory was favored us putting a measure on the ballot to increase the transfer tax.

We did that with METRO TTT. Understand.

Yeah. No.

I understand. And and and it it lost by a very

Mhmm. Slim margin for

a variety of reasons not to include I mean, including the fact that we were campaigning strongly for the pool and that one kinda got ignored in the or didn't didn't get as much attention in a in a informational way to our community members. Mhmm. It's still lost by a very small margin. So I would absolutely be in favor of this. I know that they've also talked about it, you know, like looking looking for revenue sources by increasing fees or or or, you know, collecting an, you know, an access money, but that's nickel and dime kind of stuff.

And we need, you know, we need to look at something that already exists that and I my memory is that we were quite lower than other cities in what we collect on a transfer tax, significantly lower and it hadn't been raised for quite some time. So I think that that's worth having budget advisory look at again in addition to anything else they might want to come up with.

I feel like someone told me recently it's never been raised.

Oh, it's never been raised. And how long has it been in effect?

I don't again, I don't know.

Because I don't have the answer to

And and also I'd be interested in knowing how much money was left uncollected in the last five years because it wasn't passed in 2020.

And I think

we How much should be bought on the table by the table? Would be interesting calculation. And

really it's just kind of right sizing it to Oakland and Berkeley and folks in our arena area.

I also think that having the planning budget on the horizon is an important piece to include.

Which planning? I don't know.

To whether it's city center planning, the Oh. The city center light or whatever the terms of our year, you have been thrown around for some sort of Mhmm. Planning

Mhmm.

So that we can be strategic about what we use the funds for. And I mean, I don't know if I don't know how long that process would take. I suspect longer than a few months of the the budget committee. Right? Right.

But I don't I don't think even if we right size the transfer tax, that's not going to get us to the big rock capital improvements. I mean, what we're talking about is a delta of Yeah. Of maybe less

That would

be less than 1,000,000.

That would be a specific measure like the pool measure or something.

Exactly. So so the way I view the transfer tax is it really is and I know it's volatile whereas our director will probably shoot little daggers at me for saying this. We do rely upon those funds as volatile as they are to at the end of the year backfill these buckets of need, Backfill equipment replacement, backfill capital improvement. That's just kind of how we've had to budget for many many years now. So anyway, so yeah, it's not going to get us the the dollars to do to redo police or fire.

Yeah. But that's farther down the road. Yeah. Yes. Anyway, and you can't do anything if you haven't planned, like Correct.

I don't know.

I just feel like that Mhmm. To me, it seems like it's with all of the maintenance, which would use some of that big bucket, If we're gonna do a major improvement, but we don't know we're gonna do a major improvement because we haven't done any planning for it, instead we're spending transfer tax money that our residents just voted for to do all these maintenance upgrades, the whack a mole plan without having any any additional strategy. So I I feel like those need to happen in parallel. Mhmm. I agree. And waiting longer for the strategy side of things is not

Mhmm.

A good idea.

Yeah. The needs aren't going away.

The the The needs aren't going away. It's gonna end up costing the city more Right. In the long run because we're not doing our homework. We're just kicking the can down the road every year.

Well, there was a Civic Center master plan in 2008 when Abe Friedman was mayor. And at the time, I remember they they always redo this building and the whole the whole Civic Center, everything the city owned, and it was $40,000,000. And everyone's like, oh my gosh, $40,000,000. And then the and then the economic downturn happened and it never even made it to the ballot. So Yeah. But there was a significant amount of planning planning undertaken now. And and and in hindsight, it's like, we

we should have done it. Yeah. I mean, not in 2008, though. I mean, like, there's no way that would happen in 2008.

Right.

But I wonder if we can piggyback off of some of that work that's done. I mean, I get that it's out of date, but maybe

think Houseman Ramsey looked at it. Was that part of the package that you looked at when you were on the task force?

Full master plan. Yeah. It was very You looked at that. Visionary.

Yes. It was very visionary. Isn't there

a piazza in the middle of it?

It was lovely. It's

beautiful. Right? Okay. So thank you for bringing us back to what is being asked of us this evening. So it sounds like, are we at least three of us in agreement that the Budget Advisory and Financial Planning Committee would like to request that they do an evaluation of our funding sources, current and future. Yes. Is that enough direction? Include all the transfer time. And report back to us in a timely fashion. Do we need to give a time horizon?

I think we're good.

Okay. Okay. Then and then with respect to upcoming expenditures, did you wanna talk a little bit more about that? Because I have some questions and thoughts.

Yeah. Well, you go first.

Okay. So one of the questions I had is on it looks like there's maybe some planning looking at fiscal year 2026, 2027 with respect to Highland Avenue green infrastructure. And then I was looking at the next year it's $05,000,000 and that kind of made my eyes pop a little bit because that seems like a lot of money.

Yeah. So what you're what you're I'm sorry. Do you want me to speak So I'm curious.

Just wanted to know more about that.

Okay. So so you're looking one fiscal year, you're looking at design work that's associated with it. The next fiscal year, you're looking at anticipated construction costs associated with What

is it?

It would be the installation of some component of green infrastructure on Highland Avenue. So what you're looking at is we are looking at is the the vicinity around the Highland Sheridan Strip, where there would be some conversion of the grass area, not all of it, but some portion of it, probably similar in size to what you see down at Fairview Grand, where you would take some area there, and that would become GI, where it would be planted, and you would have curb cuts that allow water to flow into that. There's already existing drainage, there's already it receives flow from in terms of tributary area, what flows towards that strip. So it would be a transition of that space to green infrastructure, a portion, not all, but a portion of it. Now I want to note one important thing, and this gets back to mandates.

One of the mandates we have is that we have to convert grass areas that are decorative grass areas by 2027. I think it's 2027. Nancy's nodding. That's different. So you're looking for a twofer.

You're looking for a project that

That's right. So often what we're looking to do is to for a convergence of several things that have to occur, and so this would be another example of that, where we know that we are going to have to remove ornamental grass, and we know we have green infrastructure that's going to be required. We're not looking at the entire area, but a portion of it. And we think we can accomplish our goal with a portion of it. Many areas in Piedmont do not avail themselves to green infrastructure. They do not work very well. And it's mostly due to drainage. It's mostly due to slopes. It's very difficult. Highland the Highland Sheridan Strip is one that does.

And there I think there are a few things that come together and converge very well to make it a project that addresses several issues all at once.

So just two observations. One, that just sounds too expensive, and I'm just wondering if there's less expensive options. I know we put a bioswale in Dracena Park, which I don't know how successful that is. But if there's other park area that's not used because it is a slope, that might be less expensive than working on the Highland Sheridan Strip. And then my other observation was this one point we talked about other uses for that space. So my concern is by allocating some of that to green infrastructure, you're now precluding any other future uses of that space. So I don't I think I need to know a little bit more about that before I'm on board.

You can correct me

if my memory is wrong, but I have some recollection that we discussed using that strip as potential parking and that that could be green infrastructure incorporated into a parking area.

That's exactly it. So park new parking actually triggers green infrastructure. So it's kind of it's one of these things. There's all these triggers, and that's one of them that is triggered by it. So the program the green infrastructure is under, by the way, with the with the regional board is called no missed opportunities. And, it's because they want to I think I think it was an engineer that came up with it, but, yeah. So

He bet.

But no missed opportunities, and so The CIT. Yeah. So so, you know, even parking would would trigger a need. You would have to install green infrastructure with parking because you're adding impervious area. And so what they want to do is they want to offset that and they they want a net zero calculation so that the runoff and the collection and detention are equal.

Right. It last arose when council considered the Civic Center parking plan. And I think it also intersects with the bikeped master plan

That's right.

Idea of the 1 Way Highland.

Well, and and beyond and just beyond 1 Way Highland, I think that there's also and this is part of what we would look at and ultimately look to bring forward is I think there's potential at that location to incorporate some of the components of BikePed, where you have right now a designated right turn, which is so if you're give me if you're coming down Sheridan and you're headed westbound towards San Francisco, there's a designated right turn. It's just like an on ramp almost, right? And so It's a yield. That's right, and it's a yield, where the roadway is very wide, and that violates almost every principle of traffic safety and bike safety that typically you wanna bring if you wanna bring vehicles to a t intersection because it forces them to make right turns, 90 degree turns are most the slowest, most controlled, where they're most likely to be looking in all directions. So it's the most traffic safe turning movement that you can force vehicles into.

And so I think there's actually potential for maintaining much of the space, making it much more traffic safe, and addressing some of the decorative lawn issue that we're going to have to be forced to comply with. So again, what we tend to look at is we tend to, you know, no missed opportunities. We have to look at every project, and we say, we are literally required to say, you know, is this can we do it here? And very often it's yes, but there's very little benefit for the money you're spending. There are places, and I'll say that we've gone through this exercise with all the bulb outs on Moraga Avenue, the Moraga Avenue Safety Improvement Project.

Very challenging to implement all of those, know, in most of those locations because of the topography, because of the slope, because of how constrained you are. So, we're always looking at all of these. You know, we don't want to spend too much money evaluating something that does not work, and we know it doesn't work. Highland Sheridan is a location that could work, and I think it could be beneficial in several different ways. It doesn't mean it has to be there.

I was going say, have there been accidents there? Like, think people kind of like the yield. They're flowing, right? I don't get one driving that way. Right? Yeah. Like, I haven't heard that that's a problematic intersection.

I think that it's problematic from a width standpoint, but I hear you. I mean, I understand what your concerns are there, and obviously, we take concerns into account. But if looking at implementing several of these things and where you have potential to do it, you would look at that. There are other locations that we're looking at also. But this is one that we've identified that we believe actually meets the requirement and is feasible to implement.

Feels like a solution in search of a problem a little bit, and it's not your you didn't create this. I'm appreciating that, that you're being creative in your thought process. This is coming from on high, but I would love it if it felt more like a solution an organic solution or something that actually felt like we needed to solve it, right. I thought was right. Needed to be narrowed, like that is so much safer now and it's gorgeous and the neighbors love it, like I feel like that, if we can replicate that, that would be amazing.

Could the Sheridan Strip be a park instead and not be subject to that?

Absolutely.

So then we wouldn't have to get rid of it, right?

Yes. So I think the key is how you would classify I think the key is how you classify ornamental lawn. So, you know, it's areas so it's not so much it's even in all of our parks we are going to have to remove grass area, and that's what we'll be looking at. Now, in every not all of our grass in all of our locations, but there are areas that you would look at that are classified as being ornamental, and it's actually something in our parks that I know we've reviewed several times with our park commission, and, you know, they've gone through an exercise of looking at that, reviewing them, and what they believe is ornamental or not. You know, I know that most of the active areas are areas that we would keep, but there are locations where we have grass that would be considered decorative or ornamental as opposed to active.

So Sheridan Strip, for example, could be that, but you would have to see people playing. If, you know, if you were seeing people playing on the field, like throwing a football every day or just, you know, doing that, perhaps it would be different. But, you know, there are certain uses that you could see that, or, you know, and there's always potential in those areas. GI in that location, by the way, location, by the way, would would not not take up all of Sheridan Strip. You're actually looking at a relatively small amount of it, but it would be part of what we're talking about.

But the whole thing is subject to the grass removal?

The whole the entire area would be subject to grass removal.

I think

we need, like, what are the options for this space? Like, right? Like, what are the options that maybe could come back to us? Like, how could we best utilize it given all the different possibilities even though it's, you know, budgeted for whatever it is. But it sounds like there might be a lot of desire.

I'm no longer on the list for housing. It was

It was at some point. Yeah. It is not.

Can I say that out loud?

Yeah. Beach volleyball. What about dog park? Put a fence around it?

There is potential for doing that,

yeah. Yeah.

So yeah,

it's flat.

It's flat. One of the things in our sustainability and I'll just direct back to the sustainability study is one of the things that it's doing, it's not identifying locations, but it is identifying traits that are consistent with off lease usage, right? And so one of the that is I don't I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but that's one of the areas I would anticipate has some potential for off leash activity because it meets a lot of the criteria. There are also drawbacks to it, Right? And so it'll it'll look at all of those and we wanna anything we bring forward has to to to to consider all of those things, the pros and the cons.

Is that space in the parks Purview of sustainability study? Do you know that

Sure.

Sustainability study? Study, yes. The study that's being done about with all the Yeah,

it's so it is not a park, but what that not

in the scope

of It's not necessarily in the scope of that, but what it will do, again, is it will identify traits that you would look for off leash activity.

Okay, so I've taken us down a rabbit hole, and I apologize. So let's get back. Let's get back. Yes, go ahead.

Go ahead. So another we're talking '26, '27, right, this year? Yes, yes. So islands and medians, it looks like everything is happening in that year. Can you tell us more Yes, about

it's a

lot, right? Yes, point 2,000,000.

I would expect some adjustment to that. I think that just being completely forthright, I think some of these as I was putting this together, this is usually an exercise you do during budget prep and I was probably more rushed there and I would distribute that differently.

But the idea is that we're dealing with our islands and medians in one year or whatever it is that we need to be doing with them.

Yes. In reality, you would see that distributed over five years. So that will shift.

Yes. Kind of like we see the park irrigation is kind of spread over like five years.

That's correct. Okay. Got it. Got it. Thank you.

We will have some very happy park commissioners if we can proceed with the park irrigation plan, right, because that has been talked about for any long time now.

Correct.

Okay. Do we have any other questions about the column? I feel like I'm remembering now it seems like a long time ago, but you did a good introduction, Daniel, on some of the higher level numbers that we talked about, like direct building and whatnot.

And I think,

I know you want our feedback on sort of the prioritization. I think the caveat is what you gave us before, right? You've evaluated that some of these other projects that might appear to be something we might move up are just not right yet for that year for a multitude of reasons.

I think that's an accurate characterization, yes.

Can I ask you a question about EV charging infrastructure on sustainability? Are these costs associated with the partnership with Eva Community Energy? Are these associated with getting our own city owned and operated EV?

Both. Both. Okay. I'm sorry. I want to defer if I'm supposed to, but yes, both. So these costs so there is in the current fiscal year, there is $135,000 in EV charging infrastructure that is associated with the Eva community energy installation. There's a certain component of that project where the city had pledged a certain amount of funding and which I believe is a little bit less than 135,000,000 but we put some funding in there for that. And that's almost entirely what that is for.

Do have an update on whether or not that's

So we do have we have been in contact with Ewa Community Energy about that project. It they have a vendor. The vendor is they are having some challenges with the vendor, getting them in to mobilize to complete construction. And there are also some challenges that they are having with the vendor with maintenance over the ten year maintenance period that we would have. And so that has given them pause.

And as part of the discussions we've had with them, we have said that we want to we concur with the approach of if there are doubts that this vendor can perform, we want to hold until they are they have a vendor that will be responsive to the needs of their solicitation and of course our needs as a community. So right now it is paused. We don't know if that's paused for six months or if it's paused for six weeks, But I would guess it's going to be longer than six weeks. It's more like six months perhaps. And that's just a guess based on conversations with them.

This might be for Kevin. Do we know when the 12 new EV stations at Wildwood and Grand are going to be completed?

And this is the Shell, right? This is the Shell station at the corner of Grand And Wildwood that has been or is being converted, right, from gas to electric?

They are still working with the county on remediation. And the most recent conversation I had with the project advocates was that the soonest they will start construction would be this summer in July.

So it's coming. That's the soonest. But I'm glad to know it's still in the works.

And and and could possibly influence our continued interest maybe.

Yeah. I mean You having

charges up here? I I don't I feel like that's I don't know. It's a different top. I mean I feel like it's a different location. And if you're doing city center business, I feel like it's important to provide EV chargers to people who are in the city center for whatever I don't want to reason in

the

digress with the topic on hand.

All

right. It's a thought.

Okay. So then the $500,000 is actually really what I was

much of that is looking at energy upgrades that we would need. So we have a very undersized panel, electrical panel. You would have to do some work to let me back up. This is bringing EV infrastructure for city fleet reasons. Okay. So city fleet. So that now there are there is potential with that. PG and E does have programs for charging if you are on a private property. They are less geared towards public property. They gear they they They orient you back towards EVA, community energy actually, because we've gone through that exercise.

But if you have a parking lot, in this case, we have a very small lot, city lot, there is potential for having some type of EV infrastructure on-site. There has periodically been grants that are available for that type of thing. But what we've seen when we've costed it out is about $500,000 for PG and E upgrades, electrical panel upgrades, city building and then to be able to provide charging infrastructure itself, there's usually a cost. And that's the cost assuming that we cannot take advantage of any type of grant program.

And then the only other line item I just wanted to flag is actually out a couple of years, which is the Hampton Park Tennis Court. And I kind of again, I've been around long enough that I was here for the Hampton Park redo, which was amazing when it happened and we raised or should say PRFO on behalf of the city, raised over $800,000 for that project. So I guess I'm flagging that because there may be some private dollars available if some PBF or PRFO or some other pro recreation nonprofit wanted to raise some funds related to both the turf replacement and or the tennis court resurfacing, there might be community support out there. We don't know if we don't ask. So that might be something that's worth talking to those organizations about as we get closer, I mean as those plans mature.

Yeah. I would just flag that because people do love their recreation spaces. Alright. Anything else? Any other observations about what's coming? And it sounds like we're gonna have another look at this when we're talking about the budget, right?

That is correct.

Coming up in April?

Next few months.

That's exciting. All right. AAF, anticipated available funding. So do we do you have what you need from us? Okay, great. Everybody feel good? Any other comments? Okay, sorry.

The AAF can't be negative.

Can't be negative. It can only be positive. Alright. Thank you so much. As I as I mentioned in the beginning, this it's really wonderful to have this level of information and thoughtfulness, and I feel like this is why we make the big bucks here on the council is to wrestle with with these important decisions for our very limited taxpayer dollars and very limited taxpayer supported staff. Right? This is, we're doing this on behalf of our neighbors and our community, and I appreciate how thoughtful everyone is being. Alright. So let's see. That concludes agenda item number five.

So we're now turning to announcements, reports from council members, and discussion of future agenda items. Who would like to go first? I'm gonna start over here. Council member Lamia.

Okay. I have one quick announcement from Stop

which is our

Alameda Mike, please. I have a quick announcement from Stop Waste, which is our Alameda County waste reduction organization, and it is for an event that is this Saturday. The weather should be a little bit better than today, and they're having a sheet mulching party with Tandy Family Farms in Oakland. So if you are interested in removing grass and you are a DIY kind of person, they will walk you through the whole process and teach you how to do it. Tandy, T A N D I, tandyfamilyfarms.org and you can find out more information.

Cool.

Great.

Thank you. Councilman Ramsey? Nothing? I wasn't here to hear it. So, yes, so all right. All right. Councilman Ramsey. Oh my God. Okay. I'm going make up for all of you all here because I've got like pages. Go ahead. No. I'm What? All yours.

What? Although I do wanna mention that I I think Nancy Kent is an expert in the sheep mulch department. Could be very helpful.

You can do a community We cut peed

my party. Y'all y'all, as she said, have fun on

that. Alright. Well, I have a lot have, like, pent up announcements because I missed the first February meeting. So I really I have two meetings worth of announcements here. So first, I wanted to thank and commend our fire chief. Where'd he go?

He was just there. Oh,

no. Okay. I wanna thank and commend fire chief Brannigan for his presentation to the Piedmont Garden Club back in January. It was an event that was open to the public, and the community hall was packed. The chief shared practical steps residents can take to reduce wildfire risk to their property from home hardening essentials to simple changes that make a real difference, and it was actually really helpful. He did a they did a q and a. It was very inspirational. So I just wanted to thank him for that. So hopefully someone will let him know. And then also

oh, no. No. You missed it?

Did you do that on purpose? So I was thanking you for your speech to the Garden Club back in January. And you were you were awesome. And they they just loved having you, so thank you for doing that. Okay. Last month, we had an official ribbon cutting for the remodeled nine one one dispatch center, and I wanna thank our city staff, particularly our public safety staff for their help with that event. That was a lovely event. And then last week of January, I was it was Catholic Schools Week, and I was a special guest at Corpus Christi School here in Piedmont. I had a great time doing a q and a with the entire student body. That was pretty amazing.

And then I got a tour of the school from the Cub Scout troop, and they I invited them, and I think they're gonna take me up on the offer of coming to visit us at a future city council meeting. So that's super cool. And then the first week of this month, now we're in February, the vice mayor and I attended our budget advisory and financial planning committee meeting, and there were two main topics. One, we've already discussed, which is our mid year budget, and then the other was a detailed presentation and discussion about possible funding mechanisms for to support both new housing and the Marquesne specific plan, and I think beyond. Like, it's not just just it's it's all kind of all new housing.

And then I left straight from that meeting to attend CCA Lobby Day and CCA stands for Community Choice Aggregator which is what East Bay Community Energy now Ava Community Energy is. It's one of 24 of them statewide. And this was our lobby day to talk with state legislators and policymakers, including our very own state senator Jesse Aragine. So that was really nice. I got kind of an inside look on kinda how it's made, how legislation comes together.

And then I had this as finally, but I'm gonna have another finally. We've had a lot of PR around the opening of the new and much improved Piedmont Community Pool that's coming. And I wanna thank Eka Schneider for her all her help behind the scenes coordination, especially with the article that was in the San Francisco Chronicle. And then just today, the vice mayor and I met with our county supervisor, Nikki Fortinato Bass, and talked about both Piedmont's priorities and challenges and the challenges being faced by Alameda County which is facing significant budget cuts. And one of the things she shared with us is Highland Hospital has already laid off 100 healthcare workers.

Over one

Over 100 in anticipation of the funding budgets, the budget funding that's to come and it's just really decimating Alameda County, our social safety net and those that's going to reverberate throughout our communities. So that was an uplifting meeting. And maybe I will kick it to our city administrator, if she wants to talk a little bit more about the fun topic of the pool.

Yes. So not only do we have the great news of opening day on April 11, but we also have throughout the month of April of April from the twelfth to the thirtieth introductory drop in rate. So we're really excited to welcome all members of the public to the community pool, and the long awaited opening of registration for summer swim lessons and aquatic program registration for residents will begin on April 21. So come one, come all, we're really excited to open up registration. Later in let's see.

I'm gonna back up just a minute to March 24. We're gonna have our resident annual pass sales will begin. We receive questions all the time about when that's that opening date is, and we really are excited to to to go live with it. And we've got a wonderful new system that is gonna make buying passes easier than ever. That system will will be available for registration as of March 10. The portal will be open and available for drop in. People can come in and get some help Yeah. To set up and and talk with our staff about the different offerings that we have and such. They can set up their accounts, learn more. We're really, really excited.

And and best of all, come May when everyone is looking at the sun being out and really, really excited to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend, we are going to have the celebration of a lifetime. Memorial Day weekend, we're kicking off summer with a wonderful party. And so we hope everyone will come and celebrate with Piedmont, a beautiful facility that's been long coming. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make that facility go live, and we are so grateful for everybody's patience. It will hopefully be worth the wait, and we're we're so so excited that warm water is waiting for everyone Yay. To splash in. So Yeah.

I saw steam coming off it when I Yes.

Was driving through

the window. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, where are the covers? Okay. Anyway

So out there

too. Yeah. Right? So just a cup a couple a couple things that you reminded me of. Rosanna, the vice mayor, and I did a q and a with the public. Yes. That was also earlier this month. It's been a

busy time. It is. Important night.

At eight an important night. And that was that was when we announced that it was gonna open in April. Was a super fun announcement to make. And but it's quite quite a robust q and a. I mean, people showed up and asked me questions and all that. And then I I am looking at Daniel Gonzalez, our director of public works, and I'm remembering that you were not at the ribbon cutting for the dispatch center. And that was such a huge accomplishment, so I just wanna give you a extra special shout out for getting that project done on budget, mostly on time. But really, I mean, what an amazing amenity for our community to have a beautiful state of the art nine eleven center. And I know a lot of that was was work that you did.

So thank you. He was at work very early in the morning and went home to take care of a sick child. So we were sorry he couldn't be part of the celebration.

That was my next guess.

Okay. Any future agenda items? Alright. I am I feel like I'm gonna do a whack a mole, but I'm really just whacking the going ahead to adjourn the meeting at 08:50PM. Thank you.