City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon, everyone. I think we have a quorum, right? Yes. Four cup. Thank you. I call to order a special meeting of the Marin City Council at 01:30PM. Good afternoon and welcome and thank you to those who are here and thank you to those viewing remotely. Could I have pastor Lee Cole from Calvary Chapel San Bernardino lead to this afternoon's invocation? And can I have council member Flores, lead on the pledge of allegiance? Please rise.

Good afternoon, mayor, council members. Good to see you. Let's bow in a word of prayer. Father, we wanna begin this important meeting here asking you to lead and guide us. We're fallen. We're broken. We really need your guidance, Lord, to help us. And we ask today that you would help us to make decisions for the good citizens of San Bernardino. Be with the mayor and the council members, with the city managers and all that are here. We pray, Lord, that they would be concerned mostly with the people they serve and that their decisions would bring unity and prosperity to San Bernardino. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you, Pastor Lee. Thank you, Councilmember Flores. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll.

Councilmember Sanchez. Here. Councilmember Barr has not yet arrived. Councilmember Figueroa.

Here.

Councilmember Charett? Here. Mayor Perthem Canas has not yet arrived. Councilmember Flores? Present. Councilmember Ortiz?

Here. And Mayor Tran? Here. Thank you.

Moving on to public comments for the special meeting. At this time, public comments will be heard for items on the agenda only. To address city council, everyone must complete a speaker card and provide it to the city clerk. Only those speaker cards turned into the city clerk will be allowed to address the city council. No late cards will be accepted. Each person should state their name for the record, before beginning their comments, and you have three minutes each. As your name is called, please line up in the behind the podium. There's two available for you. Please note your name will only be called once. If you do not respond when called, we're good, right?

When called, may forfeit your opportunity to speak. If you require Spanish interpretation, we do have an interpreter on-site. Please raise your hand at this time if you need interpreting assistance. We ask that you please observe proper decorum and do not speak out of turn or make comments from your seat. If you wish to address the mayor and city council, please be sure to submit a speaker slip. If you speak out of turn or disrupt the meeting, a warning may be given and or you will be asked to leave the meeting pursuant to government code section five four nine five seven point nine and penal code four zero three.

Thank you.

Gracias. We have 10 speakers.

Madam Mayor,

because there is one item of closed session, I wanted to describe the circumstances now. That way if anyone wants to give public comment, they know what it's about. There is one item of closed session. It's anticipated litigation, significant exposure to litigation. What that is relating to is that the city received a letter from an attorney, Timothy Prince of Tomlinson And Prince, April 17, threatening legal action to overturn the censure of council member Doctor. Treasure Ortiz. That is what we will be talking about in closed session. Thank you.

Thank you. Madam City Clerk. Ron Alvarado, Robert Carrillo, Ruben Mendoza, Daniel Givangi, Ulysses Rodriguez, Brandon Aguilera, Miriam Nieto, Michael Segura, Alex Beltran, and James Ojeda.

Thank you. Please state your name for the record. You have three minutes each.

Good afternoon, mayor, city council, neighbors. My name is Ronald Verrado, and I am a resident of the 1st Ward, a fraud investigator, and a candidate for the 1st Ward Council seat. I'm here today because the timing of this special meeting is a disservice to our residents. Scheduling a budget workshop for 01:30PM on a Wednesday ensures that the vast majority of San Bernardino is at work and unable to participate. We had one council member show up late and we're missing another.

This is the most critical document the city produces. Yet by holding it now, the council is effectively conducting the budget process in the dark. A participatory budget process is the only way to build trust. But when you sideline the public, you have to ask, What are you trying to hide? This budget packet mentions a 6,100,000 decline in revenues and a need for conservative choices.

However, we could easily have the resources we need if this council stopped wasting taxpayer money. We see continuous waste on mismanagement, an endless cycle of lawsuits this council leads us into. Here, we just heard another lawsuit this council led us into. Even more frustrating is a waste of time and money on special meetings called specifically to attack political opponents and take away our rights. While this council spends its energy on political theater, our actual problems go unaddressed.

We have a downtown that is continuously burning, a homeless crisis that isn't being solved, and open prostitution and human trafficking happening on G Street daily. These are emergencies we should be calling special meetings for, not to settle political scores and not to drive us further into more litigation where only attorneys are making money and our streets go unpaved. Despite these failures, we must look towards the future. I want to voice my strong support for designating the East Street Corridor as an official cultural district. This is a vital place based strategy to anchor investment in infrastructure, safety, and housing.

We have the potential to grow our economy through our cultural assets, but we need a council that prioritizes our streets over their own legal and political battles. I urge this council to move future BRJF workshops to the evening, put the resources where they belong in our infrastructure, our safety and our cultural districts. Not into donor pockets, lawsuits, political attacks, lawyers. It's time to move San Bernardino forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Good afternoon, mayor and council, Robert Carrillo, San Bernardino resident, founder of the LaunchPack Collective. And I'm also a treasurer and finance committee chair of one of the largest federally qualified health centers in the country, with a budget over close to $50,000,000 And I'm going to be direct. I've reviewed the proposed budget. While it is disciplined and fiscally balanced, it is also clear we are not aligned with the outcomes that we want in the city. Out of roughly $233,000,000 about 150 goes to police, $16,000,000 to community development and housing and under $3,000,000 to economic development.

That's roughly 65% on public safety and about 8% on development and housing combined. That's not a criticism. That's just the math. And I say this from experience managing this multimillion dollar budget: If your spending doesn't align with your outcomes, you will keep paying for the same problems. In the only two departments that have the word development in them, economic development and community development and housing, we are not actually funding development.

We are funding administration, code enforcement, compliance, and internal operations. But we are not funding development or production. I went line by line through the community development housing budget. There was not a single dollar allocated to actually producing housing. If we want different outcomes, we need to invest in the front end.

We need predevelopment dollars, we need low interest loan programs, and we need to expedite planning processes. Projects are not stalling because they're bad They're stalling because the system cannot move at the required speed. We also need to rethink how we reactivate or activate our corridors. Instead of spreading small grants across the city, let's adopt corridors and fully commit. Mount Vernon from the bridge to the train station, E Street from 5th to baseline, baseline from E Street to Sierra.

Focus the resources, build momentum, and show what's possible. And I'll say this also clearly. As someone with over twenty years in commercial real estate, including having done deals at the ICSC, we need to stop focusing or rather going on fishing expeditions trying to attract national tenants when we can't stabilize our local economy. It's not happening, it hasn't happened, and it won't happen until we get our house in order. Focus internally, and the external will come.

We should be creating a city based housing voucher or master lease program. We should be leveraging our opportunity zones before we lose them in two point zero, and we should actually be driving transit oriented development overlays. These are strengths we already have, but we are not using them strategically. Right now, development in the budget is a category, not a strategy.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

You bet. Welcome, council and mayor. My name is Daniel Jumanji, and I'm a 7th Ward resident. And today, I'm here to speak in advocacy, because I know you all are going to be having a discussion item on the budget. So, I wanted to speak in support of supporting the arts in the city and making sure that we're able to do so in the twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven year.

We need to dedicate money to the arts and the beautification of the city. Many of you might have realized in the last year or two, it feels like something's a little bit different about San Bernardino, especially around my neighborhood in the 7th Ward. I passed by the other day, and I started noticing people are walking dogs on Dates Street. So, I feel like we should continue positive momentum and invest in things that will really help the city. Investing in the arts will beautify the city.

It will help attract economic development. Right now, our downtown corridor is looking a little bit scary and not as nice. There are some businesses that are really holding it down. And through the advocacy of the Garcia Center, San Bernardino County Arts Connection with Creative Grounds, they've been doing a lot of great work. There's many other organizations.

So having the city put money towards the budget to improve the arts, to beautify the city, and then simultaneously, if the city is able to dedicate funds to beautify the streets, add trees, do things like that, that's gonna put things in the right direction for us and attract further money and attention for us. Thank you so much, and I wanted to give that advocacy.

Thank you. Thank you.

Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ruben Mendoza. Two years ago, I moved to the 7th Ward when I purchased my first single family home with my girlfriend Jasmine. We live here, we work here, we play here. And we're asking you to build more housing across all income levels as defined in the RENA, the regional housing needs allocation. The city has only met 12% of its RENA obligation, 1,500 of the 8,100 units we are mandated to produce by 2029. We are running out of time and two things need to happen. First, you have to create a one stop shop for predevelopment, entitlement, and permitting. The legislation that incentivizes streamlining already exists, and we need to use it. Approval should not take years.

Projects that already meet regulatory frameworks should not be subject to discretionary reviews that delay, dilute, or kill them. Second, get capital to the builders who are actually doing neighborhood scale work. When we talk about housing, the spotlight lands on the biggest players. The firms with full departments for finance, permitting, legal, and community relations. Teams that can absorb delays, carry pre development costs, and survive a bad quarter.

Meanwhile, small and local developers are out here trying to build what most neighborhoods actually need. An ADU, a duplex, a cottage core, or a mixed use building. It's small, smart, and within reach, and they are doing it while facing the highest barriers to entry. If we want equitable growth, we cannot keep debating housing only at the mega project scale. We have to lower barriers for local builders working block by block with neighbors as partners, not obstacles.

What small developers need to succeed are time certainty, right size capital for right size projects, a real path to site control, and a reputable process, and not a custom battle every single time. Policy creates permission. Delivery creates belief. Small developers are the delivery layer. They are the ones who turn permission into keys in hands, but they cannot do that if the system keeps rewarding the status quo that is costing us a million dollars per unit, like on E Street. And let me close with this. Infrastructure is not only about building buildings or zoning maps. A community cannot hold together without culture. The arts are not a luxury line item. They are the connective tissue of neighborhood life.

If we are serious about building communities and not just buildings, then the arts must be funded like it as well. Invest in what works. Housing, economic development, culture, all three together. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

James Hello. Yes, I am James Ojeda. It's a pleasure to be here. I just want to come in and kind of bring attention to the need for a creative economy here in San Bernardino. So let me just say thank you for the cultural district that you guys I'm assuming unanimously all decided that we really need here.

So I am one of the few people that are trying to push arts advocacy here, and it's it's needed. I didn't really prepare too well, but I really wanted to really stress that that need. That we we need a creative economy. There's like pockets of people that need to be uplifted, and like that feeds into like many other things, you know, beautification and like gardens and all these things that like you just don't see enough of around here. Yeah.

That's the gist of it. Yeah. Blanks. I yield. You very Thank you.

Next speaker, please state your name. Have three minutes.

Thank you, James, for coming out and speaking. Amazing ceramicist at the Garcia Center and all over, does events everywhere. My name is Michael Seguta. I'm the executive director of the Garcia Center for the Arts. I'm a resident here in San Bernardino. I know most of you. I'm also a lifetime resident and a member of San Bernardino Generation Now. We've done a lot of cultural development over the years. Arts is an investment in quality of life. It's an investment in our economy.

I hear we're in a deficit and we need to put money and invest at least 3,000,000 into the arts. It's not a huge lift when there's larger budgets out there going to other departments. I don't wanna say which departments. I think we could read that on the budget. But we're asking for a $3,000,000 annual budget for arts to just get started.

And I know being in a deficit, we need to find other funding mechanisms. There's things like the impact development fee that we used to have that funded arts and culture and was taken away from our community and put into general funds. So there's mechanisms we can explore. And currently, we're looking at partnerships to push forward an economic study for those funding mechanisms so that we can bring that to you, we can bring that to the community, we can move forward with some solutions besides just asking for money, right? Other than that, we do want you guys to adopt the E Street corridor.

We think that's a easy opportunity to start looking at investment and really solidifying where we can spend some money and build partnerships along that corridor. We also would love to ensure that we push forward policies and at least a framework to organize the budget as well as other policies that are needed here in the city. And part of that is transparency, transparency of process. The commission has been lifting, I'm on the commission as well for arts and historical preservation if you didn't know. And the commission has been lifting that the meetings aren't recorded.

The notes are very general. There's not enough transparency within the commission spaces. So how are we supposed to communicate to the entire city? How are we supposed to communicate to folks when the meetings are at four p. M. And people can't make it out of work to just come to a commission meeting. So it was lifted. James, he's not here, he's not able to make it, but Jim Smith asked me to lift that as well, that he's been asking for recordings and YouTube. It's not too much to lift and just put a phone there. Other than that, part of it is also saving historical sites and infrastructure so that eraser erasing of culture doesn't happen here in the city.

I want my kids to grow up in a place they can be proud of, and I want them to have access to culture. So I just wanna say thank you all for listening. Let's fund the arts, $3,000,000. Let's keep moving forward and working together. Let's look at other funding mechanisms. If we can't fund it, hopefully the city can fund it. And let's work as a team. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. Please hold off for comment.

No, no, no. Was just related to that. Just a quick comment. So Vice President?

Let's wait for the comments after all the public comments. I can hold I can have a council member comment right after the public Thank you. Next, state your name. Have three minutes.

Hello. My name is Casey Ball. I am with the Desert Empire Filmmaker Foundation. We're a local nonprofit. We're fiscally sponsored by the Arts Connection and pending our five zero one(three). I'm here also in support of the E Street corridor asking for you to approve that in this official cultural district. And also, the $3,000,000 ask of a arts funding budget, which would break down in 2,000,000 for citywide arts programming, staffing, and systems to support public art. And then, a million dollars of that three to reinstate the visual arts grants. So, we're talking about how people are seeing a shift in San Bernardino, right, walking their dogs on the streets, seeing positivity, right? We've all been pushing that boulder to get things really back on track here.

And it's starting to budge. Right? And this arts is one of those things that really starts to develop the pride in the community. That way it looks from the outside. It's going to help bring people in and keep people here. And that's what we're here in support of. I also wanted to say, I spoke to the California Arts Council along with the Arts Connection earlier or later last year, excuse me. And we made a great impression. They really wanted to move forward with that because we presented the E Street corridor. But since we didn't have the city on board with that, it didn't get approved.

Now, getting that cultural district approval from the state kind of helps to open up some of the arts funding from the state. And if we're showing that what we're doing here is on board with all that, that's going to help increase that momentum overall. So, finally, we need transparent and accessible processes that protect historic buildings, conduct site surveys, and reduce barriers for community organizations, including waiving permit fees for arts and cultural events. I'm going to yield the rest of my time. Thank you all very much.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Hello, mayor and council. My name is Miriam Yeto, and I'm sorry, I've been having this, like, stuffy thing for a while now, but I'm not contagious, I promise. Yeah, my name is Miriam Yeto. I am a resident of the 7th Ward. I am a long time organizer here, organized with Generation Now, organized with different groups.

And today, I'm here to really support a budget that's gonna be reflective of what the community wants. I want to make sure that in this budget, we really support programs, we support departments that are really going to build infrastructure and foundations for systems that are going to be sustainable in the future. I think that's something that we don't really do good as a local government. We don't support processes and systems that create that infrastructure to really leverage other funding elsewhere. I think that there is the funding out there.

We can get the funding if we set up the foundation and the infrastructure. I think the East Street Corridor is a huge way for us to really start leveraging some of those fundings. As we're hearing, if we would have been set up, you know, almost like six months ago for an East Recorder to happen, we could have gotten a designation from the East Recorder from the state. But we weren't ready, so we didn't get it, right? Another city like Riverside did get it because they have the infrastructure and they have the sustainability processes that will support that.

We lack that. We need that. And in order for that to happen, we need investment. We believe $3,000,000 is an adequate amount that can support that. We believe that $3,000,000 can also support in bringing other economic leverages into our city that we can then continue to build on. So this is an investment in the people. This is an investment in our community. This is an investment in economic growth. This is also an investment into those small businesses that are already doing the on the ground work for all of us, right? So they are out there.

They're bringing out the people. They're selling items with no support. Nobody is getting any support right now. So I think that if we can work together, if we can bring together a budget that can sustain infrastructure, designate the East Street Corridor, then we can start leveraging funding for grants for small businesses, housing for artists, housing for other community for displacement not to happen, funding for other centers that are doing the work already in the community. So we need to make sure that we invest in the right way, and we provide the departments that are supposed to be in charge of that with some actual staff resources to do the work.

So again, we're asking for $3,000,000 and we're asking for this impact fee to really be reinvested in and to understand better how can we get this back. The city of San Bernardino had it already. Let's figure out how we can get it back. So thank you. Again, my name is Myriah.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Good afternoon. My name is Alex Beltran. I'm a resident of the 4th Ward, and I'm, here to advocate for important issues in this budget. I've come previously with a laundry list of issues that I've seen in the city. I'm not gonna repeat that list, but some key things I definitely think we need affordable housing support, for, street improvements that will improve pedestrian and, bicycle safety.

And also, we need support for arts and culture. I strongly encourage the council to support the $3,000,000 that we're asking for for arts and culture. As Michael said, I was also part of San Bernardino generation now, and immediately after the bankruptcy, we helped bring a revival in the city, and we helped bring life back to the parks and engage a lot of people that previously haven't been engaged, but we weren't able to sustain it because we didn't have enough support from the city and city leadership. And now we have all the programs and people in the right places. And I think we could do a lot of good work if we had full support from the city.

So, thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Hello, council. My name is Brandon Aguilera. I'm a lifelong resident of the city, out of the 2nd Ward. And I just want to highlight and uplift the arts well, I want to talk about the arts economy advocacy here, but also advocate for improvements for and campaign for the Paracel pickleball and tennis court campaign that we have. I've been a as a lifelong resident and a lifelong artist and art kid here at San Bernardino, I graduated from Sierra High School and went to Digitech there and left from their graphic design program and continued in that.

And have been doing arts and design in the city ever since. I've been a part of many San Bernardino, that. And it's been a part of the growth the independent growth here at the city basically all my life. And back in 2010, when I was doing arts gatherings and art show work here, there wasn't anything ongoing at that time. Since then, there's been a tremendous growth independently.

And we since then, we've still been waiting for more work and more collaboration from the city. So, I highly just advocate for the 3,000,000 that they're that we're asking for just to continue as we are all a lot of us are artists and designers and creatives, and we're still here. And we're still trying to create and we're still trying to build and improve the city. Also, I represent the Paris Hill Pickleball Group and the IEP Pickle Pals Group. And I understand that the city is in the process of considering grant funding for a large pickleball and tennis court improvement vision and plan that we have there.

I know that there's various grants out there that we could potentially collaborate to qualify for. We're ready to partner with the city. Further beyond what we've already been doing and the work that me and others of the group have been doing for the last three years in gathering tremendous batch of information and financial gatherings that we've presented to do that. I know that we've met with, many of the city. You know, we met with Sandra and Helen and, the parks and rec, director, Vanessa Carter and Eric Levin.

And we're just looking to highlight that we want to partner with the city deeper to continue all that because there's tremendous financial needs there at the park. Largely just even trying to get trash cans there and trying to get the 21st Street lights operable and working to help deter some of the organizations that gather there and then end up leaving trash and filth all over the park there at the tennis courts. So if we get the lights working there within the budget, that would so that way can lead to getting the restrooms opened and operable because growth is going to continue to explode there throughout spring and summer season. So, I just want to lift up both the arts and the pickleball

Thank you.

Campaign for the city.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Hello, everybody. My name is Julius Rodriguez. I am a local artist. I'm a community leader, and I serve as the associate director for Arts Connection, your arts council for San Bernardino County. I'm here in advocacy for the Eastern Corridor as well.

First of all, wanna say thank you to the city and all of you guys for supporting the cultural district movement that we did together as we brought the state to see our beautiful downtown. Unfortunately, we were just short and we were not we didn't receive the designation because we didn't quite have a plan or a vision on how this cultural district could take place from the city, but that's okay because we can continue the movement and we're still advocating for that. So as we look into the new city budget, we encourage you all to please allocate some funding as my colleagues have mentioned to please support the planning and implementation of our cultural district, to continue to work hand on hand with us and our community to make this a reality, to support for more public art activations, cultural programming that basically make our beautiful San Bernardino a better place for people can walk around, where people can feel like they belong here. We can create communities of belonging, and we can create not just that, but also job opportunities where we can see more business coming into our city to elevate what we already have.

And we see that with sister cities who are currently doing that. So I think this is a great opportunity to continue to do so. Not only that, I think with this, this is a good opportunity to also continue to support the public art and cultural programming by restoring the visual and performing arts grant that had been taking place in the city for so many years before. And knowing that this is not just something that is gonna is gonna elevate our way of life, but it's also an investment back into our city. There's a report back in 2022, the AEP six report where it was shown that most of the basically, it was an economic and social impact by for nonprofits on the arts and cultural organizations, all related to the arts.

They brought $1,700,000 in tax revenue just in that in a year alone to our city. So this is not just an ask to continue to work with us and beautify our spaces. Yes. And it's an it's a ask to continue to invest on the people that make this city a better place, who continue to make this city a better place to live, who continue to create cultural districts, who continue to create amazing opportunities where we can all thrive and feel proud of where we are. So, thank you so much, and we look forward to working with you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Hi, my name excuse me. Hi, my name is Sonya Gray Hun. I'm with the Congregation Organized for the Feded Engagement, better known as COPE, and also I'm part of Just SB. I'm here to speak about the E Street Corridor, and I want to thank everybody for just taking in to have this conversation. One of the things that we asked for, as you heard numerous times, is the $3,000,000 investment.

But one of the things I want you to kind of like close your eyes and just dream of what that might look like for our city when we talk about investing. You know, most of you guys know me, you also know that I'm a housing organizer. So one of the things, if we talk about investing into our city, we heard about the arts, we heard about what that would look like, But imagine what that would look like if we actually had housing, mixed income housing, where we had small businesses on the bottom and mixed income housing on the top. I know we talked about that numbers of times in this space. But also, I'm picturing what that would look like if we were able to actually create more green spaces using that in an art format, to be able to bring in that economic development for folks to come in that live in the city to develop those entities.

And so, one of the things that we want to really just push is what that looked like for our city to be able to have affordable housing within the city, within the E Street calendar not just there, but just starting there and reinvesting that $3,000,000 into the arts, into what that looked like for economic development, and just investing into our community and making sure that folks that's been here, that's been sowing into this city, that really want to see our city grow, especially in the arts, that we have a place to stay, and that we're encouraging other folks to come to our city to actually take roots and stuff. I'm a long term member. I've been here for thirty four years, you know? And I would love to stay here, but I also want to see the investment of people that say that they represent our city really show that in action other than words. So, I thank you for your time.

Thank you. Next speaker, please state your name. You have three minutes.

Hi, everyone. My name is David Friedman. I'm a creative. I'm an artist. I'm a weirdo. You guys have all dealt with me in different capacities, but I get shit done, and so do these people. And we're just asking for funding to continue to help you guys and help the city. And so I think that $3,000,000 will go very far in artists' hands, in the community's hands. I'm obviously a huge proponent of arts funding. I rent five spaces to art galleries in downtown, the Little Gallery of San Bernardino, and my newest one, Dream Death.

I know it's a weird name, but they pay rent. They're good tenants, and they're a small business here. Creative grounds, creatively collected, and all eyes on us. So we try to subsidize rent and include at least one space in each of our buildings for some sort of art organization. And those are people that are maybe not making money from art, but they're working a job, and they use that money to support their art ventures because it's important in downtown, and they believe that they're helping the community, which they are.

And they have events, it brings people to our businesses, and we pay sales tax just like other small businesses in downtown who receive the benefit of community and those people coming down. Also want to say, like, art doesn't just mean murals. It also means investing into spaces like Soul Alley. Soul Alley is now a space where creatives can gather and host events and bring people into downtown. It's an attractive and clean place and safe place where people can spend their money or just have a good time and enjoy time with their family in downtown.

And we need more spaces like that. And so the 3,000,000 isn't just murals, it's public art, it's public space, it's space that people can connect with and leave San Bernardino feeling like, I love San Bernardino and this is what inspired me to love it. And so please support the funding for the arts, and we're asking for $3,000,000 in the budget. Thank you.

Thank you.

There are no more speakers, and we've also received written comments, which have been distributed to the mayor and members of the city council for their review. And the comments can also be found on the website attached to the agenda packet.

Thank you. And then, I know there are some council comments. Councilor Sanchez, did you have a comment?

Michael Segura, you came up here and talked about making sure that the meetings are accessible. So, I've been working with the city clerk's office and other staff. And in the coming months, all commission meetings will be available via YouTube.

Thank you. Any other comments from other council members? Seeing none, we will now move Mr. City Attorney, do you have any further comments? Madam City Clerk? That's it? Yeah, council member Mayor Pro Tem Canas.

I don't know if you guys will still be here when we come back out, but I just want to say thank you for all the collective voices that came out today to express your passion for this city. I just want you to know your opinions, your thoughts, and your passion have not gone unheard. So, you guys for taking the time to join us today.

Thank you, Mayor Bill Tamm. Mr. City Manager, did you have a comment?

Yes. Mayor Tran and City Council members, I wanted to make you aware that there were questions from some of you during our one on one budget meetings, where I went over the budget before the study session tonight. You had questions. We have given all the we've tried to address all those questions that came out to you and give everyone a copy of those. So, they're in front of you today.

Thank you. Mr. City Attorney?

I forgot to mention, Councilmember Ortiz, I'd recommend that you recuse yourself for the closed session item. Do you want to announce that for the record, please?

I'll recuse myself.

Thank you. We will now move on to we'll go into closed session at this point. Thank you. It's 02:09. We are going to closed session.

And thank you to the public who came out to speak. We are back from closed session. It's 03:02 p. M. We are convening back into open session.

Mr. City Attorney, is there anything to report from closed session?

Mayor, thank you. There's only one item from closed session that the mayor and council took up. There is no reportable action from closed session. That concludes my report. Thank you.

Thank you. Moving on to discussion item item number one, fiscal year twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven budget workshop. Could we begin with staff's presentation?

Yes. Madam mayor and city council members, we're here for the proposed operating CIP budget workshop. This meeting is we plan to give you an overview of economic trends, the proposed revenue and expenditures for twenty twenty six-twenty twenty seven, the fund balance and where the fund balance has come from and where it's going, capital improvement program, and then the budget calendar. We're also prepared that if you decided that you wanted to continue to a second study session. Depending upon how the study session goes, then we will set up a follow-up meeting with you before the budget comes forward.

But I want to just hit so I went through that. Go to next. So I want to hit just overall, first of all, I appreciate all of you taking the time tonight or to this afternoon to be here for the budget study session. Our plan is to show you what we're what we've done to propose the city manager's proposed budget, which is in front of you. I also want to let you know that in going through the budget this year, we made some tough choices.

We're going to go through those tough choices. But we also have room that if you want to make changes, we're here to listen to those changes and then bring back those changes at any point if you want to do it. We also would like to have a dialogue so we understand and make sure that we're meeting the priorities of the City Council. So going forward to the total proposed budget funds, our revenues are being projected this year, twenty twenty six-twenty seven at $3,000,000 We're at expenditures of $333,000,000 And this is for the entire budget, 15,200,000 in deferrals on CIP. We'll get into that further.

And there's a reason for that, and we can explain that. It has to do with capacity, staff capacity and management capacity as well as fiscal capacity. As we move forward, the balanced budget achieved through the general fund surplus, which is essentially a balanced budget, it says $4,000 but it's essentially a balanced budget as being proposed today. We also have other funds which are about $56,000 above as far as the amount of revenues above expenditures. I want to bring a highlight.

So we've had budget challenges. One of the issues that has put pressure on the budget is over the last three years, the workforce has grown from about 700 positions to about nine fifty eight positions. We've also had to try to meet market realities as far as our salaries. In doing both of those, what's happened is we've had a lot of vacancies in the past. That's what's provided some of the budget savings in the past and has grown the reserve.

But as you meet market for salaries and as we have grown positions to meet the demands of the community, what's happened is that vacancy savings has shrunk. And when that vacancy savings shrunk, that has put more pressure on the budget. It's just a natural phenomenon that happens and I just want to bring that and make you aware of that as a city council. We had a general fund gap initially, but we closed that through salary savings, department contributions and really looking at our internal service funds and where we could create savings in our internal service funds. We're willing to go through that in detail at any point.

And we also reduced reliance on onetime resources. Moving forward, we sort of have a chart here on the historical full time equivalent accounts, which in 2023 was around 600 fiscal year 2021 was around 600 employees. And as you've seen, it sort of steadily grew in about 2025, it reached right around 900. It's now a sort of at a steady over the next two fiscal years, we've remained at a steady pace. With that steady pace as far as keeping those positions about the same in the organization will help us catch up in revenues hopefully as revenues hopefully in the future start to grow.

With that, I want to turn it over to Zweva, who is the budget manager. Some of you know her, some of you don't. She has been in the city for a long time. I have a lot of confidence in her and her team. And she has done an excellent job. And I want to express my gratitude to her and the team. They have done an excellent job in putting this budget together and working with the city manager staff in doing this.

Thank you, Mr. City Manager, honorable mayor, and members of the council. My name is ZUEVA RUIZ. So, we'll go through some of the economic trends. As you all know, we like to provide some context of what the economic landscape looks like as we're preparing the budget.

So, the fiscal year 'twenty seven budget was developed with some of the shifting external environments in view. So, specifically, one of the national pressures right now is tariffs. And so, that there's some uncertainty that's beginning to cool down some of that consumer spending. The way that this specifically impacts San Bernardino is we're reliant on sales tax, and that's based on consumer spending. Inland Empire employment as unemployment rates as well stand at 5.4% as of January 2026 and that is higher than the national average as well.

So, that impacts consumer spending and patterns within the city. California structural budget deficit at this time, I the California state budget is proposed to be relatively balanced. There is some concern that there is a structural deficit in there. So, in the future years, we just need to keep that in mind as we're going through future budget cycles to anticipate some of those state funding level changes. And right at the time that we were developing this, the Fed interest rate was held at 3.5 to 3.75 for a second consecutive time.

We the Fed did hold a meeting today, and they are holding those rates steady for a third consecutive time, which just really indicates that inflation we're still fighting inflation. And hopefully, the next time we can see some of those rates drop. As we go into the proposed revenues so, bottom line proposed revenues for 'twenty seven is $233,800,000 in general fund. This is a 2.7% increase over the prior fiscal year adopted budget. A few highlights for that is fines and forfeitures specifically are projected to increase from the adopted budget from the previous year.

This really is activity seen in this current year specific to code enforcement and parking enforcement. Those departments are definitely seeing those increase in revenues. Intergovernmental is also increasing and this is reflective of new contracts that we're acquiring with other organizations. And sales tax numbers, those are staying relatively flat, again, reflective of the consumer spending behavior that we discussed in the economic indicators. This is just a visual representation to show really the revenue sources that the city is really reliant on. So, as you can see, the largest portion of that, which is 44%, is both sales tax and measure S,

which again

is influenced by consumer spending. We also have the general fund bottom line expenditures. So, this is a we have it at $249,000,000 which is a 7% increase above what the fiscal year 'twenty six adopted budget was. This is also a visual representation of the general fund proposed budget by department. We just see which the departments, how it segments out to the bottom line proposed February for expenditures.

We also have other funds factored into the budget. And so, at this time, the revenues for fiscal year twenty seven stand at 884,400,000 and expenditures stand at 84,300,000, which gives us a small surplus of $56,000,000 Some of the large changes in that is the liability fund was decreased by 4,500,000. Our IT fund was decreased by 2,000,000. And the small surplus that you're seeing there is really just reflective of how other funds are operating within their projected revenues. In previous budget cycles, there was fund balance being used within those other funds.

So, then, we would like to go into fund balance. And so, this really we also have a visual following this that really tells the story of the bottom line fund balance. But as you can see, the spendable fund balance over the years in fiscal year 'twenty three was $132,000,000 In 'twenty four, it grew to $162,000,000 Then, as we go into fiscal year 'twenty five and 'twenty six, there's a decrease in the net fund balance, and that's really reflective of the use of reserves. That's intentional, and those reserves are set aside. And so, those are being deployed with purpose.

And the upcoming proposed budget just remains steady, so that is also reflective of just keeping the steady funding levels and not dipping into fund balance.

And if I could interject here

so the I'll let you go to the next

step, and then I'll interject. No, the next slide. So if I can interject what we've done as a strategy for this year is I think you have a healthy fund balance, you have a healthy reserve. The reserve and the fund balance is over $100,000,000 The issue and the concern I've had when I came in was while you have a healthy reserve and a healthy fund balance, it had dropped steadily from about $160,000,000 to about 113,000,000 So what we wanted to do was just stabilize it and keep it constant going forward. And as long as we did that, that you could even be able to dip into it.

But if there was anything that occurred or a certain capital project you want, we would have that capacity within the fund balance to do it. So our concern with the fiscal is, one, our operations and our revenues are fairly are very much consistent right now. So the concern is as expenditures grow, our revenues are not growing at the same pace. So that was the one concern we had going into the future. The second concern was we just didn't want to continue to see the steady drop that we had seen in the fund balance, the fund balance reserves, which was fine where you have it today, but if we kept doing it at that pace in two or three years, we could see some concerns and you might be having concerns at that point.

So that's why our budget this year is to try to maintain a consistent fund balance and keep that financials healthy as it has been in San Bernardino and keep it healthy moving forward. With that, we have challenges, as we said before. Our challenges are some of our revenues and trying to look for other revenue sources as we move forward.

And with that, I'll hand it over to our CIP team to go over the capital improvement program.

Good afternoon. I'm the principal civil engineer for the city's public works department. I'll be taking you through the city's capital improvement program update. This section of the CIP update will be divided into three sections. The first portion will be the capital improvement program project delivery. I will touch on project delivery for CIP projects. Then we will go into the CIP budget summary. And then we will end on the CIP projects update to give you more of an overall snapshot. Starting off, we will briefly touch on CIP project delivery. As many of you may already well know, there is essentially three main phases.

We are talking about planning, design and construction. If we go into the next slide, we can further subdivide it into the following categories. Preliminary engineering, design bid and award, design, construction bid and award as well as construction. On the average, a typical CIP project will take around one to four years depending on the level of complexity you have involved in the project. Next up, will go into the CIP budget summary.

Here we are showing we have CIP projects by phase. We currently have over 130 projects with approximately half of the projects in planning. Majority of the rest will be divided either within construction or design. Moving on to project categories, we have roughly equal amounts of streets, buildings, parks projects around 30 each or so. The remaining projects will be falling into both the traffic and the storm drain categories at about 133 in total at the moment.

Now we are looking at CIP project funding by category. We can highlight that streets currently has the largest funding allocation of the 148,000,000 shown here. That is followed up by buildings, storm drains, parks with the remaining portion of the funding allocated to traffic categories for projects. On to the CIP project deferrals, as Eric indicated, this was basically a list of projects that we represented to the CIP's office and the budget team. In large part of a combination of things.

As you mentioned, there is a limited number of capacity that the CIP team has to deliver projects every year. And that was a large part of it. Furthermore, we look at the project phase. For example, projects that were currently under construction weren't going to be good candidates since you basically have existing contracts for those type of projects. As you go through each of the various categories and details project by project, you essentially end up with 11 projects that are currently being proposed to be postponed and additional 12 projects that are proposed to continue with a combination of either reduced and or replacement funding.

Moving on now to the CIP project updates. Listed here are some of the current fiscal year's completed project highlights. We have here for example the California Theater renovation, the Mount Vernon Bridge replacement and the Gutierrez Park improvements. So, just on this list alone, this represents over the course of the years of delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment in the city over the past few years. These projects in particular were ones that we're happy to wrap up this fiscal year so far.

Now looking forward to the end of the fiscal year, otherwise through the June, we have projects that we are currently anticipating to be completion. Some of them being the Nicholson Park improvement project, the Cross Street Bridge project, as well as the others you see listed here today. I'd like to also note that as of yesterday afternoon when I verified and checked some of the numbers, the public works department has delivered over 33,000,000 of capital improvement projects so far this fiscal year. Moving on into the next fiscal year, we have a subset of projects here that are essentially going to be what's going to be the major ongoing projects. You have major projects including 2nd Lake Park revitalization, the Spiker Park ball fields, the whole campus and the plaza park improvements.

These are all major projects that the department is essentially going to continue to work on through the end of this fiscal year on into the next. So, you will be seeing a lot of updates and progress as the years goes on moving into the next fiscal year on these as well as several others. So, this is a summary of essentially the latest information on major projects currently be coordinated with other agencies and organizations. Although the public works department does take place in these projects, they are primarily led by one of the other groups you see listed here. So, we do attend meetings and provide coordination efforts.

But generally speaking, you'll see a list of the other organizations that generally take the lead on a lot of these larger projects as well. Approximately a year ago, we made an interactive map that demonstrated the ongoing CIP street improvement projects. At that time, we displayed what was known as the 14th Street improvements projects. This map will soon be updated and it will include the major interest to the city project which has the six locations that were discussed last year and is out to bid right now. If not already, very soon this map will be updated with the new locations.

And in addition to the street projects map located on the same page, I just point out, it's linked on the bottom of the slide for those who have access to it, a digital copy. I am also happy to announce that parks and building projects are actually available as of today. This is something that along with the street improvement map will be updated over the coming years to include the latest CIP project information at a high level so you can get a snapshot of where some of these projects are without having to reach out to anyone in particular. You can get an idea based off these regular updates on what the phase is and a brief description of what the project includes. At this point, I will hand it back over to Zuiva.

Last item, Go ahead, then. As our city manager referenced, we are open to holding another session. At this time, the next scheduled budget hearing is 06/17/2026.

So and I Mayor Tran, City Council, I just want to end by saying I want to thank Zuiva one more time and her budget team, as well as Eddie. I've been working with him in the capital improvement side. Now I've been able to see what his approach is and how they have done it and how they've been organizing over the last three months. I've worked on 26 budgets as a city manager and I'm very impressed with both of them and their staff and what they've brought forward to you. So I think we have I also want to thank all the department directors and their staff that work on the budgets.

What we've tried to do is bring a budget that preserves the services that you want and at the quality you want and try to do cuts and do containment of costs in areas to keep those services at the highest level we can without the public seeing some of the impacts of some of the cuts that we have to have. And so that's what they've all come forward and they've all taken a positive approach in doing it. So I want to thank them for bringing this budget to you in a way that we try to maintain services at the quality that you deserve and want for the community.

Thank you. Thank you, staff, presentation. I will now move on to council comments. Council, any comments from you? Questions? Council Member Mubarra?

Yes, I just want to give thanks to our staff. This was the first time I met with Zuiva and, she's very knowledgeable. Thank you, mister Levitt, for recognizing a good employee that knows what they're doing and bringing them up to the forefront for us to get to meet. And, a lot of the questions I had, she was able to answer during our one on one meeting. So, thank you, Zuiva. Good job. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments? Council Member, Ortiz.

Thank you, Mayor. So, community came today looking for a specific allocation towards the arts and what that means for the East Street Corridor. One thing I do appreciate about this budget is that sustainability model of making sure that we're not overspending because I really don't like when I understand the discretion of the council, but I think sometimes that ability to cut in and out of departments really, because I remember watching John Valdivia do this all last, every time that he was a mayor come in and be like, I want this and I want that. And, it was such an undercutting to the true fiscal management of the city. And so, when I hear from the community is that they have this need and this desire for this quarter.

And so I'm wondering, is that something that you can sit with the community, you and your office and community and economic development, and look at what that really looks like, and look what a budget really looks like. I know it's a $3 ask, but really what does, is that facilitated within an initial start with us working in conjunction with the state and all the different type of grant funding. Is that something that we can do, that you have the capacity to do to look how we can incorporate that? Because really I think what the issue is, is we don't have a general plan in place. And so when people are still asking for this idea and this vision of what San Bernardino looks like aesthetically, economically, we still haven't completed that portion.

That solidifies what the future of the city is. So is that is that something we And can look and look at how the capabilities of any funding, if we have available, can be utilized?

I can work with economic development. Can also work with the budget staff and meet with some of the core people there and then bring back options to the City Council at the next budget session, whether it be the final budget or even maybe a meeting before the final budget of options and what those options, I don't know what they would be at this point or how limited they'd be, but we can maybe see if there's some options.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem? No, not yet. Councilor Martis, do you

have more questions?

I do. I just have a couple. So, I did want to talk about the vehicle, leases that we have in our city. And so I know Lynn that you had been working, I think in our last budget, I think mid year or something we had approved or I think Bill was maybe here, one of the two. Where are we with the enterprise lease? Where are we with the expenditures cars? I know that there were grants that were specifically allocated for police vehicles, and I want to say maybe a couple months ago that money was unused. And then I'm just trying to figure out what the real budget is.

Thank you, Councilman. One of the things that we did is that we have frozen the acquisition of any new vehicles under the lease. And we continue to look at what the needs are of the city. I would defer to the chief as far as his vehicle fleet, as far as the black and whites go and everything. But we have been looking at how we can fine tune that lease and make sure that we're getting the right value for the city.

Were black and whites under the lease with Enterprise?

I believe that they were initially, but I believe now the chief is actually managing his fleet separately from us.

Are we?

Yes.

How are we? So I need an answer.

He actually you've approved procurements of vehicles from Fairview Ford on a regular basis. And so that's he has brought those to you separately.

So, that's a $2,000,000 expenditure for cars that we allocated last time?

Yeah, that would be part of that. I think we also have a regular expenditure for vehicles every year for police vehicles, because you turn over police vehicles every year.

Yes, that's correct.

I see a lady standing up, but don't

Hi, good afternoon. I'm Emily Bernal. I'm with the PD's finance unit. And so, I do have some additional information with regards to the PD's vehicle fleet. And yes, you are correct.

We were allocated a one time appropriation of $2,000,000,000 to go towards our fleet. And I am happy to report that we have encumbered those funds towards the purchase of vehicles, in addition to what was already regularly budgeted in our account. There were several contracts that were bought before council for approval, and one of them happened to be for the purchase of vehicles with Fairview Ford. Some of those funds are also going to be used to upfit those vehicles to make sure that they are service ready, and to purchase and install any of the components. So, as of right now, we have actually spent cut checks issued, nearly $500,000 from that allocation, and we have encumbered, or will be encumbering, 2,250,000 before the end of this year.

So, that will essentially use up all of the funds that were allocated specifically for the fleet.

And is that going to put us at a number I think one of my residents brought up the point that at some point someone made the comment about having our officers have to hitchhike to work, which I thought was interesting with a $1,151,000 budget. So, does that suffice the amount of need versus officers per shift where everybody will have a proper vehicle? And then, also, this just hit me, during COVID there was a specific allocation at some point about some type of heat heat up, kill it kind of is that even a thing anymore? Or are we Yeah. Able to move past

So, during the COVID era, if you will, we did receive some federal funding that was to go towards the purchase fleet vehicles that would it had some sort of specialized interior that was supposed to fight off germs and stuff like that. And so, that was one time. We did procure vehicles with that. I think they're still in our fleet or about to be retired, but that was just during that time. Going back to whether there's sufficient vehicles, ideally, we should have 100 black and whites in our fleet to be able to make sure that everybody has a vehicle.

And the reason we say 100 is because we always anticipate 25% of them are going to be undergoing some sort of maintenance and service. Okay, so that would allow for 75 in service vehicles ready to go. So, ideally, we always want to have 100. Right now, we do have 100. The additional vehicles that we're going to be getting will be replacing some of those aging vehicles. But we'll still be able to maintain that number and continue to do that.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

You're welcome.

Thank you. Mayor Potem?

Thank you. I do sincerely appreciate the presentation and your hard efforts, Zuiva. And it was a pleasure meeting with you as well. So, thank you for that. In the effort of this budget, there was mention of the organizational assessment. I wanted to get an update. When do we anticipate we're actually going to get an organizational assessment? In my opinion, would have been nice for that to be done prior to our budgeting. I would like to see if it's going to be coming soon after.

Yeah. So, before the end of the fiscal year you're talking about from the retreat, right? Or from the retreat, yeah.

I think, actually, I think council member Charette's been asking for this for quite some time, I think, since you got here in August.

So from the retreat, as far as the organizational strategies of the council and what those priorities would be, we're trying to get it in before the end of the fiscal year. So before June? Yeah, before the June.

Okay. So that would come back to us before June 17. How would that be presented to us? Is there a plan for that?

Yeah, it's going to be the plan would be that it would be a plan, and then we would try to show priorities that would meet the different objectives that the council's laid out.

Okay. And just to remind you, that's going to be the comprehensive?

No, a comprehensive strategy is going to have to be a much longer term thing. That's from the retreat, which would be more a the short term strategies for that.

So when we say longer, how long are we talking about? And I'm speaking directly about just the comprehensive organizational assessment of our of City Hall.

Oh, well, would be a different thing. And so that I've been doing that. I've actually never presented that to a council as far as an organizational assessment. I do that as I'm going through the different departments and working with them on different things. I can bring that to the council and sort of give you I can bring that at night, but I would not say that that would be a budget specific type item.

But for instance, I'm looking at different ways that we can be, in my opinion, that we can be less bureaucratic and more community friendly, let's say, building and development and economic development. In fact, we were working on that yesterday with them. So it's not necessarily people issues. It's how do you actually use those resources in a way to be more effective. Or even in our some of our internal departments, how do we make things more user friendly for the other departments and how the internal departments work.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but I do see that aligns with budget expectations because it does align with how we need to actually finance making that organizational assessment that you conduct actually happen. So that's why it's imperative to me, as you go through our organization department by department, and assess the true, genuine needs, to make sure that our organization is in fact efficient, And there may be a need for us to dedicate and allocate resources to ensure that is happening. And we can't do that without the assessment by you. So that's why I do think it's necessary, and it does need to be aligned with our budget. Okay.

Well, I have given you how I would view it and how I've done it in the past. A lot of organizations, this obviously is a fairly large organization that you've built up over time. It's very tough to reorganize that organization in a fairly quick and I mean quick meaning less than a year. What I was looking at was how to try to make outcomes more effective. I would say that would I wouldn't necessarily connect that with the budget necessarily.

Okay. I guess I disagree, but we can maybe dwell into that a little bit later. Next, regarding the fund balance. You had mentioned, you kind of touched on that, we've approximately decreased it over the year by about $50,000,000 or so from the Over the one hundred and sixty three two million years. Three years, okay. Just from my own knowledge, how do we build that back up?

My opinion is you're at a healthy reserve even at the level you're at. So I'm thinking so my strategy and the strategy within the our budget strategy is not to build it back up, but just to hold it steady. You don't have to necessarily build it back up. It's how you could use it effectively for key capital projects you want to do or if there's some staffing issues, or if there's a short term revenue loss, how to use it to stabilize the organization moving forward.

Got it. Okay. There was an item in regards to our general plan. It was for 600,000 for this projected budget. I just want to know that remaining balance, does that include the downtown specific plan?

Believe it does. That was the grant, right? So that's the grant for the general plan update. That was the grant funds for the general plan update, which I'm not sure if that

And it's been so many years, unfortunately, but into my recollection, I do believe there is two, Because we received the allocation from assemblyman, Ramos. But then I believe there is additional funds that were provided to us for our downtown specific plan, if I recollect correctly.

Right. I'm not sure if this included the downtown specific plan. We can have Gabe. Madam Mayor, Councilman, can I ask? Yes, it does.

It does. Perfect. Thank you for answering that.

And so that is separated, just so you're aware, that's just separated because it's a specific type of funding source, And so it was just taken out, and that was just the grant funding for the two items.

Got it. And that's perfect. I just want to make sure that we haven't forgotten about the downtown specific plan because we did receive allocations specifically Yes, for

and both are moving forward, and we're pushing I'm pushing hard to get them in front of the council, hopefully, by the fall hopefully, even sooner.

I appreciate that. Thank you. You mentioned it, and I'm going to touch on this. And this isn't to point fingers. I looked at Fontana, because now they're the up and coming next city. I looked at what their operating revenues are, and compared to the city of San Bernardino. Their projected is over 400,000,000. And I have to say, our city's financial picture is an indication of our city's health. And, right now, unfortunately, the city of San Bernardino, it is revenue poor. And, you touched on it.

We still, to date, haven't really found any significant ways to increase our city coffers. And, I don't know that anything is really on the horizon, not that I know of. I've said it before, I've set here now for this is my second budget cycle. And, it's a continual conversation of cuts of us, you know, our operating revenues not meeting our expenditures. And, it is a little bit frustrating. I wear two hats. I'm not just an elected official sitting here representing the city. I'm also a constituent. I'm also a person here living in the city, wanting a better quality of life for my kids, and I hear it every single day from my constituents. I get the text messages.

I get the emails about what their wants are, what their desires are, and the answer, unfortunately, always is, even for the individuals that came here tonight, we can't afford it. We don't have the money. It's just this constant here in the city of San Bernardino, but we cannot do. So, I've said it last budget cycle in June, I know you weren't here, but when do we have the conversations about what we can do, the actual real strategy, what we are going to implement to truly impact our revenue, so that we do not continually come to this position of having to do budget cuts.

So we are and we've talked to some other groups some of our actually even unions, looking at ways of revenue generation, I will say in my experience, the two biggest, especially in California, every state is different, but in California, the two biggest revenues that you have typically are property tax and sales tax. And then you have other revenues that then supplement. So we are looking at those supplemental revenues, but when you don't have one of those major revenues, that does create some limits on what you can do. But we are looking at other ways of doing that. But each of those ways of giving revenues, because we're a government, because we're a regulatory agency, sometimes that also a revenue for us is also a fee for others.

So you are always trying to balance those things. But we are looking at some different types of revenues. The two biggest are property tax and sales tax, and obviously our property tax is limited. We are Limited to zero.

Get the property tax. And that's a broader discussion that unfortunately we won't be able to remedy today or probably not even this year. So I do understand that, but it's still the question still remains is, how do we increase our revenue? What I would like to propose, I don't know if this council would be amenable to it, we have had our goal setting and strategy session that was done, I believe, in January. I think we all said it then, and our colleagues that have been sitting here on the dais have said it repeatedly.

They've gone through those sessions before. It kind of ends up being just stacked on a shelf. We don't really see the implementation behind it. I said it then, and I want to echo it. It can't just be a one and done thing where we meet in some hotel convention room and then we don't talk anymore about it. We do need some actual transparency. I asked at that time that what we set as our priorities are actually on our city website. We have actual dashboards. We have indicators letting our community know what we are working towards and the progress that we're making towards working towards those goals. I would like to come back collectively as a council.

I don't think we need to do it in a hotel. I think we could do it right here at the dais, where we come back and we actually really hash out those goals that we talked about in January. To me, they were vague. We say we wanna we wanna focus on economic development. Well, what does that really mean? You know, we have a general plan that's not done, we have a downtown specific plan that's not done. But what are the true investments that we're gonna really make in this city to help us actually get a return on those investments? We talk about a 100, I'm sorry, 50 something million or I think it was a 148,000,000 proposed in capital improvement projects, but we don't know what return that we're gonna get on those investments. They're spread. It doesn't really seem like it's truly aligned with priorities.

Sometimes it seems politically motivated. We have dis it's it's a little bit disjointed in my opinion. And I think that it warrants us coming together again collectively as a council so that we can really have a firm, formalized path forward, and really have something that the community, all business stakeholders, everyone knows, this is what we're working towards.

And that was part of why I was talking about coming back in June, hopefully by the June, to have that as one of the agenda items.

So in June, when you come back, would it be agendized that we will be having an intentional discussion on economic development and revenue generation? How will that be?

I was talking about what you were talking about from the retreat, more of the broader, trying to get to specific goals, not can't really

speak specifically.

So, but within that, we could have that Yeah. That roundtable discussion?

That would

be great. Okay. So, and that will be in June?

That's my goal, is to have it by the June, yes.

Okay. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. And I look forward to it being agendized in June. My next thing, and I have to give credit to my colleagues that were here before I got here. I remember sitting in that audience, and I always point to that because, again, I've been engaged in listening to the ups and downs of our city's financial situations. One of the things that I believe was unanimously voted on is a forensic audit for our city. And I don't know that to date that has been done.

Yeah, that is correct. And one of the things we want to bring back is to get a better understanding of what the council means by a forensic audit. We've done audit. We've done obviously, it's different per people here now. A forensic audit usually is when you're investigating for something that you think is wrong in some situation. So I want to I think the finance director and I are trying to understand better what the council is actually looking to get out of this forensic audit. And we need to bring an item back just to make sure, I don't believe that there's an active contract or anything of that type on that.

Okay. And again, it's up to this current council, but I would like to have a forensic audit. And I think it would be beneficial to our new finance director coming in. He's our finance director. And let's just be real.

Our previous finance director that was our permanent finance director stood at that podium literally signaling alarms. Whether it was validity to the claims or not, I'm not here to support or refute anything that was said, but the reality is that created a lot of mistrust in our city government. And I think it warrants the need for us to actually do an audit. In addition to that, we do have to just be real. Again, it's time after time, year after year, that we are discussing that we need to close a gap, that there's deficits, that our revenues are not meeting our expenditures.

That's real. It's black and white. And again, we have not had the substantive discussion or taking any steps to remedy that. This is my second budget workshop, and yet again, we're talking about we need to close a 40 plus million dollar gap. That's concerning to me. And I need to make sure that going forward, as I sit here on the stice, this isn't going to be the conversation that we have every year.

As local government, you face these challenges. I meant to have this here, but didn't put it here. Almost every city across the state is having these discussions this year. So we're not unique in

that way.

And I completely understand. There's been a lot of shifts in federal priorities that impact CBG funding, our city has been very reliant on. Completely get that. But again, this conversation isn't new. It's not just for the 2627 fiscal year that we're talking about cuts. So, again, we do have to take in consideration what are we going to do? What plan? What are we going to actually implement to help protect our city's financial standing. And that's just what I have not seen. I need to know what we are going to do as a city, what are we going to do differently. And I do think it starts with that forensic audit. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor Mosherrette?

I didn't ask to be, but I will say

You marked

I did that accidentally, That was But I'll take advantage of it.

Okay.

Thank And I will just simply say what she said. My colleague Kim, she she articulated it all perfectly as far as I'm concerned. And I have much of the same concerns and thoughts that she did, so I'm not gonna take the time to reiterate them. But what she said, needs to be taken to heart and understood, and we need to be, looking at at the the the concerns that she has. I think we all do.

I've I've talked about reopening the discussion on property taxes. I've talked about a lot of different things. And I understand, we can't just up the price on our product And we can't just go out and get more sales tax. So we've got to figure out, we've got to make sure that we are effective, that we are efficient and that we have all right people in the right places and that we're lean and mean and getting the job done. And I don't wanna be the one that says, everyone else is talking about the same issues and so we're okay because everyone everyone else has experienced the same thing.

I wanna stand out as as the leader, as somebody that's bringing this city back from what it's been, and and we have. We've constantly gone down, down, down. And this isn't your fault. I'm I'm looking at you, Harry, but you happen to be the guy in the chair. And so we've just gotta be looking at all all operations and how we can be effective, very efficient, and get bang for our buck. So I don't think I'm saying much more than what miss Kanas said.

Thank you. Council member Figueroa.

Yeah. Sure. Well, first and foremost, thank you, Mr. City Manager, to all the staff, I'm sorry, the finance department, all departments, right, for putting this budget together. But I also want to say that, yes, I do agree with what Councilmember Knoss and Charette have said as well and reemphasize that also, that I tend to align with what Council Member Kanaz is saying also, but so I won't go into details about that.

But yes, we do have to start getting creative as far as revenues, right? Because we can only tap into so much of what exists. We have to start getting creative, right? As people start moving away from brick and mortar type of shopping, sales tax and more online digital, I don't know if that's an avenue to explore. Perhaps renegotiating property taxes, especially with new developments.

I don't know if we're tied into what already exists, but perhaps renegotiating with new developments, specifically with the downtown, right? There's lots of opportunities there to potentially renegotiate for property taxes there as well. I want to go to Slide 28, just briefly, with the there's about $15,000,000 approximately in general fund project deferrals. There's 11 projects identified for to be postponed, and 12 projects for reduction in funding. Is there and I was trying to quickly go through here to find out which projects exactly are being proposed for postponement.

Quickly, can point you to the pages, and then I'll defer to Eddie to go through it. So this would be the projects are on page in your budget book three thirty six, three thirty seven, three thirty eight,

two thirty six.

Sorry. Two thirty six, two thirty seven, two thirty eight, two thirty nine. So the last four pages, and they go across. So it's essentially two, and it's at the bottom under traffic is where it starts. And then if you go to funding source, where it says Major S, that's what's being deferred out but if you look at replaced with another fund if it's being replaced then it's still in the budget it's just not being funded from the same source And that was going to be my question as well. And thank you for pointing out the thank you mayor for pointing that the page out. I appreciate that.

I was looking for it and I couldn't find it. So I appreciate that. And that was part of my next question as well is that it's being deferred from general fund, the funding source is coming being deferred from general fund, but I wanted to find out is it going to be funded from a separate source, So

that's Some are. Some are not. And those projects probably, because they're mostly planning design projects that are in that group, they may have been deferred anyway. So we're just reflecting that because from a staffing capacity, a project management capacity, and I'll let Eddie continue if he wants, but project status or management capacity, we only have so much resources to be managing those projects anyway, and we have about 100 just under $150,000,000 capital fund. So these are the projects that they saw that could be deferred that would help us as far as the budget issue, but also help us as far as our management and our project management capacity issue.

And then finally, and I know this one's much more difficult, not much more, it's complex, right? It's difficult to give a timeline on the completion of projects based on the complexities of each project, Some projects are going to take a little bit longer to go from planning to design to construction, right? But is there anything we can do to help expedite or help support some of these projects going from planning to design to construction. And again, I know it's difficult to kind of give a timeline based on the complexities of some of these projects, but is there anything else that can be done to help support some of these things from just sitting in the design stage for years, so to speak, or months or years? It just simply funding that's holding up a project to go from design to construction?

Or is there something else that we're not aware of? I just want to make sure that I think it was there was a graph on there that 50%, 60% of them are currently in just like in the design stage or something like that. What can we do? Is there anything outside of funding that's keeping it from moving on to construction? Or is it just simply funding?

Yeah. So, there's going to be a variation depending on, as you alluded to, what phase the project is in. So, if we talk about funding in particular, the majority of projects that are going to require more funding are usually because they're trying to move from design into construction. Right? You've put some sort of seed money. The staff, either through consultants have designed a set of plans, go through approvals, etcetera. And now when you move to construction, usually what you end up as far as the desired outcome has at times been not quite what you started with. Right? So, for example, you might only spend a few 100,000 in design and the construction costs 10,000,000 There's a pretty big gap there you're trying to overcome. In some cases, we're able to be creative.

For example, in the Spiker Pog ball fields, in that particular example, the final design exceeded $10,000,000 We only had about three. We're designed to phase it out. Internally, we're making certain decisions to at least use the funding resources we do have, the staffing we do have, to deliver a quality outcome with the limited resources we have available. For projects that are in planning, those are things we have a little more flexibility on. For example, this year we had a call for projects and what we did is in order to alleviate the staff demand, we brought in consultants for about four to six weeks and said, hey, here's all the new projects the departments need that were provided to public works.

We issued task orders and they did a planning and feasibility analysis for new projects. That was for a set period of time. For items such as planning, consultants can make sense for very specific deliverables. As you move into design, you move into budget issues depending on the complexity of the project. But overall, you have more flexibility once you move into design because that's where you get the opportunity, for example, to apply for grants.

Usually you need some sort of preliminary design or in some cases a more elaborate design completed to apply for grant funding and be successful. That's where you can have more flexibility there. In regards to staffing, as I alluded to during engineers week when I was up here, were receiving the proclamation from the mayor. Last year was the highest in recent history that I could see where we had the $44,000,000 of projects delivered. This year we're on track to exceed $30,000,000 and probably get close to 40.

With that in mind, that's not just engineering at work. There's a lot of administrative staff and staff within other departments where even when you bring in help, just bringing additional engineers isn't really the long term solution. You're going to see bottlenecks at the administrative level because you still have to manage contracts, cut checks to contractors, review things with the legal team, etcetera, etcetera. So, in reality, it's more than just engineering and public works. It's really a citywide thing that you have to look at and try to see how you can be more efficient and effective with the money we do have.

Thank you for that. No more

questions, Mary.

Thank you.

Thank you, staff. And thank you, Councilman Figueroa, for bringing up the CIP. Because I think staff is providing the council recommendation on projects to defer based on capacity. But if council look at that list from page two thirty six to two thirty eight, and if some of these projects that you feel that it's very important to continue and I think that's what staff needs to hear from councils, you know what? We don't want to delay City Hall Rehabilitation Project, which is 248,000.

And that's what staff needs to hear. So if that is something that you believe needs to continue, not to be delayed, That's the feedback that staff needs to hear. Then staff can restructure on how the priorities are, right? So like for instance, I know Tom Miner Park Park improvement has been a huge issue in the 5th Ward. So that's $750,000 And again, it's just for council to look at that and see, you know what, the $50,000,000 delay, maybe if we look at certain ones that is not so much in cost, but want to keep moving, that's just for staff to understand where council stands.

And if council's okay with delaying for this fiscal budget cycle to because of capacity and so forth, and next year revisit that, that's just something that, you know, council provides staff and go from there and adjust. So but thank you, Counselor Figueroa. That was very important for the body to understand and for the staff to hear what feedback can we give to the staff to prioritize. I have Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you, Mayor. And you're right. I think, you know, I listened to Mayor Pro Tem's questions, and I have to tell you I'm not satisfied with the answers. Because everything that I know about government is that we should be aligning, our budget should be aligning with the goals. And so, to say that what the desires and the pillars of progress mean for the council isn't necessarily budget worthy, that's how we base it.

I mean, that's why that's the discretion of the council is to refocus based on assigned priorities. And we paid someone $15,000 for six hours in dry chicken. And I always have an issue with that, because we've done that for years and years and years. And then realign and not have an answer in six months. And I find that really not okay. Because as the mayor of Probetone says, we did it based off what? I mean, hanging out isn't the priority. One day isn't, because when we come down six months later, have nothing to show for it. We have no additional revenue expenditures. I really don't like the answer about the forensic audit needing to be brought back to us for clarification.

Go watch the video. It's a public record, what the council requested and why they requested it. And there should be minutes. And this is the other issue of when a city cannot produce minutes and audits of their past meetings. So you guys should already know the date.

You and I talked about this when we talked about the budget last week. You should already have a date, a time, and a stamp of when this previous council, it's been almost two years now, requested a forensic audit. Why we would wait until today, to me only speaks to more potential malfeasance, and why you would need a definition of what forensic audit means. When we already know what it means. And so again, here's the underlying problems that I have, especially when we had a previous mayor walk out of the city with $10,000 on a VIP private party that he was trying to host, and no one did anything about it.

So, if we had to come back and re explain the necessity for a deep dive into the finances in this city, it kind of speaks for itself Eric. I would like you to go back and tell us the day, and tell us the time and the meeting, and tell us what the council said, and then come back and say, is this still in alignment? Rather than, I need you to redefine what was already told to the city two years ago that we still have not done. That's on me. And I know you weren't here, but neither were the 12 other people before you.

And that's always the issue, is this year to year continuum of recycling of information. And I think to what you're saying about budgets faring and everybody being in this position, and I want to go back to something that you had talked about, I know people had brought up Fullerton was an issue, is that that expedited lack of revenue, right, their measure has failed them, is what would be their measure, tax measure failed in their city. Well, that only expedites the loss of revenue and the potential for bankruptcy. And, I think, you know, Councilman Schrutt, all of us, in and out of open and closed session have continually brought to you the issue of us revisiting the property tax continuum. Because nobody can tell us how much fire costs in the city for the city to be supplied by the county, and nobody can tell us how much property tax we pay.

And, those two unknown quantities are probably one of the largest devastating economic factors that we face and have since the council decided in perpetuity to give away our values. But, we know values have gone up. So that's another issue that the council has been talking about between the new of us for a year and a half now. When we were looking at redeveloping the downtown, they were talking about EIFDs, and we were talking with Larry Kosmott, and what that potential economic impact. And they were talking almost billions of dollars.

I mean they just sold Victoria Gardens for like 3,000,000,000 something dollars. So the fact that we don't have that, for anybody to sit and say they can't figure out how to drive economics in our city, or economic development in our city, Fontana, Rialto, Redlands just sold their mall, Riverside. I mean everybody seems to be able to figure it out, but when you cross a border into San Bernardino, it's this vast unknowing of how to get anything done. Why don't we have specific plans on East Street? Why don't we have a specific plan on Highland, on 40th, on baseline, on Mount Vernon?

I mean, we wasted an entire year on being able to redevelop Mount Vernon right now for a 100 year anniversary of Route 66. You're gonna tell me we couldn't find an economic driver for to do redo Mount Vernon at the same time we almost killed the entire corridor with that delayed bridge project? That everybody still wants to celebrate? Would nobody want to talk about the economic impact? So, we can have great conversations, but we've got to be real and true to form.

Because I don't want to be someone up here for four years that has nothing to show for it. Other than a possible reduction in homeless people that circulate in and out of the streets every couple months. Or one or two murals, that we have to be grant funded to get. Like, you got it right here, the one stop permitting center, is in a delayed project for four hundred thousand dollars. One of the biggest complaints that people talk about when they come to the city of San Bernardino to develop, is that it is hard to get through, it is bottlenecked, it is inconsistent, and I may be doing the same project as the mayor, and we may have completely two different outcomes in two different pathways.

And so, why, which I've heard from this council and previous council, was one of our main priorities was streamlining development in our city. So, same thing with and then the thing is, this project was held off by Charles Montoya, because this council had made this and I believe it was Fred, if I'm incorrect, Fred, but I think you were, this was one of your big priorities, to come independently. They were going either do it in the, I don't know where we're at, the Building For Public Works, or they were looking downtown right when you walk into City Hall. They put that on hold, because then they were going put it into new city Hall when we got into city hall. Well, then they were going to go bond city hall for $330,000,000 and not tell anybody.

So, then one stop got stopped. And nobody has ever discussed that with the council. Nobody has ever come back and said, is that still not a priority? It just seems like, hey, we're not doing it, and we're not bringing it back to you. So, that to me is an issue. And, is 400,000, what are we losing by not having a one stop shop? Is it $400,000? Is it a million dollars? Large scale development? Is it small businesses?

So, and I refer to you as the city manager because this is a thing. I mean, is a real issue. But for the council, I would like for us to consider if it's between now and next meeting, to bring back discussion and funding on this one stop shop. Because I think it's a valuable, valuable entity that we have been dismissive of for a lot of years. Thank you. Thank

you. Mayor, Council Member Ibarrafal by Mayor Proton? Oh, Mr. Zuniganshu.

Yeah. So, have several responses, but I'm going to hit on the one stop shop. Because I have some very strong views on the one stop shop. And I actually just talked to a fairly a person that developed a lot in the community, and I told them my view on the one stop shop, and they actually said they agreed with me. So at least I have one person in the city of San Bernardino who agrees with me.

And my feel is that you don't want a one stop shop. What you want is effective and streamless permitting process And having a counter that's a one stop shop that you have permit to set at looks good, but doesn't necessarily get you efficiency in development. And I've been working towards trying to figure out how you have four components in development. You have fire, you have public works, you have building, and you have planning. Those are your four components in development.

How can they work more effectively? We've been doing a little bit of it. We haven't gotten far enough. I agree. But having a one stop shop that you have a counter there doesn't necessarily, in and of itself it creates a good image, but doesn't necessarily, especially in this day and age when you now have these portals.

And if everyone has their own portal and you still have to submit it through the portal, the counter has limited effectiveness. But I think what you really want and sometimes I try to say this what you really want as a council is you want streamlined, and you want developer friendly keep accountability, but also have developer friendly so that people feel that this is a good, effective place to develop and to move projects through. And I agree with you. We need to do that. I don't know that I agree that a one stop shop counter is the way to do it.

I think it looks good. It sounds good. It's something physical that everyone can see. But I don't know that it actually accomplishes what you as a council want. I've been trying to look at ways to figure out how to accomplish what you as a council want, which is I think more effective development and more effective ways to why are we not getting some of the same development opportunities And why are people steering away from us? And how can we bring that here? And so I've been meeting with people. I've been dealing with things and trying to do that. And so the one stop shop's a great concept, but I'm not sure that that's really, in and of itself, is not going to do it. How do we work with the fire department, which is a separate district?

Actually, there's a fifth component. That's the utilities. You have the utilities, which is a department that's under a separate entity or works in a separate entity as a city. How do we work together? And I've been talking with those people. How can we become more effective in doing that? We had a meeting recently with the fire. I've had a meeting with utilities. Haven't accomplished it. I'm not going to say that we don't have more effective development review yet, but I am trying to figure out ways to do what I think is your goal, but maybe that isn't your goal, and you need to help me understand that.

See, but that's the thing, is this one stop shop has been a concept that's been talked about, that's been described. And city of Redlands got one. And they're doing great. There are other, I, it's, again, we have nothing, and so let's figure out how what we don't have isn't still well enough to work with something that's not still a consistent, coherent thought that's out in the sphere of something that nobody else has discussed. And if that didn't make sense, that's exactly what I just heard from you.

It made absolutely no sense to me. I get that you're thinking in a context, in a space, in a time of something that you believe would be conceptually great, but at the same time, for five years, a city has asked for a counter. Just a counter. Just to have a planner and an engineer, and maybe someone from FIRE, sit at one counter and one space in one day. That's how little people are just asking for it and still can't get. And, I think that to me is always speaks to the tale as old as time in the city of San Bernardino is you can't even get what you just asked for and then build and make it better. You can't even get a straight line in one building, let alone a streamlined online application.

Thank you. Council Member Ray Barrow followed by Mayor Bolton.

Thank you, mayor. And once again, thank you, staff. Now I wanna give this pearls of ideas that I have in my head for our staff. We have legislative aids voicing, to state federal representatives what our needs are for a city. Have we provided the list of those capital improvement projects that have been on hold to those aids because when I talked to them they told me council member just send us your information what is it that you need funding for and then I have to provide a number like for example when I came to staff for Perrysdale Park the urban trail up on the hill, I still haven't been given an actual figures of how much a project of that nature is gonna cost the city.

So I cannot request any legislative aids. Please request as much money from our city. If I look at what we've, the general fund and the additional funds, I think we're missing out on all of funding. I will give the perfect example Redlands received and Teddy can correct me I think it was $24,000,000 to rehab one of their hotels for the motel voucher program and here we were getting only 3,000,000 for the navigation center. We're missing out on a lot of funding for the city as big as we are and for all these projects that are not getting done and they're getting bottlenecked because of funding.

That's where we need to start focusing on. We have staff that is very knowledgeable and I would like to see staff come through a come up with funding for those pending projects to us. Because they'll come to us and they'll say we need a million dollars per event or 2,000,000 for funding of this project. But when it comes to what's already in the books that we haven't really funded and finished working on, that's where we need to use our legislative aids. And I'm gonna put it out there so for our staff, the directors, please give a budget analysis for each project so that we as your elected officials here for the city can advocate for them for these projects.

We have that capacity and but we are not given that information. I'm just given numbers left and right of how much it's going to cost but if we want nets over the pickleball or the tennis courts or rehab the hill up in Paris Hill, how much is that gonna cost? To repave the streets, how much is that? Well, we know how much it's costing to repair the streets, but I just want to put it out there for our staff to help us help the city. We can only do so much.

We can put a lot on our wish list but if we don't get an actual breakdown of those costs associated to those actual wishes that we're asking for it's never gonna happen. We need everybody at the table and come together and just start giving us those figures. And then from there, every year our state and federal legislators reach out to us. What do you need funding for? And we don't know what to tell them.

So, Mr. City Manager, since we have those pending CIP projects, there shouldn't be a reason we don't get funding for those anymore. We need to present these to the legislative aides and say this is what we need. This is what we have to do and we've been stuck on this for because of the funding. Let them know fight for our city. You're getting paid to represent us at those levels, here's the list. I don't think that's ever been done in the past. I know when we first got legislative aides, I was told to wait a year before we got any funding. I was like why why are we forking up money in advance to legislative aides if they don't know what it is that a city needs? So that's just my ideas I want to throw out to our staff to reconsider.

Because the East Street Corridor, Parris Hill Park, whichever project we need in the city whether it's the restrooms at those parks, the lighting at the parks on our streets, all of that has to have a price ticket attached to it so we can get funding for it. Simple as that. I think it's simple.

Like the I will say like the restrooms for instance, we did take that. That was one of the things we took. That wasn't they had other priorities they looked at from San Bernardino. I can get those projects on where they focused, because we did take several of those. We took restrooms. I think that is one project that one of our legislators is looking at and trying to do. So that project had we just had meetings last week, not myself, but the deputy state manager did with one of our with one of our legislators.

It'd be good to present all the projects to them because you never know what kind of funding is gonna go before, the federal government to approve. And, you know, for us, we got money for cross for Cross Street and Mount Vernon Bridge. I'm happy that that Mount Vernon Bridge took five years but it got done. And it was a collaboration of various agencies. It was not just our city. I I I love seeing collaboration with different agencies come together for that. But, thank you for following up. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Mayor Pro Tem.

Councilmember Abara actually brought up a good point. I brought this up during our last budget cycle in regards to our legislative affairs, the advocacy that we do. I myself went to Sacramento last year. I'm a little feisty, so I, advocated fiercely in regards to homelessness. But one of the concerns that I did have is the alignment.

I don't still to this state see that there is that great alignment amongst our council. I know some of our staff, as well as our mayor, you guys went to Sacramento. It would be nice for us to have some actual comprehensive report outs. Even before those trips are made, like you said, there's advocating for restrooms and what else, we don't know what's being advocated for on our behalf. We pay a legislative affairs representative, we pay federal advocacy group, we pay state, but yet there is no alignment when it comes to this council and what our true goals are.

We haven't even really set our goals. Councilmember Ortiz was talking about that. What are they going to Sacramento for? We really do have to have some better alignment. To Councilmember Abara's point, I think when we, you know, have that alignment, it will help with the funding opportunities that are there and help us to be able to seize those opportunities. What I'm seeing is just, I think we're all visionaries. We all have dreams. We have aspirations as elected officials. We all ran campaigns. We know what our constituents want.

What's missing is the actual strategic plan that being put on paper, formalized, and us being able to actually implement and show our constituents that this is what we're doing. So, I hope in June that's what we can get to. I know June is right around the corner. If it's not June, city manager, I do hope that it could come very, very soon. I do understand you have extensive background in city managerials, you know, I get that.

But, I do want to just touch on, again, the alignment. You know, these efforts shouldn't be so disjointed when it comes to organizational assessment. When it comes to our legislative advocacy, it does all align. This shouldn't be all siloed. That, I think, is a breakdown in this city, as there's too many siloed efforts in and out of city hall. We do need to start formalizing and being collective. I say it all the time. It's team San Bernardino, I say that for a reason. We do need to be more united. I wanna say too, right now, I think I think council member Ortiz, you said it, and I just wanna repeat and echo what you said.

95% of the time, this council is aligned. We do agree when it comes to the policy and the foundational things to really move this city forward and truly progress. This council is not divided. We are united and we want to see San Bernardino rise. I think all of you because I think the the conversations that we've had here, it's been robust and I think it's been very, very helpful. And I appreciate everyone's input today at this budget workshop.

Thank you, Mayor Bolton. One more thing.

Yes. We had mentioned the 11 CIP projects that are going be deferred, and you had referred to pages two thirty six through two thirty eight. That is actually all the capital improvement projects, so it really doesn't delineate which ones are deferred. Or maybe I'm missing something?

If there's a comment that if it says Measure S replaced with, say, Aquatics Fund, those are not deferred. Just the one that's if you look at page two thirty six and it goes all the way across the board to 37, you can see funding source, the Measure S, right? And if it says Measure S, nothing says it doesn't say replaced, it means it's not it's going to be deferred.

So Yeah.

But if it does say replace, measure S replaced with storm drain fund, or measure S replaced with measure I, like for instance, the last roll, street improvement rehabilitation citywide at 50 locations, which we all know street is the priority, that is actually replaced with Measure I. So, that's not deferred. It's just any row that just says Measure S, that's deferred. But if there's anything on there that council feels that we need to actually continue and not defer, and there's costs tied to that, that's just something that staff needs to hear. So But Mr. Sinbadge Yeah,

if I could flip it a little bit, page two thirty two across to two thirty three, two thirty four across to two thirty five, and two thirty six across to two thirty seven above the traffic total, all those projects are moving forward. They are all in the budget, and they're all moving forward. So, it's only the projects below the traffic total that are the ones that we're talking about that are either getting replaced in funding or getting deferred.

So, I'm sorry, can you be more specific? What page so you just because you went to two thirty two through two All 30 of those projects they'll be moving forward.

Yeah, all of those projects are moving forward. Only projects that we're talking about in what Eddie presented is two thirty six, two thirty seven, and two thirty seven, two thirty eight. The two thirty six, two thirty seven is below the traffic total. It's only those projects below the traffic total.

Below the traffic. Okay. So, Tom Park, because Tom Miner Park was mentioned. Yeah. And I have been working on Tom Miner Park since Jim Tickemar was our Parks and Rec Director in 2017. So, that, I just want to clarify, is not a project that is going to be deferred.

So that there is an issue with that. I want Eddie to explain what the issue with Tom Miner Park is.

Yeah, sure.

Because I did know that that was a high priority, and I was trying to understand why that was in this list. So I did ask him to be able to talk to you and the Yeah. Council about

So, the original funding that was placed in there was based off a combination of essentially community feedback, lots of e mails and phone calls that made their way to the public works department. And what I was made aware of is there was a period of time that the park was essentially closed down. It was fenced off because the area essentially where the play equipment was located was unsafe, to And be since we were talking about essentially just making safe or just making it, you know, accessible again, the funding that was placed there was really only to do that. What do we need to do so that we can take the fence down and it's accessible and safe for use? Between the project being put on the CIP list and the budget being adopted, the former operations director, Ernesto or excuse me, deputy director, he went out and he made repairs that were very economical.

They allowed the fencing to come down and the part to be used again. And at that point, the cost stopped. So from public works perspective, we weren't receiving any more feedback from anywhere essentially saying, hey, we need to proceed with any form of renovation because operations had addressed it in the short term at least.

That's not accurate at all. And I have text messages from our previous parks and rec director that actually refute that. I have been advocating for this park well before I even thought about running for city council. I have text messages dating all the way back to Jim Tickamara, our parks and rec director. I was advised there was specific allocation for Tom Miner Park. Repairs you were speaking of, that was a band aid approach. When I got in office, that park had been closed for almost two years. The community was literally ripping the fence off and the children were still playing. It posed a huge liability. It was a significant risk.

They were parked, I'm sorry, the playground equipment, it was so damaged, the flooring was ripped up. It was in horrible condition. So, I worked with, Lynn Merrill and Ernesto Salinas at the time to come up with a temporary solution so that we can remedy one of liability issues and get that park reopened. And that's what was done. However, the conversation was always that we were going to make the adequate investments to go into Tom Miner Park beyond that. That was a fix, so to speak.

To clarify, the original funding allocation was for more fixing and renovating to make safe, you would need more than what we currently have allocated to start replacing and updating. That's really the distinction I want to make. Not that there wasn't any desire to improve the park, but rather the original funding allocation was specifically to repair what was there, not to go ahead and fully replace necessarily everything and make brand new.

That's not what I'd advise. So, now,

for My remaining balance recommendation is similar to the arts and culture coming back

Yes.

To recommend how we can bring that back in the final budget, putting that capital project back in.

Okay. So, I just want to for right now, for the proposed balance, we still have a remaining $750,000 Is that correct?

Yeah. We should have essentially the full balance. There might be a slight difference depending on if any staff were working on it, but to my knowledge, the full amount should be there.

Okay. Thank you.

But my recommendation, just so that we would have clear direction, is if you want us to be looking at putting that back in the budget, that you ask for that right now, and so that we just make sure that that's that could be something we bring back for you. Similar to like arts and culture.

No. Again, that's why I wanted you to have the, you know, more comprehensive or robust discussion. I don't want to keep saying it, but I can't say it enough. It's very concerning when we as representatives have to continually say to our constituents what we cannot do. This has been an ongoing issue.

Tom Miner Park is highly utilized. For that specific area of the 5th Ward, we're not eligible for funding. A lot of the opportunities for park improvements that come to the city, that portion of the city isn't eligible for. So, we've been fighting to get some improvements for that because, again, we don't get the grants that the city, we're not eligible for the grants, I should say, that the city does receive. So, to now hear that we may not get those improvements that we've been told we would get now for years, it is very disheartening.

Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Frigarroa followed by Councilmember Ortiz.

Yes. Was looking something else up. I'm sorry. Going back to deferrals, again, all these projects are important, It's important to everybody, but one that really stood out to me is one that affects the entire city, and one that about three or four years ago, I think it was unanimously, city, the council unanimously supported the, where did it go here, it was the street sweeping sign, street sweeping program, And I'm just again going, this is in the vein of just being creative, this isn't necessarily, doesn't necessarily mean that I support it or wanted to move forward. But what I want to convey is that I'm willing to be creative with how we get certain things done.

Right? Because ultimately, the the the goal here is to get this this done. And my apologies to Bertec because I haven't had I'm just thinking out here. I'm just spitballing up here, and I haven't had an opportunity to really even to speak with them or if anybody here has really even had an opportunity to speak with them. But, again, just to reinforce, I'm willing to be creative with how we get some of these things done, right?

Perhaps negotiating with Vertex because they do manage the street sweeping. Have we had or let's encourage an opportunity to speak with them to say, hey, since you do manage and oversee the street sweeping program, are you able to perhaps do the street sweeping the sign the signage and in exchange perhaps we can negotiate the the enforcement aspect of it, right? Because there going to be opportunities where some of that money is recovered or we can renegotiate the contract with them as well, right? I know that they'll probably say no because that's not part of their business model. I don't know, maybe they'll say yes, but what I'm trying to convey is that I'm willing to be creative with getting some of these things done.

Let's have that conversation with them, with Vertec and with any of our other vendors and partners as well to say, how can we negotiate some of these programs to get done, to implement some of these programs, and in exchange, let's negotiate something that can potentially offset the cost to them as well. Or, you know, that's all I'm trying to say. And I'm not saying that that's what we should do or we write off rights to enforcement to them. In fact, they probably don't want to do that anyways. But what I'm saying is let's be creative with how we get some of these things done because I'm willing to be creative in that regard.

So, Councilmember Figueroa and State Councils, that was so I sort of figured I sort of viewed what projects on here might be a concern. Tom Meyer Park was one, and I thought this one was based on conversations. And so the question that came back to me on an operational level is, are you looking as a city council, because there was some confusion at least on operational that came back to me. I wasn't here for the discussions at the council level. I was here.

I have heard from a few of you about the concern about it but not at the city council as a whole level And so the question was, are you looking to have it being enforced or just better signs so people know to move have people be more coordinated in making sure that they are not parking on the street, or are you looking for enforcement? Because the signage is about enforcement, as you probably know, whereas there might be some other elements we can use if you're really just trying to communicate better to the public. And the enforcement, what I've been told, is about $2,000,000 for the signage. I don't have the specifics on that, but I did check-in the BERTEC. I think there is a provision that if they change operations, they have about a million they have to expend up to for signage.

The question is, would enforcement make that a BERTEC item or not? That's something we'd have to work through. But I can bring some options back on the

street signs. Don't have a problem with that.

And I'm not saying that we have to take it off the deferral list here. I'm just saying that it's it was an item in the past that was very much supported by the entire council. And we shouldn't just immediately throw it away without being creative, right? When I go to other cities, I see signs posted no parking between 8AM and noon on, you know, the third Wednesdays of the month, right? Because of street sweeping.

And I think that's just what we're trying to get to as well because there will be cars parked on the street for weeks and weeks and you can see the trash is piling up underneath it right And you can see where the street sweeper comes in and just circles around them. Right? And so what we're trying to do is clean our gutters. But what I'm saying is how can we negotiate with Bertec? I don't even know if it's legal or not, but again, I'm just spitballing here.

I'm just throwing out ideas. I'm willing to be creative here, where we task them with implementing the program. And in exchange, we can say, hey, look, we'll set a certain amount of the fees that from penalties will we can negotiate that in order to cover that cost. And so that's just all I'm saying. It's an important program that the city that the council supported a few years ago. I don't want to just throw it away without at least having a creative conversation about how we can still move forward with it. That's all. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Ortiz? Yes. Thank you, Councilman Figueroa, because that was the one I was going to hit on as well. No. Maybe I'm wrong or maybe I'm but I thought money and I keep saying this to you. Weren't we given money to put signage up years ago? I can't I and I guess what would probably be more advantageous is for the council to receive the contract, so that we can see what stipulations were put into place. Because I can't imagine us wanting to do a street sweeping program without talking about signage and enforcement. And then why would you do something and not enforce it?

That also makes zero sense. It's these small things, like the most basic things that other people have that we can't manage, that bug me again. That you can't put a meter maid or whatever they are, a ticket rider behind a street sweeping truck and start writing tickets. And you can educate the community. We already have schedules.

The schedule's online, but you can give everybody a thirty day notice and say we're putting signs up and in thirty day we're going to enforce. This way we get stalled vehicles off the road. You have unregistered vehicles being tagged. You have a better enforcement of parking, you have a better enforcement of of what people are doing with their vehicles and without their vehicles. Cleaning the streets, preparing, we have a lot of flooding and zones where everything start like, councilman Februz said, where dirt collects, where trash collects. Like, it's like the most basic thing. I don't think anybody thinks this hard about street sweeping as much as we do. It's like a collective conversation. And you know what the thing about about people liking or not liking things is, it is what it is. Most of us grew up with street sweeping.

It's like even it's like trash pickup. It's not a second thought. But five years I've heard this conversation. So what does it take for you to bring it back?

I'm I'm gonna bring it back as part of the budget item to to bring this item back into the budget. And I would just say to the council that I've heard lots of discussions and lots of debates in my career about street sweeping. This is not the only city that this becomes of I've had where we've had to pull back on enforcement. I've had where we increase enforcement. I've had where we've done both in the same year in the same city. So I've done a lot on street sweeping. It's pretty controversial throughout most cities. Or at least most cities I've been involved in.

Just the controversy alone here is just getting it

started. Yeah.

Just for anybody to even complain about enforcement would be amazing at this point because we don't even have that. So do you need, I guess, for a recommendation or is this all just verbal, you know, just to provide you the feedback that you bring back conversation on Tom Minor, whatever the

issue Yeah, summarize at the end what we'll bring back or what I have and then if anyone has a disagreement, then that would be great.

And then so for all of this to be brought back to us, or for all of this to be funded, we would need an additional $15,100,000 basically.

Are you wanting us to bring back

all No, the no, I'm asking a question. We had an additional $15,100,000 is that the deferred or is that all total everything even though if you're deferring to Measure I?

No, the 15,100,000 includes those that went to other funds. So, you wouldn't need a full 15,100,000

Okay. So, this would be something I would just like as a councilmember is to get the totals of everything that we're deferring minus what you've replaced. Because I think councilwoman Obara and Mayor Pro Tem had a good point of when we're looking at sending people and the mayor out to go get funding for our city, how much funding are we looking for? What are our additional, you know, I think PD has been probably the best department, and nothing to any other departments, but grant funding, has saved a lot of money. And so, what type of grants are available to parks? What type of grants are available to animal services? What types of, you know, if anything additional funding can we do in public works. So, unless you have that number and I'm missing it.

So, it's seven

So, like 50%, 7,000,000?

About 6.3.

6,300,000 in deferred

That's deferred that's not been reallocated to other funds.

Okay. See, that's now to me, it sounds crazy, it doesn't seem like an insurmountable hurdle. No. In addition to us also figuring out how to fund, you know, about $500,000,000 to $700,000,000 in street paving that we need to get done at some point in the next, you know, decade. So, thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions? Customer Sanchez.

The street sweeping is an excellent example, I think, of how some things may seem simple. And then when you're trying to implement it, that's where the difficulties and the complexities become apparent. I wanted to start off with there was talk about making sure that staff provides the contract for BirdTeq. Staff, August, Eric, it was a week after you came here, that you provided the whole council, all the electives, all eight of us, with a the five most important contracts in the city. And I can't remember all of them, but it was the fire contract, burtech contract, legal services, and maybe one of the labor agreements.

But you provided that to all of And in there, in the BERTEC contract, it was, I think, stipulated that there was going be some sort of cost sharing for the signage. It was either that we were going to pay for it, they were going to come back, and Bird Tech would compensate us. We've had extensive conversations with Bird Tech about what it would cost both sides, both the vendor and the city, to implement this citywide. Would have to, as a city, include an ongoing cost annually of $1,000,000 for parking enforcement. So between the vehicles, staffing, the costs for the support network behind those additional parking officers would be roughly a million dollars.

I mean, we even talked about how we would need to probably expand the hearing officers contract, because the number of appeals would grow exponentially. So, these are things that we would have to take into account. Someone told me, and people have repeated it, and it makes a lot of sense, there's a lot of things that are a priority. But then it's about the hierarchy of priority. We can go ahead and say, no one would no one on this dais wants the street dedicated street sweeping days more than myself. Because

I

can see the the the results of what what could what could be if we were to implement this. But where do we where do we pull a million dollars so that we could implement this program effectively when we're keeping nearly 150 vacant positions vacant, we're holding off of filling them so that we can have a balanced budget. So these are things that we need to take into effect or take into account. Because oftentimes, we can say, well, I want this and I want that. We were able to have a balanced budget by making sure by by taking into account that these vacancies are here, and maybe holding off on filling several of these key positions.

So again, I I can't emphasize enough that when you ask for something, it's not like you get it and nothing else is taken away. Even where it seems like the picture is

a little

rosier, there's issues. The capital improvement projects that we're going to continue forward with, but are being funded through Measure I, are taking away from future projects. It's not like because we're taking general fund funding for a particular project and filling it with Measure I, that suddenly our allocation of Measure I is growing. It's not. So what's happening is we're taking Measure I money here that could be for a project that we don't know quite yet what that project will be, and we're using it to fund a project that we've already identified, that previously was going to be funded through general fund.

So, it goes back to the same theme of, yes, we want to throw money to this project and that project and these programs, but we are already foregoing. How much in Measure I money is being used to supplement pulling back from the CIP projects? How much is that? How many millions is that? Because however many millions that is, as you guys are looking it up, however many millions that that is, that is not money that is that is not is not decreasing the number of capital improvement projects that we're moving forward with.

They just those capital improvement projects haven't been identified yet. Do we know yet?

Approximately 5,000,000

So $5,000,000 So there are $5,000,000 worth of capital improvement projects that haven't been identified, that would have been funded through Measure I that are no longer going to be funded. These are projects, the ones that were previously going to be funded through the General Fund are now being funded through Measure I. It's a priority. That's good. So we're doing that.

But we are not making more money here. We're not getting more Measure I money. So again, before we start saying, hey, I'm going get a win with the public by saying we're going to fund this and this and this, we have to take into account, we rate cuts to things already that this council has said is a top priority. So, I want make sure that I'm driving home that point. The street sweeping, the contracts with Bird Tech, the one stop shop, I really appreciate what you said about the one stop shop.

It goes back to much of the conversation that my colleagues have been having here publicly. We have made it pretty clear as a council what our priorities are, How we achieve the goals that we've set out have been very murky. This is where, Eric, you and your team should really come back and say, hey, if economic development is what you want, let me tell you how we get there. Put out of your mind that you need one counter. Because if if your goal is one to have one counter, then go ahead and and I can figure that out.

But if your goal is to streamline the permitting process and be more more welcoming to to builders who wanna come and build in our city, then let me tell you how to do that. And I think that's what we're looking for from you, is how do you streamline processes processes in in permitting? How do you reduce our overhead when it comes to day to day operations? How do you grow the city's revenues? These are things so these are the broad things we want you to do.

Now how we get there, I think is what my colleagues are asking of you. So that that is what I'm hearing. Unless I'm wrong, someone speak up. But I think that's the task we're giving you. An example of where the city is doing something well, I'm looking at the internal charges. Can we go to where the internal charges are? You know, what every department is charged by IT and HR and all those. Where is that? Is that charges for service? Or is that something else?

Is it broken out by department?

No. I want the totals. Was that? Internal funds. Internal service charges. What I yeah. What all right. So the point I'm going try to make with this is that we've the city has invested over the last couple of years into making sure that we streamline a lot of the internal operations. An example of that is IT. We made some big upfront investments so that our overall costs in the foreseeable future are less.

There's more efficiency, there's quicker responses. We're pulling the city into the twenty first century. So that's the sort of thing, those are the sorts of things that you need to tell us. If you want to improve the operation of the city, these are the things we need to do. So that again is what I think me and my colleagues are looking for when we want you to do an organizational assessment.

So that's that. If we can I touched on it a little bit before, but if we can go over the vacancies? How many vacancies, what is it, the number of vacancies we have, how many of those vacancies are we holding off on filling in order to have a balanced budget? Because if we go ahead and start spending money on several other programs,

we start handing out money for certain projects, know that it's We have vacancy savings of a little over 14,000,000 plus certain positions, too. And there are

some positions that we're holding off on filling, but there are other positions where we're counting on filling them, but before they're filled, we're counting on those cost savings, right? That is correct.

All

right. But there are some key positions what is it? So between 1315% of positions that are unfilled, The cost savings is about what did you say, 4,000,000 or $5,000,000 How much was it?

Yes. Our annual average every year is about 15% of vacancies that the city holds. Not I'm sorry, not holds. It's just the annual This is savings.

Yes. And this is where there's another example, I think, of what you need to take a very, very close look at and tell us, look, these are positions you guys have had on the books that I don't think we need to be funding in the future, because so many of the positions that were created are a patchwork of what city managers proposed over the last five, seven, ten years. We had a city manager, an interim city manager, that brought forward strategic initiatives that added 130 employees in less than a year and a half, in less than sixteen months, eighteen months. So we need someone like you to look this over and say, look, these are positions that we don't need, but this is where the city is hurting for we this sort of position. Here, we don't need this one, and start shifting that around.

One thing that just came to mind as we were discussing all of this is, do we have a line item for funding the homeless shelter that's going be up and running January 1? We do.

Okay. How much is It's 2,000,000, and we're looking to try to use another funding source for a million of it.

Okay. So we're setting aside $3,000,000 and that would just be $22,000,000

out.

Of general fund.

And is that going to be enough? Because I understand that this is for fiscal year the shelter will not be up and running until 01/01/2027, meaning we only need to identify money for six months of operation of the shelter. Is that going to be enough money?

I think for this year, it will be. I think in the future, could be higher. And part of the reason is this is based on the strategy the city council set, which was also going to use I'm trying to think of the term for it where you use outside funding for the oh, recuperative care, where you use recuperative care, because you don't have to use city funds for the recuperative care beds.

Okay. I know it's precarious to count on just like it is precarious to count on fines or on fines, for example, for code enforcement, or for parking, we can't, I think, just count that it's going to be a guarantee that we'll be able to supplement the operation of the shelter with state and federal grant funding. And this goes back to the whole thing of we need to make sure that whatever operations we're committing to, from public safety to code enforcement to running the shelter, that the money we're setting aside is our worst case scenario if funding doesn't come through from the state or federal or any sort of other program that could supplement the operation. So these are things that I think we need to take into account. So I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we show some restraint.

This budget does generally reflect a level of services that is that reflects a level of services that isn't less or more than the past couple years. And I think that is a triumph for the city, that we have expanded, that costs have gone up, and revenues have remained the same. But, I would encourage my colleagues to really think again about the hierarchy of priorities. And I think we've identified those already, and we should look at a couple of things. I mean, Tom Minor Park is an example of something that we've committed to, and I think it's a priority.

And we shouldn't pull away from either funding that or other things that we've identified as a priority to suddenly try to identify monies for the most recent requests for whatever. All right?

Thank you. Mr. Senior Manager, did you have a comment?

No, no. I would do it once I'll summarize after

Councilmember a Flores.

Thank you, Mayor. I just want to say thank you to the finance team and City Manager for bringing this budget together and showing it to us. But also, at least for me, the beforehand working and of showing me entering the second budget and just allowing me to be better prepared coming into this. I appreciate all that's been poured in. I hear a lot of things that my colleagues are mentioning here on the dais.

And I'm in agreeance with a lot of the things that they're saying. And one thing that I'm hearing is that or I feel that I'm hearing is that we need to continue this discussion, especially if there's, like, a lot more things that we we need to talk about. The the the main thing is the follow-up to the retreat that we had a couple months ago, and even the regarding the forensic audit. Right? So perhaps, I'm not sure if it will be during the final adoption, but I think we're really piling onto it.

Perhaps maybe if my colleague really putting myself out here, but maybe my colleagues are amenable to holding, like, a special meeting, like, before or even after. I don't know what's more convenient so we can just kinda really, like, dig in and start setting that continuing from the foundation that we set on from our our retreat. And, lastly, to tap on, I

would like to second that. It was actually a motion I wanted to make at the end, and I appreciate that, Council Member Flores. I'm totally in alignment with that. I do think it warrants, again, a robust discussion in regards to our goal setting and priorities and what that really means, really outlining, again, what specifically does economic development mean? What priority projects are we gonna be emphasizing? That does entail a lot more discussion. And if we're gonna try to lump this all in on June 17, I think that that probably wouldn't be the most conducive approach. So thank you, council member Flores, I second that.

Thank you, mayor Bolton. Council member Flores, keep going.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the second. And I want to ask my colleagues as we're identifying priorities and we're setting up our internal infrastructure and getting things in place because we know we have a lot to tackle on. Moving the city hall rehabilitation project from deferred onto the to to be funded list because, to council member Ybarra's point, we we're here, trying to secure that funding for projects.

If we're able to have a shelf ready project, we can then ask our partners for the funding for it, then we can just work towards that. And then we'll have that infrastructure, that internal part in place so we can go move back into city hall, wherever that that may look like. And that's about it. And thank you again for the second mayor pro tem.

Thank you. Mr. Smedes, did you have a comment?

No, no.

Okay, because your mic is not, so I just want to make sure. Counsel, any other comments? Councilman Ortiz.

Yes. Going back, because I don't want to miss this thing with Vertex, because I just just the idea that we can't enforce anything, just to me, is just it's just unreal. But when we were talking about the Virtek contract, and I guess this for you, City Attorney, on page 44 of the contract, item 11.16, signage, we kind of had a we had a discussion, so I'll just I'll resend it to you, but it was about what it meant when they said if we were adding street sweeping signs or modifying them, then the cost would fall on the contractor, which would be us. And so I think that was where we were all kind of trying to figure out what that language meant. And so I'm not asking to make a legal decision here, but I would like to revisit that so that we know where we're going.

Because I think one of the important things that you said is that know code enforcement isn't a revenue driver, but it is a source of revenue to make sure that we are if I am incorrect, you said that it was up because of our investment. And, I look at, when we look at the things that we want, right? Crime is at a twenty five year low. Well, that's because this is probably the largest financial investment the city has made in policing. Not to mention it's down nationwide, but we made the largest financial investment in the last decade since the bankruptcy into resources for the police.

So, why wouldn't crime be down? We'd be wasting money. It would be counterintuitive to all the things that we're doing. So, enforcement, decreasing blight, decreasing parked vehicles on cars, or homeless vehicles parked wherever they want to be, or whatever that is, That's a part of street streaming as a mechanism of cleaning streets, beautification of neighborhoods, and enforcement of parking and registration. So, again, and I haven't, I've never seen a figure, I've never seen a million dollar figure come, if I'm missing it, if you could send it to me, because I hear a lot of what something will cost, won't cost, but I've never seen a definitive breakdown of enforcement.

And so, it's kind of like the thing with the Airbnb's is, I want to start seeing numbers, and so if that's something at at one point when mister city attorney is looking for this, if you guys could put it together, because I I really just don't wanna I don't wanna keep hearing projections of what someone thinks, or may or may not be, or what happens in another city versus what happens in our city. So, that would be awesome on that area. And, as far as, you know, the conception of a one stop shop counter or online mechanism, for me, it really is a physical basis, a physical manifestation of where people can come and have a collective and singular conversation with the people to get a job done. That to me is just, if you can't, the fact that we can't get basic things done is an issue. And so whatever that looks like, it is vital.

Because it's about tangibility. It's what people, can see, touch, and feel in this city. Remember, safety, but it looks like crap. So we have a problem with that. You can't have something look bad and tell people it's safe. A dark alley, still a dark alley, whether there's anybody waiting at the end of it with a gun or not. And so, are we development friendly? Are we streamlining? If you have nowhere to go and you've got a hopscotch here around there, it doesn't feel like that. And so, I think we need to match the effort to I mean, we've added 200 employees. They're doing, in my opinion, great work, but we got to so we got to match that effort to their effort on what we're doing on this side as far as investment is concerned. So but if we could look at that as far as Vertex, I'd appreciate it.

If I if I could clarify one thing on the vertex. So I you've heard two different comments on the street sweeping. My comment on street sweeping was more just the signage, and that's the $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 As far as enforcement and all that, I agree with you. That needs to be a different number and different calculation.

Thank you. Any other comments from

counsel? Seeing none, I do have comments myself. Thank you so much, council, for your great comments and questions. I do agree with almost all of them, actually. So, thank you so much.

And staff, please really take note of what the feedback is in follow through. I think that's the biggest thing that I'm hearing is the follow-up, follow through communication, and Mayor Proton mentioned about the priorities and alignment when we go to Sacramento, when we meet with legislators. If we could just, we just recently went to the city leaders summit and met with legislators. If your office could provide the council, the body, an update, what was presented, what was the response. And a lot of it is really making sure we build relationships, so that way our legislators, when there's opportunities, and they know what our priorities are, they will reach out to our office or city manager and say, hey, look, there's this opportunity, let's follow through and let's be on it.

So it's communication. We just had that trip, please send an email update to the council body, so then they are the loop, and I think that's the biggest thing. In the presentation on page four, it talked about aligning strategic goals in the budget, and I agree with Mayor Pro Temp and the council. This one says 2021 to 2025, we're in 2026. We just had a recent.

So, again, making sure that we're up to date, current, and aligned is optics to the public, knowing that we are on top of it. And this does not look like, you know, we are current. It looks like we are falling back to what was in the prior. So it's very important how we present ourselves as the body. Heard revenue opportunities, please explore, explore because we want to make sure our city is sustainable fiscally going forward and what are those opportunities that council can make decisions to say, you know what, we want go down that path on revenue opportunities.

So please come back with that, so that way, council feels, confident, that we are heading down, again, a good fiscal path and good fiscal health. Let's see. I heard a lot from the council efficiency, accountability, performance, driving results. How are we measuring ourselves to make sure that we are physically sustainable, healthy, future, and making sure that we're again driving results to this community? And I appreciate that a lot.

One of the things that, so the organizational structure review, organizational review, to make sure that we are serving this community by, with the right structure, right, is important, because we've said that multiple times, the council did. Missus Szymanski, you said that you can't have that, you know, turnaround in in a month. Totally understandable, but please, beyond that, and then provide that feedback on what we can do to improve our services, and that's efficient, that is cost effective, and it drives results. That is key. And let me tell you why that's important, because I believe it was last year's budget I brought up the whole liability line item, because as a former agent director, that's where I would always have to look at and review it, it was so 100 huge, and I had asked the question, if you go to page 138 in the budget book, and it's the fund 5,062 liability claims, and I get it because this goes back to fiscal twenty three, '24, 4,000,000, right?

And then it jumped to 24, 25 to almost 26,000,000 actuals, and then fiscal year twenty, and I understand that, that's why you gotta be just, okay, how do you budget this going forward, because you have to look at actual experience. Then you go to $25.26, 14,900,000. And then the amended 25, 26, 14,900,000 actuals for '25, '26, 06/2005. So that is a huge drop from 14,900,000 that was budgeted and the actuals came in at 6,500,000, which leaves you over half of that still, you know, it's available for the city. So I do see the proposed budget for twenty six-twenty seven, 10/2008, almost 10,900,000, which again, that is just to make sure because of the risks and what's involved.

I appreciate that because then that tells you that to the council, 4,500,000 pulled from that liability, we're okay, Because the actual of the 2526 shield that went from 14,900,000 to 6,500,000. Right? So there's that. And the other question that I have, and I brought this up to every single manager that since I've been mayor. This goes back to the fiscal years 2324, but I always like to go back how far, to when, say, pre bankruptcy.

For instance, HR risk management, that's why I think it's always good to review the whole structure and how we serve this community. February, I remember we had employees of 1,200 employees. At that time, it was full time staff, up to 14 full time staffers and we had in house workers' comp and in house liability staffers. We didn't have an outside TPA, third party administrators that runs the workers' comp and liability. Fast forward, we went to BK.

We had to really restructure right away. And so when that happened, we outsourced workers comp liability that used to be in house. That was part of efficiency, cost savings and so forth to get a bankruptcy. Staff dropped to five full time staff. And fast forward now, we have 18 full time staff, but we still outsource third party administrator on workers' comp liability.

I just ask the question or I just bring this up. Those are things I need you as a city manager to review as an ordinary structure and full time employees, we are not at 1,200. We are now moving up not even to 1,000 yet. So it's again, efficiency, performance, and how we deliver services. That's one example.

But I would want to, and I think the council want to see, citywide organizationally, how are we doing to make sure that we, when we spend taxpayers dollars, we're on taxpayers dime. We gotta make sure we are utilizing it right. And the other thing is I wanna bring up, and I appreciate the public for bringing up the arts And cultural district. The state did not approve funds because of the lack of commitment of the city. And every community, since I've been mayor, I've visited successful communities that have arts and cultural district that create the economic boom.

Boston, DC, and as, you know, I am so fortunate that we are part of the US Council of Mayors. Cities that have been successful in developing the economic boom, always tied arts and culture, cultural districts as part of that development. And so we have an opportunity when we have a blank canvas downtown, we have a blank canvas with major corridors, E Street, 40th, all of these things. It's been mindful how we, and there's a huge heavy arts and culture in this community, history in this community. And every part of San Bernardino is very deep in culture.

So we just need to be mindful, and I know council will probably agree with that, because that is something that we always feel, and there's such great heart in the city, and as we move forward, that's something we, and thank you City Manager for meeting with the folks to say, hey, how do we move this? How do we move the needle? And look at it and bring that back to the council body to make a decision, what do we need to sign on? Okay. Let's see.

I think that's the other thing is, again, communication updates follow-up. But staff, thank you so much for all the work that you do, because we can't do it without you guys driving the results. And so if we could show, and the police department does a great job with this data, pushing that out, like hey, this is how we're, if we could do that for departments on how many streets are getting filled, how many pots are being streets being paved, pots are being filled, and we get those data, but it would be nice to have that out there to the public eye where it's like a dashboard for public works, for parks, and all these great things are happening, we're not pushing enough information out to share to the public about how much progress, you mentioned that we've done so much and delivered so much services and infrastructure that, okay, let's push that out. So that's oh, another one. Mister Stemanich, you mentioned unions.

And mentioned unions on budget, and thank you for doing that, because I think that's very proactive, which unions represent the employees. Did you meet with all the unions?

No. Could

you consider meeting with all the unions? I think unions represent all employees, and I don't know which unions you met, but it would be nice to make sure there's, again, across the board. All employees are factored in, what that would tie into the budget, right? And what the needs are, and how that reflects with the council and the community. Thank you. I think that's it. So, I counsel, I think at this point Can

I summarize why I hear for us bringing back in June, just so that

Actually, one more thing? On the deferred, the city hall has been an issue from the get go. And I think one stop shop is tied to city hall, and that was $24,000 We should need to we need to start, even if it takes time, because I know that takes time, I would like to see that back then. Thank you.

So, if I could summarize, what we'll bring back is, there was a question to bring back possible option on arts and culture for the next budget in June. Arts and culture, on the deferred, a lot of it was deferred projects, the Tom Miner specifically, the City Hall specifically, street sweeping, but then also look at all the deferred projects and bring back those that aren't moved to other funding sources for your consideration. And then the shelter, relook at the operational cost and make sure that that's in here appropriately. Those are the items we're that I put down that we should be bringing back at the next at the final budget as part of the final budget for your review.

Thank you. And I heard there's a motion second to have another special meeting. I think that's important for just Tump? Didn't touch

on the forensic audit request and the organizational assessment.

Yeah. And I okay. As far as funding for it, for the budget review, is that what you're asking?

I think that's more informational that you can come back to the council to have a dialogue, say, hey, it would be helpful if you look back at past meetings or from staff's notes on what has transpired on that, because that has been multiple times that has been brought forward. And approved. Mayfield 10, followed by Council Sondra.

I would like to move past just talking about it. I mean, to council member Ortiz's point, this has been talked about. This council before us approved it two years ago. We need you to come back with what is the next steps to actually implement and have a forensic audit done. Does it, you know, you need to go out to bid to select, you know, what agency is going to conduct the audit? We need to actually have the steps that are going to be taken to have it completed. And then we need to know when. If you come back, does it have to go out to bid? What's the timeline for that? And then, what does the process look like? We need information so that we can actually get this done.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Temp. Perhaps, Mr. Szymatica, you said some questions earlier about it. What clarification do you need to understand what the council wants on the audit? You

So in my experience, a forensic audit means you're looking at a very specific or a couple specific areas that you're concerned that there is just wrongdoing happening, and you're wanting to look at those areas. Doing it across the whole organization, we do an annual audit. We do it every year. But that's not a forensic audit. A forensic audit is a criminal audit. So if you're trying to do a criminal audit across the organization, that will be costly. I'll look back and see what was being accused of. Okay. Thank you. Customer Sanchez?

I think that the best way you can handle this is instead of you being the messenger, that you bring someone in. You can do it under your signing authority. It's not that they're going to do the audit, but you can bring someone in who does forensic audits to explain to this council because what often happens is that these these words, these catch phrases, these keywords take a life of their own. I I actually decided to look into what an all American city stands for and what that program is, and it's very, very different than what people have have, have come to believe that it is. A forensic audit, the the last time a local organization went through a forensic audit was, I think, our airport, long before I was an elected official.

And it was it was a it was a years long process, and it was very specific to a particular operation at the airport, which is a significantly smaller operation than we have here at the city. So I know that those are typically done because there's the idea that people are actively working outside of the standard accounting rules. And so that's where I think someone who does this sort of thing needs to explain this to us and really find out, hey, what is it you guys are looking for? Let's see if it's the forensic audit that needs to be done to satisfy the request, or are you looking for an audit that is more extensive than the yearly required audit that any municipal corporation does? But I would encourage you, and I would add this as a motion.

I would supplement whatever the motion is to give direction to you to use under your signing authority to bring a qualified someone with experience in forensic audits to come in and present to this counsel within the next can I give you 90 come on, me a number? Next thirty days? Is that too quick? Thirty days work?

Six days probably. Yeah, I'll give you

an example of two forensics audits I'm familiar with that were in cities next to mine. One was very specific to procurement in a public works department and why was equipment not coming in? What was happening with equipment? It was very specific. Another forensic audit was start looking to people

deal with utilities?

So I think what we're looking for is more than, hey, are the controls that are in place in your local municipal government, are they being followed? That is what we do every year. And I think what me and my colleagues are looking for is, hey, are we I mean, why does it always seem like we come up short? And I don't think it's fraud, but something that's in between the forensic audit. And maybe it is a forensic audit that we need, but we need someone to really tell us what that means.

Because I think most of us would have a pretty hard time thoroughly explaining what a forensic audit is, or what it entails. So, thirty days, sixty days? Sixty days? Is sixty days fine with you guys? That should be enough time for you guys to identify someone. Look, like I said, the city manager under assigning authority could bring someone in that's qualified that could present to this council. Excellent.

Thank you, Councilor Sanchez. Good point. And just provide us an update. Provide the council an update on how that's going. Councilor Scherritt, followed by Councilor Sanchez.

Amer, very, very quickly. I think we're talking semantics. And I think I think you can take the word forensic out of there and just say we really want to deep dive into efficiencies. I I think that's really what we're looking for. It's just making sure that we're we're we're auditing the whole organization for making sure that we're totally efficient. And if there's anywhere I don't think we're looking for a crime. And I think forensic has has a connotation of criminal activity or as you say something that's wrong. So I think it's just it's it's a really thorough deep dive audit of the organization and how efficient we are. That's that's my view and that's what I think I'm looking for.

Thank you council member. Council member Ortiz?