City Council - Regular Meeting

okay there you go don't smudge don't smudge all right thank you very much thank you all righty we'll go ahead and call the meeting to order and we'll pass it to clementine to do roll call and to share announcements with the public

Council Member Barber? Present. Council Member Rasch? Here. Council Member Smith?

Here.

Mayor Williamson?

Here.

And the record will reflect that Council Member Gino Garcia is absent. Public comment and participation information for this meeting is provided on its agenda, which is online at monterey.gov slash agendas. In-person attendees, could you keep your electronic devices muted, please, to prevent audio interference with our meeting? And consistent with the First Amendment and the Brown Act, individuals have the right to speak at public meetings, which includes the right to criticize or support city policies or actions. The city encourages your uninhibited and robust feedback on public issues affecting the city, and we thank you for participating.

All right, thank you, Clementine. And with that, give me one second here. We will go into our first item on the agenda is under presentations is to recognize city employees for milestones, anniversaries, and retirements in 2026. It's always one of the most exciting opportunities that we have. on our council agenda because we get to hear some of the great work that's happening um and i think the council gets to hear a little bit more often than the general public does um but it's always just nice to hear the work that's being done behind the scenes um and recognizing the the great work that's being done that allows the city uh to continue to function and provide the great services that we have so with that i'll pass it to dante for a staff presentation thank you mayor and i echo everything that you said um it's

been amazing for me as I'm meeting with every department and every employee and the number of times where I hear people have been here for 20 years, 30 years, it is quite unusual. I would say you see in a lot of the cities and municipalities that I've served, you see people move around, but people stay put here. And so I think it's important for us to really recognize tonight, We have several employees with 20-year milestones. And then we have a retirement, upcoming retirement with 21 years of service. And so what I'd like to do is let our department heads come up uh talk a little bit about the employees that are receiving this honor and and maybe saying a few words and then after that like to take some pictures and give some certificates the three departments and i'll call them up i think we have several represented in our fire department one in our finance department, one in libraries, and then the last is public works. So let me call up FIRE first and they can start the presentation.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Council. Thank you for allowing us to do this today. This is one of the more enjoyable things I get to do. So, you know, it seems like I've been doing this a lot lately, and I think even I take it for granted at times. Kind of brought me back down to earth, as Dante is saying, is introducing him to our fire employees. He says, seems like we have a lot of tenured employees in our department. And I said, yeah, it is. And I think it's a testament to not only our community, our city and our department, I think it's something we can all be proud of and be excited about. So with that, there's five members of the fire department we're gonna recognize today. Three were supposed to be here, but I don't see the third one, but two of them are not. So I'm just gonna start briefly with them. So the first one we're gonna recognize is Captain Adam Rust, who's 20 years of service within the department. He was hired as a firefighter in 2006, promoted engineer in 2017, and then promoted captain in 2020. He's currently assigned to Medic Engine 15, which is our engine in Carmel. He resides here in Monterey a couple blocks up the street with his wife, Jen, two sons, Sullivan, and Gideon. One thing I just want to recognize about Adam is something I just learned recently is that he's going to be awarded a community service award from our police department, something I had no idea that he was even involved with. Chief Hover called me and said, hey, do you know one of your firefighters? He has a word. I said, no, I didn't. But what happened was in December, he lives up, like I said, right up the street. He backs an apartment complex. He heard a lady calling for help. So he looked over his fence and saw that there had been a man that had grabbed the lady and was threatening her with a hammer and had her in his grasp. So he jumped over the fence with another citizen, separated the two and kept them separated until police could come in and resolve the situation. I think it says a lot about Adam. One is that he actually did it, like decided to intervene. And then two, that he didn't tell anybody. He didn't want any recognition for it. So just something about Adam. The second person is Captain Mitch Ocon. He's 20 year also. He was hired in 2006, promoted to captain in 2019. He's currently assigned to our truck company in downtown. He resides in Gilroy with his partner, Carmen, and his adult daughter, Kelly. So the thing about Mitch, just to know he's really involved with the training in our organization. He's a part of our training committee and one of our shift trainers. We always encourage people to go out and take classes and bring information back to the department so we can stay up to date on training techniques. One thing that we do a lot of is training for civilians and fire, and there was a technique that came out a few years ago called Venator Search. He not only brought the training back to the department, came up with a training plan, and then executed the training for a whole department. So I think that says a lot about Mitch on who he is as a member of our organization. The next person I have is Captain Brian Holm. I don't know, did Brian show up? no okay i'll go back to him because maybe he's a little bit late um the next person i'd like to recognize is captain neil hurd who is here today um So Captain Hurd's been with the department for 20 years. He grew up in beautiful Fireball, which is in Central California.

It's by Doss Palace.

Yeah, Doss Palace. He went to the Modesto Fire Academy. He was a seasonal firefighter for CAL FIRE before he joined our department. He was hired as a firefighter in 2006 and promoted to captain in 2015. He's also currently assigned to Medic Engine 15, which is in Carmel. He's past president of the Monterey Firefighters Association. And as you know, for our contract city, it's really important to have that institutional knowledge within those communities and with our department. Neil's been primarily assigned to Carmel since he's been a captain, what, about 10 years ago. He's a great liaison between our department, our city, and our partners in Carmel. Just as an example of that, recently we took over staffing the ambulance in Carmel, and there's a lot of work that needed to be done beforehand on how that worked operationally. Neil was really involved with that operation and greatly appreciated. Another thing is the station just recently got remodeled. As you know, as your house, there's a lot of logistics need to go with remodeling. He and his crew really worked beforehand to make sure it was successful and then put the station back to where it is today afterwards. So he did a lot of great work with that. Neil resides in Carmel Valley with his wife, Carrie Ann, and has a daughter, Priscilla. But I think what's really important to know about Neil is that since 1884, the Monterey Fire Department has only had four Medal of Valor winners. Neil is one of them. He proudly displays it on his chest. So July 18, 2012, just to remind everybody what happened, we had a fire up on Golden Oaks Lane, which is 30 Monta Vista. There's a condominium complex. large clusters of buildings with common attics. Fire started one of the units and got up into the attic. Well, Neil's assigned to the truck that day. They went on the roof and were cutting holes to help with the suppression efforts. As they're getting off the roof, his captain fell into a hole, not all the way through, but his foot went through the roof. So can you imagine, you have all those tools and equipment, you're trying to push yourself up off the unstable surface with active fire burning below you. Neil rushed over, helped him to get out of that hole and make sure he got home safely you know at the very least saved him from any catastrophic injuries but the very worst potential fatality with the fire activity that was in that building so i think that says a lot about neil and who he is as a person and who he is as a firefighter so i want to recognize neil hurd for 25 years of service

I just want to say I'll be brief. Thank you, Council. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It's been an honor to work for the city for 20 years. This is a great place. I've never thought about leaving, and it's always been great to me. So thank you all for the opportunity to continue to serve, and I appreciate it.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, 20 years of service, not 25. So the last person I have is engineer Russell Soper. Last but not least, Russell, come on up. So Russell started his fire service career in 1990. He actually worked for Florida Fire Department when we had a fire department out there before the base shut down. In 1994, he transferred over to the Naval Postgraduate School as a firefighter there before he came to us in 2001. He was promoted to engineer in 2006. He's currently assigned to downtown on the truck company. So over the years, Russell's been involved with a lot of projects in our department. He was really involved with our hose project, with all the hosing department. And one thing I thought was kind of funny, he was actually involved with our pager project back in the day. We used to carry pagers with us. So that tells you how long we've been in the fire service, how far technology has come. Yeah, he was a member of our USAR team and an instructor for off-road driving. So we practice off-road driving. But I think what's really important to know about Russell is that he is a very skilled and tenured professional engineer within our department. And he's helped a lot of people learn that skill and craft and continues to do so today. So Russell resides in Monterey with his wife, Betty, and three adult daughters, Jillian, Leah, and Kiona. And I think that it's really important to understand for Russell about Russell is that, you know, a lot of people organizations are forward facing and you see them a lot doing things. And then you have those, the quiet and behind the scenes doing the work. They're the backbone of the organization. And Russell is one of those guys. He not only helps us better be better as a department, But, you know, we have an opportunity to work together. We become a family. We spend a third of our lives together. And as a family members, you know, everyone goes through troubled times and have difficulties. And I guarantee you talk to almost anyone in our department who's gone through those times. They received a phone call from Russell or something like some kind words or just, hey, what do you need? So I think that says a lot about his character, who he is. He's very reliable and one of the most trusted members of our organization. So I will recognize Russell for 25 years of service to the Monterey Fire Department.

want to say thank you and everything that you provide and i want us to do this thank you so much

Last call, Captain Holm. Okay, the last one I just want to recognize is Captain Brian Holm. He had 20 years experience as well. He was hired as a firefighter in 2006, promoted to captain in 2014. He's currently assigned at a new Monterey station, Hawthorne, which cross-staffs the boat, so he's been there. Active member of the USAR team. He resides in Seaside. And just something about Brian is that, as you know, the Monterey Firefighters Association does a lot of community events, including the 4th of July Pancake Breakfast, which is coming up. So please come, you know, stop by. But they also do, like, Movie in the Park and Kids Combat Challenge in Pacific Grove of the Good Old Days. As you can understand, finding volunteers can work these events can sometimes be challenging. You go to any event, Brian's always one of the people there that is working the event. So I think it says a lot about who he is, not only representing the Monterey Fire Department, but representing our community and giving back. So just want to recognize him as well. So thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. And we'll take pictures with everyone if that's at one time at the end. I'd like to call up Brian Edwards, Library and Museums Director, to recognize his employee.

Thank you. Thank you to our city manager, Dante Hall, and our honorable mayor and council. I want to recognize public services manager, Kim Smith, here in the audience for 20 years of service. Come on up, Kim. Kim, if you don't know, you should know Kim. Kim is one of those people like if you're ordering books, if you're requesting books, that's somebody who's going to be looking through your order and adding them in that library. So Kim is really responsible. Her and her team are really going through and making sure we have an equitable collection here for the library. Kim is looking over the different programs in the library and also things like our new bookmobile. Kim was the person really responsible for getting that grant, getting over, what, $190,000 for us to get a brand new bookmobile. So that book on the road is thanks to Kim's work. Kim worked on getting all of our zip books and our grants over the years. So it's always been looking forward, you know, been somebody really active in the community. You'll see her on the desk helping out people. Nixie and Sinclair supporting her as well. So really enjoy working with Kim, somebody who will be direct and tell you what she thinks too. I think we all need that person in our lives. So I do appreciate all my time working with Kim. Kim, anything you'd like to add? Come on up.

Nope. Just thank you, everybody. It's been a wonderful opportunity the last 20 years here. And if I haven't seen you at the library recently, I hope you come by soon.

I love how she inserted the public service announcement, which was well-placed for the library. So thank you for that.

Next, I'd like to call up finance for their employee.

Do we have her?

There we go. Thank you.

Good afternoon, esteemed council and city manager. My name is Stella Sandoval. I'm the assistant finance director for the city of Monterey.

I don't know if Herlinda is here.

So it is my privilege to recognize Herlinda Franklin for an extraordinary milestone of 20 years of dedicated service to the City of Monterey. Herlinda joined the City Revenue Division in June of 2006, and for the past two decades, she has continued to be an integral part of our finance team. Throughout her tenure with the City, she has been promoted through several accounting positions and is currently an Accountant Auditor in the Revenue Division. Herlinda is a trusted and invaluable resource to her peers and managers throughout the City. Her attention to detail, extensive knowledge of the City's revenue operations, and unwavering dedication to serving both the City of Monterey and the public have contributed significantly to her success. She is well respected as someone who is dependable, knowledgeable, and always willing to lend a helping hand. She continues to demonstrate her commitment to gain technical knowledge and contribute her outstanding work ethic. We appreciate all her efforts and we take pride in her achievements and look forward to her continued success. And on behalf of the finance department, I extend our heartfelt gratitude to Herlinda for her two decades of exemplary service to the city of Monterey. Thank you.

And last but not least, I'd like to call up our Public Works Department who has a milestone retirement.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council. Thank you, Mr. Hall. Today we have the honor of recognizing Michael Coleman as he retires after 21 years of dedicated service to the City of Monterey. Unfortunately, he was not able to be here with us tonight. Michael joined the city in 2005 as a parking attendant and built his entire career within the parking division through hard work, dedication, and commitment to excellence. Over the years, he advanced through the ranks, ultimately serving as parking maintenance supervisor. Those who work with Michael know him as someone who led a calm, steady presence, no matter what the challenge, he always approached his work with professionalism. Michael played a very important role in modernizing the parking operations. He helped implement new technologies while never losing sight of the day-to-day details that keep the facilities running smoothly. His contributions and leadership have left a lasting mark on the parking division. In 2025, Michael was recognized with the Public Works Teamwork Award, an honor that reflects the collaborative spirit and dedication he brought to his work throughout his career. He's going to be greatly missed. And I just want to say that I wish him the best. He is going to travel the world with his spouse. He is going to live like a local in different areas of the world and snorkel the waters. And I cannot be more jealous. So I do wish you the best and thank you so much for all your years of dedication for the city of Monterey and a very well deserved retirement.

So mayor, if we could, if we invite all the people who were here tonight to take a picture with the city council and receive your award recognition letter and also your pen. So come on up and department heads too, please.

Yeah, do you want me to help you hand it off? Yeah. Yeah, I know. All right, I'm trying to get the things. Hang on. Can you move this a little bit, Neil, to the left? Perfect. Here we go. One, two, three.

One, two, and three.

All right.

Thank you. Thank you. Congrats, everybody.

Thank you, guys.

Congrats. Thank you.

All right, and at this point we'll go ahead and open it up for public comments specifically on this item so public comments on the. Anniversary and milestones for our city staff how this process works just to remind everybody what we do is we identify those who want to speak during public comment at the beginning of the public comment period. And then once those folks are identified, only those folks will be able to speak. So if you raise your hand after the cutoff, you won't be able to have the opportunity to speak. So again, this is just public comment on the milestones and anniversaries. I'm going to start with folks on Zoom. You can use the raise hand function while you're navigating your way there. I'll check in the chamber. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? All right, I'm not seeing any takers. So I'll go back to Zoom and do a countdown to five, four, three, two, one. And we have nobody on Zoom. And so with that, bring it back to the council. Anybody have any last minute comments on this one?

Just one quick comment. Please. It is really great to see the folks that are here with milestones of 15, 20, 25. It is incredible and it is part of our legacy at the City of Monterey. It means that there's something right in the culture. It means that there is a lot of things for people to do. And I don't think anybody really gets bored when they're working. There are always challenges. And so I've seen some of these folks when I was walking out the door and retiring and they were just starting. So it's just great to see how dedicated so many of our employees are, and that means that we have something that we have an obligation to sustain, and that's providing a workplace that is safe, that's a culture, that is positive, that is rewarding for these fine employees that you saw tonight to make sure that they are supported and that they have the resources to do their work.

just hats off to the folks that uh land in a good job and love the job and serve this community amen um i i think i would just add to that um when we have a lot of difficult conversations in the community around high salaries within the city and the benefits that our workforce gets there's a consequence to to being too draconian and impacting the benefits that our employees get. And so we need to make sure that we stay competitive and make sure that we can recruit and retain good talent in the city of Monterey. Otherwise, we may not continue to see these long-term years of service in the city. So we need to make sure that we continue to take care of our employees that are taking care of us every single day. All right, with that, we'll go ahead and move on to general public comments. So this is for items that are not on today's agenda. So if you have a comment that is something that is on the agenda, this is not the time to speak. This is for pretty much anything else that has to do with city business. I'll do the same thing again for folks on Zoom. You can use the raise hand function. Anybody in the chamber, I just ask that you stand up to the left of the podium, or you can stay seated by identifying yourself by raising your hand. I'm seeing one, two, three, four, five. Is there a hand raise that I'm missing? Luis isn't going to speak. No, you're good. Four or five. So there's five in the chamber. Anybody else in the chamber wish to speak for general public comment? All right, so we'll go ahead and cut it off to those five, and I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. We have one on Zoom. We're going to leave it to two minutes, and we'll start in the chamber.

Yeah, good evening or good afternoon. Tom Raleigh, I'm president of the Fisherman's Flats Homeowners and Residents Association. And recently I was able to give a windshield tour for the new city manager in which I'm trying to orient him to the flats and foothills area of Monterey. With that respect, there's a legal matter coming up that I have not seen on any city council agenda, and it's July 1st, Superior Court, and it's on the buffer area of 50 acres that belongs to MPUSD in Tarpey Flats. It's totally surrounded. There's no access to it. It has no city services. And this was never raised, to my knowledge, during any public comment when it was stuck in the city report to the state to get approved. So this is one of the buffer areas that the Planning Commission mentioned during a staff report. last the last june 9th so i don't see it on your closed session for tonight and it's july 1. so it's something you need to find out about the city has been sued for its conclusion thank you

Good afternoon. I want to bring something to your attention that some of you are probably already aware of and that is the sidewalk marking that's occurred out in Del Monte Beach neighborhood. People there were quite surprised by all of the orange tagging that happened on the sidewalks and then they were sent demand letters that said you have to repair your sidewalk and also pay for a permit. to in order to conduct those repairs. And staff was very gracious. They got me an answer very promptly today on that. But as I understand it, we're tripping over the rules of the NCIP policies and procedures manual and also your own policies, which leaves staff with the impression that they can't use public money to repair these sidewalks, which I think is a big change from what was being done not all that long ago. And I think we should go back to that or at least enable people to propose an NCIP project in order to pay for those repairs. I think the right thing to do would be to allow the public to put in a nomination form so that they don't have to pay for those repairs. And not only that, by bundling all these repairs together, it could all cost a lot less money because it'd be the same contractor working in the same neighborhood and not every single person would have to buy a whatever it is almost a 400 permit so that might be a policy matter that you have to consider because the policies and procedures manual is ultimately approved by the city council if that's in fact what's standing in the way of this then i would ask that you agendize that thank you

Mr. Ruz, I just ask that you continue working with staff on that. I can't go into it too much now because it's not an agendized item, but I would encourage you to keep working with staff on getting clarification in regards to the rules associated with that. So, thank you, sir.

Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the City Council. Josh Stevens, North Monterey. For the last decade, whenever my generation has voiced concerns about the cost of living, housing, or inflation, society has handed us a very specific playbook for fiscal responsibility. We are told, quite simply, that our financial struggles are our own fault. The advice is always the same. Stop buying avocado toast. Make your coffee at home. Cancel your streaming subscriptions. Stop taking Ubers and take the bus. Get a second job or a side hustle. Learn to code or live within your means. We are told that if we are running out of money, the solution isn't to demand a bigger allowance. The solution is to tighten our belts, cut out the extras, and make do. Today, the taxpayers of Monterey are here to offer that exact same advice to City Council. This city has a spending problem, and whenever the budget falls short, your first instinct is to turn to the taxpayers, treating us like your personal bank of mom and dad, and ask for a bailout. We said it loudly and clearly when we denied Measure D. And when you also looked at your receipts, by your own admission, eight of the $10 million deficit was caused by operating a city-owned and operated gym. You threatened our police and fire services to cover the staggering losses of a municipal gym, a facility that operates to the direct detriment of flourishing, tax-paying, competitive private businesses in our own community. Subsidizing a massive rec facility while local businesses are trying to survive is the ultimate municipal avocado toast. Before you ever ask us to open our wallets again at the ballot box, we have to ask, have you audited your departments and canceled your unnecessary subscriptions? Are you making your municipal coffee at home? From where we sit, it looks like the city council is trying to maintain a lifestyle it can't afford while expecting us to cover your overdraft fees. Take a page from your playbook from your rental assistance. Break out the budgeting worksheet. Stop asking us for an allowance. Go home and make your own coffee. Thank you.

And, sir, hopefully you'll stick around for this evening's session when we look at the budget. So it'll be a good discussion.

good evening monterey city council mayor williamson my name is patrice parks and i am the co-founder of the non-profit organization oco arts foundation i'm here tonight to announce that we are extremely close to signing a lease for the oco theater complex and we are now gearing up our fundraising efforts to all eight cylinders and hope to have the theater operational by the end of 2026. The plans for the OCO Theatre Complex 3.0 include four dedicated screening rooms, a multi-use live performance screening room hybrid, and a production studio available to local filmmakers and creatives. In addition, the café will also be up and operational offering service both during the morning hours and during the theatre's operational hours. The OCO Arts Foundation seeks to build collaborative relationships and projects with the local filmmakers, artists, performers, nonprofits, businesses, and citizens to create a third space for locals, as well as the many visitors to Monterey County. We are excited to move forward with our plans and hope that we can count on the support of the city of Monterey as we restore and revitalize the OCO to even more than its former glory. Thank you.

Hello City Council and Mayor Monterey. My name is Samuel Mactari. I'm actually the Vice President of the OCO Arts Foundation. And first off, I want to thank the City of Monterey for its continued commitment to culture and the arts. The OCO Theatre, ever since the City initially supported it, has long been part of Monterey's cultural identity, and we are honored to be part of what's building it to open back up again. Now, As Patrice mentioned, we are about to sign a lease with Green Valley, and this project signifies a really big investment by the community and even private led partners into Monterey County. And it's going to provide opportunities for live performances, music, general cultural programing and creative entrepreneurship. And even though we've accomplished a lot, there's still a lot of milestones ahead of us. So the lease and the associated use permit approval will require review by the city's processes. We respectfully ask that whenever possible, you consider the applications on a timely manner so that we might be able to serve the community a little sooner rather than later. Every month gained by an efficient approval process is another month closer to us bringing cultural programming, space for the community to gather downtown, and general economic activity down there. But with that being said, we recognize that projects to this degree definitely require a lot of collaboration to succeed. So we would be deeply appreciative for any guidance or support the City Council could offer. And we look forward to working with city staff, city council, locals, the artists, and local businesses in restoring the OCO as a vibrant cultural anchor in downtown Monterey, hopefully. That's all. Thank you for your time.

Thank you both for showing up today. And I guess my ask for you all is to keep us informed. Keep coming back to the council and let us know how the process is going for you all. Will do. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks, you guys. Take care. All right. With that, we'll go to our caller on Zoom.

laurie you can unmute and you can go ahead good evening council um tom reeves kind of audio is a little bit faint could you try try again uh boy i don't know what to do it sounds am i am i still faint it sounds better is that better yep yeah Okay, good evening all. So, Tom Reeves sort of went into what I was going to bring up. So I'll try to dance around it and I didn't know we'd only have 2 minutes, but maybe give you a little history based from Del Monte Beach because that's where I live. And definitely want to raise concerns about that. And we've been through probably about 3 rounds of this now. So, in 2022, my next door neighbor, how to say called in a safety hazard because she has a senior husband and was worried about tripping public works showed up within days. Mark the sidewalks within a week. They came and ground them down. No permit fees. No demand letters. No bills, no, nothing. Everything was like, it always had been just a year later. Another senior neighbor called in same thing safety concern for a senior member. And we all learned the hard way the city's approach had completely changed. It was very rough for a number of months before the city announced what was going on. But basically, we're required now to pay permit fees, exceeding 425 dollars higher contractors spend spend up some in some cases, thousands of dollars to repair these sidewalks. And it might be coincidence, but it just seems weird that after measure D failed within weeks, cities come through our neighborhood. We're bright orange everywhere. You look latest round was very excessive. Very few homes are not marked. So what troubles many of us is that we approved Measure S in 2018 to fund these things, sidewalk streets and storm drains. So if we're already paying for sidewalks from Measure S, why are we being charged separately for repairs? And it's set to expire next year, Measure S, Do you really think in November that residents are going to support renewing this if we're expected to pay out of pocket? If this is truly citywide, it would be nice to see how many other neighborhoods have been issued these notices and how much collection and permit fees and how much the cost has shifted onto homeowners. I will be talking to Tom Reeves. We are in talks, but before this NCIP didn't work as an option. Correct. Yeah.

all right with that we'll go ahead and close general public comment thank you for all those can we turn that down just a little bit now sorry thank you um we'll go ahead and close general public comment thank you for all those that that contributed to public comment today um with that we'll move on to consent agenda there's been no request to pull i just want to do another quick check-in with the council any requests to pull items from the consent i'd like to go over seven okay we'll pull seven Staff, anything else that we're not capturing that's been requested? Just seven? Okay. With that, we'll go ahead and open it up for public comment on the consents. You can either speak to an item on consent, or if you would like an item to be pulled, you can make that request at this time as well. So we'll start with folks on Zoom. You can use the raise hand function. While you're navigating your way there, I'll check in the chamber. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on any of the consent items or wish to pull a consent item? Seeing none, we'll bring it back to the council. I'm sorry, go back to Zoom. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. There's nobody on Zoom. Bring it back to the council for motion and deliberation.

I make a motion to approve the consent agenda calendar two through eight, accepting seven.

Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. Any other discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. With that, we'll look at item seven is to authorize an increase in FY26 grant revenue and appropriation of regional surface transportation funds in the amount of 130,000 to the Madison Herman Larkin Intersection Safety Improvement Project in the Capital Project Fund and award a construction contract in the amount of $140,306.50 to Don Chapin Company Inc. And this is a CIP project. And then I'll just pass it to you, Captain Barash, if you had any specific questions that you wanted to kick us off with.

I would just appreciate a review of it for myself and the public and just walk us through the increased safety. And I have a little bit of question about what I think is the bicycle lanes, which I think are in the middle. Okay. All right. Obviously, I don't understand it enough. Go ahead.

Clementine, if you could put the so this is a rstp grant funded quick build project and so the goal of these projects are that they have a low cost easy to implement shorter timeline so we have up on the screen and this was attachment 3 of the agenda report and that is what a conceptual of what the intersection will look like So we are not proposing any bike facilities as part of this. We are actually proposing painted medians. We're proposing narrowing the pedestrian crossings as this is a pretty high pedestrian activity location as it's a major entrance and exit for the Monterey High School. And then we also are proposing a very low mounted median island in the center really a traffic circle. And so this is for a traffic calming effect. So really the goal is reducing vehicle speed at the intersection approaches, reducing vehicle speed through the intersection, especially when you have such a large area. So you can catch speed where you have a lot of pedestrians, particularly students walking. By narrowing these crossings, we wanna improve the visibility of the intersection. And we proposed making this mountable median island that Monterey M. So we had the opportunity for placemaking to reinforce that this is an area that's serving the Monterey High School students. Okay.

Thank you.

Did you have a few questions?

no um so that center m is elevated yeah and the cars are just gonna do a roundabout it's um doesn't seem like there's enough room

It's bigger than you think. It's a very large intersection and it's kind of oddly shaped. And so we kind of wanted this to take up space so that cars don't take up space. Also, when you have to circulate around the traffic circle, it has the same conflict reducing effect that a roundabout does where we want you to go right rather than go left. So you don't do that left hook. and potentially hit a pedestrian. So we just wanted to minimize conflict points, but it's very oddly shaped and there's a little more space than you think in there.

And will those green middle lanes, middle dividers, they will be green, they'll be marked green and yellow?

Yeah, so the yellow and green, we tried to really pull the Monterey High School colors. So we were going for that placemaking. There actually will be plastic bollards as well to add a vertical element. When you add vertical elements, it causes this effect where you slow down because you feel that it's narrower. So it's not just paint, there will be plastic bollards, the mountable traffic circle.

OK, great. I appreciate that.

Thanks. Just one quick clarification, because I heard you use the term roundabout, and it's not technically a roundabout. It's a traffic circle, which is just a traffic calm device in the middle of the intersection. So it's still going to remain stop controlled. Unlike a roundabout, you'll still have stop signs as you approach the intersection. But we'll have, I think it's an inch or two inch minimal median. So even if there's a big truck or something that needs to go through the intersection, and they don't have the room to go all the way around, they can still drive over the top of the traffic.

OK. But they do still stop and then enter the control circle. Yes. But they're always going right.

Yes, so it remains a stop-controlled intersection, but the traffic circle in the middle of the intersection, they should be going around it, but if they're too big to the point where they can't actually navigate around, it's mountable, so they can drive right over the top.

So the stop signs remain, the kids remain crossing the street?

Yes, that's correct.

In hordes? In hordes. Okay, thank you. That was helpful.

This is similar to the...

traffic circles that exist like in build a money we're going to run the neighborhoods so those ones actually do have yield control but similar size um and they are not mountable yield control so yield control the the yellow or the red and white triangle so basically if you do not have to yield right away to somebody that's already in the circle you can just go just like you would a roundabout

So, but here...

Here, this is stop. Yes, it's staying stop controlled with stop signs.

Okay. I'm appreciative that you pulled this. I have... I'm having some hesitancy. I'm getting into comments here. Let's take this out to the public and then I'll come back to it. Can I ask staff a question?

Please. So, was there any consideration of... eliminating one of the crossings. In other words, eliminating pedestrians from going across one of them because it's five intersections. It's a lot of people coming all at the same time and sometimes you can close a crosswalk and encourage folks to cross in another way. So I know that the vulnerable part up there is on the upper side of Madison And then when you cross Madison, then they've got to cross again to go across Herman. So if we're able to cause the pedestrians to spend their time opposite Madison, but actually crossing Larkin and then crossing lower Madison instead of upper Madison because it seems like a lot of the congestion comes from the pedestrians at the upper side, upper Herman, upper Madison in front of the church. Any thought about how we can, or is this one of those cases where we have to put it in and then we will adjust it if we see that there's an opportunity later?

yeah that's actually one of the goals of a quick build project is this is like it's like sticking your foot in the water let's see if this is going to work and then you can start to basically prove your case of like oh we should take further future steps so this is just dipping our toe in the water and that's really what quick build projects their goal is So at this time, no proposal to change the crosswalks.

Okay. And have we done any outreach to the neighborhoods that are most impacted, not so much for construction, but their input? Is it that point in this process?

A long, long time ago, back when we did the grant itself. So, and we did reach out and we did get a letter of support from the high school.

okay but i'm wondering about the residents have we gotten anything back from the residents because if we did it a long time ago not recently these concepts didn't come with that application so so we have not done it recently okay okay thank you one other question please um

So I think I understand that all five crosswalks are crosswalks, but just explain why one is remaining gray and the four are off-white.

Oh, I think that might be an error in the drawing, but no, it will be staying a yellow crosswalk. It might have to do with... I'm not sure why, but yes, no, it'll be staying yellow.

Thank you.

um okay let's did you have anything any questions okay let's take it thank you for answering those questions um we'll open it up for public comment for folks on zoom you can use the raise hand function anybody in the chamber just ask that you stand up to the left of the podium or you can identify yourself by raising your hand i see two takers anybody else All right. We'll cut it off to the two. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. There's nobody on Zoom. We'll go ahead and start in the chamber.

Good afternoon. I want the city council to know I have lived around the corner from that intersection for over 70 years. And I'm very familiar with that intersection. And none of my neighbors have received any notification that this was happening. And If the city really wanted to calm traffic, they would try to do something to encourage that not be the pick up and drop off point for Monterey High School, which is what they have done ever since this new improved track. and all sort of thing, there's cars that park in that intersection. They physically park in that intersection and going up Madison waiting to turn into that high school. All you're going to do is create more chaos and more trouble with people trying to turn left onto Larkin or to coming down Herman and turn right or crossing Larkin to get into the high school. The high school needs to come up with their own entrance and they not dump their entrance on on our neighborhood like what it appears that they're doing says you got approval from the high school but you didn't get approval from the neighbors now it it is just it is just inconceivable to me that people will not be able to go across larkin without doing that little roundabout if you wanted to calm traffic on larkin street put Put some speed bumps in. Do you know the kids try to go between zero and 60 between the high school and that intersection at Larkin? They don't try to go across Larkin. So I think you really need to be up there and monitor that intersection when school gets out. And during the day, I just think you're just flat out wrong. I'm sorry, but none of my neighbors have seen this, and I'm really upset. So thank you.

And I just remind folks when they're giving public comment to address them to the council.

Council, I have an apartment building off on Larkin down the street, and I go down there quite a bit. And it just logic tells me that the more space you have, the more ability for people to avoid hitting somebody, having traffic. And the minute you put something like this, you're going to restrict traffic on things, you're going to have accidents, and you're going to have liability. I suggest that this is something new. As she said, try it someplace else where there's less traffic and see how it works there before you bring it to a very impacted. At 3 o'clock through 30, the DLI is coming down the hill. People are going home and back and down the hill. The kids are getting out. it is you need as much room and space to be safe even though you have a stop sign there you really really shouldn't put something that's going to restrict something an elderly person will come down thing will get confused will stop traffic it'll be worse than it it was intended to do if it was a it had the space for a roundabout that's something else roundabout seems to work well this is something that's not in the best interest of the people that live there much less the people that travel through there and i wasn't even going to speak on this but it just it just logic jumped out of my head and says this is this is crazy this is some company coming in there trying to spend money that's been allocated by the government why don't you just give it back to the government tell them to pay down the budget all right with that we'll go ahead and close uh public comment bring it back to the council for motion and deliberation

I did, but I'll stick to my theme. I'll close us out. Please go ahead, Dr. Barber.

So it sounds to me, just listening to the brief presentation of the outreach, that the outreach wasn't done to the residents for this time, for this specific time. a rendering. So it sounds like to me that that needs to be done prior to moving forward just so you can get feedback from the residents that it's going to impact. It's great that the school has given their approval and I think that's great and I applaud you for trying to address a situation that has been an issue for a while for safety purposes uh for not only the students and um the parents and the drop-offs but for even you know other people just traveling through so i would i would say that we would need to kind of go back a step and get the outreach done just so that we can get the feedback from the residents uh for this new rendering you can i ask staff something else that might bring some clarity to that yeah um so staff if we could ask you a another question sorry to have to

to a second round here. Thank you. So I know that your staff and the funds are trying to solve a problem. It's been complex since Nelson went to high school there. And funny that he was there at high school at the time. I was also picking up my now wife at Monterey High School. It's always been an intersection that has had its complications. So I'm wondering, do we have a track record of

collisions that have occurred at that intersection that helps support why we would want to do something where we change the way it's been for a long time is there any evidence of uh collisions so i'd have to pull up the memo when we originally submitted the application back in i believe it was 2022 and i believe there were collisions for pedestrians and bikes i would have to pull the memo to get the exact number though because that would would have been part of our application

Okay, so the other thing, and I think it was brought up by 1 of the speakers is that have we had an outreach where we did the high school. And I know they have environmentally engineering, and I know they have security, but to determine, are there other options? In other words, they just finished the construction last year, which, by the way, was crucial. I mean, just terribly long and impacted the neighbors horrifically. But finally, there is a student lot. I'm just wondering, the high school has changed its drop off point a couple of times. You can't drive through and turn left into the upper staff parking lot. Formerly, you could, and that was where your drop-off is. So now the drop-off has a certain pattern. I'm just wondering, have we gone back to the school and analyzed what other options there might be to reduce some of the pedestrian traffic that's coming in right at the front of the school instead of maybe down at the student parking lot?

No, we haven't.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Andrew, one more question. The little black circles to the right of every street at the stop sign, is that part of the narrowing? I think I heard the word that you're designing some narrowing. Am I wrong? What is that? Those little black circles.

Can we pull it back up?

Sorry. I thought it was still up. Oh, I'm on the agenda.

That's where we'd be putting the bollards.

Okay, so that's either the bollards or there's a surface mounted, it's an R16 sign that's a pedestrian yield sign. So I see the black circles in the median of those painted, or in the middle of those painted medians is a flexible post sign. And there would be bollards along the edge of the median and edge of travel way.

Okay, all right. So I'm pretty close with Nelson's observations. I get the beauty because of your explanation, Andrew, of everybody going right. I think that might be safer for the kids if everybody's going the same direction. But I am wondering about the narrowing, but it's not my bailiwick. And I have a lot of respect for you guys. And I'm sure you're thinking of the kids. But

So I can add maybe just one point of context. We will be coming back to you in about a year with this item. So this is quick build. These are all cheap and expensive materials relatively. We can come back and we can choose not to make it permanent. We can say, hey, we've come back. We've done more outreach during this last year, seeing how people have acclimated or responded to the quick build and say, okay, people didn't like it or they liked it, but they want this tweaked. We can go ahead and approve those changes a year from now. This is all, if you have commitment issues with this concept, it's not permanent. And then we could, if we're thinking we need to do more outreach before we even do the quick build, We could not approve this item tonight. We could come back, do some outreach. We would probably have to return the grant funds to TAMC and reapply in a future cycle. But we would miss this summer window for construction, so meaning we wouldn't be able to do it during summer break while school's out. We'd have to come back in at least a year from now if we're able to hold onto those funds with a different concept. So we have options. If you don't want to approve this item tonight, we probably could return the grant funds, do more outreach, come back with a different concept. If you do want to approve this item, don't worry. We can come back a year from now and say it was just temporary material. We can remove it. It's not permanent or we can change it. Essentially, this is something that we can come back. It's not intended to be permanent.

Can we do just the center and everybody turns right and then we see how people react?

I suppose, yeah, we could probably approve, make an alternative motion or approve it with some conditions. Then as staff, we can make plan amendments and work with the contractor and incorporate those changes.

Mayor, since we're kind of in discussion mode now. Could I jump in? Yeah. I wanted to also give her some feedback from what she just commented on that.

I think the biggest thing for me is the engagement piece. And I appreciate that there was some engagement previously. The concern that I have is I want this to be successful. And I'm in the same position that Councilman Barash is in, which is I'm not the expert. I trust... that you all are um knowledgeable enough in this area to know that change can be difficult and we're going to get some community pushback right but on the other side of this i just want i want to make sure that what's being proposed is successful and so even though there might be some pushback still i think it would be helpful if we potentially took a pause and did some community outreach. I don't know if just connecting with council member Rash and opening up an opportunity for the neighborhood association to meet and discuss. If we delayed this to the next council meeting, would that create a problem with us being able to leverage the grant funding?

No, but the problem I see is we would probably miss the window in order to construct it during the summer break. So right now we're trying to award, our contractor would be able to mobilize the next month or two and construct everything before the school season starts up again. If we push it any further, it just increases the likelihood that that timeline might start to encroach into the school.

Into the school year, yeah. I guess I'll pass it over to Council Member Smith here in a second. I guess to me it's, If we're going to do it, we do it. I see the traffic circle as the part that maybe is generating some frustration from the community, the concern in the community. It's not the elements. that lead up to the circle. So if we're gonna do it, my thought is that we just do it. And then a final note is if we find that it's not working sooner than a year, I don't think anything should prevent us or preclude us from engaging in the conversation sooner. Like, yeah, this is just really not working. So I just kind of throw that in as well. So customer Smith.

Yeah, I lean towards the pause that you had suggested because I think that without appropriately engaging the neighbors and reengaging the school to discover what's going to work better, where are the vulnerabilities that they might be able to suggest, without having the conversations and asking those kind of questions, That is sorta to me insulting to the neighborhood where they're not even consulted on a current project with some concepts that they can now see that raise questions. I think the outreach to me is the number one priority. The engineering is soft scape. It's not very difficult to go into the project, but I don't think it's money that will never come back to us. I think it's money that would recycle next year for the TAMSI awarding time. And I would rather have a pause to do it right with the outreach. And also when you slow it down, we tend to open up our eyes for other options and it sort of comes together a little bit better. Councilman Rash, you mentioned right-hand turns a couple of times. It's not just a right-hand turn. People are going to go into the intersection and go around and have to turn left. So there's a lot of car movement. I know this is a concept that doesn't have actual space alignment, but to me it looks like when you come up Madison, traffic that's coming up Madison are crowded in to go very close to Larkin, very close to upper Madison, and then coming through the whole circle and then going down Larkin Street. Ultimately, everybody's trying to get down Larkin Street. That's in the drop-off is at the front of the school, and you have to get down Larkin to do that. Anybody else that's going up, Herman is dropping off in not an approved location, but they do it anyway. I just think that our opportunity is to fully engage the school and the neighbors, get it right before we go to construction, pause a bit, and then do it when we're ready, where we start a couple weeks after school is out next year, so we don't have a rush. Because we know how construction goes. all it takes is a couple of days of rain if we started this and we approved it tonight i'm not real comfortable that we're going to get it done before school starts we don't really have that much time school's back in session early august so we really have very little time to do it i would rather be prepared come back at it next year have this already approved like you know february april and and then we are able to you know move ahead with it when the funds come in that's my preference

I would agree. And I appreciate your words to not panic too much about utilizing the money. And I think that we often think we have to utilize money or lose it, which maybe we lose it, but another community gets it, or we get it the next time, or it's available, the same grant might be available the next year. I think we ought to reach out to the community and do this as well as we can. I think it's a very problematic intersection. I appreciate that it's been decades and decades and decades of working this. So I'd make a motion that we pause for community outreach and resubmission in a year?

Second.

I mean, I'm asking for when the grant, when is the grant time.

So the grant happens on a two to three year cycle. We will have to reject all bids because there was a couple actions in this council report. So one was awarding bids to the Don Chapin company. We'll have to reject bids and we'll put a pause on approving the plans, do some outreach, and we'll maybe reapply in three years and the grant cycle opens up again. We will probably have to return the grant funds from this last award, and we'll probably eat whatever expenditures happened during the design phase. It probably won't be reimbursed.

How much are we looking at there?

We have around $29,000. How much? I'm sorry.

$29,000. So it's a moved and seconded. Any other discussion on the motion?

Just a comment that I know nobody wants to do anything and then waste money and not be able to effectuate the design. But sometimes, and I've done this with a remodel or two, where I rushed it thinking that the value was going to come back with the speed of my calendar. And it winds up every time burning me and I wind up spending more money. This is a case of I just think we're a little bit advanced. And I think we owe it to the neighbors. We owe it to the school to do it right. And I hate to waste the $29,000, but I would rather we do a project that's going to work and solve the problem. So I support the motion.

taking a little bit of a different tack. I mean, there's elements obviously that I'm agreeing with as far as concerns, particularly the community outreach. I do have concern though, that we're not, we're gonna return the funds and we make it sound as if it's easy for us to just apply again and we're going to get the funding what kind of perception is tamsea going to have of the city of monterey if we went through the process of applying and then rejected the funds and had to return them And then I just don't think it's a good look for us to be eating costs right now. I think that there is some general concept here that works and it's probably going to be the thing that we end up doing in the end. But there is this community engagement piece. And so I wonder if there could be some kind of middle ground where we say, let's delay to the next council meeting. Let's get some community engagement in. I recognize that this might eat into the school year a little bit. Um, but I think that that's worth doing in order to not lose the grant funding and allow this process to move forward now, as opposed to continuing to kick the can down the road for another two or three years. I think it's a lost opportunity. It's here in front of us. It may not be perfect, but knowing that we will come back in a year, it'll allow us to make those adjustments that are needed to help find that balance within the community.

How much time do we have? I believe the end of August of this year.

Well, school starts August 9th, something like that. Yeah, so how long would it take for outreach, for community outreach?

So it would take time to prepare notices, get something scheduled with the community. I'd say probably at least a month if you wanted us to advertise and market it, make sure people are aware, set up the meeting. What I could offer is, you know, maybe we don't aim for the summer. Maybe we aim for a fall break or the winter break. That's where the weather comes into factor a little bit. It's a little bit more unpredictable. But we could still award Chapin tonight. We could have a contractor ready to go. We could do some outreach, make some minor plan modifications. And then suspend work with Chapin until we have whatever those modifications are and then be ready to go in like winter break or fall break.

I would also just offer that we don't need to do... I don't think we necessarily need to take a lot of time to put notices and things together. I mean, I think it's just... if somebody could create a flyer tomorrow, share that with the neighborhood associations, schedule something for next week. I don't think it has to be something too extensive. But neither here nor there, I'm hearing that there might be some flexibility to at least amend the motion. And so maybe, I leave it to you, Jean, because you made the motion, or I can try to make a substitute.

No, I'm fine amending it or yielding for a substitute motion. Why don't I?

Yeah, let me try.

Would you answer Councilmember Smith's question about what would be TAMC's opinion if we returned it? Is that a big deal?

I can offer that as a board member of TAMSI. If I said to the executive director the reasons that it didn't pass at the council, this happens all the time. I don't know when the money expires. I mean, you would know that better than I do. It could be the pause, but you might be against the timeline.

So they were, I think we were awarded grant funds in two different cycles. So the funding's on two different timelines. We can request an extension. Usually TAMC is receptive to allowing extension if there's still a reasonable path forward.

Yeah. Well, you'd have one vote by the board member. Yeah. But I think it's a matter of, it's an ask of an extension. As long as they know that we're getting closer to the work being done, I think that serves the purpose of the mission of what TAMSI is doing with the money. But I think it's twofold. allow staff to request the extension, allow them to number one, go out and do the outreach and work with the school. And I like the idea of we know we're not going to get it this summer, but there are other opportunities when the school is in a break. And these are hard or not hardscapes, but these are probably able to do the adaptation within a week. If that's the preliminary plan that you'd want to do and that could be done during the winter time.

Would you like to do a substitute motion?

I'll do a substitute motion. So the substitute motion would be a slight modification instead of it being a canceled that we approve and give direction to staff to do outreach. uh to request uh extension with Tamsie for the funding and look to a later date rather than the summer for this execution after that outreach and look for uh I'd say in the next six to eight months and can I add one thing and be open to modifications as you get feedback from the community Yeah, I would agree with that.

So this was a little bit of a long resume. One thing I do need clarification on is, are we awarding to the contractor tonight or not? Because the bid will only be valid for 90 days. So if part of this action, we're going to award that action.

You did? I'm sorry. You're saying that we need to make this action. We need to take that action tonight as well.

Yes, please. If you could include that in the motion, if we're awarding to the contractor or not. Okay.

So this is a classic case of why you probably don't like to do this because what happens when you award the contract and then the input comes from the community and there's a minor modification, would we be better to just reject the bid and go out to bid once we've finalized what we get from our neighbors and what we get from the school? Because what you're doing is you're working towards an end result, which you hope is gonna still be the same as the bid. And then you're going to have to go back and modify the bid and have a change order. So which is going to work better for you?

So we could reject bids. If they're minor modifications, part of this recommended motion was a 15% contingency. And so that would allow for some small change orders. If we're making major changes, then we're best rejecting bids and coming back with a different set of plans. But if these are small modifications, part of this recommendation was to approve a 15% contingency. And so that would allow for minor modifications.

And you could come back to the council if it's more than the 15%, right?

We would have, if it's more than 15%, we would have to come back.

And you're saying 15%. 15, one five. That's what I said. Yeah. Does that work? Does that work for you as a modification? Are you seconding his substitute?

i will second it all right andrew are we getting you in pop and marissa are we getting in hot water is this doable i see dante wants to jump in here well i i i just wanted to clarify um are you saying um to go do um engagement with the community yes depending on what they say that's the decision it doesn't come back to council for review no it would have to come back we just would have that information to be able to consider for the um for the modification okay so you want us to get input and come back to council is that your understanding from the motion yeah that's what's been clarified so that that wasn't what we understood initially so this clarification helps and is that still workable yes and as the motion maker that makes sense and

Madam Clerk has a... With the substitute motion, did that include awarding the bid or canceling all bids?

It does now. I did not say it in the beginning.

Which one?

Which one?

Add that we move ahead with the bid.

Awarding.

Awarding the bid. Could I just make one friendly amendment to the substitute motion, which is if it's minor and agreeable, I don't think it needs to come back to the council. If it's a minor suggestion, I don't think we need to waste administrator on having it come back. And I trust staff to be able to make that determination on whether it's something that would be considered major or minor. If it's something that... fits within what staff thinks is reasonable, then I think that we should allow them to move forward.

So I appreciate the spirit. However, I think we own it with our neighbors and our public, the general public. And I think that this is like the front door of everything that happens in District 3, It touches District 1, and it's District 2, and it's the school, and it's, what, 3,000 people that go through that intersection every day. So I don't have a problem with it coming back because if it changes and it looks better, it's success. because the neighbors have had their input so i i would like to let it mature itself out with the conversations the notices the the the wonderful work that i know the staff is going to do with a with a bid award and they're waiting for final approval and then you get the assurance that the council's happy with it otherwise you've left the council out and i don't think that's good governance

And you guys said that you were okay with that, right, as far as time-wise? Yeah. Okay.

So, yes, we can bring it back for any plan modifications to the council. I think if we had to re-bid the project, that would add a few months to the timeline, and you'd see pricing probably jump. But, yeah, so if we award bids tonight and we come back with minor modifications we plan to approve, we can do that and make it probably work.

Oil's going to go down, so the bid may go down.

sure if we start omitting items yeah like for example the traffic circle in the middle that was considered if that comes out and that's a deduction the the contract would be reduced yeah okay all right i think we've talked this one to death i'm gonna go ahead and call the question um all those in favor aye any opposed motion passes unanimously thank you staff for that thank you for the members of the public that offered public comment there and uh thank you council member rash for for pulling that it was a worthy discussion there um all right with that we're gonna go ahead and move to um we're gonna adjourn to ocean view community services district meeting and we have our consent agenda um my understanding there's been no um requested items to be pulled we already did that didn't we uh we're done no this is ocean view community services district okay um i'm supposed to ask ovp csd directors if there are any items they wish to pull do you wish to pull anything from consent ovp csd directors you're not a council member at this point nothing i want to pull okay we're talking about item number nine

We are talking about... Yeah, nothing to pull here.

Yeah, okay. All right. There's no vote needed. Staff, has there been any request to pull anything? No. Okay. With that, we'll go ahead and open up for public comment on this item. So for folks on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? All right, I'm not seeing any takers. We'll bring it back to... Zoom, my brain is still connecting here. I'll do a countdown to five, four, three, two, one, nobody on Zoom. And with that, we'll go ahead and adjourn back to the council meeting and we'll go to our public hearing items. Item 10 is to levy assessments to fund the Cannery Row, New Monterey and North Fremont Business Improvement Districts. This has been continued from June 2nd. And with that, I'll pass it to Dante for staff presentation.

thank you and i'll pass it to levi who will be providing the presentation tonight thank you mr all good afternoon mayor and council as mentioned this is the annual levy of assessments for our business improvement districts and i'll briefly run through a presentation for that item oh there we go thank you now So as mentioned, this is an annual action each year that state law establishes in a two-part process for a self-assessment. The first step of that process was taken on May 19th when this council approved each of the boards for the business improvement districts, adopted the annual reports and budgets for those districts, and then approved a resolution setting this public hearing. And then this is the second step in which we actually take public hearing and public comment and accept protest and levy the assessment. As mentioned in the staff report, there are no changes to the assessments or the surcharges applied to the business licenses will all remain. That's 25% for New Monterey, 25% for North Fremont, and then 100% for Canary Row, except for professional services, which are 25% surcharge. So just some highlights from the proposed plans for each of the business improvement districts. This is a snapshot of the summary for the expenses and revenues for Canary Row Business Improvement District. As you see, most of their expenses have to do predominantly with maintenance as well as administrative and overhead. and a considerable amount of new projects for total expenses of around $237,000. For revenues with the BID assessment, along with the balance forward, they have a total available funds of $279,000. For Lighthouse Business Improvement District, significantly less assessment coming through there. So obviously less expenses, roughly about $19,000 in expenses. And then as you see here with the BID assessment, along with other fundraisers, carryover funds, they hit around $22,000 in available funds. Similarly, North Fremont's Business Improvement District spends most of their money on promotion with some economic vitality and then other expenses totaling around $34,000. With their BID assessment of approximately $20,000, other funds, fundraisers, and a considerable amount of reserves that move forward, they have a total available funds of $137,000. And with that, staff's recommending that City Council adopt or hold the public hearing, accept any protest and adopt the levy of assessment for the fiscal year 2026-2027 with the following resolutions attached in your packet. I'm happy to answer any questions.

A question, and if you answer this when I was stepped out of the room, you had listed their proposed projects for the Canary Row Neighborhood Association or Business Association. They list $65,000 in a new project. What is that new project?

So that was adopted in the work program. I'd have to go back and look. They have a pretty extensive work program in Canary Row because the amount of funding they move through. So I'd have to go back. I can follow up with you after. Okay.

Yeah. Just shoot me an email. That'd be fine. Absolutely.

Yeah.

Thank you.

All right. Any other questions? All right. We'll take it out for public comment. Thank you for the presentation. Anybody on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? C1 taker. Anybody else? All right, we'll cut it off to the one in the chamber. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. Nobody on Zoom. Go ahead and go to the...

I represent two property owners on North Fremont. One has a lot on the corner of Casa Verde, and another one is a commercial building there. But my question for you is, every year we spend this money for this North Fremont thing, et cetera, et cetera, and they assess X amount of dollars. Not exactly sure how they do it, but it seems to be that nothing ever happens. And I just need to bring the attention to the city council that that bike track that you guys put there for about four or five blocks be the biggest detriment to any improvement in North Fremont. And one of the biggest detractors is, in fact, that you can't walk across the street to a business. And it was a terrible idea back then. And this has really affected what people can do on their properties. Just don't know where to go with that North Fremont. Something that's been looking like that for years and years and years. Even the residents in the area have lost all hope that anything will ever happen there. As I talked to a few of them. But I just wish that money that you have can address maybe finding a solution because I go down North Fremont almost every day, two or three times. And I guarantee you, I have only seen in one year, two bicycles using that hike and bike trail. That is a travesty, a waste of taxpayers' money, and it's really hurting that North Fremont. And you guys should really address that, do something about it. Even if it means giving back the $14 or the $15 million that you guys took to put it in, because it is a total disaster. Thank you.

Okay. With that, we'll go ahead and close public comment and bring it back to the council for... Sorry. Yes. Yes. For motion and deliberation.

I move that we approve as is. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Go ahead, Council Member Smith. So, Mayor, does this require a vote, or it's just a public hearing first that we hear, and then we are voting on it? Because there's no recommendation of a vote. This one's a vote. Okay. I'm looking at the notes, too. And it just doesn't... Yeah. It's missing the... You know, I'm looking at item number 10 and its recommendation, if there is not a majority protest by affected business owners after the public hearing, city council should adopt the attached resolutions to levy. So have we heard protest votes that have been received?

No protests have been received.

Okay. Then in that case, then we can move ahead.

That's why we have to adopt it to vote. Second.

Okay, so moved and seconded. Any other discussion?

Good point, though, Ed.

and i would just bring up to mr vega this i know you were bringing up the bike path um which this is not that item but if it's related to that for your uh for your colleagues that you work with um there is a process and we're just kind of facilitating this for the business community um and i understand that you're just making those general comments as it relates to the the improvements on the north fremont business district um but just as a matter of procedure we're We're simply accepting... the resolution as identified in the staff report. All right, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. With that, we will move on to item 11, open a public hearing to confirm Alvarado Street Maintenance District 85-1 area and receive protests related to the collection of the assessment proposed in Engineer's Report for fiscal year 26-27 and authorize the assessment if a majority protest does not exist. With that, I'll pass it to Dante for staff presentation.

Thank you, Mayor. And I'm going to turn to Cody Hennings, our associate engineer, to provide this presentation.

Hi, Cody. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor and Council. so this year we have our annual downtown business district assessment report so each year we meet with the property owners and discuss their level of service that the city can provide on top of the base services that the city does this includes sidewalk cleaning trash can replacement trash can cleaning a little bit of landscaping and then the tree lighting um so today we are opening the ballots that we've mailed out to all the property owners and they'll vote on the assessment uh that lays out kind of the cost of all these services that we provide for the year based on um their linear footage in the district and if there's any questions awesome any questions for cody

Not seeing any. Please.

So we can get started doing the count, but I think we should take public comment.

Awesome. All right. Well, with that, we'll open up for public comment. For folks on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? Seeing one taker. Anybody else? All right. We'll cut it off to the one in the chamber. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom. Five, four, three, two, one. Nobody on Zoom.

Just a data point to bring forth to you. If I remember correctly, the assessment district for Alvarado and Cali principal is supposed to be paying for services that are over and above the forget what the wording is like, but it's over and above what ordinarily would be provided. And what I noticed back when I was upstairs is that as the city raised its standards throughout the city, It caused me to question, well, why are these people paying additional amounts on Alvarado and Cali Principal when streets and other areas are being swept just as frequently? So I don't know if that's been a discussion in the intervening 12 years since I've been retired or not, but perhaps it's something you should keep in the back of your minds in terms of fairness and parity with other places. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Reeves.

All right, with that, we'll go ahead and close public comment. Does anybody on staff have feedback in regards to Please, please.

So these additional assessment districts were voted by the property owners and they were looking for additional services. Services we provide, which is sidewalk cleaning. We don't do that really around the city very generally. Additional landscaping. So actually contracting somebody to plant plants and pots, water them regularly. and then a pay for additional staff time they have a kind of our city staff two to three times a week picking up additional trash cleaning up the leaves and things like that so it is additional services on top of kind of the base services that the city provides and it's all broken down in our engineers report kind of what they're additionally paying for

And I guess I would just ask an additional clarifying question, which I think is where Mr. Reeves is going, is that these additional services that are above and beyond aren't created through some kind of city policy that's been established requiring them to maintain a certain level of service in the district?

Not to my understanding. I mean, they can vote. to have these additional services so it's all we kind of have a meeting sit down and it's pretty open kind of within the um the mechanism that was used to create these districts what services we can provide but we all sit down go through additional things that way they want to see that we don't provide example they wanted like falconeering is something they threw around not we're not doing that this year but like odds and ends of things on top of our base services they can kind of work through this process with and Cody it's my understanding that they actually increased their self-assessment in order to clean the streets more frequently that is correct so so there's

Great involvement. I mean, I so admire that they feed themselves more. They're paying more to make the downtown look better. Better. So I think that's great. And I like the falconer. I want the falconer back.

Okay. So it's a matter of process. We will just hold tight here while we count the protest votes.

Yeah. My mind is still somewhere else. you having island fever he has an umbrella drink in his hand still oh my goodness it takes a while to detox with my ties all day long did you go back to work today

No, I literally got home at 3 o'clock.

Boy, that's good planning.

It was all Ivan. He did plan a good trip, though. Thank you.

Five, six, seven. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

I don't know why, but I do that in the morning. Maybe it's in the morning. My brain's just kind of getting going.

And I come out and I start humming and making noise and talking to my wife's wife.

Not yet. She's got her. She's got her hot tea and she's watching, you know, morning shows. Like, I don't know. I think it's the today show. She watches and then I leave the house usually about 737.5. So she's just not ready for engagement. Well, she is a morning person, but she doesn't want to. Yeah, she's got nothing. It's like I told her, it's got an empty cavern.

There's nothing.

She sleeps and she's not ready to go. She sleeps and she starts in the morning and she just doesn't want to have to do anything. That's about nine o'clock.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm ready to go off the door and I've already started saying, hey, before I begin, what do you think about? It's like, I don't know. Ask me tonight. Well, tonight, tonight, when I come home at 6 o'clock. I'm like, my word count is already exceeded, and I walk in and I'm done. And, you know, I don't want him having to go to 6 o'clock at night. Yeah.

Yep. No. No. No.

Well, they got a lot of them. How come we didn't have any protest from camera roll seven north? We got a bunch of all right.

Yeah. This is all right.

I think it's the first one. Yes, it's not the public hearing for the other

574-029. 574-029. 574-030. 574-030. 574-030.

Mr. Mayor, whenever Council Member Rasch is back, we're ready.

You know that engineering one at Madison and Larkin and Herman? Although it's $140,000. And you could just say, yeah, okay, we'll go. But it's like, that is a huge impact for everybody. Everybody goes through that intersection twice a day. And all the residents in this side of the skyline are coming down Herman. And if they're going to work out of way, they're coming off of Herman, down Larkin, on Pacific, over New Monterey. So it's just, yeah. And there's just, it's a heavy, heavy intersection.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and start up again here. And I'm going to pass to Clementine to give us an announcement in regards to the results.

All right.

Yes, so we had a majority yes, which means that a majority protest did not exist.

Awesome. All right.

Oh, I'm sorry, my microphone was off. We had a majority yes, proportionally, and that means that a majority protest did not take place.

Beautiful. All right, so. Erica, is there, can we have a count? Yeah, is there? Is it a precise count you can report?

It is. 86.102% voted yes.

Okay, thank you. Is there a motion to adopt? I'll make a motion to adopt agenda item 11.

Second. It's removed and seconded. Any other discussion? All right, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. We're now past 5.30, so I'm just going to do a quick check-in with the council. We have two more items that were scheduled for the afternoon. Do we want to try to power through and get those done, or? I do. We'll be quick. I just want to make sure we're all consenting. All right, no issue here. All right, so move to item 12. Item 12 is open a public hearing to confirm CAI Principal Maintenance District 00-1 area and receive protests related to the collection of the assessment proposed in Engineer's Report for Fiscal Year 26-27 and authorize the assessment for majority protest does not exist. With that, I'll pass it to Dante for staff presentation.

And I'll bring back up Cody Hennings to provide the presentation.

and now we have our annual maintenance district for uh kai principal maintenance district so similarly we meet with uh property owners discuss kind of level of service that they want to see for the year above our base city services um we get together put together an estimate in the engineer's report and then uh send out a an assessment that they can vote on uh through the mail beautiful any questions from the council

Nope. All right, seeing none. Thank you, Cody, for your second presentation here. For folks on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function to open up public comment. You can use the raise hand function on Zoom. While you're navigating your way there, I'll check in the chamber. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? All right, seeing none. All right, so we just opened up public comment. And I'm going to give folks on Zoom another second here. My mic was off, so I apologize. um navigate your way to the raise hand function i'm gonna do a count down here to five four three two one and there's been nobody on zoom so with that we will take another quick recess here while we do a count of the votes

It seems to be in green.

Are you inspired to read your mind?

It seems to be in green.

Are you inspired to read your mind?

5204. 5-0-2-2, yes. 5-0-2-2. Yes.

Thank you.

3, 4, 0, 0. 0, 1. Nice. 35, 0, 0, 1.

So, excuse me.

That's too slow when he said it.

Mr. Mayor, we're all set with this count as well.

All right, beautiful. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and ask the city clerk to read the results from the ballot.

Yes, so 73.488% voted yes, which means the majority protest did not take place.

What was the percentage, sorry?

73.488. 73.488, okay.

All right, bring it to the council for motion to adopt. make a motion to authorize um the assessment of the cali p maintenance district second so moved and seconded any other discussion all those in favor aye aye any opposed motion passes unanimously with that we'll move on to thank you cody and team for all the work on that My mic's on. Yep. Public appearance item 13 is to approve installation of a patriotic crosswalk to express the city's support of the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. With that, I'll pass it to Dante for staff presentation.

Thank you, and I'll pass it to our Director of Public Works, Andrea Rennie.

Thank you, and good afternoon again. just a couple of minutes while we get the presentation on but tonight's staff is presenting a request to approve a decorative patriotic crosswalk in our condition of the united states 250th anniversary also known as the semi-quincentennial and yes i did practice that word quite a few times So this milestone provides an opportunity to celebrate our nation's history and the many cultures, backgrounds, and traditions that have contributed to the American story and to our Monterey community. And if you could do next slide, please. Thank you. So the proposed location was selected because it lies along the city's 4th of July parade route. The design itself is pretty simple. It has the legally required wide crosswalk and ladder style markings that remain unchanged. Red and blue decorative elements are placed in between the white markings. That's the location. And it was requested to be temporary for one year. Next slide, please. financial considerations, it is estimated that it's going to cost $2,100 for painting the crosswalk $1,700 to remove the crosswalk, which is contingent on being covered by donations. It might require additional maintenance compared to a conventional crosswalk. And any refresh of this crosswalk is also contingent on donations. And I'm here for any questions.

Hey, open it up to the council for questions. I'm going to learn how to do my mic correctly here. Open it up to the council for questions. I see Council Member Rasch has her hand up.

Andrea, does temporary or permanent affect the shades of the colors? Remember that was the shades are dictated in

off ambers in my opinion so we we don't want so the matcd they don't want anything that's too distracting and so that's one of the reasons why we try to keep it simple and have the blue between the red and the white is that when you're looking at it and now if you don't mind bringing back the If you're looking at it, it does have the transverse markings for a crosswalk. It has the ladder style similar to the decorative crosswalk we put on Alvarado. We also try to keep the same pattern so it's predictable, not distracting, so it follows the same simplicity.

It'll be the same shades of red and blue that were similar to the Pride crosswalk?

We're going to try and match it. We have to order special paint. We're going to try and match it to as best as we can to flag colors. Thank you.

Any other questions?

Just a point of clarification that this is not a flag. This is just coloring of the red, white, and blue, right? Okay. Thank you.

So I guess I would clarify the rendering that's in the presentation is what the crosswalk would look like.

Hopefully. Yeah. We will try to match the colors as closely as we can. Yes.

Okay. And then if I could ask, and this might be a question for Council Member Smith, who made the request? I wasn't at the last council meeting, but going back and listening, I guess... it'd be helpful to know where this was generated from.

Yeah, I started talking to the folks that are frequently in downtown, members of coffee shop relationships, people that I see. um my office on cali principal although i like to try and work and have some quiet time to get stuff done it is a place that people frequently find me and stop by and so we started having some conversations so as i advanced the idea and thinking i put in the request starting back in early may put the 350 words together, identified the group that's asking and the group that organized to get the checks to donate. The Friends of Alvarado Street, just about 32 people that have donated and a check was delivered to Dante Friday for the amount that the city proposed that it would be. And feeding back to those 32 people, I stopped the collection of donations when we achieved the 3,800, and I've turned away probably another 20 or 30 folks that said, hey, how can we help? And we'd like to contribute. So, you know, it's timely. July 4th is right around the corner. The parade is going to go right past this. We're celebrating the 250th year, so it seemed like it was a fitting request. And it started with actually having a conversation with some folks that I have coffee with frequently at Plumes. And then it was another group at Starbucks, another group at East Village Coffee, and a few drop-bys at my office. So just a bunch of people that are community members and business members.

little bit of a comment but leading to a question um it may be helpful for us to re-agendize the discussion because i know there's a lot of questions as it relates to the rainbow crosswalk um and and so I don't know the answer to this because what my understanding was where we left off with this discussion last year is different than I think what we're currently operating under. And so I think getting that agendized I think would be helpful just to make sure that we're clear and fair across the board in regards to how we handle crosswalks. But as it relates to what's being presented to us, which is this inclusion of the maintenance cost, I guess that's maybe a little bit where of my concern is, if we're gonna add a crosswalk in downtown, anywhere in the city, I would wanna make sure that it always looks fresh. I don't want something that represents America's 250th birthday to look frankly, like the rainbow crosswalk looked like for most of the last year. The purple in particular was kind of, it didn't look good. And it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with it. I think that if it's something that is being managed and operated by the city of Monterey, we should maintain a high standard. And I know this was a little bit of the discussion that we had when going into the rainbow crosswalk last year, which what are the type of materials that we use? And obviously that changes the cost, but all that being said, Are we having the foresight to think about the cost for the maintenance so that we're not having to figure out how does that work? And then is the funding available? And now that we have the crosswalk there, so I guess I want to make sure that we do this and we do it right. And so I guess I just wonder thoughts in regards to if we're saying for a year, how frequently are we expecting to refresh it so that it looks fresh?

And so mayor, yeah, we had a good conversation about this. And Andrea has been doing some thinking and we're thinking about, I'll let her talk for a minute about us coming back. That's exactly what we're going to do is come back and clarify the policy. But as your city manager, this is not practical. If we're gonna have hundreds of crosswalks that are separate decorations. So we really need to hone in on that policy. And so Andrea, I think you had some additional comments.

Thank you, City Manager Hall. Yes, we had some conversations on defining temporary versus permanent. And so we wanted to go more of a sense of if it is permanent and we're going to do a thermoplastic or a material that lasts longer or a methyl metacrylate. And if we're gonna do something that's temporary, then we take into account the cost of removing the crosswalk. And again, one of the things that is just really hard to predict is the vandalism part of it. We did not, you know, it's hard to predict. So I think that absolutely we're going to come back to get a little bit more clarity on permanent versus temporary so that we can assign the right materials and also come back with a bit of a revision on the crosswalk policy. I think we also need to have a little bit of a caveat, which we now put in this agenda report, which is you know, if it is to our discretion, if it is faded, we don't have the money, or if there is utility work or city work that needs to be done at the site also that we're able to do so. So yes, we need to spend a little bit more time narrowing it down and coming back with the updated policy.

So I guess just to clarify, are we saying then that if it's faded, that the city will cover the cost of the maintenance of that?

I'm sorry, can you clarify your question?

If it starts to fade, like we saw with the Rainbow Crosswalk, would the city be covering that cost?

No. What we're asking specifically for this one is that the cost for... Refreshing it if it gets defaced essentially is included in the donation. So we're asking if it's an outside group that's donating that they not only cover the cost of the first installation, but also some money to refresh it or remove it. Okay. I'm sorry. I got that mixed up. We're asking for money to remove it. And it's going to be a question about does it continue to exist? And if that is the case, we're going to ask for that group, whoever did the donation, to also contribute to having it refreshed again.

Okay. And I guess that's maybe where some of my concern is that if we're not... receiving that funding in advance, and then the group or the individuals that are contributing to do the installation of it don't provide the funding to the city yes now we're stuck in a position where we don't have a refresh look to get a crosswalk and that's my concern that's that's that's what i'm trying to address well can let me answer that question this request is realizing it's temporary it will wear out and when it gets to the point where it's worn out

one simple phone call from city manager or public works to me and another designated person, the question is, do you want to keep it going another couple of months? Likely it's going to be when it wears out, it wears out. It was there for July 4th and it was there for all of July and August and maybe September. And if we get rains in, I don't know what the date is, October, December 1st, who knows? It disappears and the city paints it back to white and gray. And they're collecting from this group all of the proceeds needed to install it and remove it. And if the group doesn't want to continue it, and I don't think they're going to want to continue it, it's a one-off. It disappears and goes back to regular crosswalk.

I guess my concern that I'm raising is still not being addressed. Well, the city would deem it when it's done. I hear what you're saying and we're getting a little bit into the debate. So I think maybe we defer this to after public comment. I think the thing that I'm raising here is not leaving it to some obscure group on the side to decide, are we gonna continue this or not? My concern is that we live in a military community. We have people, I get contacted on a regular basis, people complaining about, why is our flag falling at half staff? Why is there a ripped flag? I keep hearing this over and over again. It is a patriotic community. And so the moment that that looks dingy, we're going to hear complaints about it. And I just want to... I want us to be prepared about how we're gonna handle this as opposed to, oh, well, let's decide. And that's the only point that I'm making it. It doesn't sound like there's much of a plan there other than when it happens, we'll talk about it and see if we wanna continue it.

Well, can I, I just wanna offer that um to your first part when you were first asking where it came from and the policy we bifurcated my request uh june 2nd when when you were absent and that was bifurcated and staff is going to come back to us with a deeper discussion with the policy the crosswalk policy this request is timed to get it installed before july 4th because it is a patriotic town because we are a town that's going to have a july 4th parade we are a town with a lot of military folks aside from military folks there are citizens that love the flag and that represents country and it's 250 years that's the whole reason to do it um it's not complicated when city staff says you know this is it's it's time it's either refresh or we get rid of it The decision's not up to us, only in that, do we want to pay for it to be repainted? The decision is entirely in control of the city when they deem that it needs to be repainted or it's going to be removed. This group is not arguing that at all. It is within entire responsibility of public works in the city to tell us it's time to repaint it or it's coming out. We don't own it. The city owns it. This is intended to be temporary and intended to be at least through July 4th.

Okay. I still have questions here, but we're getting into a debate of it, and I will defer that until after public comment. Are there any other questions at this time from the council?

Well, one for Councilmember Smith, which I think you answered, but I'm going to presume that the businesses very close to the walkway were in that list of businesses that you consulted and that I'm presuming they go along with it?

Yes, quite a number of property owners and individuals that are retail leasors on Alvarado and on Cali principal and generally downtown, but also residents that don't have a business downtown. They're just residents.

Well, I'm just asking the same question that I asked the first time we were talking about crosswalks. Were the tangential property business managers consulted and have an opinion? I mean, the only opinion I would think that someone might have about the patriotic colors might be, you know, they don't want it on the ground. But so they've been consulted and they're in support. Yeah. Great.

Yeah, and their support was also support, and many of them wrote checks, and we had, it took about five days to raise the $3,800. Okay.

Okay. With that, we'll go ahead and open up for public comment. Thank you, Andrea. For folks on Zoom, we can use the raise hand function. Anybody in the chamber, you can stand up to the left of the podium, which I see we already have a line formed. Anybody else that's not standing that would like to speak on this item? All right, so we have two, four, six, eight. Did I count right? One, two, three. Okay, so we'll cut it off to the eight in the chamber, and I'll do a, sir, you can come on up, and I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. We have two on Zoom. We're gonna go ahead and leave it to two minutes.

Okay. Good afternoon, Jim Clark, Delray Oaks. Mayor, City Council, you guys opened this Pandora's box a couple years ago. i was here for multiple meetings multiple people said if you do this for one you've got to do it for all for the spca for friends save the whales or whatever for july 4th you opened up the pandora's box You cannot, in any good conscience, start changing the rules or backpedaling now. We have a legitimate request which followed the exact same rules that you laid down for the other flag being on, that individuals provided the money to paint it, refresh it and renew it. And you have the exact same thing happening right now. Don't be hypocrites. You approved it before. You've opened up the box. Anybody that comes along and meets those specifications must be approved by this. And just for your information, I'll give you more money too to make this thing happen. Thank you for your time. Thank you.

Faculty and fellow students. Anyway. Just to mention, I wasn't so much aware of the Pride crosswalk. Is that correct? What will you be doing now? Are they going to be cleaning that up? I mean, you know, if you're concerned about the red, white, and blue one, are they going to be doing anything to get that cleaned? You know what I mean. I mean, you were concerned about making sure this thing stays. Well, I think Ed's already brought up, he had people who was turning away to get money for this. So I'm sure we won't have a problem. Can the community wash the crosswalk or does it have to be the city?

I'm just bringing that.

Did I?

It's okay. I got it. I got it. You're answering questions. I'm assuming they're rhetorical. So I'll let you continue. We're not engaging in a back and forth discussion though.

Oh, no, that's fine. So I'm in favor of the crosswalk. And the only safety issue here is when motorists go over it, hopefully they'll still have one hand on the steering wheel when they salute it. Thank you.

Mayor Williamson and council members, I want to voice my support for the patriotic crosswalk to be installed on Alvarado Street. This year, on July 4th, our country will celebrate 250 years of freedom. Monterey had an important role in United States history. On July 7th, we will also celebrate 100 years of the flag of the United States of America flying over California. Commodore Sloat first raised the United States flag in 1846 here in Monterey at our custom house, and then that flag had only 28 stars. Monterey has a rich cultural history with a wide variety of ties to the military. In many cases, it was the military that brought our families to this area. Not only would this patriotic crosswalk honor our United States history, but our United States military as well. I urge you to adopt this resolution. Thank you.

Good evening and thanks so much to Council Member Ed Smith for his cohesiveness, all the background information that he's given us about the crosswalk. Obviously, you can tell by my hat. I'm totally in favor of this ordinance. I am a Navy wife plus a Coast Guard Reserve wife, but it's the same guy. I promise it's the same husband. No rumors, no rumors. I am a daughter of... an Army person and I am a Coast Guard, another representative. Let's see, the Marines are my nephew in Indiana and my other nephew in Fort Wayne, Indiana. At any rate, we cover all of the military entities. and we're a very patriotic family. We're thrilled to be here, and I would love for one of you on the dais to please tell me, how much money does the military put in our coffers every year? They're worth a lot more than that, but excuse me? 15%. 15%. That's very significant. So we need the crosswalk. Thank you, and God bless America.

Hello, my name is Patricia Hoffman, and I'm a past president of the Native Daughters of the Golden West and here in Monterey. I'm very proud to be here in Monterey and be a part of that organization. I am very much in favor of our red, white, and blue. We're 250 years old. How exciting is that? And we're babies compared to Europe.

and i am so proud to be here in monterey thank you very much mayor uh council um my name is nelson big guy and i uh donate donated 500 toward this cause and i'll tell you why because my father served in world war ii Vietnam and the Korean War. He was in the military for 40 years. I have a high respect for the people in the military. We're celebrating this country being 250 years old. It's not about what's on the other side of town in the other crosswalk. This is about standing behind the United States that gave us these extraordinary, extraordinary freedoms that we have, and we should celebrate it. And I find it really... insulting that you would be worried more about keeping it clean and stuff than the spirit of why it's being brought here. This is an inclusive country of diverse people. I'm Puerto Rican. I came here as a little kid, but I'm just as patriotic as every other American that was born here. And I really, really was disappointed in you not just Grabbing the time and saying, yes, this is inclusive of all Americans, and this is a special year, and we should do this. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I think we echo all the same sentiment that we are a patriotic city and that we want to celebrate our patriotism. But what I'm hearing from the mayor is that you're applying a different standard to the patriotic crosswalk than what's been applied to the rainbow crosswalk. You want to bring it so that it's pristine all of the time. And we know that the Rainbow Crosswalk was vandalized. It was maintained twice. And there was just a new petition that was put forward without any approval from anybody beyond the one year. So please, I ask that the policies be applied fairly and the same until the policy is changed. Thank you.

It seems odd that for once we have an issue before us that should be unifying and not divisive. I happen to be a Democrat. A lot of people I know are Republicans. This isn't a Democrat versus Republican issue. It's an America issue. you should everybody should get behind this equivocating over who's going to maintain and how it's going to be maintained when it's already been answered is quite frankly insulting to me and i'm sure everybody else too councilmember smith has answered the questions i i generously and proudly donated to the cause and i'll do so again if it comes down to having to repaint it if that's what people want to do. So I ask you to stop equivocating over this. I brought these very same issues up when the Rainbow Crosswalk came up. You've had a year since then to consider those issues. Now what comes before us is all of a sudden it's, oh my God, this is the first time we've heard this. We got to rehash this whole thing. The previous meeting, we had the same filibustering going on. where it was a 2-2 vote. I mean, it's just astounding to me that an issue like this, as simple as putting a red, white, and blue crosswalk on the 250th anniversary of this nation, has caused this much discussion. Just do it.

OK, and we'll go to our callers on Zoom.

First speaker, we have Lori.

Well, well, darn it Tom review and I are going to just have to get together before his meetings and discuss it. I don't have anything more to say. Every speaker's hit the nail on the head. Tom Reeves just spewed out exactly what I was going to. We'll leave it there. And I'll, but I will say that I also am a Democrat. This isn't a partisan issue. I was among those that said, you're going to open 10 doors box. If you fly a certain groups flag, if you put a certain groups, you're just asking for trouble. In that we're going to fight over. what group can and what group can't and nitpick the details. It's ridiculous. And the fact that the two of the council members last week voted no, like, okay, we vote for a rainbow crosswalk, but not a red, white and blue one. Yeah, we need to grow up here and get with the program. And if we're gonna be this way, like little children in a school yard, And, you know, I don't you is mine. That was my idea. You don't get to do this. This is I know you, I don't want yours there. That's ridiculous. We need to just scrap the entire. Policy when it comes time for that discussion, but we will get there and I'm sure that will be an enlightening 1. we have much bigger fish to fry with this budget than bickering about crosswalks so i'm not even going to be there i don't really like crowds but for the people who want to be around crowds and there's a parade and it's a festive event absolutely put it in have a good time enjoy it as long as it lasts thank you have a good night good luck with the budget talks

And our next speaker is our telephone caller. You can unmute and go ahead.

This is Nina Beattie. I will say the same thing that I said the last time. I oppose colored crosswalks, painted, striped, whatever is put on the street. Streets are for driving. And the less distractions that the public has, the better. These are... Anyone who's driven over in Seaside on Broadway and all the colors that have been put to designate different zones, there's no signage to say what those zones are. It's just all of a sudden now we've got different markings than have traditionally been on streets. Usually had white for crosswalks, and then you had the gray of the streets. It's very quiet for the eyes. You can focus on the street, which you're supposed to while you're driving. and any pedestrians coming back and forth, and you're not distracted by miscellaneous things. And these sidewalks that are decorations on the street don't belong on the street. And I said that about the rainbow crosswalk, and I say it about this. We need to keep the streets for driving. And that includes the crosswalks that cross the streets. So all the staff time that will be spent, even though there's not money going out, it's still staff time that's going to be monitoring and making sure things are painted correctly. No, this is in a budget situation that Monterey's got. The streets need to be left as streets. And as I opposed the last one, I oppose this one too. Thank you.

All right. With that, we'll go ahead and close public comment and bring it back to the council for motion and deliberation. I'd like to make a motion.

Can I make a statement first?

You can do that after the motion.

Since he jumped in, he can make his motion, and then we'll go to you next.

Yeah, I'll make a motion that the request for the crosswalk be adopted by the City Council and accepted of the resolution of a red, white, and blue crosswalk at Alvarado in recognition of the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Second, with no public funding.

No public funding.

Right. If we could include that, Madam Clerk. Second.

All right, so moved and seconded. Dr. Barber.

So I want to make sure that for a point of clarification to that people understand that my reservation was very clear. I asked the question, is this going to be a flag? The last time that was that was the reservation because I don't believe in the flag touching the ground. But he's made this very clear that this is not a flag, even though I've heard some of the people who were speaking tonight talking about it being a flag and saluting. You're making it very clear that it's not a flag.

Not a flag.

Okay, because that was my reservation. Just like I said before, I don't believe in the flag touching the ground. My father served too, so I understand and have that same pride, but I just wanted to make sure about that point. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments? All right, so I have a few. So it was alluded to from the first public comment and in the last, or not the last, the second to last, was this whole concept of opening pandora's box this conversation would not be happening around a patriotic crosswalk if it wasn't for this community pushing forward a rainbow crosswalk it absolutely would not have happened um and and i think that's the problem that i have with it and mr vega you alluded to in your comments around um being for all um and your experience is your experience so i i won't um i won't begin to act as if i know what you've gone through in your life um but the fact that you are of puerto rican ancestry i think a lot of people will say it's fair to say that simply because of the color of your skin, you would be treated different. And so there is something about equality that we need to be able to look at fairly and openly. And it doesn't really have anything to do with the patriotic crosswalk, but I bring it up as it relates to the rainbow crosswalk because the rainbow crosswalk is truly about inclusivity and making sure that everybody feels that they're included. I apologize. So the time for public comment is over. So if anybody has anything else to say, I just ask that you withhold it for now because right now the conversation sits with the council. And if it's going to continue to be interrupted by comments in the chambers, I'm going to ask you to leave the chamber. So please just be respectful and allow me to finish my comments. I don't have any problem at all. The way that this conversation is going, I think, is very emblematic of what we're seeing happening at a national level, where it becomes like that we're pitting sides against each other. And at no point in this discussion at all have I heard anybody being anti-patriotic or bringing in Democrat versus Republican mantra. I'm not hearing that. I'm feeling it. And I think that if there was, and I would wish there was more time for us to have worked on this, I'm going to support it moving forward. Though, again, how we got here is a little bit concerning to me because it almost feels retaliatory. And some of the same folks that spoke about supporting the Rainbow Crosswalk, the Patriotic Crosswalk today, were making some of the same points that Ms. Beattie was just made in the last public comment. And in fact, I saw some acknowledgement for some folks that are here in support of the Patriotic Crosswalk. Like, yeah, it doesn't make sense that we're doing painted crosswalks. I think the appropriate way, and to me, it's a case by case basis. The rainbow crosswalk represents something about visibility. And that's something that's really important to the LGBTQ community. Because as I am a member of, we are often pushed aside, even amongst people within our own families. So that is a very important symbolic meaning, the visibility. the patriotic piece around celebration of the 250th anniversary. I think what would have been a more appropriate response to this would have been let's find a great space to do a public art mural that could last Decades. It doesn't have to be something temporary. Let's let this be something that can endure time and show future generations the support that we've had of our community. That's what I'm talking about. It's finding that common ground that we can work together on. There's no disagreement. I don't think anybody on the council would have disagreed around elevating something to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States and the role that the city of Monterey has played in that. But unfortunately, members of the public and unfortunately, a member of one of my colleagues on the council has made this contentious unnecessarily. I feel like the idea around the rainbow crosswalk has been hijacked. And the point that was made around now the Pandora's box is open and we're going to do this, that, and the other. I just, I look forward to the conversation around how we follow up with this. And nothing that I'm saying or doing is treating the patriotic crosswalk any different than the rainbow crosswalk. um i do think that we need to have clear clearer um policy so i look forward to that discussion um and with that i'll go ahead and call the question all those in favor well before we do that is there so sorry sorry we're going to call the question yeah you you you you made them you made some you made the motion there and it deserves a response ed please go ahead

You seem to be confused about this was either suddenly coming to you or not done the right way. I started this in early May and you postponed it. We ran out of time. We had an argument. We postponed this and dragged it and delayed it until now it's in the 11th hour in time to get this done by July 4th. So this could have been done earlier in May. And you can shake your head. It's not true. You continue this. We couldn't even get to the agenda.

When was this on the calendar? When was this on the agenda? It was in May. When in May? Well, I think it was the first meeting in May or the second meeting in May. No, it was not. It was the study session. It was the last week of May.

Yeah, it was a study session, special council meeting, and we never got to it. Let's go through my comments. You had your comments and I'll finish it up and we can take our vote. And I appreciate the council members that are supporting this. But don't question my intention of this. I made it very clear from the beginning it had nothing to do with the other crosswalk. This was purely for in symbolic 250th year, July 4th. If I wanted to do something else, I would have done it right after June of last year. This was not retribution for the other crosswalk. This was to celebrate the patriotic feeling of July 4th And I don't understand how you can confuse my intention with that. I said it very clearly. I said it in the words. I said it in my news releases. Everybody knows I'm not trying to take out the moderate pride. I've never criticized that after it was voted in ever for a whole year. My intention is pure. Red, white, and blue is as simple as you can get. And for you to make this somehow some social cause and criticize the public, I mean, your words can hang and you'll own those words. That's up to you. But I think you're way over the line trying to criticize my intention for a patriotic crosswalk that's red, white, and blue at a different location. Don't overthink this. It's just simply that request. It's got nothing to do with prejudice or the color of your skin or trying to attack another crosswalk. It's not. So that's not in my heart or in my head. This was about July 4th. That's it. And you know me well enough.

So you can call for the vote now. All right. Call the question. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion passes unanimously. and with that we will take public comment on closed session agenda items item 14 on the closed session is closed session conference with real property negotiators pursuant to government code section 54956 tac 8 regarding 735 ramona avenue for those on zoom you can use a raise hand function anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item hey just ask that everybody keep it down while we try to finish the proceedings please uh anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item All right, seeing none, we'll go ahead and close it off in the chamber. Do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. All right, nobody on Zoom. Bring it back to the council. We'll go ahead and recess to close session. Thank you, everybody. Start the meeting here. Hello, everybody, good evening. Welcome to our evening session of today's council meeting, June 16th, 2026. We're gonna go ahead and reconvene. And we will kick this off with Councilman Barash leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you, Jean. All right, next we will do continued general public comment. So this is an opportunity for members of the public to speak to the council on items that are not on today's agenda. So if it's on today's agenda, this is not the opportunity to speak. This is general public comment. How this process works is we will ask folks to identify themselves at the beginning of the public comment period. Once those folks are identified, we will close it off, and then only those folks will be able to speak. So we'll go ahead and start on Zoom. For folks on Zoom, you can navigate your way to the raise hand function while you're finding your way there. I'll check in the chamber. Anybody in the chamber wish to speak on this item? I see we already have two takers. We have three in the back. And Bob is walking up, so we have four. Anybody else? I have the three that are standing. I have the one hand raised. Anybody else? All right, we'll cut it off to the four in the chamber. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. And there's two on Zoom. We're going to leave it to two minutes. Go ahead and start in the chamber, sir.

I'm Henry Molay, resident for 47 years. I have emailed my concerns to the council about the budget twice. Here are my bullet points. Three as mentioned in email.

Sir, I apologize. Did you say the budget?

Budget.

The budget's on the agenda. This is for general public comments for items that aren't on today's agenda.

When can I talk about the budget?

So we'll be giving a presentation. You'll know because staff will give a presentation. The council will ask some questions and then we'll go back out to the public on that item specifically. Okay. More to come there, sir.

Good evening, honorable mayors, city council, and members of the public. My name is Jacqueline Simon. I am the chair and founder of the Youth of Promise and Peace Officer Ambassadors. For five years after the murder of George Floyd, I decided as a professor what could I do to change those conditions where someone would lose their life for those reasons. So as a professor and an elected official, I decided to develop a program where youth and police officers can become more aware of each other and how important each of them deserves to get home at night. So we started programs that provided students and youth from the age five to 17 all over Monterey County. We worked with, of course, Seaside started the program with Mayor Ian Oglesby. And as well as last year worked with the city of Monterey. So if Chief Hober is here, I wanted to make sure that he received the additional acknowledgments for his officers that participated. This past the 31st of May, Ed, your council member here, Smith, spoke to our group and provided really good quality information in reference to that program. we also provided you i don't know if you've received it we brought over a picture that shows the the police officers and the assistant chief here in an opportunity working with those youth So at the end of the day, you've got to start teaching and helping children understand that someone that has a badge and a gun and a cavalry vest is there to protect and serve you, as opposed to sometimes them running away from you. So I wanted to provide these and... Our Assistant Chief Mike Bruno is here. Yes, he was in our program and he was awesome. So I commend you City of Monterey because in order for it to work, the mayor, the city manager, the police officers, everyone has to be engaged in that. Thank you. Thank you, Jacqueline.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, City Council, Beth. Mr. Hall, I'm one of the biggest cheerleaders of this city and the city council. The way we run things, we're good. But with every team, there's always some call. You didn't like the way the quarterback called it or... The way the coach said to run the play. I've been a little heightened and I took a trip all over. I'm trying to struggle through all the rules and costs and expenses of opening the two new restaurants we're doing on Wave Street. And with that, I'm doing a lot of driving. And it's quite disheartening to see how poor our roads are. And then it's more disheartening to get down to like Vegas and see gas $3 a gallon cheaper. It's bizarre. But I'm going to speak to something, bring a little more color to it, maybe the orange painted sidewalks. I've had a little issue with that. I watched and spoke to the gentleman who did that, and I asked him if he knew the state laws that gave him the ability to require the city to have the business owner repair the sidewalks. He had no idea. They just told me to go out and paint the sidewalks. He literally does that, and I have pictures. He has a hairline crack down the... middle of a sidewalk square, and he paints all four corners showing he wants it to be replaced. I told her the law really requires it has to be a half inch gap. There's got to be a rise of a half inch. She says, I have no idea. And then videotaped and watched him. He spent more time on his phone playing with that than doing that. But when we hire these third parties, a great way to save money, but train them so they know what to do. Because then I got to go back and fight and spend more staff time complaining about a hairline crack that no one could trip on. So I'd like to just address that issue a little better that we would try to resolve that. Thank you.

Mayor, earlier in this evening, you kind of called me out and I just, I don't want it to make it a personal thing. This is a policy thing. And everything I talk about is about policy. And I just want you to be rest assured, I'm sure that you all are trying to do the best, but we have difference of opinions, but it's strictly about policy and I don't want it to be a personal thing. And I apologize if I've offended you.

Okay, with that, we will go to public commenters on Zoom.

Yes, first we have a telephone caller with the last three digits, 705. You can unmute and then go ahead. You'll need to dial star six to unmute.

Yes, good evening, everyone. Lorna Mulford here. I noticed the wonderful Canadian geese are here blessing our parks once more. And there are a few people, I call them the petty people, that are objecting to their goose poop. And all over the United States, they're gassing them with CO2, which is a very cruel gas. If you hold your breath until you can't anymore, that's how they die. But they have discovered, a middle schooler collected some local park goose poop and discovered it has a bacterium that suppresses melanoma. So if you've got melanoma, you might want to walk in goose poop. And also, it is also being studied at the University of Montana for cleaning up toxic metals and lakes. And I'd like to remind everyone that the skies are filled with all kinds of bird poops because they're migrating and they're doing their business. So we have evolved with that. We don't need to be worried about poop. except perhaps our own. And I would like you all to please go look at the marvelous flocks that are blessing our parks right now. And please do not disturb them. Do not chase them away. Do not gas them as other states are doing because they're disappearing from the skies. And I think we all miss the wonderful flocks that used to blacken the skies with their numbers. And then the second thing, please, in the upcoming climate change, do not remove the eucalyptus. I have proven to you the top fire scientist in the United States is stating that it is not the eucalyptus that are the problem. It's a home ignition zoning problem, which is not being dealt with. And I have given you the science, so please pay attention. Thank you so much.

And our other speaker is Esther. Good evening, everybody. I wanted to make a statement about Measure D that did not pass by a handful of votes. I want to point out that that measure was placed on the ballot unanimously by all five council members. And they did that because they understood the need for it. And those that have been on social media claiming to have this massive victory over it are really going to be called out if and when we end up having to remove staff from positions and cut services. And when we end up in a position that currently we have people coming to the city council meetings and complaining, about how long it takes to get a permit how long it takes to get staff to get back to them about things all of that is not going to get better so those of you that have been fighting against the city's revenue really need to think this through because there's a reason why every single council member sitting up there voted for it to go on the ballot And you voted for them on there in your districts. They knew that that was important for us to pass as a city. So keep that in mind as we go through all this and as you celebrate on social media that somehow you feel like you won some big victory because Measure D didn't pass. It's really not going to be something for everybody to celebrate at the end of the day. Thank you.

Okay, thank you for those that provided public comment. At this point, we're going to move on to announcements from closed session.

Yes, Council convened in closed session regarding 735 Ramona Avenue, Casanova Open All Park Center and negotiating where the price in terms of license agreement and confidential direction was given to legal counsel on a unanimous roll call vote. That end of report.

Thank you, Nat. With that, we'll move on to our public appearance items. 15 on the agenda is adopt the fiscal year FY26-27 operating budget, including appropriation of funds from the Neighborhood and Community Improvement Program to the general fund, position control list, the FY26-27 salary schedules for regular full-time, regular part-time, and part-time seasonal employees effective July 1, 2026. With that, pass it to Dante for staff presentation.

Thank you, Mayor. and I'll be sharing this presentation with our finance director but I did want to say a couple of words about the budget tonight before I turn it over to her like you mentioned we are looking at and before you tonight is the fiscal year 26-27 budget and it is no secret that our cost model that We have employed for a number of years, just isn't working anymore. Our revenues are relatively flat and we're seeing growth in expenditures and in cost, just like everybody else is. And so we have a deficit and we are prepared to present to the city council tonight a budget that balances the next fiscal year's budget, but it doesn't solve the problem. And that was our goal was always sustainability. Our goal was always long term. And that's what we need to continue to work on So what do we do essentially to close the gap for this year? We have reduced our personnel. This first slide, it may be a little bit difficult to see, but what it represents is the movement over time of our staffing pre-COVID, since COVID and there is a significant hit to your operational staff already. Thank you. A significant hit to your operational staff already. But I just wanted to point out that we are definitely not back to COVID levels, pre-COVID levels in some of our divisions. So there has been an effort over years to start reducing staff, but the gap is just too large for us. But for this year, we have taken a look. um at our positions and we are freezing 30 full-time positions uh next slide please And these are the positions by breakdown and in the departments that were actually freezing and defunding for this year. You'll see that some of the departments are impacted more than others, but this represents what was vacant at the time, currently. So there are no people actually sitting in these seats. So we've done a thank you to the departments. It was a really difficult decision to get to this point, but that really produced a savings that we needed for this year, but not funding these positions. In addition to that, what we've done is we've cut our operational costs by 17% over the last two years, over the last two fiscal years. And in some of these departments, there just really isn't anything else to cut with the exception of personnel. And thanks to the council and the community, we got the one year infusion of NCIP money. And we're using that $3.5 million of one-time money. And we're going to be looking to protect revenue. As the council knows, we're talking about the continuation of Measure S, which represents a significant amount of money for us to repair our roads. But we're doing the work ahead of time to... make sure the public is informed, they understand the importance of this, and hopefully they will support the effort moving forward. And to be clear, again, this budget that we're presenting is not the answer. It's not the solution to cure our fiscal deficit. It is an opportunity for us to spend the next period, the next, we're talking months, not years, to continue working with the community and with the council, with our labor groups and other stakeholders to really navigate this path to fiscal sustainability. And I'll speak in a few minutes after the finance director provides her portion about that roadmap. And I'm calling it a roadmap to resilience because we don't want to be here again in several years. So we really want to take a look at that plan. In a nutshell, it's a coordinated strategy and a way for us to cure our structural deficit. And it really includes prioritizing our core services, practicing discipline spending, and seeking operational efficiencies in our organization. We've done a lot of that, but we're going to do a lot more to see if we can streamline processes to save the city money. And that last piece, which is an important piece, is really this economic growth. And you'll hear a little bit more about that later. later this year about our economic development strategy that the Council visited last year and how we plan to implement that. But we believe that that is a big piece. And at the same time, we're looking at engaging the public. Everywhere I've gone and I've been thankful to be invited to neighborhood associations and functions, but I'm using these opportunities to really talk to people about our budget situation and about a pathway forward. Some of the comments that I got where people were confused about the budget, how do we get here? And when people have questions, sometimes that leads to trust issues. And so we would like the opportunity to build back that trust with the community, with council, and with our stakeholders. And we would like to take the opportunity at this next period to work on that and i'll talk a little bit more again about about that strategy but the goal is always going to be long-term sustainability and so with that i know that was a kind of a long preamble but with that i'll turn it to our finance director um director king to provide the presentation for this evening and then after her presentation i have a couple more minutes of the strategy moving forward so i'll turn it over to director king

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I just want to jump right in. So this is how we're going to separate this and talk about it. So for the 26-27 proposed budget, we're going to talk about the process, our proposed strategy, and the balancing, how we balance the budget for next year. We're going to review the proposed budget. We're going to review some frequently asked questions that we've been receiving from the from the public these last few weeks. Talk about our recommendations and turn it back over to Dante for the roadmap to resilience and any questions. So our background and process. So over the last several years, the city's deficit has continued to grow. In FY25-26, the deficit was approximately $10 million. And in 26-27, the deficit without any corrective action is projected to be approximately $12 million. So city staff has been working diligently since last August to find ways to address the ongoing deficit. So I wanted to point this out, the debt versus deficit. We have in town hall meetings, we've had members of the public say that we're in debt, we're in debt, we're in debt, basically interchanging debt for deficit. So we just wanted to give a definition that a deficit is a negative difference between the government revenue and expenses. So meaning that our revenues that we are projecting Are not enough to cover the expenses that we have so as opposed to debt, which is money that we owe to outside parties To date as of no we have not taken on the city has not taken on any debt in order to cover the deficit and on an annual basis we use any savings or carryover some previous years to help cover any operating deficits and So 4-26-27, our process launched in early 20-20-2026. Our departments were then asked to project their revenues and their expenditures. This happens in February of every year. As with previous years, our departments were instructed to conduct a complete review of their operational needs and only request what was truly necessary to support their operations. Additionally, after we got our first round of numbers, departments were asked to go back and reduce their operating budgets by 10%. And then a moratorium was placed on new position requests. Departments were permitted to request any changes as long as that was cost neutral and had no impact on the budget. Departments are also instructed to limit any requests for new IT products and services as long as those long-term costs were passed on to the general fund. So getting into our projected revenues and expenses, So this chart should be very familiar by this time. This is the overall big picture. So our revenues are projected at $114 million and some change. Expenditures, this is after the 10%, are projected $125 million. You see that that's at $11.6, almost $12 million worth of a deficit. Then we have transfers in. Our annual transfers in are $1.3 million. Transfers out, $600,000. That net is $700,000. So this is where that 10.9 operating deficit is. So some of the things that we put in place this year, these are the one-time fixes for this year only with savings from the frozen positions. We'll talk about that a little bit more. So we, $3.7 million for the frozen positions. This is just for the general fund, as noted in the staff report, you will see that there, I believe it was like 4.2 million overall, which included all of the positions, but just for the general fund is 3.7 million. Then our one-time transfers from NCIP, 3.5 million. Estimated salary savings, 2.7. And just so that there's no mix up about what this means, It means that come July 1, we'll still have another 30 vacant positions. But July 1, all those positions are going to magically be filled. So it takes some time for recruiting and to get people in. And when people actually leave the city, retire, move on, there's time that needs to go by in order to get those positions refilled. So we anticipate by the end of the year that that would bring in an additional $2.7 million in savings. And then our estimated operating and maintenance O&M savings, a little more than a million dollars, which brings the total one-time savings to 10.9 in savings. So as you can see, our surplus at this point is just 25,000. So we are right on the market of being balanced for the year. This is our five-year forecast. Just a note, and I want to thank some of the public who actually sent us notes. Some numbers didn't make sense or bullet points. We made some changes last minute and just a couple of corrections that needed to be addressed and they were caught and so we appreciate that. So there was a small discrepancy that was identified. So the five-year forecast as presented here does not include savings from frozen position. Initially we had the first year for 25, 26, 27 to include the 3.7 of savings and expenditures and reduce that amount but in order for everyone to actually see what we're doing and be consistent with what the numbers are without any changes we put it back and then we projected those numbers out and expenditures all through the next five years so that you can see what that number would be without any frozen positions so we're actually comparing apples to apples is that the discrepancy that was in the budget book because in the budget book the numbers show different or is it something else I don't know. Okay. I'm gonna come and ask you later.

I'll come back.

It should be the same and if it's not the same we will fix it to make sure that it is the same. Okay so here's our transfers in and out each year and our operating deficit as you can see In the next five years, it goes down, but that number does not go down. It's never a balanced budget because we still need some changes that has to be made, some structural changes. This also does not include the potential transfer to the stormwater utility. We're waiting for the results of the 26th ballot for that. It also includes Fund 105, which is our facility maintenance fund, which is the extra 5% that we set aside. now it's six percent that we set aside for the parks and recs department to do facility maintenance from the fees that we collect um yeah move on so this um chart should be very familiar to you we show it every year um these are the top five revenue generators our tot is always the highest is 26.5 percent fees and charges are 22.6 percent Sales and use tax 14.2%, property tax 15.7, utility user tax 4.8. So these are the top five accounts that account for 84% of the general fund revenue. Of note, I would like to, the last several years, the TOT is, think about three years ago, was closer to 29%. And as you see, every year that number is going down, which means that the The amount that's coming in is flattening out as the other fees kind of catch up to it. So it's just something to be mindful that we watch for with those TOT money that comes in actually looks like for the long term. So in more details for next year, our projected revenue for TOT is $35.8 million. NCIP's portion is $5.7. And before anyone asks, I know we have $6 million is projected for NCIP, but NCIP gets about $500,000 worth of interest. So that's where that difference is. So this is just the tax. portion of that $35 million that comes to the general fund is $30 million, $30.2 million. And then see Monterey gets a 6% contribution, which is caps at $1.8 million. So that is where our TLT is allocated. This slide is just a background, a historical view of what the expenses for a general fund. I thought it would be interesting to kind of look at, as you see the expenses rising, the largest is the bottom. I know you can't tell what color it is on that screen, but the bottom one is salary and benefits, the cost of salary and benefits as we go up the next level, which is orange is our services and supplies, and then is internal services. So you can see how in proportion our salaries and benefits are our highest expenses as any organization. Your highest cost is always going to be your personnel cost. um our general fund expenditures by department um we wanted to show what that number what those percentages look like for public safety um 52 percent of our expenditures um go to public fund public safety uh parks and recs is 15.6 percent community development 6.9 public works is 7.7 library 3.3 percent conference center is 4.6 And administrative is 9.1. Administrative is inclusive of city managers, city clerk, ISD, HR, and finance, and city council. So that's the administrative. And I wanted to point out also that Public Works is 7.7%, but most of their expenses are in other special revenue funds. So how do we balance our budget? One of the lists are the frozen positions. These are the list of the 30 positions, 29.5 FTEs that are projected to be or proposed to be frozen for the next year. You will find these positions also on the PCO. There is a column on the PCO list that says unfunded. So they are still on the PCO. But they are moved into a column that says unfunded so that it's clear which department they're in. and also that they're not funded this year. So these are the positions. I'm not gonna go through all of them, but where you see a times two, times three, those are the number of that position that's projected to be frozen. I do wanna, because we get a lot of questions about public safety, I do wanna make sure that I point out that firefighter has three positions and police officers has two. So I want to point out on the next slide, these are the positions that are vacant and unfrozen that we did not freeze that are still either currently going through the recruitment process or are slated to be, there's still, there's funding for the positions. And looking at public safety, notice that police officers, there are five positions that are still available to be filled. and firefighters also have five positions that are still available to be filled. So we did not cut, first of all, we didn't cut any bodies. There are no bodies that are in these positions. One of the things on this slide that we would take note of is that some of these, positions when this list was done it was about the end of May end of April end of May and some of these positions were already going through the recruitment cycle so some of them are already filled for example I'll just say the finance manager was filled in April and that was a replacement for someone who was retired and some of the other positions for as noted with other departments as well there these are a lot of them are replacement positions as well so the numbers of frozen positions so again the positions that are currently in the recruitment process are not frozen positions that are not funded by the general fund and reimbursed by other funding sources positions that are not vacant were not considered to be frozen so if there's a body in a position we didn't touch it we didn't look at it none of that other positions that are not recommended based on evaluation completed by each department and we did a thorough analysis of positions to be performed in reference to long-term strategies during the next fiscal year. So here are some of the other things we talked about at the study session, and some decisions were made at that point, but we're including them here. So community contributions, the budget team proposes the following funding levels. So rental assistance at 125,000, which is a decrease of 125,000 from this fiscal year. The citywide 4th of July event was proposed, but it has been Left alone is $80,000 for the 4th of July. First night Monterey's also was proposed, but it maintains at 35,000. For 26-27, the budget still includes a 1.8 contribution to see Monterey. So our rising costs, I want to talk briefly about this. I don't want to get into all the details that we talked about before, because most of these are things that we don't have any control over. And the rising costs of everything actually helps our full-time salary. We have negotiated labor agreements. So those are contracts that increases this year, the last year of the three-year contract of 4%. We didn't change that. Our UAL is up an increase. What we'll pay out this year is $18.8 million, which is a $1.2 million increase from last year. Our OPEB is also, projects a total of $1.8 million. OPEB is $126,000 increase over the current year. Our overtime, we project 5.4 million in overtime costs, 130,000 increase from this current year, and of note that approximately 33% of the city's overtime is reimbursable. We have some special events for Monterey Police Department that they do that we get reimbursed for, and also services for other contracted cities from the fire department. As you know, liability, our insurance costs were the liability and workers' comp. The liability insurance is up. We're paying out $6.2 million for this year's insurance premiums. And for workers' comp, we're paying $4.1 million for workers' comp insurance this year. Our utilities and fuel costs project 4.1% and utilities cost is $140,000 increase from the current year. And our fuel, we kind of left it about the same. We have contracts that'll leave it the same, but we are keeping a very close watch as the fuel cost is going up. So by mid-year, we will know a lot more of where that number is leading and if there's any adjustments that needs to be made. But any more details on the rising cost can be viewed in our published agenda report. So moving on to the special revenue funds, enterprise funds and our special revenue funds are so special they're listed twice. All right, so these are a few. These are the most popular ones that we listed here. So our NCIP, we are projected beginning balance as of 7-1-26, we have $27 million. And we're projecting $6.2 million in revenues, expending out $570,000, what we already know about, plus transfer to $3.5 million to the general funds, which leaves an estimated ending balance of $29.6. Of note, the NCIP has approximately 22 million appropriated already NCIP projects from previous years. Moving to measure S&P, we have 16.6 million as the beginning balance of revenue. We're looking at 12 million expenditures, 1.3 million for an ending balance of 27 million. As noted for most of these, when we get projects that come to the council on an individual basis, so that number will of course increase as projects are identified. And then Presidio, we have a beginning balance of 2.6 million, expecting revenue of 27 million, expenditures of 27 million, ending balance to basically approximate the beginning of the year as well. are Thailand's $5.6 million as the beginning balance, $4 million in revenue, $3.1 million in expenditures, transfers out of $263,000, and $6.2 is the ending balance. And Thailand's has approximately $1.1 million already committed to CIP projects from previous years. And the table also notes this presumption that Measure P&S is renewed in the fall. If it's not renewed, Measure P&S, the revenue will be decreased by $3 million in 26-27 and eliminated in future years. Our enterprise funds, again, these are selected ones, so we start with the sewer line maintenance, beginning balance, 2.5 million, revenue expected of 4.5, expenditures 3.9, leaving an ending balance of 3.1. Sewer line maintenance fund has 2.3 million already committed to CIP projects from previous years. Our marina fund, 3.3 million as beginning, 4 million in revenues, 2.5 million in expenditures, 4.8 estimated as the ending balance. Marina fund currently has 1.8 million committed to CIP projects from previous years. The cemetery fund has a beginning deficit of $1.7 million. We're expecting revenue of $354,000 and expenses of $700,000 would leave the ending balance of a negative $2.1 million. Parking fund, $1.7 million in unrestricted beginning balance, $13 million in revenues expected, $10 million expenditures. plus $723,000 and transfers out for $4.4 million and unrestricted at the end of the year. And as of now, $4 million is committed to CIP projects from previous years as well as a $4 million commitment to a loan for an economic development activity for the city. Our internal service funds, the beginning balances in red are all bad. We want it to be black and we're working on that. So our vehicle maintenance fund starts with 2.4 million negative balance. We have revenues 3.1 million. And you see the expenses are 3.1 million. Also, the ending balance 2.3. As you can see, there's a short or very small chip in a way at the 2.4. But these numbers, the expenditures should approximate the revenues in each one of these accounts. And most of them, we're doing a better job of making sure that happens. But we have to chip away at the beginning balances that are negative. And the ISD division, 2.3 million. Beginning balance, expecting revenue, 7.1 million. Expenditure, 7.1 million. And 2.4 would be the ending balance. Our workers' comp fund is $4 million negative to begin with. We have $4 million of revenue coming in. another four million dollars of revenue going out in expenditures so we basically are in the same position a hundred thousand dollars um better off by the end of the year our risk and liability 1.2 million in negative in the beginning six million in revenues 5.6 million dollars in expenses um 625 000 um As the ending balance, as you can see this one, we cut the deficit by about half of 600,000 by the end of the year is the projection. And then our employee benefits fund is, we have 1.9 million as the beginning, 11.8 million in revenues, just as 11.8 going out, plus a $75,000 transfer in. So $2 million is the projected ending balance for that.

I'm not a mathematician, but the ISD and the risk and liability fund, I'm assuming how this works is it's the beginning balance plus the revenue minus expenditure plus or minus in and out, depending on what's going on there, right? And that gives us the estimated imbalance. So for ISD, for an example, if you add the 2.3 million and the 7.1, That gives me 9.4, take away seven, shouldn't that be, have a positive ending balance? Am I not reading that correctly?

It's just, it shouldn't be red. There's no brackets around the end. It shouldn't be red. It shouldn't be red. If you see there's no brackets around the end of it.

Yes, yes, okay.

It is positive.

Okay, and then I guess the same for the risk and liability. Oh, because that's a negative. Okay. Okay. I think I'm good. All right. Yeah. We've established we like black better.

Yes, we do. We like black better. Absolutely.

Okay. I'm paying attention.

Yes, you are. I'm proud of you. Thank you.

You got to squint to see those parentheticals.

Okay, so our other costs and budget items. So our debt service, we like to show this slide every year to let you know where we are. As far as our debt service, we have this broken down in both inter fund and external loans. So for the first one, two, three, four fire trucks, this is money that's going from the general fund into the equipment replacement fund. This is money to replace the current vehicles that we have to we put aside for and if you see those pay off dates, we have the first one will be paid off in 2027. And then We have different dates. First is 2027, and the fire loan for the truck, this first truck, 2030, then 2032, 2031. So by 2032, all of these loans, which is money from the general fund going to the equipment replacement, will be paid off. So that's money that will still be available in the general fund. And then the settlement funding, which is our liability and risk insurance fund, Paying from that, going into Thailand, there was an initial $2 million loan. This will be paid off in December of 2028. And there's $400,000 that will be left over by the end of this year. And then the cemetery, from the cemetery fund to the general fund. Gets paid off at the end of next year, which is money from cemetery fund to general fund. So our total payments and interest principal and interest this year will be 842,000. This is basically internal transfers. The next 1 is our external loans.

Before you move on, we can ask questions now. yeah i think my mic's on now um yeah i wanted to ask you as an example where you've listed um the cemetery uh loan is an annual loan uh payment principal So the initial one was $879,000. Correct. And our annual payment is $59,383. Yes. So is that annual amount factored in when you're looking at the balance sheet of the cemetery operations?

Yes.

Is that service in there?

Yes, it's in the P&L, the property and law statement, yes. So if I go back and you see the the cemetery fund, how it's in a negative position, that will be part included and part of their expenditures. We didn't, we could have just like, well, just forgive it, don't pay it, but we need to actually show that the actual expenses from this justice center cemetery fund are what they are, even though the general fund subsidizes those amounts.

Okay, thank you.

Can I do this one? Okay. And cemetery. I mean, the parking fund. Did I do that one already?

I did that one.

Okay. So our internal funds. I did that one too. All right. Other costs. Here I go. All right. I did that one.

You did that one too.

External funds. Our external loans. This is money that goes out of our house into someone else's house. So the first one is our 2013 financing agreement. This is being paid out of the debt service fund and it's going to Capital One Public Funding. The initial loan was $7 million. We're paying out $540,000. THIS LOAN IS PAID OFF IN 2032. THE NEXT ONE IS THE PG&E FINANCING WILL BE PAID OFF IN 2027. THIS IS BEING PAID FROM THE GENERAL FUND TO PG&E. THAT WILL BE PAID IN 2027. THE FIRE TRUCK LOANS WHICH ARE THE SAME ONES THAT WE TALKED ABOUT EARLIER. THIS IS US PAYING FROM THE EQUIPMENT REPLACEMENT FUND TO BANK OF AMERICA. So those will be paid off in December, 2029. Our conference center bond will be paid off, which is paid to, from the conference center facilities district, will be paid to PNC Bank, will be paid off by 2034. That's our largest one loan, as you can see. We have $50 million to start with. By the end of next year, we'll still have 19.7. left sewer loans for the next two ones are being paid from fund 20 279 or some sewer line maintenance and it's being paid to the state water resources one will be paid off in 2035 and the other one in 2038 so the total interest and payments that are being paid out of the um from the city to outside agencies of 6.1 million for the year and then we'll still have um 31 million worth of debt left we started initial uh 74 million so we are um chugging right along and um the good thing is that is most of our debt is going to be paid off within the next five years

Another question, Raphael. On the top of this list, it looks like it's a financing agreement. It's got 2013, so I'm assuming that's the date?

That's when it was initiated, yes.

What is that for? It predates all of us being on the council. Me too. I don't know what that is for.

Sports center?

Sports center. Sports center remodel, right? Right. Did I hear an answer out there?

I hear SportsCenter.

It was the SportsCenter remote.

Okay, thank you.

okay our transfers in and out um in the first slide that had the numbers it just had what the totals were these are kind of the details there was a typo in the report so um just of note that this table does not include um transfer from the general fund from the stormwater utility we're waiting for the results so it's not included in here and the small typo um the net transfers are 758 thousand nine oh eight we stated here so the projected amounts um the differences was less than um 27 000 in total and compared to a 200 million dollar budget um we will fix those to make sure that everything matches because there were some last minute changes that didn't get go through so These are transfers in and out, transfers into the general fund or out of the general fund, $621,000 and into $1.3 million. So that net is $758,000. Our reserves. We're not making any recommendations to fund any of the general fund reserves this year. We will hopefully next year be able to come back and fund them. We're also not asking for any uses from any other reserve funds. Unless there are changes that exceed the $25,000 surplus and then we will ask for any of those changes to come from a dollar for dollar match to the economic uncertainty reserve. For special revenue funds reserves we are continuing to put money aside for those parking still parking facilities reserve fund for the parking. Our current policy says 250,000 on contributions we are adding that in. And then sea level rise for the tight lens fund, $250,000 also. So our projected ending balance, beginning balance for both funds, $4.4 million, $500,000 worth of contributions, leading to combined balance of $4.9 million for both funds and reserve accounts. And then our capital improvement projects. This is where the funding sources are coming from for the $14 million worth of capital improvement projects. I will just kind of skim through this or pass by this because Andrea would love to talk about this capital improvement projects when we're done with this. So I'm just going to let her be that. Our numbers match. We made sure of that. Okay, so I'm going to move on to some of our frequently asked questions, some things that we've gotten on the town halls and also some from emails. So one of the questions that we keep getting is what is the cost to operate the city's rental registry? So we put together this quick and dirty. The city recovers more than 90% of the cost to manage the city's rental registry and the cost, um, it costs the city to, um, um, 23,000. So our revenues 211,000 expenses 235,000. So the city actually pays about 23,000 for the rental registry currently. Another question is, what is the net cost to operate the city sports center? Again, we've heard some numbers that people were saying. We don't really know where those numbers came from, so we wanted to make sure that we put it out there. Our total revenue for next year is projected at $5 million, expenditures $8 million. So our cost recovery is at 62%. And I've note that when the sports center was originally put together, it never was intended to be 100% cost recovery, it was put together to be 75%. So we are working towards that. And as soon as the bond is paid off from the sports center, that number will be higher, the recovery percentage will be higher. And so moving on to our recommendation are, one, to adopt the FY26-27 operating budget in the position control list. Recommendation two is to adopt the 26-27 position control list with the following administrative corrections. So we're noting that there's a police service technician position as frozen and marking a senior police service technician as not frozen. The numbers are correct, the titles are not, so we want to make that note. Also removing one assistant urban forester and adding one urban forester positions as noted in the agenda report. And then correctly displaying the funding source of the community development department's administrative assistant and property technician positions in the general fund and tight-lens fund. the split, again, the dollar amount is correct, but in the PCL, the split is not updated. And then a recommendation three is to adopt the 26-27 salary schedule. And with that, I will turn it back over to our city manager.

thank you rafaela um and just i know the council and community has a number of questions just a few minutes more um about this road map to um to resilience and uh again i i think we need to make sure that we keep our our eye on the ball um instead of one year let's look at how do we write this ship um and so what we're coining the roadmap to resilience is a process that we're going to go through and i'll just spend just a couple of minutes two or three minutes just kind of going through the process so you'll understand it but we will be doing a deeper dive with the city council and an upcoming meeting our assistant city manager is working hard to set that up and prepare for that meeting with the council and the community to actually launch. We're doing some work in the background already, but that first navigation point is really to make sure that we have a shared understanding of our fiscal deficit. Again, when I talk to people in the community and different groups, Different numbers were flying around. People didn't really understand. Some people were surprised we had a structural deficit. And so I think part of that is making sure that we're speaking the same language. Each time we talk to people in groups, let's make sure that we all understand what the problem is and This is not going to be easy. I'm not going to sugarcoat anything here, but the process is going to be filled with hard choices and service level expectations are going to need to be adjusted. And so we want to walk through this process with the council and the community so that we make that. So that first step is really to make sure everybody understands. Also, it's making sure that we understand the drivers behind them and make sure that we're laser focused on some of the things that we may have some impact on. For instance, overtime. Is there something that we can do about that? But that all starts with just understanding the drivers and communicating that consistent message to the community. That second one is prioritizing the essential services and aligning workforce planning. What this is, is really protecting our core services. We need to have some agreement with Council about those core services. But what we're suggesting is these are all the things that people can't do for themselves. It's public safety. It's infrastructure. It's public health. It's community well-being programs. And there are regulatory positions that we're required to have that serve an administrative role. And it's looking at how... to match the available resources that we have with the stuff that we got to do to protect the community. That's going to be the first part or the second step of that. The third one is This, well, let me also say that is the point too, where we're gonna be looking at position control, looking at, you know, if for instance, we need to eliminate some of the vacated or vacant, currently vacant positions, do some retooling for efficiency sake of divisions and departments, that's when that work is essentially gonna happen. That third navigation point is strengthening our organizational efficiencies, taking a real deep look at modernizing our processes, making sure that we streamline workflows where we can and where we can afford. Are there technology answers that help us do more with less staff? optimizing our contracts with others and outside groups, and really looking at how we improve our public-facing services within what we can afford, and then advancing some of our management policies to make sure we keep the eye on the ball and look at long-term cost savings for the city. That fourth bullet or that area is maximizing our revenues and practicing discipline spending. We're going to evaluate some of the items that the City Council had put forth as items that you're interested in talking more about. You know, some are revenue measures. I talked earlier about Measure S. There are other things that were brought up during that session, that public session with council, that we're going to be bringing back and talking about to enhance. But this is the point where we're going to have to manage our expenses responsibly and align our spending with the priorities and make sure that we're able to provide whatever services we can to protect the community based on what we can afford. That fifth one is engage and inform the community and that's an important one. My thought is we need the cooperation and the participation of everyone. obviously the council, the community, businesses, our stakeholders to really provide comments to us, understand what the problem is. And there are some good suggestions and some ideas that we may wanna take a look at. And I think it's also important for us to understand what the trade-offs are. These are gonna be hard decisions that are gonna be riddled with trade-offs, it's not going to be possible to cut a position and not feel anything. There is going to be a trade-off. So what my idea is, is to involve the community multiple times throughout this next six to eight months, essentially to provide comment to the council and to staff as we're going through this and walk with them through this process. Obviously, along with the council and with council's permission with that. That last step is really delivering a sustainable future budget. And this multi-year plan is intended to get to the black in our forecast. And what do we need to do change to get to that black? So that is just a very high level view of this roadmap that's going to be happening within this next, well, the initial tranche within this next six to eight months. But it's going to be ongoing. Some of the items that we're going to be bringing to you are longer term. that are big swings essentially, but we think are good ideas for the city council to consider. And we'll be bringing that back to you at one of your upcoming meetings very soon. So that is my long-winded wrap up of the budget. And I don't have any other presentation, but I'll turn it back over to the council for questions.

Okay, thank you, staff, for the presentation. Other questions from the council? Please, Dr. Barber.

First, thank you to you and the staff for the hard work. I know that you all put into bringing this to us this evening. I can appreciate the movement that you're trying to make and being able to, what I call in sewing, measure twice, cut once. And that's something that I like that you're coming up with as far as that concept. I had a couple questions though. What was the beginning for the like the rental assistance program? Normally, I believe it was $250,000 that was budgeted from before. And what is the balance in that account now? And how would that look? Because I'm concerned about the rental assistance cut because of so many homeless issues and housing issues where people are not able to afford. So I'm just curious as to that fund and what it was, how this will impact it and what the balance is now.

So there's no balance because it's not an actual balance sheet. So it's expenses every year that we $250,000. So this year, because we basically took what we had remaining in the budget and we allocated it for the fire victims, so there will be nothing less. And yes, you're right, it was $250,000 a year that we had been putting in that account.

Okay, so it's being cut $125,000, which that to me, I'm looking at that as more problematic because just like the fire victims, if we didn't have the $250,000 in, we wouldn't even have been able to help the fire victims. So that's a concern for me. Also, I had a question on the five-year forecast. um and starting at fy 2627 um would that is that not showing the the surplus of the 25 043 that's proposed for the 26 27 general fund budget overview that we have so i'm in packet let me i got you um packet page 96 for what I'm looking at for the surplus of the $25,043 and packet page 97 for the five-year. And I was just trying to get an understanding of the FY26-27. Trying to figure out why the $25,000 surplus is not there.

Because this chart does not include the one-time things that we did.

So it doesn't include any one-time. Correct. Okay. So this is without any type of one-times that we're doing this time. So just looking at it from just the structure itself.

Right.

Okay. Thank you for that. And then also, one of the things that I've always talked about, and you know where I'm going, cemetery fund. I talk about it all the time. So I'm just curious, I know the time before when we spoke about this, I think last year, we talked about how possibly partnering uh so that we can mitigate some of the losses would be a possibility and i'm curious to see where we are on that because i just look at that number and that's two million dollars right there this a deficit so i'm just curious of how that is coming and what that looks like

There hasn't been a lot of movement in it right now. However, it is on the list of things that we are looking at as far as making some changes for in the future.

Yeah. And I'll share, and this goes to the roadmap to resilience. And as we look at all the various strategies across the board of partnership opportunities, we actually met with Bishop Ramon today to talk about potential partnerships on the cemetery. They're spending around $80,000 on water right now to water their cemetery, yet we have potential water that we use in the lake. Could we have an agreement where we have some revenue share or share supplies and materials for efficiency since there's really no fence line between the two cemeteries, the Catholic cemetery and ours. So we're looking at partnerships like that very actively and ramping up that engagement over the next few months.

I think that's all for right now. Okay.

So on page 97 when you do the five-year forecast on the general fund, And it says to complete the above projection, city staff have had to make several assumptions. Key assumptions are listed below. Beyond fiscal year 26-27, you presume limited growth in full-time and regular part-time salaries. So what percent did you use?

So 26, 27 has the 4% that's per contract. I don't remember if we use 0 or 1 for the following years. Again, those are the contract negotiations starts basically November 8th for next year. So we have no idea what that number is going to be. And as we're looking at trying to close this gap, I don't want to play my hand, but we're really looking at what can we really do, if anything. So we didn't want to put an unrealistic number in there, but a very small number.

Okay. So you're saying you used either zero or 1%? Very small. Okay. Thank you for your transparency. I'm sure that's a hard question. and and just a presumptive question also um liability insurance i'll tell you what i think i know from from mr usler and that's that for um for most of what we're liable for we're in a pool through cal cities a pool of cities um and we share we pay our premiums and we share liability. So my question is, as we incur some civil liabilities that, as I understand, are not paid for by that pool, does our vulnerability about being sued increase our premiums out of proportion to the rest of the cities in California? I mean, is it like when my grandchild just crashed her daughter's car, my daughter's car? Her premiums are going up because it's the second time. So I presume we have the same liability. So the more civil liability we have, does our A, our liability increases, but if on the misdemeanors and felony parts that are covered by the pool, Does our liability increase out of proportion that premium?

I would say no. First of all, we do have a self-insurance rate of a million dollars. So the first million dollars for each occurrence is on the city to pay out of pocket. After that, because we are in the pool, our rates that we are paying, our broker is paying part of it, they actually are shopping. We just had a board meeting just this past week. They shop around our rates and our payroll cost and also our claims loss. Those make a big difference in what we pay because we are excellent. I'm going to say excellent on our claims and I'm also going to knock on wood because we're just one claim away or one date away, one incident away. As of right now, we have very, very good rates are the best rates that we can really get. And we do have our pool. We just increased from 13 to 14 cities because our pool is run differently from others. And it's one that other cities want to get in because we're run very well. And we're strong way that we are structured is.

okay let me say what i think you just said um that we aren't in a huge pool throughout the state we're in a small um small pool because our outcomes are so great and that's keeping our premiums down and did you say it was 13 or 14 so we now have 14 cities okay and

And the sizes of the cities, we have cities as large as Anaheim, Santa Monica, and as small as San Fidelio, Modesto. So not to go through all the cities, but our rates are lower because we're in the pool, because we can get more insurance more coverage because there's more agencies that are contributing that keeps our rates steady.

And we, of course, go out to professional insurers for those. Okay. That's really interesting to know. Thank you. Sabrina wrote a letter right before council at break, I read it. And she's concerned about eliminating the downtown ambassador position. And I've heard this before, but I can't find anything about it. Did we have a downtown ambassador? Have we eliminated the downtown ambassador? I know I asked you and I think you answered it, but I can't remember.

Yes, and that was part of the recommendations from departments, and I believe, can you speak to that, Mike?

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Chief Oberg can be here today. He's on vacation, so. Yeah, so a few years ago, The city had given money to the Downtown Business Association to hire security. The ambassador is actually security that's hired through the Downtown Association.

Oh, all right. So it doesn't get into our budget. at all? Oh, I'm sorry.

Well, it was part of, if I understand correctly from Chief Holber, it was part of the operating budget for the police department.

Correct. It was our budget and we helped supplement the security for the downtown.

Okay. And are we continuing that or not?

The recommendation is not to continue that.

Okay. But that's a new one this year? um i i need to check with finance is that new yes that is new this year okay which is why we're getting the concern from this community okay but but that's that's within the recommendation of the police department there you you get your recommendations from each of your 11 departments and you to a very high degree honor them. Correct. You're telling them how much they have and they figure out how to spend it. Okay. Okay. Thank you on that one. And then to the question of overtime, I hear a lot from the community that why can't we lower overtime? I know it's a complicated question, but on top of it, we're were freezing, what was it, five police positions and four fire positions. So how can we possibly get overtime under more control and I'm I don't have an answer but I want some more wisdom than I can find.

Okay so I'm gonna back up we are you got it just opposite so we are actually recruiting five police officers and five firefighters we are freezing I believe it's two officers and three firefighters and the ones that we are freezing are all vacant. There's nobody in those positions at all. So the recruitment, so it has no net effect at the moment. So again, we didn't touch, we still left positions in the budget for them and funded them for them to fill the positions. But consistently, I believe it's like nine officer positions that are consistently vacant. and the three additional, the three firefighter positions are ones that are actually kind of placed in the budget based on how they do their recruitment. So those are never really meant to be filled. It's just kind of like an overlap thing, but we actually have been funding them. So we're just proposing to take them out and not actually fund them. But again, there are no bodies and so we're not losing.

Right, right. I get that. It's more a projection into an approach of how do we reduce overtime when we're reducing potential positions? And I don't expect an answer. It's kind of a rhetorical question about don't i don't think we can do it i mean i want to bring down the overtime i don't know how to do that without more more bodies i'm hearing that we still have five or so positions i get that but in order how many bodies does it take to start bringing down overtime and that's just a question i think we should be addressing in the next year is is

Right, and we can address that, but I can just tell you conceptually herein lies the argument, right? With less people, you have the people here who are working more and working overtime. So it's a loop that's happening. But here we're saying we're allowing police and fire to hire for more positions than they can probably ever fill within the next year.

Okay, all right, that's reassuring. That's reassuring. And we also want them well. We also don't want them exhausted and stressed out. Okay, I appreciate that conversation.

Can I weigh in on the overtime? Sure. Ideally, and this is not my wish, in public safety, they only stay five years and they leave. Because the longer you stay, the more vacation benefits you're a cure. And if you work overtime by law, they can take comp time instead of the overtime. When they take comp time, when they choose to draw on that comp time, that body is gone and that shift has a vacancy. That shift has to be filled and then you grab an overtime person to fill the person who is gone. So it's a perpetual, you're not paying time and a half, you're actually paying two and a half. Because the longer someone is there, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, they are earning more time off. And in between their days off, when they're working, they put in for overtime, I'm sorry, they put in for vacation time or comp time. they use their vacation time that they're entitled to and they use their comp time that they're entitled to someone has to fill that position because none of the positions whether it's police or fire have more than minimum staffing on duty so a patrol shift has a minimum standard, there's no extra bodies and one body's gone, they have to hire overtime for that. Same thing with the engine company. Somebody's off the engine company on vacation, you have to hire and it's overtime. So it is a real art and science in trying to figure out what's the right number. And I think that it's good that we get some reimbursement on the fire side and the special events for police, but the real number that is the challenge is shift coverage when they're using their entitled time, which is vacation time or comp time. that's where you're over time by the lion's share and if i'm wrong you tell me but it's the lion's share is personnel movement for time that they are entitled to requires overtime to fill it unless we get to a point where we have a bunch of reserves for police and that's got some issues or you have a fire department that's got a bunch of reserves and that's got its own set of problems so it's it's difficult for that over time because you're chasing the numbers to be because you can't say no to someone who is taking their comp time off and when they're entitled to their vacation time you certainly want to be able to lock them the time off but when they're gone we have to pay time and a half for that i think this is an area for a deep dive for the for the community to understand well i barely understand and i think the point is still well made that even though it might be

a really fine balancing act, there's still a balancing that exists there that needs to be done and that we need to engage in. And I think that's the point that you're raising. And if I could just raise one other point in the context of what you're bringing up, these frozen positions So I think it was 2.7 million that we are getting from salary savings.

3.7 from the frozen position and 2.7 from the other one.

From the salary savings. Yes. But we can expect that to not be a parachute for us basically this next fiscal year because we're freezing these positions so they're not going to be all these vacancies that we've typically seen year over year where positions are just sitting vacant maybe we try to recruit them and they're not getting filled but we're literally now saying they're frozen we're not even going to try to recruit them so i

it's just another element right to to to the conversation and and frozen and defunded i i think even frozen positions in the past we'd have to budget for them if they're on the position control list we're actually defunding those positions to realize those savings yeah which is actually accurate accounting right just not how we've done it it's going to be a difference different feeling going into next year's budget

Those are my questions. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. I want to try and be succinct, but there were several charts that went past and I need to go back. A question on the Sports Center. I know it stands alone because it's a big operation, there's revenue there, but we don't do the same thing for Dennis Jimenez Park or Dondavi Park or Whispering Springs. You know, they all cost something to maintain. But in the Sports Center operation, the number was way higher than I expected. I didn't realize that it was at 62% recovery. And I'm wondering, have we ever been at a 75 or an 80? And that's not a fair question, because you weren't here five years or six years ago. But where are the opportunities for savings? If we're running at 62%, then the natural next question is, operationally, where are the opportunities to lower that number? Because we can't sustain this number.

Well, quickly, I remember post-COVID, we got to a point where we were in the 80-something percentile. And I can't remember exactly what the percentage was, but it was like we were exceeding what the goal... And we went out with a marketing campaign and people returned.

So I'm wondering, not questioning your numbers, because you've got the balance sheet and the calculator, but I'm just wondering, is that really an accurate number? Because how quickly did we go from being at 80% recovery, were we not counting the debt on the loan before?

Probably not. I can speak to this since I'm familiar with the SportsCenter budget. That is exactly correct. We did not include in the cost recovery the debt payment. And so there was that piece, and we want to make sure we include fully burdened costs for an operation. So that does affect the percentage. But I can assure you that the team is working very hard to identify as many revenue opportunities as possible, not only in terms of fee increases, but being mindful that the more we increase the rates the more people and we've seen this happen actually people will thought membership we just had a report come out uh this week we had a drop in membership when we increased rates so that you know reduces revenue right yeah so so beyond and i'm sensitive to that because i don't want members to say that they can't go and they can't afford it that that is a public health that we all really appreciate that just like you have a recreational trail

What I wanna say is that it's probably something we should be talking about as a philosophy, because when we look at the debt service that we have, I'm not sure that we consistently charge back the debt service on everything else. Now, I appreciate that we have the CCFD for the conference center, but it stands out there as a big debt, but it's actually fully covered through the guests that come and stay in the hotel. So the city of Monterey is not paying anything for the debt we incurred of the 50 million on the conference center. But I know it's on your books. We're responsible for covering it. But when it sits there, people in the community and elsewhere count that against us, even though it's got revenue, nothing's guaranteed. But we can almost say it's guaranteed that it will be paid and covered. until it's paid off. But it's kind of the philosophy of like, okay, is it, are we consistently counting everything against that piece of property and then comparing it to revenue expenditures and coming up with a number? The Dennis Menace Park is 100% deficit and costs us whatever it takes to maintain it, plus the insurance we pay out when somebody falls. So it's philosophy wise, it's just, I'm wondering if we shouldn't have this conversation for how do we report this and record it in the future? Because I don't think it's really accurate because I didn't see anywhere in here where we're talking about all of the different parks we have and that cost, that's all wrapped up in the public works or parks and rec. So the true picture of what everything costs is not really, there's no light shed on it. It's just by the departments. But if somebody said, what's it cost to maintain Don Levy Park? You're probably the only person in the planet that knows that. What's it cost for the Dennis Smith's Park? What's it cost for Solicito Ballpark? All those numbers are available, but I just think we probably need to know that more. I want to quickly go into, are we at a point where we should be talking about the library closing on Sunday or Monday? What would that save us if we closed the library one day? And I know if Brian's out there, he's squirming right now, but we've gotta ask these questions. Should the library be closed to save the money? Should we be managing the hours at the conference center where we're able to manipulate less costs? And I think it closes at 10. Now, my grandson will complain, but that's okay. He'll get over it. Should it close at 9? Would that save us? So I think that these are the things that the city manager is going to be dealing with between now and January, because there's a lot of those things that are in the unknown, but we need to ask the questions. On the cemetery, I have family and friends that are buried there or... and the cement wall there. I'm just wondering if we have such a large deficit at the cemetery, should we close off the burial sites and only sell the urns that hang on the wall? because if we are selling or we are burying folks in a plot that maybe they have had for 20 or 30 years and they purchased it at, I'm just picking a number, they purchased it at $199 and that burial site now is worth $4,000, we have no ability to recover but we are servicing a 1955 purchase in 2026 and we are losing money. So should we do this a different way? Should we contract out? Should we reduce the burial sites that are available and not sell them anymore? Because that impacts your future costs in 2046. So should we start to slow down to get out of the business of operating a burial site that's probably 125 years old. So I don't know the answer to that but I think we need to do a deep dive on how we reduce the ability to to service that for the public and it's well deserved but it's a great deficit in it and that red hangs out there for the cemetery. the downtown security it's 80 000 it comes off of the city police department budget and i understand that i'm sure that when the chief is faced with well what does he cut he's got to cut 10 that one saves him something operationally but my approach is that and we've heard from a gentleman twice here who's testified who has a business who really appreciates what happens with security And I'm downtown and I'm in an office and I see the activities. The benefit of having a security who is an ambassador does greatly impact the ability for the reasons not to have police come on many occasions. And they also serve as a conduit for information. And they also keep the peace before the police officer gets there. And they also service the Tuesday night farmer's market. And they do offer a variety of services that are greatly beneficial. So removing them, I think actually has a potential of impacting the response time, the ability to serve and the ability for Monterey PD to be able to get there fairly quick before there is problems. Now, they're always gonna try and get there. But if there's one sergeant and three officers, maybe four, throw in a detective, they're all busy and they're all scattered all over this big town. But that unique place of downtown is where conference center's attendees go. hoteliers are going folks are going they're spending money and i'd hate to see that impact our ability for uh tot and sales tax that is impacted by small businesses having that quality loss so i don't know where there's 80 000 somewhere i know the balance recommended is 25 if we take from somewhere else the 80 000 has got to go back in but maybe it's 40 000 for security and then omba figures out how they can do it part-time with less hours but still has some presence. So what I would offer that we should maybe revisit this. If we don't finalize this tonight, I think we need to revisit and consider something of the downtown security in some format, whether it's, you know, $40,000, $50,000. But the complete elimination of it doesn't make sense to me. Almost done. I know rental registry, it shows it has a deficit for total recovery. I think it was about 23,000 in the red. It's not completely recovering. I've always questioned the value in it. I know there are jobs behind it. I don't know if all those jobs are actually charged to that operation. But to me, we don't get anything for that amount of heartburn the community has over it. And the fact that we have a sunset on it that was five years. We're halfway through. We've had two years of reports. The reports has not given us anything that's novel or unique. And it's not going to allow us to have any increased housing. because we have this. So I just think that that's one exercise that could go and would save a little bit of money. So I'll pitch that out again. I know I'm not going to agree with everybody on that one, but I wanted to say it again. I just don't think it's something that we should consider continuing year after year. I think I've covered everything. I'll pass to somebody else.

I'm gonna start with the downtown security thing. just because you rose that as a question. And I think I spoke to the same business owner that you did. I think where this conversation needs to start, because there's a lot going on and we're trying to manage multiple things. I mean, just look at tonight's council meeting and all the different actions that are being put on staff. when, oh, by the way, we're talking about freezing positions, reducing workforce, putting more on staff. So just being mindful of that. The message that I gave to that business owner, and I share this with anybody if OMBA is listening, to present a proposal to the city that shows that they can take some more ownership over that. And so what does that look like for them? Do they increase the business license fee so that they can collect more for... um for their operations so anyways i just wanted to throw that up because you you you brought that up but i will stick to my my questions for now um so i i had this similar question posed um with the overtime thing i think for sake of time, I'm not gonna dive into my questions here because it does sound like we're gonna have a deeper dive later on that one. I do think that there, I see that staff is proposing that we fully fund 4th of July and 1st night, both great events, but again, equally to the special grants, programs which a lot of organizations in town are offering great events um how do we make sure that we're being fair and equitable across the board um so i think that there needs to be a deeper conversation there particularly around fourth of july i think the concern is that the city came to some kind of agreement with OMBA sometime in the past, and they took over the operations of 4th of July for the city. So I think there just needs to be some conversation around what does that look like moving forward? Is there an off-ramp opportunity there so that we can make sure that the community organizations are being treated fairly and equitably across the board? The five-year forecast thing, Rafaela, I found it. It's on page... Actually, I did have it here. It's on page 16 of exhibit A. It shows the lesser amount of... um then the amount that's in the in the agenda report and in the staff presentation did you say that again page 16 of this handout um no page 16 of exhibit a it's the in the agenda it's the operating budget book okay it's a 24 page document page 16 of that has the five-year forecast and it shows 26 27 deficit being 3.7 So I think that might be the thing that you were getting feedback on from some folks in the community.

That's fine. We knew that there were going to be changes here, so that abbreviated budget book is going to be updated.

Perfect, perfect. And we touched on that. Okay, so in the staff report, it says due to changes in the city's accounting practices, city staff will be adjusting the projects located in the city measure SP special revenue fund to be in alignment with the government accounting standards board and the government finance officers association best practices. I'm just hoping that staff could just describe what that means.

means and what are the implications is that a benefit to the city in a nutshell i'll have um kyle come up in a second but in a in a nutshell um a lot of the projects over the last 20 years and measure pns have been um accounted for as long projects just add more money add more money add more money when they're actually expenses last year we had to do a restatement of our act for 55 million because those are things that should have been expense as opposed to being capitalized. So in order for us to do things correctly, we are unwinding some of those major projects. And Kyle can kind of talk a little bit more detail about that. So the budget kind of lives in a different fund than the actual project. So I'll let him explain a bit more.

I'm actually not sure if I can add too much. But essentially, as Rafael has stated, we have several very large projects that have, over the years, accumulated several million dollars each. This is a process that we're working through to essentially unwind this, these large mega projects, as we kind of refer to them, and set up these smaller projects, which will require moving funds back and forth between the NCIP or the, not NCIP, the CIP fund, fund 410, and the fund source fund. So the Thailand's fund, parking fund, et cetera, or measure S&P specifically in this case.

Okay, and then what is the outcome of all that? Is it going to provide a net benefit to the city?

Yeah, I think the real net positive is that our projects and project accounting will more accurately line up with the work that is taking place around the city, that our projects will have accurate start and end dates. When it comes to what Raffaella just talked about with capitalizing the assets at the end of the project, we'll make it Easier and more transparent to capitalize projects at the end of their life with these large mega projects. We had to. It was not as they were not.

There was no start in. So, example, and I'm just making this up. If you had a project that was to fix street a going through street D. That's one project. And then E going through K is another project. But what has been happening over the last 20 years is- They just add on. Just kept adding on. And so that's not proper accounting because it's- there's no end day to capitalize anything. So when you're looking at a line on a fixed assets with a capital improvement or construction, the project just continues to grow and there's no asset attached to it. So again, we had to unwind and restate our financial statements because we had been doing that for so long. And so it does not accurately report our assets and expenses. So we're making sure that moving forward that we're doing things in the correct way.

Okay. All right. I think that's a good opportunity to go to public comment. Okay. But before we do, I'm going to pass it to Dante.

And so I just got pegged by our...

our uh public works director who wants to respond okay i just have a little bit more context and we actually have an explanation on that for the cip presentation perfect so the difference that you'll see is that we're not appropriating a huge bucket of money like rafaela said for each ada projects road projects storm drain what you're going to see is over the over the course of the year we're going to appropriate to smaller projects that are more specific So instead of the whole bucket of ADA, which is a continuous project, you're going to see many smaller projects that have a start and a finish date. So these appropriations requests are going to come to you throughout the year. So we have a little bit more detail in the CIP presentation.

It sounds like it might create more work for you all.

It does. No, it's actually, I agree with Rafaela. It makes it easier to capitalize and start and close a project.

I mean, I think there's a public transparency piece that I can appreciate out of that. I just am trying to find where this... Helps streamline, but if you're saying it does, it's the proper counting to believe it's going to go with it. All right. All right. With that, we're going to go to public comment. So for folks that are on zoom, you can navigate your way to the raise hand function as you're working your way there. I'll check in the chamber. Anybody in the chamber wishes speak on this item. You see what to do. Folks are lining up to the left of the podium and. if you want to remain seated you could raise your hand but hold off on raising your hand i got you mr vega hold off on raising your hand though while i allow folks to stand okay so we have two four six seven eight folks standing and then can i get hands again i see two hands So eight and two is 10. I see 10. Am I math correct? Okay, so we're gonna cut off to the 10 in the chamber. I'll do a countdown for folks on Zoom to five, four, three, two, one. We have three on Zoom. We're gonna go ahead and start in the chamber.

Henry Mollet, resident of 47 years. In view of what I've heard, I'm jumping to my bullets four and five. The Sydney administration wants to grab 3.5 million from NIP to help balance the budget. I don't think that should happen. I have a compromise. The NIP money of 3.5 million will be used for one year only to fix sidewalks in the neighborhoods. That's what NIP money is for. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Members of the Council, I'm Rick Hoyer, President of Monterey Peninsula Taxpayers Association. As Dante indicated, the hard work starts now or as soon as you pass this budget. I mean, this is a band-aid to get you to starting to deal with your issue, which is historically you've been spending way more than you bring in. and they're going to have to be a lot of hard decisions and yes you could add things in tonight of yeah do we put more into rental assistance do we add do we take out uh the rental programming my suggestion is you deal all that as you're dealing with how are you going to get 11 million dollars in permanent savings and then you have the hard decisions You got to balance your budget tonight. You have a proposal in front of you. Is it perfect? No. There are things I would love to see coming out of it tonight. But I think the reality is you need to start that next process. The voters did speak. They did say you've got to get your act together and start and you're going to have to cut things and it's not going to be easy and it's going to hurt and you're going to have to make our decisions. but that's what you got elected to do. That's what you're up there for. I've also indicated to the city manager and others, we're happy to be involved and help and be actively involved to help come up with plans to do it. But the time to start is actually a year ago, but we're a little late getting started, but at least tonight, get this off of your plate so that you can start that process. The longer you spread this out, The less time you have to actually do the hard work because you don't have a lot of time because it's not long until you're going to have to start having the next budget. And yeah, it's going to keep going. So it's time to start dealing with the issues. And, you know, there are a lot of good things brought up tonight. The fact that you're now actually looking at what is the real cost of the sports center, including debt service, that's the way it should always have been, and things of that nature. It's time to start moving forward with dealing with the issues that have to be dealt with. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Phil Bazuska. I am president of the Monterey Firefighters Association. As I've stated previously, our department has come a long way in the past few years. Your decisions have restored immense pride in the members of the Monterey Fire Department, and we appreciate the difficulty of the impending budget discussion. We know that we are just a part of the larger city family, and you have a duty to evaluate all of your options to balance the budget. I have a duty to represent my members, so obviously my comments will focus on the impacts to firefighters. These proposed cuts take us backwards. Let us at least capture the progress we've made rather than letting it slip away. City staff's recommendation to freeze fire positions goes against multiple findings and recommendations from the city gate standards of coverage study published in 2022, which found that our fire administration was 4.4 to 7.7 full time equivalent positions short of the capacity required to meet its workload. Firefighters and the Deputy Fire Marshal are within my bargaining unit, while the Assistant Chief is not. But even if you freeze the AC position, the workload will continue to be passed down to my members. It is abundantly clear that we need people to do the work of the Assistant Fire Chief and Deputy Fire Marshal. Our Fire Prevention Division has legal and contractual obligations to provide these services to our partners. Furthermore, you are currently paying an employee to do the work of the assistant chief in an acting capacity, and you are paying a non-union retired annuitant to do the work of the deputy fire marshal. Freezing these positions only creates an illusion of cost savings. What will actually happen is that fire suppression employees will continue to act in these positions, creating vacancies in the ranks of my firefighting line personnel. These vacancies on our fire engines result in increased overtime costs to the city and increased workload on my members who will be forced to work additional shifts above and beyond our 56 hour work week. We cannot be expected to support this practice indefinitely. You're already paying overtime because the work needs to be done. Just fund the positions permanently and support your employees rather than stressing our already taxed staffing system. Thank you.

Kevin Dayton, Government Affairs Liaison for the Monterey Peninsula Chamber of Commerce. I wanted to say something about the budget. One thing the Chamber points out is there's actually another way to deal with your budget besides raising taxes and fees and cutting spending, and that's reasonable and appropriate economic development. It's very impressive seeing what's happening in Sand City, Seaside and Marina. Some of those places have been, you know, formerly had a reputation for not wanting any growth and how things are happening there. I've been impressed with the city of Salinas. They've been regularly having summits. They just had one last week about ways to do public-private partnerships and infrastructure. They had one last fall on housing and encouraging small development parcels. Will this work out in the end? We don't know. But Nat just mentioned an idea of working with the Diocese of Monterey on irrigation water. You got to think of 25 more ideas to do that. And I think there is a lot of potential here in the city of Monterey for growth and it I know some people will say, you know what, we don't need any more commerce here. It brings in traffic and people. But it is an option that you need to consider. Basically, most of what you're discussing here, I remember this discussion happening already. It all happened in 2019. And the same things are being discussed. So, you know, obviously these are difficult issues. And maybe encouraging economic growth is a solution to push more aggressively with a systematic plan. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, staff. Rick Aldinger speaking on behalf of the Monterey County Hospitality Association. I hope you do pass this budget tonight. I want to let you know that we very much appreciate the support given by staff and by Council regarding C-Monterey funding. Budget season is always a challenge and it seems to be a bigger challenge each year. It's great that we're not looking at simply plugging a hole for this year without looking ahead. And fully funding see Monterey is certainly one way to help ensure we are doing what we can to ease the financial burden as we move forward. The return on investment is proven and all residents benefit. As always, We urge you to maximize your return on this investment by maximizing the investment itself. Thanks again for your continued support.

You've heard me speak in the past about running parts of the city more as a business than a bureaucracy, and Councilmember Smith brought up the Sports Center, so I'll tag onto that too. Throughout the years, I've heard different numbers from it's fully supporting itself to its 80% to its 65%. and that I think undermines our city the trust in the city when you hear these wildly varying numbers and then also having worked a lot with the NIP committee I was hearing on one hand hey this this sports center is doing pretty well and then the city council and the recreation department are coming to the NIP with with hat in hand saying, well, we needed a couple million dollars or whatever it was to replaster the pool and replace the slide and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm thinking to myself, well, that doesn't really calculate it. I thought you were doing great. Now, why do you need money from the NIP? So I applaud the idea of running our city facilities more like a business and be open and transparent about the numbers. Whatever the number is, let's hear what the number is and then we can deal with it properly. And then tagging onto that, your public works director will be talking in the next session or the next item about the CIP, the deferred capital improvements that need to be made. What part of that, if any, is baked into these numbers that you're looking at tonight? That also seems to be a bit mysterious. It's like, well, some of it's in there, but some of it's not in there. And why is that? Why can't it all be in there? Just be open and transparent about it. And lastly, and I'm sure staff has done this, but I would like to hear from staff. what conversations have been had with our neighboring cities about doing what we've already done with the fire department, which I think is a great model. And that is to partner with them, police department, the public works, perhaps parks and recreation to see if there could be some efficiencies there teaming up with those other agencies. When I first moved here, I thought this is a kind of a strange setup. You got these little postage stamp cities all in an area that was probably smaller than the area I grew up in in Los Angeles, which would be an absurd sort of a way to run the city of Los Angeles to have all these different little fiefdoms. And I understand there's a lot of civic pride in your police department and people wanna know that their police department is run by their city council. But I think there's ways of doing that to where each city could remain autonomous and yet you would have the savings of the administrative staff, much like what we do with the fire department. I appreciate all your efforts. I know it's not easy. Thank you.

Bob Bluth, Monterey. I'd like to follow through what Mr. Hall was talking about earlier and have the city and staff and council come up with a better way of articulating the city's budget so its benefits and its costs so we can have a much more efficient discussion of how to raise revenue for what we take advantage of in the city. And the structural deficit is a problem, but it's the tip of the iceberg. We've got the piers that are going to cost us tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance. We have the police station, which needs to probably be rebuilt. The library has enormous amounts of deferred maintenance that it has to come up with. Colton Hall has deferred maintenance. It wouldn't surprise me if the state wants to take it over to protect it. So we have maybe $100 million in costs that we have to figure out how to cover. And we're not really going to the populace and explaining that we have those big deficits and we need to raise funds to cover the parts of the city that we all enjoy. So we've got a real big problem that we need to try to address beyond just the structural deficit of $11 million. And I think that should all be part of your discussion. And then how do we articulate to the citizens want to support those facilities and services. We've had staff that have been recruited out of us to go work in Marina. So we've got a hard time keeping the good people that we've got. And so we can't reduce on the expenses for the crew that works the city. So it all comes down to trying to figure out how to convince the residents to pay more to support what they enjoy. We get what we pay for. Thank you.

uh hi my name is Shea Ballesteri i am the chairman for the general employees of the city of monterey um i've said this a few times previously um but i think one of the best ways to save money is to stop contracting out gem work at twice the price we still have landscape contractors work right alongside of our own people at twice the price we have fire truck maintenance mechanics ready to do their job, but we still contract it out at twice the price. I know we're planning to, the city wants to just recently contract out CCTV inspection for all our storm and sewer lines at twice the price. This is stuff that we could do in-house at half the cost. And I don't understand why we continuously attempt to contract this stuff out. The other thing is I know with the vacancies, a lot of those are gym employee positions. People are doing that work, whether those jobs are filled or not. I think that probably the right thing to do by the employees is if there's promotional opportunities within, you guys should open those up and then leave the vacancies left by those promotions to be canceled out because people are doing that work. I don't know if people realize But you can do someone else's job at the city of Monterey for up to three weeks before you're considered to be working out of class. And it's been fairly easy historically for management to just simply shuffle that responsibility around continuously so they don't have to hire out for it. So I think doing the right thing by the employees, especially now that we know it's 0% to 1% for our next contract, is to at least open up those opportunities vacancies to inside promotional opportunity. I think that's the only fair thing you guys can do. Other than that, We've seen what the problems that the cities have, and employees do their best. But I think, in all fairness, we need to have a system that makes sense for everyone. And I don't currently see the examples that I've given as part of the solution. It can be part of the solution. Thank you.

Good evening. Excuse me. Good evening, Ellen Martin. And on behalf of First Night Monterey, I want to say thank you for the opportunity to come up and speak and for all the hard work that you're doing on the budget. I wanted to just make it really clear that when you're funding First Night, those funds are going back to pay for city services. and police, traffic control, public works permits, and that kind of thing. It's really, the funding is not just to support First Night, it's an investment in a safe, organized downtown on New Year's Eve. That's how First Night started way back in Boston. That's why it started here in Monterey, to keep our city safe on that last night of the year. And without First Night Downtown, there wouldn't be that structure, alcohol-free celebration. So for more than three decades, we've been just more than an event. We have been a New Year's Eve celebration that's safe, organized, where tourists, citizens, everybody can come together. I know it's really, I understand, difficult right now with this budget choices. This is a modest support. It does help protect this tradition where many years ago, the city of Monterey named First Night Monterey as a signature event of the city. We'd like to remain that. So we hope that you'll approve that 35,000. And I also want to say that someone that works with OMBA, we help way back when to bring the parade back with OMBA. We work with OMBA for the Christmas tree lighting when the city stopped doing that. It's so important to bring the community together and having that 4th of July and having an ambassador on the streets being visible to everyone. I think it's a really important position. Thank you.

Mayor, council, I've been at these meetings for a long, long, many, many years. And when Coach Albert was up and he was the mayor, they actually had surpluses for years and they put money aside for this convention center that we never built because we took the money and spent it. You need to go back five years, 10 years if you have to, find out where, how the things get out of control, and then go back and say, we're going to have to cut this. You cannot go out to the public anymore. The public is taxed up to here. The TO tax is 12%. The sales tax is 9.75%. All these things are paid by everything that the public does. And it's not fair for you to not be able to live within your means. When I run a business, when I have cash flow problems, I look at the problems. I say, I got to cut this. I got to do this. Is it fun? No. Some people get hurt. Some people have to lay off people sometimes. Some things you have to do. But the fact is, I saw probably six or seven groups of people here who are trying to protect their interests. Instead of coming up with a solution, they're here to protect their interests. You have a tough job to do, but at some point, people have to know that the average person has it much worse. They don't have union protections, the average guy. Businesses don't have protections against the loss of business. I just reach out to you that please don't come to the private sector and try to tax us more or with a sales tax, whatever tax it is. I paid $2,300, I believe it is, just to get permission to convert a house back to a house that it was. And I just think it's shocking that that planning department cost that much to make that small of a decision. And I haven't even put the other paperwork in to get the permit. Thank you for your time.

With that, we'll go to the callers on Zoom. And I would just clarify that there was five callers that we captured before the time was called.

Chris, you're up first, you can go ahead.

Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we hear you. Okay, good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Chris Richardson. I'm here on behalf of MPA. I'm here to ask that you reconsider the proposal to eliminate two police officer positions in fiscal year 2027. At first glance, eliminating two vacant positions may appear to be a reasonable budget reduction. However, it comes at a time when the Monterey Police Department is facing a known staffing challenge. Outside of patrol, we currently have no traffic officers. Community Action Team is half staffed, and we only have two of five detectives. We are currently expecting four sworn. That's one lieutenant, two sergeants, and one officer retirements during the second quarter of FY27. Those retirements are not speculative. They are vacancies we know are coming. The challenge that we have is replacing officers is not immediate. Between recruitment, background investigations, academy attendance, and field training, it takes approximately a year before our newly hired Officer can work independently in the field that is far longer than the other position potentially being cut outside of the fire department. Eliminating these positions that reduces our ability to recruit ahead of those departures and prepare for the staffing losses we know are on the horizon. As those retirements occur, the work does not go away. Calls for service must still be answered. Reports must still be taken and community concerns must still be addressed. Without positions available to recruit into, staffing shortages will replace greater demands on existing personnel and continue to drive overtime costs upward. Eliminating positions may reduce vacancies on paper, but it does not reduce the workload. It simply shifts the cost from vacancies to overtime. It's also important to understand where these reductions are going to occur. Patrol staffing must be maintained to answer emergency and non-emergency calls. As a result, cuts will more likely come from specialized assignments such as traffic and CAT. These units address many quality of life concerns that residents bring up, including traffic complaints, speeding, homeless issues like encampments, neighborhood problem solving, and proactive community engagement. There's also long-term recruitment and retention applications since 2008. We've lost 90 sworn employees. We know additional retirements are coming, and we have a lack of experience. Law enforcement agencies across California are competing for a limited number of qualified applicants. Potential candidates want to join organizations that are investing in public safety, and current employees want confidence that their department is supported for the long term. Eliminating these positions sends the opposite message. The decision is not simply about two positions today, but it's about maintaining the city's ability to respond to community needs tomorrow. Our department's motto is responsive to all, second to none, every time. Preserving these positions will help ensure that that remains more than a slogan, that it remains a commitment that we can continue to deliver to the Monterey community. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Stacy.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council members, staff, and members of the public. My name is Stacey Alzealer-Perkins, and I'm the Executive Director of Gathering for Women Monterey. We are a nonprofit that focuses on the unhoused and potentially unhoused people in our community, particularly women. I want to encourage you to continue the rent registry as well as the rental assistance program. It's a very small part of your budget. And yet it keeps those members in our community in their houses, rental assistance program specifically, keeps them in their houses, which is much less expensive than trying to get them into houses once they're homeless. The rental registry enables us to track what's happening with the rental community and whether or not the apartments for rent are going up or down. And over time that will enable us to understand what's happening and why we have such an increase in homelessness. We are seeing a phenomenal increase in homelessness in our community, and it's very frightening. This is a very small part of your budget, and I hope you will continue to protect that part. I recognize you're having to deal with very pressing issues in this budget, but please consider protecting this. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Lori.

Good evening. So I wrote a public comment letter so I'll just try to say something that isn't in that letter. Just sort of a general preamble to my comments tonight is that it's been clear tonight that everybody has their interest in special groups and everything's important or certain things are important to some people and they're not as important to others and That's going to go across the board. It's never going to be consistent. But some people in residence and council members even are more attracted to some programs and the causes. And we all have things that we're more passionate about. But in general, I think it would help all of us if we could actually just be practical in going forward and take a step back and kind of erase the emotion of our personal attachments. to everything and embrace the fact that we have to let go of some things and make changes. And there's no way to make these hard decisions that have to be made to make everyone happy, but it has to be done. And sometimes you have to chew your leg off to get out of the bear trap and that's kind of where we are. So that's my preamble to say that I think we need to keep in our sight What the true purpose of a city government is, and this is just my practical side just saying, I don't our city government is not a nonprofit organization. It's not the Salvation Army. It's not a charitable foundation. The purpose of the city government is to provide core municipal services and maintain public infrastructure. When we're facing an 11.7Million dollars structural deficit, every dollar should be judged by 1 question. And I think if we all ask the same question, at least for now, maybe later when we have a lot more money, we can get a little more flexible with the question. But does this provide an essential city service that benefits the community as a whole? I think that should be the key question and if the answer is no, it shouldn't be a priority right now. Residents shouldn't be paying higher fees. We shouldn't be losing our NCIP funds or being pushed into costly sidewalk repairs while the city continues to expand programs, benefits and discretionary spending. And as for the nice, you know, charitable programs and nice to have giveaways, there's many of those. And they're set up to do that work and they do it very well. And there's a lot of money in this community. Even when we gave away the 125,000 to the fire victims. I saw on the paper not long after that another organization donated 110,000 dollars. So. I don't think we need to feel like we have to step up to every cause. I do have other ideas and suggestions. There's no time to go through it, but hopefully in time, as we go into some of these meetings, I can share some of those.

All right, thank you. Our next speaker is Esther.

Good evening, everybody. I want to thank Raffaella for putting together a really clear, understandable presentation. I'm really happy that she specifically cited the rental inventory program, that it has a 90% recovery because that is a targeted program by people who have vested interests in getting rid of it since day one. And at this point, there really is no argument for getting rid of it if it has that much of a recovery rate. I also want to bring up the word historically has been used a lot tonight by specifically Rick Hoyer and Nelson Vega and You want to refer to historically, and one of you went back as far as five or 10 years. Well, guess what? Five or 10 years ago, if that administration had put together a roadmap like what Dante has brought forth tonight, we would not be here tonight. And that's not going to change the matter, but it's also not okay for you guys to try and push the city councils out blaming them for something that all of you that are coming out tonight to complain about could have been addressing it back then and didn't. So it's disingenuous for you guys to refer to historically this and that when you only want to do that in one context, but not in the big picture and why we are here. I want to thank Stacy for calling in about supporting the rental assistance program as well as Kim Barber for bringing it up. That program, we would not have been able to help those fire victims if that wasn't in place. If you are concerned about having an ambassador walking around on Alvarado to help those businesses, you need to be concerned about the number one tool that this city has to help prevent people from becoming homeless. And that is this essential renter assistance program. If you don't want more homelessness, you have to keep people out of homelessness. And over to Kevin Dayton, who's trying to compare our city what our economic development is like to cities like Sand City and Salinas and Seaside we will never be able to bring more economic development here if we don't create affordable housing and you know that so if you're not willing to step up hardcore and build housing but not just build any housing to build affordable housing we will never be able to diversify the economic and situation and development in this city. Until then, everything revolves around that when it comes to bringing more industries here, we cannot do it without housing. Thank you.

All right, and our last speaker is Elena.

Good evening mayor and council members and staff. My name is Elena Loomis. I'm a long time resident and I am very well aware of the high cost of rent and housing and I want to applaud the city for funding the renters assistance program this past fiscal year. And I urge you to fully funded again in fiscal year 2026-27. And I have a thought of how you could do this. I noticed that see Monterey is fully funded. and that would be a small chunk to take out of their 1.8 million dollar budget and um one rationale for that is see monterey is promoting tourism and Tourism can't happen without the workforce and the workforce that supports that are many, many, many of them are renters. So I strongly encourage you to make that little swap and consider prioritizing our residents who are renters. And one other thing I'd like to mention is I hope that you don't close the libraries again. They are vital. I'm a retired librarian and they're a vital service to our community. They make our community more vibrant. And I also hope that the sports center maintains its funding. It's a valuable thing. I was there the other night with my grandchildren and witnessed the joy of children playing in the swimming pool and getting swimming lessons and the day camps. It's just a very valuable resource that this community can't afford. to lose. So I appreciate the difficulty and the situation that you're in, but those are three programs that I really hope maintain their support of the city council and the city budget. So thank you for your hard work and your time.

Awesome all right with that will bring it back to the Council, thank you for all those who provided public comment. i'm going to go ahead and start us off on this one and i'm just going to dive in and make a motion to approve the proposed staff budget with the. With the 10.975 million that staff has proposed in the one time savings. that's my motion.

Point of clarification. So that, that is as is, is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay.

Okay. Well, let's open it up then. Let's hear what you guys have to say.

I'll second.

Okay. So it's been moved and seconded. Thank you, Council Member Barash. Discussion on the motion. And let me, let me just start us off since I made the motion. A couple of comments. In the agenda report, it identified any desire to change, to add things back into the budget, the utilization of the reserves. And I'm gonna keep touting this, the reserves should be last resort. So I'm happy to entertain discussion around adding things to the budget, but I will not be supportive of it if we're taking out of the reserves, particularly because we're not even contributing to our reserves this year, which was, I think, a hard enough pill to swallow. And to me, I see that as still us moving in the wrong direction. But I think that the reserves have already made their contribution towards trying to find a way of balancing the budget for this fiscal year. So just wanted to throw that out there. Sorry, I'm realizing some of my comments are irrelevant now, so give me one second. I was contacted by a city employee, and I appreciated their comments to me. What I would like to propose, and I'm open to this discussion with the council, is that we give the city manager the authority to unfreeze positions that that might help move employees around that are dealing with reasonable accommodation and return to work related issues. So the point being is if an employee is put on an RA, they're not able to do all the essential functions of their home-based job, but they are able to do one of the positions that are frozen The point that's being made in this is it allows us to make sure that we're taking care of our workforce. Let's allow them to be fully effective in a position and giving that authority to the city manager to be able to have that flexibility. So I just throw that out. I'm interested in hearing comments from my colleagues on that.

Is there anyone in that situation right now?

The person that contacted me might be in that situation.

So they aren't right now.

I guess I want to be a little bit careful about the details that I share about their situation.

Yeah, I need some clarification on that one, too, whenever you're ready.

Yeah, so the idea, so let's say that you have a disability, and that disability precludes you from being able to fully do the essential functions of the job that you're in. But one of the positions that we're freezing, which is kind of the proposal that I'm wanting us to consider, might allow you to move into one of these frozen positions and fully do that job. and allowing the city to retain you as part of the city workforce. So that's, I'm not sure if that provides any clarification for you.

Yeah, I guess the part that I'm confused about is where would the savings still be for the city? because the frozen positions are where the savings is. And when that person is asking for a position to jump into, then that adds to our deficit.

Yeah, so the idea is that we give the city manager the authority Assumedly, he would free, it would be a swap, right? And so that position would be frozen. And the whole purpose of why this was being asked is because the process that employees go through to deal with an RA already takes a long time. And so then for it to come to the council. Sorry, what's an RA? A reasonable accommodation. Sorry. Okay. um it it already takes a long time to go through that ministerial process and then for it to get on the agenda and and the council to have to approve the shift it just kind of extends that out further potentially that employee being out of work um for that extended period of time so it just allows a little bit more um streamlining so that the the process moves a little bit faster it is let me ask is that something that you need uh the authority for

Because if someone's qualified to move from, basically it's a job transfer. And they would put in for that job opening. And I'm sure it's a rare case, but it's happening. Do you need the authority to...

move that so council does give me um the authority to to do that and i have no problem with just restating that but yes that's an authority that i already have the only thing that i would caution is um of the positions that are frozen and taken off of well we're not funding that are being defunded i would want something that's cost neutral um if we're saying we're accounting for these savings but we're going to reopen and fund another position, then that's increasing our deficit. That's right.

So I think you were I think you went in the back when I kind of made that statement, but it would be essentially be a swap and we would we would give that authority to. Yes. And I have no problem with that.

But don't you already have that authority?

He does, but given the authority to unfreeze the position.

I'm not sure what action our council needs to take tonight because I think he's already got that authority.

Dante, do you have the authority to unfreeze a position without us?

No, not without coming back to council because you're approving the PCL as it is. And if you're at a position, I would have to come back and get that authority from council. but we can evaluate that and you know come back um you know but i just want to make the point that it was cost neutral i think that's in the best interest okay so we can give the authority to the city manager to um i think the resolution maybe could say that the

position control list could be ministerially updated. I don't know that that's the best practice. I've never seen that.

I don't think it is a good practice because we need to protect the city manager when that request comes in. And if he's perceived to have blind authority to do anything he wants, I think it should come back to the council if it's changing the position control list.

So how about this? I will defer this for tonight. Maybe we can follow up on this. And then get a chance to refer to that. Yeah. OK. Continuing on, just kind of some bigger picture. And I'm focused mostly on staff, because really at the end of the day, this conversation is going to come down to staff, our personnel, the people that are doing the job. All these programs, you know, 4th of July event and first night and the rental. That's all small stuff compared to the elephant in the room. And so I just kind of want to. share a few comments as it relates to our personnel. I've shared this before, but I think we need to create a program that rewards and invest in those employees who are helping to create those efficiencies. And I don't know how we bake that into the discussions with our labor negotiations. But I think that a concern that I would have is if I was sitting on staff and I create a model or a system that eliminates my job, I've now worked myself out of my job, how do we How do we not only keep that employee, but reward them for those efforts because they've created savings in the city? So I think that there's a thing there that we need to latch onto. This idea of contracting out, I'll just say, and is Shay still here? He walked out. I think it's the wrong direction to go into if it is general city services. So if we're providing these things on a regular daily basis, we need to have those secure public sector jobs to ensure that we have more control over them, but also to take care of the people that are working for us. The story that he shared, and I can't confirm or deny what he shared, but I am inclined to believe what he's saying is, you know, we have parks workers working next to contractors all day and it's the same people. To me, that seems a little silly. I don't know if if he's including in his math the full burden cost associated with that public sector employee. But I think that that's a good investment in our community. So I just share that. And then I'm going to share one last thing, which I continue to bring up. which is a budget committee of some sorts. I think that it would be of benefit for the council to have some type of committee form that can do some more work in the background for us while we're trying to move this train down the road. I don't think that we can get all the work that needs to be done in the level of detail that we should be having this conversation in regular council meetings because there's so much going on in this space. I know that makes a lot of work for our finance department and our city manager's office. But I just put that out there because I If we're gonna take this serious, we need to dedicate the manpower and the time, the energy and resources. And as we've been discussing on the council, we've been struggling with trying to manage getting the workload that we have on our agendas complete. So I put that out there for council's consideration. So with that, I'll open it up, Dr. Barber.

So for me, I'm fine with your motion. I just have one part of it, which I've already kind of talked about already, which is the housing assistance. That part to me is the way we protect our most vulnerable residents. And it's been used. I mean, like if we look at the reports that were given, it's actually been used. I mean, it almost basically almost, I would say 80% in the past. And then after that, we were able to open up back up because we have certain qualifications where people can't come back and and, you know, use it again and again. And that's fine. But I feel that we wouldn't even been in a position to even help with our fire fire victims to even give that other 125 because that would have been already gone from our residents that are using that regularly because that was already gone and we had 125 to be able to give. So i didn't know i mean right now i was looking at the parking parking fund parking fund had extra money they have millions in their extra and i was like can't we take it from there for one time until we're able to figure out how to fully fund it and if not to be able to at least want to see this be a part of the deeper discussion to be able to fully fund it next the following uh fy could i follow up on that

If we had another, what I call a major emergency, like a fire that displaced 80 people, and we didn't have a rental assistance program, would there be emergency funds that you would have access to?

So you set aside 20% of your general fund budget, and that would be your source of funding.

Thank you.

Well, wouldn't it mean that the engagement with the other nonprofits would have to step up and be our partner, like they did for the displaced fire victims? Sure. And if we were in a position where we could only do $50,000, then whatever money comes in from other sources has to be combined, and we aren't able to do it because we are not living in a platinum world. We're living in a silver world because we can only afford $50,000, just as an illustration.

Well, the thing is, it's not just a fire scenario. It's a scenario of people being homeless. So to me, I'm giving you one scenario, but that's not the whole scenario. The scenario is people being homeless and people utilizing that because They can't afford to even rent here because they need to be able to get their down payment. Their down payment is three or four times the rent. Or somebody being able to get kicked out because they had a health issue that came up that they weren't expecting. And a lot of times these are different examples that were given to us when we were given the report of families that have children. You know, you talk about the highest percentage in the county right here. you know with children being homeless according to mckinney-vento so i'm saying it's more than just the fire piece it's actually homeless people people becoming homeless and that's what i'm looking at the most vulnerable residents here they live here work here and and run into trouble and they've used this and it shows that they've used so that's what i'm talking about so if we have other situations if they come up with housing can you use that same emergency money

Yes.

Okay. So now, and how much of that emergency money is available for that?

And I have to turn to finance. Do you have that number? And she's looking at me. Well, we'll have to, we'll have to get back to you.

But there is a, hold on.

The $25 million? Is that your second economic uncertainty? No, you're talking about for the program.

Correct. So there is emergency money, though, outside of what's already that would be proposed for the FY25, I mean, 26, 27.

So you're asking what the balance is at the end of this year of that program?

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to find out from.

Yes. And so, Matt, do you know?

Yeah. So I'll share just we have one more month in the fiscal year and we've spent and allocated only $62,000 so far this year based on current demand. So if there were an emergency in the next month, we would we would have quite a bit left uh to to allocate but it doesn't roll over year over year so next year uh it we would we would start again that's one of the reasons why staff recommended 125 000 was based on demand from uh that we have for the current fiscal year i would just point out for the record that part of the reason why we're seeing lower demand there is because we changed the bar we lowered the bar the threshold in regards to who qualifies

But neither here nor there.

But that in fact, that answers my question. Thank you for working with me on that.

Who wants to go next? Yeah, please. I want to go back to the $125,000 that's programmed in the recommendation of rental assistance. Now you just reported we have a balance of $63,000 in the rental assistance program.

That's the amount spent, not the balance.

Okay, so off of the total being budgeted was $250,000, and then we gave $125,000. to Monterey County? That's right. I was like, okay. So what is the real balance?

So the real balance, we're at the cap, you're right. So considering that we did give the 125. And I think- Let Rafael explain.

Yeah, go ahead. We spent 200,000 of the 250 already. Where are we at now?

not sure so my understanding instead of 62 000 that uh nat told me it's actually fifty thousand forty seven forty seven thousand let's let staff figure this out and then we'll pick up the conversation forty seven thousand eight hundred eighty eight and twenty five cents that sounds like an accurate number to me can you tell me how many pennies that is 25 thank you i appreciate it okay

So an illustration of that's a balance that will roll over to unspent. Something like that. That's a balance that rolls over. It's an unexpended. It doesn't roll over. No, it's going to be, it was budgeted and it wasn't spent. So it rolls over to savings.

It does not roll over. If you want it to roll over, we can set that aside, set up in a...

No, I'm not saying rolls over to next year. Oh, correct. At the end of this year, that's unused expenditure. Correct. So that is savings to the balance of the year 25-26.

Correct.

It doesn't roll over because, you know, we allocate it year by year.

Correct.

So next year we're allocating $125,000 as recommended tonight. Mm-hmm. And so that means that changes your balance at the end of the year, which is good because you have a little bit more money that was not spent.

Theoretically, yes. The only thing that may be different is that that's one account out of 8,000 accounts. So every account that we have is not going to...

I understand that. But as an illustration, the way this works is we start off with $125,000 allocated for rental assistance. which is not used for deposit assistance for housing. It's used for emergency funding to keep people in their apartment or their home when that emergency occurs, when they lose a job, they can't pay their PG&E, whatever. So the intent of that account was never to be trying to help people get a deposit to move into an apartment. It's to keep people in the housing that they are so they don't become homeless. And I agree, it's just a different way of saying it. But I support 125,000 for this next year. But where I'm frustrated at, and it's nobody's fault, but at the end of the day, when I look at this, I have a decision of how to spend $25,000 because that's what's recommended that we have. Off of this recommendation, there's only $25,000 to work with unless something gets less money so that I can give it to something else.

Well, we'll have at the end of the fiscal year, well, after the end of the fiscal year, staff will be able to work through all the numbers and come back to us mid-year with kind of a more accurate.

So what I'm after is, yeah, I get that this is complex and we can't change too many parts because if you take the work from here, then you add it there, and then she has to start all over. But what I want to see us get to is a place where the city manager and his team has time in the next couple of months where they might be able to find a compromised position to enable downtown security where it's maybe 40,000, where they can still have some sense of stability that gives those that are trying to run businesses some assistance. I mean, as an example, I mean, it happens all the time. They start at nine o'clock and one of the first things they do is they sweep the beat and they walk down, meaning the security. And one of the first things they do is they ask people to get out of the doorway of a merchant who's opening. And they actually will clean up and move people along. And that debris, that bed roll, the sleeping, the camping, the whatever they've left behind, that is a real thing that merchants have to deal with. If you take away the security, That is a significant decline in the quality of life for the merchants and those that live downtown. So I would like to see something that comes back before mid-year that we can find a few more dollars to take care of our downtown. Because if we can't secure health and safety in our downtown Main Street, what are we doing? This is one of the highest priorities that we should have. and it's health and safety. And the police department cannot be everywhere with a fast response like the security guard can be downtown who gets dispatched and called and helps eliminate the calls that Monterey PD has to take. So I'd like to see us look at the security in the coming months to see if we can't come a compromised position. That's the only thing I had other than a lot of the things that I rattled off can't be resolved tonight. I'd like to see some continuing conversation about what we do with the cemetery, the high expenses there. Concerned about the vehicle maintenance costs because that number is trending up. And the one resolved question I didn't pose is, Raphael, this is probably in your world, We have workers' comp, liability, insurance, and do we have an opportunity for those that are coming up for renegotiations or to see if we are able to do better with other providers, especially the liability insurance for our properties?

Workers comp, the access for workers comp insurance is also taken care of in our JPA. And again, we're getting the best price we're covered under PRISM, which is one of the largest providers anyway. So I would like to um invite we have um our october board meeting that monterey we're actually hosting our board meeting so um if you guys are interested to learning a little bit more i can invite you to this meeting to come sit and you can ask some questions and kind of see how our board runs if you're interested i am yeah i wouldn't mind that i'd like to know that they can

give us some hope that the rates are going to pause a bit because the rates for insurance for homeowners in the city and for the city has been out of control and i don't know what way weight that council member rash and i are going to have in changing the rates

No, you're not going to have any for changing the rates. This is just for a better understanding. Because the rates are not looking to go down anytime soon. And it doesn't matter what company you go with. And one of the things I think I've spoken about it in maybe if not this arena, definitely in a town hall, one of the things that keeps the insurance rates higher in California is the fact that we don't have a tort cap, which means that if there is an incident, a slip and fall, a trip, a tree falls on, a car, whatever it is, that there is no limit to what people can sue for and when. And that is where a lot of other states, they have a maximum that you can recover. In California, that is not the case. And that's something that our DP has been talking about and trying to see who's interested. And even through League of California Cities, this is basically not a high priority because for every $100,000 that as cities and California League of Cities is putting in, the attorneys on the flip side of it, they're putting in millions to stop it. So it's just something that- Industry advocated.

Exactly. And they own the politicians in Sacramento.

Exactly.

I don't have anything else.

Council Member Rush?

Well, I want to cut it in half, but I really want to thank Dennis Duke for his leadership of NCIP. You're the reason that we have come to peace with the 3.5 going from the 26, 27 year. And it was tearing this community apart until we got there. And he's the man that did it. It wasn't us. I'm kind of ashamed to admit it was him. So thank you for bringing us there. I to all of you want drastic immediate cuts. Yeah, I want them to. But I'm going to give the grace to our new city manager. He wants more time. He wants to work with the unions which deserve respect and representation. So we've got to we've got to do this with grace. And that's going to take a little bit more time than I think the public wants. But he deserves it. I want to support him. To agencies that are going to get a little bit more for a little bit longer, first night or 4th of July, everybody's on notice that next year's, I think, is going to be even worse. So I think they're all out there hustling. They're going to the community foundation, other foundations, nonprofits. They're resilient. I think we can bring down these numbers. I want to thank Rich Heuer, who's right. We've got to pass this. We've got to get going because next year is harder. Next year is going to be miserable. So I want to thank Shay because I think he's right. We need to look at the contractual agreements we have and reassess if that work can be done by our employees, let's keep it in-house. And we're going to have to, again, work with Dante to see what really can be done in-house and what isn't being able to be done in-house. I can't decide that. So that's it, thank you.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and call the question. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. We're gonna take, let's get, she sounds like confetti over here. We're gonna take a Monterey Five before we jump into this last, oh no, we have two more things. We have two more things on the agenda. So truly, truly, we'll be back at- Real quick, Mr. Mayor, to clarify.

I just wanted to clarify if that includes the amendments that Finance Director King was talking about in the bullet points. There were some administrative changes then.

Yes, yes. It's staff recommendation. It's council, right? Yes.

Yes.

Seems like yes. Okay, so next on the list, we have public appearance item 16 to approve the fiscal year 26-27 capital improvement program and authorize the finance director to make any necessary administrative budget transfers for CIP projects for FY 26-27. Where's our city manager?

He stepped from the back.

You got it, Snap? All right, so with that, we'll pass it to... Oh, Dante's here.

He's all about the grand entries.

Pass it to Dante for a staff introduction.

And I'll pass it to our Public Works Director.

Oh, it's like super fast. So I'm just very lucky to be here before 11 o'clock like the past few years. So we're going to make this very quick. We're going to tag team it so that I don't put you to sleep. So what we want to do is twofold in a past in 2024 and 2025. We've had a state of the city infrastructure presentation. This year we're combining the city of the state of the city infrastructure with the CIP program. So it's just going to be a quick refresher. It's important to continue transparency on the state of our infrastructure and our needs. And then we're going to move into the CAP program. So I have Deputy Public Works Director and City Engineer Andrew Easterling and General Services Superintendent Chris Dwight. And we're all going to tag team and hopefully make it super fun and fast.

Emphasis on fast. Could I get next slide, please? All right. So you guys have probably seen this before, but just to recap, this is everything we maintain. We have a lot of assets out there. We have a Marina with two warps. Both are in poor condition.

Oh, thank you.