Remarks by Maribeth Bushey
40 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 2
I have two items. The first one, I attended the board meeting of the Central Marine Sanitation Agency. One of the most important part of our meeting was setting, authorizing our general manager to set the effective date of the transfer of employees from San Rafael Sanitation District to CMSA. This is the operational consolidation project that we've been working on for over two years. It's very exciting to be setting that effective date. A very exciting document that was passed around was a copy of San Rafael Sanitation District's $5 million check to the city of San Rafael. It's a very popular…
Yes, Madam Mayor. I'd like to request that item 2G be held from the consent calendar due to the amount of the appropriation and the importance of wildfire preparation. Thank you.
My question is it would be really helpful to get a high level summary of the unique capabilities of this particular apparatus due to the cost of the apparatus.
And would this apparatus also play a role in our mutual aid that we provide to our neighbors?
So this provides specialty services in San Rafael and enables us to participate with our neighbors.
Very good. Thank you. Thank you for all that technical information. I want to turn back to our city manager and primarily in this capacity, his former capacity as the finance director, just to give me a real quick overview of the timeline of how long we planned for this big expenditure in the budgetary process.
So it's fair to say that the budgetary process for planning for this type of an expenditure is decades long and is, as we sit here today and as you have repeatedly reported to us, underfunded to meet the needs of that long-term plan.
Very good. Thank you. That's all my questions. Thank you. I'm happy to move the item when it's ready.
I move that we adopt the staff resolution for item 2G. Perfect. Thank you. Sorry.
Thank you. I concur with the comments of my colleagues. It's great to see an update like this come in to such a detailed thorough plan and to reflect the input from our bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee to have that group of volunteers ready and able and to participate and to be able to add the flavor and the fabric to these City Council Chambers, planned that ensure the implementation will go well and meet actual needs in our Community so it's a pleasure to see the update can't wait to see what what happens next, thank you.
I have questions, but they're probably not the kind of questions you want to hear because you've obviously done a very thorough technical and engineering job here. My question is from a user perspective. I have only recently had the opportunity to interact with the Marquardt and Second Street intersection. it was in the middle of the a sunny day with light traffic and i found it almost incomprehensible what i was supposed to do to get on to second street so my question to you is will these proposed changes which appear to be all well thought out make that intersection simpler to understand…
But for vehicular traffic as well, when you come down Marquardt and get to 2nd Street and want to turn right, that will be the only option confronting you, right?
This is a very well thought out and developed and analyzed on proposal that brings safety improvement to a very complex intersection. And that's what we need in our community. We also need continued monitoring and openness to changes that may be required if something turns out other than as parametrics predicted. Thank you for your persistence and thoroughness in bringing this forward. I support it as presented.
Karen Grove- Along along with the mayor, I attended the 350 Mary dale subcommittee meeting we heard presentations from three different perspective providers of the developers for the low permanent low income housing, so this would be for after the on. the small housing units are removed and the build out eventually. All three applicants were very well qualified and we provided our comments to staff to give them a chance to tailor the presentation that they will bring to the entire council when we choose from among those applicants. City Council Chambers, Next, and also with the mayor, I…
Thank you Councilmember Bush Thank you so much for the great presentation. I represent district 3 here in San Rafael which includes point San Pedro Road so one of the issues that is most clear in my constituent's mind has been the flooding from the king tide. And I'm wondering, my question is about your plan for training people about the nature of the ebb and flow of the tides. Because it's confusing. For example, you just said that the king tide is on Thanksgiving. you know two times on that twin that 24-hour period there will be a high tide and there will be flooding six hours later there…
And so I want to make sure you understood my message. It's about the tides, not meteorology, the fact that the flooding will happen at a predictable time at that day and that other times at that day there will be no flooding. So, for example, your signs that you put up that say flooded and then there's no water on the road is very confusing to people. So I hope that you can incorporate in your training for people and your warning materials surrounding that particular type of flooding, that timing matters. And particularly when it's the holidays, it's like get your guests here, have them…
Great to see the team working together and I love your theme of connecting with members in the Community it resonates and aligns beautifully with the presentation we had at suicide prevention awareness month, so thank you.
Yes, I have a question. But first, and it's about what's in the report and then what's not in the report. I'm delighted to see the description of Central Marin Sanitation Agency that we're meeting our load completely and exporting renewable biogas generated electricity to the grid. Glad to see that. What I didn't see, though, was any discussion of MCE. and the recent civil grand jury report. Did you consider any of the information in that report?
So in other words, you did not read the Civil Grand Jury report that talked about renewable energy credits that were being used to create the appearance of renewable energy.
Yes, tell us if your electricity includes any racks.
So it's a different type of piece of paper.
I agree with the Vice Mayor. We need your input on where to spend that next dollar. Where can we get the most climate change improvement for that dollar on behalf of our constituents? We embarked on this process many years ago. Was it 2005? Is that when we started this?
So we've been at this two decades. But we need that level of, you know, how to prioritize and how to make the biggest difference with the next move that we make. So thank you.
Just to put this all in context, it says unencumbered carryover, but they really are encumbered in that they belong to something, and we're just moving them from one year's budget to the next, right? Just to be clear. So it's not the unencumbered that's making a big pile of money that we get to spend again.
Okay, so with that understanding, And I haven't gone back and looked at the past budgets, but this number just seems larger than it usually is. Is that fair?