City Council - Regular Meeting

The council did meet in closed session starting at 5 p.m. All members were present during the entirety of the closed session, and there was no reportable action out of that.

Thank you very much. We will now have our Pledge of Allegiance and invocation. Please remain standing for the invocation. Chief Sauer, could you lead us in the pledge? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Lord, we take a moment to invite you into this space. We realize that we are limited. We see through a glass darkly into this world, into our relationships, into the issues at hand. We need your wisdom and discernment, and we appeal to you the work of your spirit to connect us together. We can be present to one another in hearing the issues and what's on the hearts so we can represent you well. Bless these leaders who take this time to request your help, and may you bless our conversation this evening. Amen. Amen. Thank you.

All right. Lisa, roll call, please.

Council Member Daniel DeGraff.

Here.

Leo Zuber.

Here.

Mike Restuccia. Present. Vice Mayor Dean Uecker.

Here.

Mayor Gary Barton.

Present. This is a time for anyone in the audience who would like to address council on issues not on the agenda. You can approach the podium, please. And we've got our poet. Laureate.

Hello, dear council members. I still want to talk to you about getting some information to write a poem about your own, you know, your public presence. So that's yet to come. But as part of the Department of Poetry this month, I am refraining from writing a poem suggesting we have a cage match this June in front of City Hall. And I will not be here in July going north to Canada to perform a one-man show. So this month, I shall read the poem I wrote for our country's 250th. Our Freedom, Our Democracy by Emil Guglielmo, First Poet Laureate of Ripon. In Ripon, anyone can speak for three minutes at a city council meeting if one so chooses. That is freedom. Sure, you can stick your head out the window and express your opinion on Wilma Avenue, but your hair will blow all over. That's not freedom. And you won't be on the record unless you do it on the second Tuesday of every month. I wax poetic as a declaration of a laureate's independence, but you will be celebrating the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights took effect 13 years after the Declaration of Independence from a king. That's when we birthed the nation in 1776. We codified the current constitution in 1789, and we didn't add the Bill of Rights until 1791. The founding fathers wanted us to do the math. The 250th covers just independence. We've got more parties to come. The Bill of Rights includes the freedom of speech without government censorship and the right to assemble more than just Legos. It means freedom of the press where news organizations can report the facts freely. Now, if only we had a ripping newspaper. It means the right to petition to fix anything we don't like. If only you can get a majority to show up at the council meeting. And it means freedom of religion. There could be no official religion or church or any law to stop you from practicing whatever you believe. Not in Ripon, not anywhere in America. That's freedom. That's our country, 250 years and counting. Believe in that. Later this summer, I'll be writing poetry on demand at the Ripon Farmer's Market, so I hope the poet comes out to get a poem written fresh for them. Respectfully, Emil Guglielmo, First Poet Laureate of Ripon. Thank you very much.

Thank you. The Department of Poetry.

Good evening, gentlemen. My name is Andrew McClure. I am the president of Delta Chapter, Sons of the American Revolution, which means that I am a descendant of an American Revolutionary War patriot. Our organization is dedicated to preservation of American history. And I have to say, we came and brought our meetings to Ripon in January of 2025. We have been warmly welcomed throughout the city. I see flags everywhere. This has to be one of the most patriotic cities in the Central Valley. And we have wanted to express our appreciation because, honestly, gentlemen, I think you're a bit out of uniform. What I have are America 250 lapel pins for you. And you can pin them on in celebration of our America 250. So I don't know if you want to pass these out. We've got some literature about our organization. We meet out of the Ripon Library every third Saturday morning. We would love to be able to honor Ripon police officers, Ripon firefighters, Ripon public servants of all kinds, because that's what our organization is about. And we have had the privilege of decorating some police officers here. You'll see us marching in the Almond Blossom Parade. You'll see us Main Street Day walking around. We're not a bunch of crack. Well, we are a bunch of crackpots, but you'll see us in our Revolutionary War attire, and we would be glad to serve in our color guard in any way that you would have us. Thank you. Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Good evening. So my name is Ron Neewald. I'm also a member of the Delta Chapter As Andrew stated, I am totally unprepared because I wasn't ready to speak to this yet, but I wanted to just use this opportunity to give you a heads up that we are going to be trying our best to appropriate a Liberty Tree planting. We wanted to do that within Ripon since we do meet here, and as Andrew stated, this is quite a city. We are not in competition with other chapters, but we do have some guidance from other chapters, namely Fresno, the Yosemite chapter, who planted a 27-foot tree, I believe, something like this, a valley oak tree down there in downtown Fresno. I would love to see us do a 28-foot tree here in Ripon, just to take precedence. It's the largest tree that's been planted in the United States. At 27 feet, so if we can get a little higher, we can take some ownership there. But we're really looking for some information on public works, on contact names, any of those things that we can get from you to further this. It's a fairly quick process. It has grants and funding through our George Washington Endowment Fund, as well as there are a relief program within California, which helps fund some of that as well. We're really looking for a space to do it. We're going to partner with American Legion, VFWs, if we can get their support as well. But I just wanted to give you a heads up. In the next month, you should see something come across your desks there with this request to join with us in celebrating America 250. So thank you very much for your time. Very good.

Thank you.

All right. Has everyone had an opportunity to review our minutes from our last meeting? And then we had a special session on June 3rd. If so, do I have a motion to approve? I'll move to approve both sets of minutes. Second. All right, both sets of minutes are approved. We have a posted agenda. Are there any items to be pulled from that agenda? If not, is there a motion to approve the agenda as posted? So moved. Second. Agenda is approved. Consent calendar. I'll move to approve the consent calendar. Thank you. Second. Consent calendar approved. And next, let's see. City ordinances. Is this a... Public hearing on this? Second reading, I don't think so. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. All right.

Second reading, Mr. Zeiderbach. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Both these two items of the ordinances are second reading and adoptions. We went over these last meeting, but I'd be happy to answer any questions on either one of these if you have them.

Any questions from council?

If not, I'll make a motion. We waive the second reading and adopt ordinance. Second.

Is that for both?

Sure, if we can take them both at the same time, that's for both.

I think, sure. Are they separate, Tommy?

I would take them separately and also take public comment if there is any.

Yeah.

I did the first one, yeah.

All right, the first one is approved, and the second one on zoning amendment on ADUs. I think Mr. Zeiderberg already commented on this. Any public comment or any comments, questions from council? If not, is there a motion to waive the second reading and approve?

So moved.

Second. Good. Discussion items. Our budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Mr. Warner.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is similar to what we've been doing the last few years. We actually started the budget process with a strategic planning meeting a month or two ago where we talked about some big picture items, and that was really focused on you know, what's happening, not just now, but in the near future and how to have impact on certain items that is better to have impact early on. What tonight is, is going through the proposed 26-27 budget and highlighting the different funds that are included in that budget and able to discuss any items the council wants to discuss or make any adjustments as necessary. So before we get into the 26-27 budget, what I normally do is talk about where we've been with our current budget, the 25-26. This is for the general fund, the green, Vertical lines are the monthly revenue. Red vertical lines are the monthly expenses. And then the black dashed line is the general fund balance from last fiscal year. And then the blue dashed line is the general fund balance that was budgeted. And then the solid blue line is what has actually happened during the 25-26 fiscal year. So you can see where we're ending up at is going to be much closer to last year. And revenue as compared to last year is actually up about 10%. If you took development revenue out of that, it's about 4.1% revenue increase. So that's on the taxes and the fees we get, everything except for development-related revenue. And then as far as expenses, they're close to 5% higher than what we saw last year.

The larger green increases, those are, if I recall, typically when you get adjustments on the sales tax revenue, right? Property tax. Property tax, rather, yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, the January, and then we get another one in June with property tax. And then general fund, just some background. This is what funds the police, parks, maintenance, library, senior center, animal control, engineering and planning. We've done a lot of good things. I think we're the only city in the county right now that does not have a self-tax measure in place. And a lot of that is just the various policies the council has put forth over decades, really, that have allowed us to not have to go out and do that. We're still able to have one of the highest police officer ratios in San Joaquin County. We're currently at 1.5 officers per 1,000 residents. And another thing that we have done over the last few years is really focused on unfunded liability. And in Ripon, we'll talk more about this later, but one of the reasons for the success of not having a self-tax measure is our employees, all of our employees are not on, the CalPERS defined benefit system, where everyone except for public safety is a defined contribution like a 401 . And that has really limited our unfunded liability. And we'll talk more about that later. But that has allowed us to maintain the officer ratio we do and the services in the parks. Some of the challenges we have is expenses are increasing faster than revenue. You saw a little bit on the last slide. I'll talk about that on the next slide. And then just in general, retaining and attracting staff. I think every city could include that on the challenge, but Ripon has had challenges with that as well. So this is a summary of the general fund budget, and it compares it to the actual of 24-25, to what we're projecting to end in 25-26, to what is being budgeted for 26-27. If you look at just the annual revenue, again, this is everything but pulling development out of it. The increase between 24-25 and 25-26 was 4.1%. For 26-27, the increase was 4.5%. And then if you look at the annual change in expenses, that compares to 4.9% in 25-26 and 6.2% in 26-27. Taking development out of that, you can see some of the concerns are expenses increasing at a faster rate than the revenue that we're getting. We've been much more aggressive with economic development. Planning has done a good job of bringing in businesses like Bow Country and the RV dealership. we need to continue some of those opportunities. So one of the projects that are included in the budget this year is to bring in a project to, or do a project that will allow us to annex additional non-residential land to look for those kinds of opportunities. And that hopefully over time will help bring in additional revenue. It is a balanced budget for 26, 27, and you can see the, There's a surplus projected for 25-26. One of the policies of the council is to transfer 33% of that surplus to the street and road fund, and I show that on here as well, what that would look like for 25-26. This is full-time staffing levels. This goes back to 2008, but the message here, the bottom line is, Really, the only significant jump we've seen in staffing, which was in 22-23, is when we took on the Lathrop contract. We've hired seven additional dispatchers with that contract. Besides that, it has remained relatively flat since the recession. The one staffing request in the budget is to add a part-time police department secretary. The fiscal impact of this is $35,000, and this would be used to really mitigate some of the disruption in services when staff is on personal time off, whether it's a health issue or a vacation. This will allow the part-time person to fill in in different areas where it's needed to maintain services to the public. Talked a little bit about the retirement earlier. Again, Ripon is one of the few cities that all of our employees are not on a CalPERS retirement system. And you see the benefit of that as far as the cost. With the public safety, we're paying about $50,000 an employee for this benefit. And the biggest portion of that is the unfunded liability. So this is the... The annual amount we pay because they did not collect enough while employees were here working. So it's about 55% of the annual payment that we paid to PERS of that 1.178. As far as all of the other employees, there's about 67 other employees that are on a government version of the 401k system. We fund that between 15 to 18.3%, and that's about $15,600 per employee. And this goes to talking about some of the increases in expenses. CalPERS, we have seen about a $530,000 per year average increase from what we've seen between the year 16-17 to 23-24 to now going forward to 34-35. And that's substantial. For us, that equates to about five full-time employees that we could be hiring to go out in. do additional services to the community. So this additional funding, which a lot of it is that unfunded liability, does impact the services being provided.

Kevin, I have a question on that. CalPERS was stepping down their actuarial rate. Has that hit the bottom of where they're going? Are they going to continue that? Because if they continue that, that's going to get worse.

Right. I'm not sure on that. Yeah, all this data is from the July 2025 actuarial report that we received. So I'm not sure if that was included in there or not. And then this slide talks about what the council has done to try to mitigate these increases. We have established a 115 trust. This is an option for us to try to put money in an account that typically has an ability to generate larger investment returns. than our typical options for government investments. The investment level to that is three years of the unfunded liability, and then ideally you're just creating additional balance in there with those returns. And that can be used, the 115 Trust can be used to pay liabilities of the CalPERS, the annual payments of CalPERS in years when there's a short-term economic downturn. Our current unfunded liability is about $7.1 million. That's the black line up on top, the dashed line. And you can see they show that going down over time. I think since I've been here, they always show the next five years going down over time. And then the blue line on there is the balance in the 115 trust and what we're projecting, assuming a 6% return on our investments in there. Another reason of higher expenses over these last couple of years is related to health and welfare and the benefits we provide our employees. These last two years has been close to 10% increases in the health care or health and welfare programs. And the year prior to that, it was 8%. And then you can see it was relatively flat. We did a pretty good job managing that over the years. But these last three years have been substantial increases. And I would point out that the employees are sharing in this cost right now for 2026. Employee contributions are offsetting these numbers by $153,000. So these are the total numbers. And then you subtract $153,000 for the net impact to the city. A little bit about general fund and the revenue. Majority of the money we get is from taxes. This slide here shows the largest revenue sources, including those taxes, but it also includes some of the fees that we get as well. The blue line is sales tax. Brown is property tax. Motor vehicle in lieu is the green line. And then our recreation fees is the orange and development related is the purple. You can see over time that they're all very stable except for sales tax. sales tax have been ranging over the last five years between $4 and $4.5 million. Besides that, they've all been pretty stable. For the property tax, I would note that this year's budget, the increase is only 1.2%. We have been seeing steadily 4% increases. The reason for the downturn is we did a redevelopment bond refinancing, and we've we front-loaded the savings in the redevelopment bonds for the first five years. So we've been seeing some of that savings in the property tax annual payments we've been receiving over these last five years. But that is going to go away. So that 1.2% is a one-year adjustment for not receiving that anymore. Motor vehicle in lieu, about 5% increase. Recreation. This is over the last four years. We've been seeing about 2% increases in that. It took a little bit to recover after COVID, but we're also showing about a 2.3% increase in the budget. And then development is averaged about $600,000 over the last five years of annual revenue. What's in the budget is just under $400,000. And why is that? Why do you show it?

Why do you drop off?

Just conservative, the $396,000 reflects a long-term average of what we saw even during the recession in some of those years without a lot of development. So we try to be more conservative in that number.

Thank you. Well, I'm glad it's not a big part of our budget. Some cities, a huge part of their budget may have development slowdown. They got some economic problems.

Do you have anyone in mind?

Anybody close to us?

And this is just a little closer at sales tax. So sales tax numbers, these are on calendar year basis, not fiscal year, just how we get the information and the data. The blue vertical lines are the revenue received from the sale of fuel. The brown is manufacturing, green commercial. The purple are the restaurants. And then the line across the top is the annual average price of fuel, which corresponds to the right side of the graph. But year to year, fuel sales have been pretty flat. The increase that we're seeing right now didn't start till March, so that's not included in these numbers. Commercial sales went down about 14%, which equated to about $160,000. Manufacturing was up 22%, and restaurants up 7%. And then you can see what the impacts are onto the sales tax revenue for each of those. And then sale of fuel, this is by gallons. I think when there was some, as there was conversion with electric, we've been monitoring this, but over the last six or so years, it's been pretty stable. And then capital replacement transfer. This is... We have a spreadsheet, a database that includes everything within the city that gets replaced over time, whether it's HVAC, painting, police cars, computers. And we update that periodically to reflect lifespan of these items and the cost to replace. So what is being included in the budget right now is a little less than what is actually being calculated in that database. The department capital, this is all the general fund items, how we fund those replacement. The budget includes a $475,000 transfer, about $100,000 less than the calculation in the database. Park and rec, $130,000 transfer, and then fueling station transfer is about $23,000. The one thing I would say about the fueling station is we've had years with, much larger transfers than the $30,000. So that fund is actually in pretty good shape.

Yeah, pretty precise.

Yes. Yeah, I don't know how. I will try to go back and not be so precise. I must have missed that one.

Yeah. No pennies.

So talking about the Department Capital Fund, right now we have about $1.5 million in that fund. As I mentioned, there's a $475,000 transfer included in this budget. And then these are the replacement items for this fiscal year. I won't read all of these items. I would point out the special study, the West Side Master Plan, that is the planning document that needs to be in place for LAFCO so we can start that process of discussing an annexation. That's a $500,000 investment included in this budget. Any question on these items?

This is the thing for 5-26 or 26-27? 26-27, this new budget. Will that master plan, is that something you'll produce internally or will you have a consultant? It'll be a consultant. Okay. Yeah.

And then as far as parks capital, the beginning balance in there is $2.5 million at the start of 26-27, $130,000 transfer. And then these are the projects. The parking lot in baseball fields is actually out to bid right now. We're projecting a $2 million bid, but we should know here in a few weeks where that project comes in at. You'll notice there's quite a bit of improvements at the community center, exterior paint, small hall, a new roof on the small hall, and then some interior paint as part of that improvements as well. And then still for the front gazebo, over time, it has just been used quite a bit. A lot of tape people have put on there. So this will clean all that up.

Okay, thanks. A lot of comments about the community center needing some attention. So I'm glad it's being done.

I think we figured once you do the parking lot.

You better do the rest.

All of a sudden you'll highlight the other problems. Yeah. Street and road, I'm not going to go through all this. We've talked about this at length. But over the last few years, we've had additional money to do street and road projects than we haven't had in the past. Some of this is because of the policies of the council and how money is being allocated to street and road, whether it's the reserve policy or the street and road reconstruction fund that we're putting money into now. But some of that is from other agencies. LTF, there was a chance we could have lost all of our LTF to transit. We only lost 25%. That was a win. And then SB1 funds that we're receiving from the state are being indexed. and that is turning to be a meaningful source of funding. This is a summary similar to the general fund that I showed earlier. The one thing I would point out in operating expenses, you can see the street department increasing in the proposed budget to $533,000. The real reason for this is public works beginning to self-perform more of the needs of the street department. That's the cracked ceiling, asphalt repair after we have to dig up asphalt for a utility repair, and then sidewalk repairs as well. So just putting more and more resources trying to self-perform those items. The other thing I'd point out is in the past, we used to fund, the landscape district has a few districts that are in the negative and we used to fund those out of the general fund. Those are now being fund out of the street and road fund. So that's close to about $100,000 to fund those districts that are in the negative.

And I noticed that the lighting fund in our little, list is negative for next year and so there's going to be one added to that of general fund money going someplace else if we don't do something about that correct yeah and that that um i have a slide on that at the end we could talk more about that and then this is a list of the projects for 26 27 um

We are doing River Road overlay that's planned. That's about a $1.3 million project. And then West Ripon, they just started construction on that project. I think that was, I think actually $400,000 was the bid. And then Area 3 is the next project that is planned. As you can see on the red in there, there's a significant amount of reconstruction. So engineering has put together some preliminary designs. They are going to do a workshop with the council to talk about how much money the council wants to allocate to that project and how we could phase that. So we'll come back with that over this fiscal year. But those improvements would actually happen in fiscal year 27, 28. Enterprise funds, this is for the water, sewer, and garbage. We recently have a five-year rates in place for February 2026 to 2030. And the biggest challenge we deal with there is just complying with state regulations and not just complying with them, but ensuring those costs are being accurately projected in our rate increases. It's been a real challenge, especially in the garbage fund. We talk about this, and I won't go through all the numbers. This is really showing the transfers that happen to the enterprise capital funds from the operating funds. but the budget does include one maintenance worker in the water department, and this is to complete additional regulatory requirements. And then also there are two projects to add wellhead treatment at city wells. So that obviously has more maintenance and demand on our staff. These are the list of utility, the... Enterprise capital projects. This is for the water and sewer capital funds. There's about $657,000 of water capital projects. The biggest are the two well treatment programs, or the wellhead treatment projects. They're about $200,000 each. I don't know if you noticed the Mislan Sports Park, the water tower, the graphics are starting to peel off. We haven't been to the top yet to see, is it a graphic issue or a paint issue? And that number could range between $100,000 and $400,000, depending on what they find up there. But James is getting bids, and the contractors are actually going to the top and looking to see what it is. We're hoping it's just a graphic issue and the sun just damaging the graphics on the order of $100,000. And the other big project is a SCADA upgrade. This is what James in Public Works controls all of our pumps and water wells through the computer system, sets the parameters of how those operate. So that's split between the water and sewer capital fund, but that's about a $250,000 project. And then the other one, big one for the sewer capital is a sludge disposal project. We're completing a draft of the wastewater treatment plant facility plan, and we're going to bring that to the council tomorrow. to go over, but one of the recommendations in there is to remove the sludge that's impacting the performance of those ponds.

We are adjourned.