City Council - Regular Meeting

and emergency management services, and gives an overview of future plans. Adopting a safety plan for slow transit and executing federally required compliance actions to ensure that the city's transit program remains eligible for federal funding. Advertise a request for proposals to design the South Broad Corridor, which is an area of the city that's quickly expanding and developing. amend three titles of the municipal code that supports housing for all, including community members with disabilities and special needs and community members at all income levels. Then the council will move on to public hearings and business items. First, the council will hold the annual budget hearing to adopt a balanced budget for the fiscal year 2026 to 2027, which begins on July 1st. Staff will present information on department performance and progress, as well as considerations for policy and grant-related items. Then, the Council will receive a presentation on the feasibility of compensating advisory body members and will consider changing the advisory handbook to add parking and a food budget section. You can view the council meetings remotely on Channel 20, on the City's YouTube channel, and on the City's website via www.slowcity.org backslash agendas. Attendees of City Council or Advisory Body meetings are eligible to receive one hour of complimentary parking, with restrictions. Visit the City's Parking for Public Meetings webpage for more details. We encourage your participation in person or prior to the meeting. Please review the cover of the meeting agenda for ways to submit your comments. For more information and the full meeting agenda, visit www.slowcity.org backslash agendas. Here is a preview of our next City Council meeting, which will take place at City Hall on June 2, 2026, starting at 5.30pm. The meeting will begin with two presentations. First, the mayor will read a proclamation declaring June as Pride Month. Then, the city manager will give a brief report on city affairs. There are several routine items on the consent agenda, which the council can approve with a single vote. These include skipping reading resolutions and ordinances out loud during the meeting, approving the minutes of May 19th, 2026 City Council Meeting, Conducting a review to update and amend the city's conflict of interest code to make sure it fits with the changes in jobs and position classifications that have occurred recently. Collecting fees for fire and life safety inspections of properties that contain three or more units through the secured property tax roll to make sure the process is efficient and reliable. Adopting a project list for road maintenance projects To help address basic road maintenance rehabilitation and safety needs which supports the infrastructure and sustainable transportation major city goal. approving an agreement to allow retired paramedic coordinators to be given the correct pension compensation, as well as introducing a pay incentive for current coordinators. Authorizing and funding plans to replace the Eastlake Street sewer line to ensure the reliable removal of wastewater and to help prevent potential health and environmental hazards. Reviewing an annual report from the Fire Department which highlights fire prevention, emergency response, and emergency management services and gives an overview of future plans. Adopting a safety plan for slow transit and executing federally required compliance actions to ensure that the city's transit program remains eligible for federal funding. Advertise a request for proposals to design the South Broad Corridor, which is an area of the city that's quickly expanding and developing. Amend three titles of the municipal code that supports housing for all, including community members with disabilities and special needs and community members at all income levels. Then the council will move on to public hearings and business items. First, the council will hold the annual budget hearing to adopt a balanced budget for the fiscal year 2026-2027, which begins on July 1st. Staff will present information on department performance and progress, as well as considerations for policy and grant related items. The Council will receive a presentation on the feasibility of compensating advisory body members and will consider changing the advisory handbook to add parking and a food budget section. You can view the Council meetings remotely on Channel 20, on the City's YouTube channel, and on the City's website via www.slowcity.org backslash agendas. attendees of city council or advisor recording in progress are eligible to receive one hour of complimentary parking with restrictions visit the city's parking for public meetings webpage for more details. We encourage your participation in person or prior to the meeting, please review the cover.

well good evening i'm mayor erica a stewart and i'm here to say that the entire council is present and with that we'll start us off with the pledge of the legions from council member marks Thank you. And today we get to start off with a proclamation. We have Tobin Johnson who will be receiving that. And then after we get done reading the proclamation, I'll bring it down to you so you can have three minutes to share about your organizations. And with that, whereas the city of San Luis Obispo is committed to creating a community where every resident is treated with dignity, respect, and fairness. Whereas lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer members of the community are valued and their contributions enrich the civic, cultural, and economic life of our city. The month of June is nationally recognized as Pride Month, honoring the history, resilience, and ongoing percent sorry, ongoing pursuit of equality for LGBTQIA plus people. Whereas the City of San Luis Obispo continues to work alongside community partners, organizations, and residents to increase belonging, connection, and safety for LGBTQIA plus individuals and families across our community. While progress has been made, LGBTQIA plus individuals continue to face barriers and inequalities and inequities. And with the city remains committed to advancing access and opportunity for all. During Pride Month, community members, businesses, and allies show support for the LGBTQIA plus community through actions both large and small, including displaying pride flags, wearing pride pins, and fostering inclusive spaces that affirm belonging and our shared humanity. Now, therefore, I, Erica A. Stewart, Mayor of the City of San Luis Obispo, on behalf of the entire City Council, recognize the month of June as Pride Month and reaffirm the City's ongoing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and respect for all people.

Madam Mayor and members of City Council, my name is Tobin Johnson, and I serve as the chair of the NAACP LGBTQIA Committee for San Luis Obispo County. Thank you for this proclamation, recognized in June as Pride Month. This acknowledgement sends a powerful message that all members of our community are seen, valued, respected, and welcomed. I would like to also share that the LGBTQIA committee is a brand new committee within the NAACP branch, and I am honored to serve as its first chair. The creation of this committee reflects our commitment to ensuring that the LGBTQIA voices and concerns are represented in our civil rights and advocacy work throughout the SLO County. At a time when members of the LGBTQIA committee are facing increasing challenges and uncertainty, local leadership matters. Pride Month is more than a celebration. It is a recognition of those who fought for equality, dignity, and the freedom to live authentically. It is also a reminder that the work of building inclusive communities continues. As an openly gay combat veteran and advocate for civil rights, I understand the importance of belonging. Acts of recognition such as this proclamation help create communities where people feel accepted, supported, and valued who they are. I would like to also thank our community partners at the Pride and Diversity Center of Slough County for their continued leadership, advocacy, and support of LGBTQIA individuals and families throughout the county. Finally, I would like to invite all of you members of the community to join us in celebrating Pride Month as we encourage everyone to attend Slough Pride at Meadow Park on June 26 and Trans Pride on June 27 as we come together to celebrate diversity, inclusion, and community. On behalf of the NAACP and our newly established LGBTQIA committee, thank you for your leadership, your support, and recognizing Pride Month. Happy Pride Month and thank you all for your time.

Thank you, Tobin. And with that, we'll move forward to the city manager's report. And city manager, I'll pass it over to you.

Thank you very much. We have just a handful of slides to go over. Hopefully, folks, I also want to mention at our last regular city council meeting on March 19th, we did go over a list of ways that the city is helping to support Pride Month. And so if anybody's curious, the information is there, as well as in a lot of our other publicly accessible um spaces on our website and i'm sure you'll see posts about our involvement as well so just wanted to mention that um first up we will uh we want to let folks know and remind everybody every year we go through a process where we make an adjustment to our user fees and impact fees they change uh effective july 1st of every year based on cpi increases or decreases that's consumer price index or CCCI, which is essentially a construction cost index which applies to our impact fees. And those increases or changes happen whenever we are not otherwise undertaking a comprehensive fee study. So this is one of those years where we will make an automatic adjustment effective July 1st. Our updated user and impact fees will again go into effect in just under a month. This year our user fees will increase by a consumer price index change of 3.68%, and our impact fees are going to decrease by half of a percent, and that is again because that CCCI showed a decrease in inflationary forces for our construction costs. And so if anybody has any questions about where to find the actual fee amounts, those are posted at slowcity.org slash fees. There's also a lot of great information on there about why fees? How did we create the fees? Why are they charged? How do they get applied? and so if anybody has any questions please go there and of course reach out to us particularly our finance department or community development department largely since a lot of these fees are housed there if you have questions user fees are paid by users of individualized services that include application fees filing fees business license fees inspections Permits things like that impact fees are paid by applicants for development projects and those are used to support the construction of additional facilities so just a little breakdown of those differences, but again, a lot of that information or all of it is that slow city.org slash fees. Okay, next up, we want to remind everybody we are also in the business license renewal season. We are working to notify all of our business operators of the requirement to renew their licenses and are providing renewal forms to all of our current businesses. Current licenses expire on June 30th. We do provide a month-long grace period so that means if your accounts are not renewed by the end of July 31st we would be looking at potential citations that could amount up to $800. Now it only costs $44.58 to renew your license. So we really encourage all of our businesses to take a look, get them renewed. If you have changes in your contact information, we ask for that as well. We want to make sure that we are reaching out in the most effective way possible. And there are multiple ways to renew your business license. You can do that online through our business license portal. You can come in in person to our finance counter. which is on the lower level of City Hall, or by mail. And of course, if you have any questions, reach out to finance staff with any business license or business tax related questions by email at bt at slow city.org or by phone at 7817134. Or again, you can visit the counter in person downstairs Monday through Friday 8am to 4pm. next up we're excited to share that this year's state of the city will be offered in a couple of different formats we are bringing back our in-person state of the city event which will be live here again next tuesday this is a really great opportunity to hear directly from the mayor and a number of others about the accomplishments over the past year and to ask questions engage in conversation and just learn more about the work going on across the city We will also be publishing a state of the city report in next week. The report will be available digitally on our website. And if you need a hard copy, please let us know. We can provide you a hard copy. We're just trying to go the digital route in case in order to save on printing and those types of both, you know, expenses and environmental questions. But we really hope you'll join us next Tuesday, June 9th at 5.30 p.m. here, same place. And so come if you have questions, we'll be happy to hear them as well. We are also holding on Saturday, January 13th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Our fire department will host a wildfire education day. And this event is actually held at our city corporation yard, which is located at 25 Prado Road. So that's important to note. It's not going to be at the fire station. I think we wanted to make sure there'll be plenty of space. because we know this is a topic of concern and there's lots of information we want to share. It's of course a free community event and it will provide residents with practical information on wildfire preparedness, home hardening, defensible space, and maybe if you wonder what those terms are, this is a great event to come and learn more about it, vegetation management, evacuation planning, and emergency notifications. We will have four education sessions offered throughout the event, including presentations from our emergency manager, Joe Little, our city biologist, Freddie Otte, and also have representatives of Yachty Choo Choo Choo, Yachtilhinny, and other local partners who are involved in wildfire mitigation in our community as well as other resilience efforts throughout our region. So you will have an opportunity to visit education booths staffed by our community risk reduction and home assessment team as well as County of San Luis Obispo Office of Emergency Services staff and other organizations who really work around our region to help reduce wildfire risk and improve emergency preparedness. We look forward to seeing everybody there who wants to learn more about how to be fire wise, fire safe in our region. Ask questions, get great information, and again, at our Corporation Yard at 25 Prado Road. And then finally, just highlighting items. We have one more meeting in June, June 16th, which then we will take a little break and be back on July 21st. So I want to highlight, we have our annual advisory body appointments on this meeting. as well as annual reviews for the San Luis Ranch and Avalo Ranch developments. Next slide shows our resolution calling for the November 3rd general municipal election and adopts regulations for that process. And I finally want to highlight our business items, which includes our 2025 local hazard mitigation plan, Our 2025 urban water management plan and water shortage contingency plan and filing an updated water supply and demand assessment. So a lot of water, great water information and then an annual review of our Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategic plan and vision for our next fiscal year. So we do have a fairly full agenda on June 16th before we go on a brief break. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. Any questions from my colleagues? Okay. I think we're good. Before I call public comments, I want to give one more chance. If anyone has something you'd like to comment on that is not on the consent agenda and not on the public hearing and business items, this is your time to turn in a slip over there, the yellow slips right near the deputy city manager, Greg Herman. And with that, City Clerk, and I just want to welcome Sarah Armas. We are lucky to have our City Clerk today for this meeting as her first official City Council meeting.

Thank you, Mayor. We do have three non-agenda public comments. We have Sean Harris will be followed by Sharon Spadafora and Roberta Smith.

On there we go. Okay. Thanks. I'll just be quick. I just have a couple of concerns and that was pretty impressive from his McDonald pronouncing our local Native Americans. I can't even pronounce that name. I've seen it written before, but I don't know how to pronounce it. The last verified slave in the US died in 1972. Mr. Peter Mills, at the age of 110. What Americans need to understand is that my late parents' generation, boomers, were the last generation to walk and live amongst actual slaves. Let me say that again. Boomers lived amongst freed slaves. Is it any wonder, then, that the US economy is structured like a cotton plantation, what the rest of us need to understand and be on guard for is not falling for the same trap as poor whites in the antebellum South? We cannot pretend that as poor whites, our interests are congruous with those of this nation's slave masters just because we may share similar levels of pigment or in the off chance they actually hold religious beliefs that we worship the same God. No, we do not. Their God is money and power. Just ask yourselves what color this nation's oligarchs are. Are they black? No. Do we live under a dictatorship of African Americans? No. Is the majority of Congress black? No. Our problems are not racial, they're financial. We live under a dictatorship of capital. Bankers acting through Congress and Secretary of Defense, defense contractors have demanded an outrageous $1.4 trillion defense budget If this goes through, and it will, it will spell the end of the dollar. Foreign central banks will no longer buy our national debt instruments. Hyperinflation will ensue through trillion dollar corporate bailouts. Americans will starve. Cities like San Luis will be unable to pay their municipal bonds. What little social spending we have will shrink even more. Our anemic social safety net will be shut down, and pensioners and little old ladies living on fixed incomes will die in agony in their mobile homes, unable to pay for air conditioning or food. Everything will be sacrificed for a Defense Department that has become an enemy of the American people. At this point, does it really matter who we vote for? We always get John McCain and life-sucking defense budgets to crowd out everything Americans deserve. The Defense Department isn't killing foreign enemies, it's killing Americans. Scott Besant, Howard Ludnick, and Kevin Hassett have two things in common. They all stutter when on national television as they lie to us about economic indicators, and two, when they come from New York City. New York City and Washington D.C. are making war on the American people on our birthright, one through the blood my grandparents' generation spilled at Omaha Beach in World War II. Namely, a strong social safety net, solid jobs, and responsive government. Although my parents' generation, through our patrimony, my grandparents' generation literally died for in the trash as they dropped acid, copulated in the mud at Woodstock, or attempted to levitate the Pentagon, we will not. The first thing we need to do is tax concentrated wealth. stand up FDR's work relief program, recapitalize our social safety net, and make direct investments in non-defense related industry, and try to balance our national budget. This is not partisan. These are emergency measures. The Defense Department's out of control, as is having $40 trillion of national debt. I'm not a leftist or a liberal, nor do I relish the idea of taxing with those who have taken the risk of starting businesses they've acquired. But at this point, does Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk really need another trillion billion dollars? while Americans experienced downward mobility of D-based currency and squalor. I have more, but thank you.

Next, we have who again? Sharon Spadafore. Thank you. Sharon Spadafore, and then after that, sorry. I should have written it down.

Trial by fire, Roberta Smith.

Thank you.

We already know I'm Sharon Spadafore, so good evening. I've been a resident of this city for 78 years. Consequently, I've had plenty of time navigating the streets of our beautiful city. As a board member and owner resident of Parkside Townhomes on King Court, I'm here to express my concern regarding the intersection of King Court and South Street. All the residents of Parkside townhomes and the villages have only one way in and one way out. Turning left from King Court onto South Street can only be called an experience that requires extreme patience. since the residents on king court did not receive notification of the current project i respectfully request a pause allowing the homeowners an opportunity to weigh in on any changes thank you for your consideration thank you

somewhat of a repeat but we're very interested in this in our environment my name is roberta smith and i'm owner and occupied 2250 king court i've only lived in this location for approximately six months but have experienced the anxiety and waiting trying to turn left from king court onto south street a left-hand turn out of king court onto south street is a totally unsafe for vehicles. Currently this intersection has a white flashing light that can be activated by pedestrians and bicyclists using the push buttons on the side of the road. Plans, and as I understand it, installation of a mostly completed for a new safer indicator using a pedestrian hybrid beacon. That's kind of like what's on Broad Street and I forget the intersection. Our neighborhood, myself included, think this is a great idea and it will make it much safer for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross South Street and those folks are typically going into Meadow Park. There's no question, there's no argument about the increased safety. However, King Court is the one and only way for my home and every resident's home to get out into South Street safely. Left-hand turns are basically our concern. We evidently had no way to express our need for a left-hand turn signal during the discussion on the new pedestrian hybrid beacon. And King Court itself is a dead end street. It's just a cul-de-sac with entrance to our homes as well as entrance to Meadow Park. So you have down at the end of the street many people who come with their kids and they park down there and then they try to get out at a five o'clock traffic or something and it's pretty difficult. I and my neighbors are officially asking the city to allow King Court residents to provide their input in order to improve the safety and operation of King Court South Street intersection for our families and our visitors, specifically to allow some kind of traffic control device to allow a safe crossing and turns or throughput actually to go to the school from King Court onto South Street. The current plans are not addressing vehicular safety or accessibility and ease of use for the residents of King Court. Thank you very much.

Thank you and I know we have some new people in the room so I just want to let you know one of the things that's always hard is people put in public comment but because it's not on the agenda we can't discuss it up here but there are some staff members in the audience that may come and chat with the speakers today. With that we will move on to our city our consent agenda and ask my colleagues do you have anything you wish to Pull from 5A to 5K. Vice Mayor.

Not to pull, but I do need to recuse myself from item 5J because my residence is too close to Broad Street to vote on it.

Thank you. Council Member Michelle Shoresman.

I was going to pull 5J, but really just for a couple of questions of staff.

Sounds good. Do you want to ask the questions before we

If we can do it without pulling the item, then I'm happy to do that and then we can just vote on everything together.

City Attorney, can we ask a few questions of staff before we start or do we need to pull the whole thing?

Okay.

Mayor Stewart. Yes. Before I proceed, I did have one last non-agenda public comment if we wanted to squeeze that in before we moved for the consent.

Okay. After I called for the... Okay.

No, proceed before. Just a misplace.

Okay. Got it. Thank you.

Rookie mistake.

Thank you. It's okay. First day.

We do have Dan C. Hello again, Mayor, council members. My name is Dan C. I'm a resident of King Court. I'm sure you've received my letter today. After our last meeting here, I went and did some more digging, found the contract approval from early January or mid-January. And then there was reference to an October 7th meeting and found that memo. Correspondence, city correspondence to council And in that correspondence, there were two questions posed to the engineering department. One was about the operational capacity, basically, of the intersection King and South. And there are eight potential warrants that would grant a the technical justification for a signal at an intersection per the California MUTCD. That's the manual uniform. uniform traffic control devices. And so only one of the eight conditions was met that would warrant a signal at that intersection. And that movement is the northbound King Court movement. That is our vehicles, all of the 130 homes, residences on King Court, their only means of egress. and so that has a level of service F that's the worst grade it can get we can't there's no G or H or it has a long delay time as seen in the morning early morning hours and the staff report also or that the answer to that question also confirms that it says via first-hand field visits that it's in line with what's been studied The second question on that is pertaining to the working court residents notified of the change from a full signal to a pedestrian or versus a pedestrian hybrid beacon. And the answer to that from staff was no, it was not. King Court residents were not consulted. I've attached that city correspondence with my letter and snippets within the letter itself. I took it upon myself and a couple neighbors to this last weekend go out Saturday and Sunday and get signatures from 77 of the 130 units in King Court in the two complexes on King Court signatures in support that no, we didn't get anything about this, never heard about this change from a full signal which would provide us a dedicated left turn movement stopping the traffic on South Street and to this pedestrian hybrid beacon that not only doesn't maintain status quo, it makes things harder because the signal timing will be longer. It makes all vehicle movements illegal, even if they're crossing on our right-hand side, and it would be technically safe to do an exit. It makes it illegal under the current planned designed project so we're asking you to come and present and thank you thank you I believe one of our team members would like to provide some input

Sure. I appreciate the opportunity. Again, I know we can't discuss this item in detail tonight, but I did want to provide some information. This crossing is a challenge. I totally understand it is very challenging making a left turn out of south or out of King Court during peak times of day onto South Street. This has been planned as a pedestrian hybrid beacon crossing for several years. It was in our active transportation plan as adopted in 2021. It was initially part of the Hygera Complete Streets project and has been publicized and all of our community outreach was proposing this as a pedestrian hybrid beacon because Initially, it wasn't meeting warrants for full signalization when we looked at it. As we got funding through SLOCOG to advance this project and started getting into design, we collected updated traffic data and confirmed, actually volumes now have gone up a little bit, we could make the case for a full signal. As we started looking into those details, one of our first conversations with City Emergency Services, we know this is a primary corridor for Fire Station One, and said, would this be a concern? And what we heard at the time was, yeah, this would add some friction. This is a primary route that we get to the South Hygeric quarter. A full signal creates some heartburn in terms of the potential delays. We prefer to start with the pedestrian crossing only and look towards potential upgrade to a full signal. So all of our community meetings, public outreach has said, this is gonna be a pedestrian crossing with potential to be a signal. We've designed it to be easily converted to a signal. Since then, some things have changed too in that we've upgraded more emergency vehicle preemption equipment for our emergency vehicles that add more capabilities to talk to our traffic signals further downstream. And as you've probably seen in some of our communications with the King Court residents this week, we acknowledge that we'd like to, a signal would be a great solution from our perspective too, If we could do this without creating those concerns for emergency response we've had more conversations with our new chief Harris this week and said. You know what the new equipment, we have is this still the where we're at and from those conversations I think there's more openness to revisit accelerating a traffic signal as maybe the right solution here. it's something staff would prefer we'd be supportive of that it's more about process what's the process to come back and make sure that there's an opportunity for public. conversation on that potential shift, but that is something we'd like to explore and plan to come back to the council and continue to discuss with the King Court neighborhood about that possibility as maybe the right fit for this project moving forward.

Thank you so much for providing some input on that. I know that you sent an email to many people on that, and I wish we could converse about that and ask lots and lots of questions and have some really good deliberation. Unfortunately, we are not at that point today since that's not on the agenda, but thank you. Really appreciate that. And then we will move back to consent agenda, items 5A through 5K. There was a quick question about something on 5J. And with that, which member would you like to chat with, Council Member Schwarzman?

Maybe Luke could come back up to the mic.

Luke cannot talk about that.

He can't answer a question?

Not Broad Street, no.

Oh, that's right. Okay. So whoever can.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. Sorry to choose inappropriately. So my question about 5J is that we've gotten quite a few agenda correspondence letters from residents who are both excited about this moving forward. I think if I can interpret correctly the emails overall, they're very interested in this moving forward. and they're interested in interim solutions before we can actually get all of this off the ground that is the full RFP project that's described in the staff in the agenda item. So we have talked a little bit about this in the past and I know that some that there are efforts to do some things in the interim. Do we are you able to summarize what types of things we might be able to do in the interim before the full project goes into place?

Sure. Brian Wheeler, good evening, Mayor, members, Council. Yes, for that question, we are, staff is working right now, very short term deploying the speed feedback trailer in the area. Maybe you've seen that on Broad Street. We are going to be deploying on to Lawton in the next couple of weeks. We also will be collecting some 48 hour speed data on Lawton specifically in the next couple of weeks. We understand the desire for more immediate improvements and so we're looking this summer at some speed feedback science on Broad Street to address some of the kind of low-hanging fruit of faster speeds before we can get to the full planning effort. one thing i do want to bring up is that lawton and many of these other adjacent streets are going to be part of the full planning effort and if we kind of skip that and go straight to some quick build we run the risk of having unintended consequences so there is the possibility of like i think some of the correspondence had indicated some quick build speed tables or speed humps on lawton some of the other streets staff hasn't really seen that there's um a reduction cost with those temporary measures that the an asphalt speed bump is about the same um and so we that's an option for us to take a look at in this summer um So that is one of the options that you'll evaluate along with speed signs and some paint and other things that you're going to be looking at this summer before the full study is complete before public outreach is really underway and we go through the whole process.

Okay. And it sounds like you'll do some kind of mini speed studies in order to decide where, if you were going to put some of those quick build things into place where you would do that.

Correct.

Okay. And it includes that whole area, Lawton, Funston?

Lawton, yes. um several of those streets are in the ntm program currently um another thing to kind of keep in mind is that lots in meadow they are sixth in line currently in the ntm queue we have several projects that are in front of them so It would be helpful for staff to maybe get some direction to elevate them outside of the normal in team process as they would kind of be like skipping outside of that established Q, knowing that they they would be part of this full planning effort, you know 2027 so.

Okay, and you just used an acronym. Do you want to pull the entire thing? Neighborhood Traffic Management.

Neighborhood Traffic Management, Q. Yeah, correct. So it's the program that the city has to address speeding volume concerns on residential streets.

Okay, thank you so much. Sorry, I'm here.

No, no, I just, if you want to give guidance, I feel like we need to pull it if that's okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, Mr. Wheeler. Perfect. Thank you. All right. Do we have public comment? Actually, before we go there, there's some yellow slips there by the deputy city manager. Anyone have any public comment on consent agenda items or public hearing or business items? I just want to make sure I give everyone a chance. Okay. Any public comment?

I can assure you, yes, we have three. Thank you. All for items 5J. We'll start off with Alec Lance followed by Desi Lance and Michael Leibovich.

Hello, Council. Thank you, obviously, here for this topic. Over Memorial Day, families from our neighborhood around Meadow Park got together for a cookout in the park. There was 80 of us there and there was at least 30 children. Okay, this is just in this neighborhood, the broader neighborhood around Meadow Park. Obviously that's a high traffic area for children who are traveling to school as well. And so I know that there's a lot of comment. There's been a lot of emails. Thank you for acknowledging these in a timely manner and for the opportunity to speak on this. I think part of the concern here is that this could get worse, right? And there's no perfect solution for things like this because there's always ripple effects. And I can appreciate that. One of my concerns is that a lot of the cars that are doing this are not cars that will willingly slow down. because they see how fast they're going in fact that could make it more fun for them it's almost a game it seems to beat the traffic light and so these are some of the cars that you would expect it to be cars that have big big motors that can go fast that are low to the ground so something like signs i don't think personally living on the street And I think if police or anybody from the city spent three hours, not even three hours, just sitting near one of these intersections, it would be abundantly clear what the issue is. So something like what this gentleman was talking about, consideration for speed humps or something that would actually physically require cars to slow down, I think is what is necessary here. My son is here, nine year old. He was one of the 30 plus children who are at this cookout on Memorial Day. This is really, really important to us. We appreciate that you guys are considering it. And I think if I understand what's going on here, I think what I want is that we want this to be pulled from the agenda to have a more robust conversation about near term fixes rather than having to wait another 12 or 18 months for this. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, Council. Desi Lance. I live at the corner of Funston and Lawton. Similar to what I said last time, we would really, we're so excited about the South Broad Corridor project. Very excited. All our neighborhood is up in arms about it in a good way. What we're hoping for, it's going to be a while until that project comes to fruition in our neighborhood. So what we would really love to see is just near-term traffic calming measures in our little neighborhood um something that can be you know low-cost temporary bolted in rubber speed humps is something that i understand is fairly simple um so specifically asking you to just allocate a small part of of the budget for those traffic calming measures in the interim um that doesn't take away obviously from the bigger picture of what you're trying to do with the planning and design of this project Would love also the signals for the speed, but I think that goes in tandem with also the speed humps. And yeah, just to make it a safer place while we all wait for the redesign in the bigger picture. So thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening council. My wife was here last time speaking and tonight's my turn. So thanks for having me. So my name is Michael Leibovich and my wife and our two daughters, a three year old and a six month old live on Funston Avenue between Lawton and Broad. I'm here tonight to a just strongly support our endorsement and excitement for the broad South corridor project. We know that project matters, and we believe that it is kind of the bigger long term fix. But I'm also here as a parent to ask you not to make the families on our street that my neighbors here sort of just spoke about wait any longer for what feels like basic safety. Every day, drivers cut through our neighborhood to avoid specifically the light at Broad and South. and they come down Funston fast and not just a little too fast, but fast enough that I feel it in my body when I'm standing next to my three-year-old in our front yard. And, you know, Funston is not just a shortcut. It's where people live. It's where kids play. It's where families walk dogs and ride bikes and push strollers and, you know, walking simply two blocks down to the park and this really keeps my wife and I and our neighbors up at night. The reality is that when you live on a street like this, you start to do the math of what if a kid runs out. And as Alec mentioned, people are really trying to beat that light. And people are on their phones, unfortunately. And what happens if someone is just not looking as they're trying to just save an extra three seconds to cross through a light and there's a child out in the street? And so it's really important to us and specifically just want to also advocate for some type of temporary measure, something that possibly could be allocated outside of kind of the current allocated budget for something that's bolt in but would physically slow drivers down driving through that neighborhood. Really appreciate your consideration and time and thanks for having me. Thank you.

Any other speakers?

No, we do not.

Okay, thank you. Council Member Marks.

Yeah, I have a question for our City Manager. Is this issue something that could be discussed when we talk about the budget allocation later as a business item? In that allocation of a small amount for this purpose?

That's a great question. Thank you. Because they it's the budget is it touches all things. However, I think I need to check with staff to see if there's something about the RFP the way this project is structured in the consent item that makes that the better place to give the direction. If not, then it could also come up in the budget item. So thank you.

And I appreciate you, Madeline, or Cassandra.

Hi, Madeline Cassenta, Assistant Director of Public Works. If we wanted to implement some type of a quick build, we do have funding within year two of the budget for things like Vision Zero implementation or active transportation implementation. So we do have things set aside where we could look at items like this that would be within city manager or director purview to allocate. that would be within staff's discretion or we could come back to council to talk about items like that.

And would that be under, do we need to talk about that today with 5J or is that per the Vision Zero plan that we've already discussed?

So 5J would consider more long-term corridor planning, which includes the neighborhoods around Broad Street. So that's already encompassed in the RFP that you guys are considering tonight. For the quick builds, you guys would not need to make a decision on that tonight. We can already move forward on that.

Great. Thank you so much. All right. With no other public comment, we'll come back to the council. Go ahead, Councillor Marks. Sorry, wait one second. I'll have city manager jump in. Go ahead.

Something we could do now or is this something we need to do at another time?

so i think i'm hearing from our staff that we don't need the south broad street corridor planning effort and the quick build that's intended to be incorporated into that project would not be where we would pull this funding it's not contemplated directly in that project right now and so we would not recommend modifying 5j But instead, we can take specific direction, maybe under the budget item, if you would like to provide it on this stretch of roadway. At the same time, we think we could accommodate the request even without that direction. So I think we're good on consent.

Thank you. Perfect. Thank you. Council Member Shoresman.

Yeah sorry just to follow up on that. My understanding from other conversations and emails with staff and from what they've said here is they are already working on some short-term solutions in the area so we don't even need to provide extra direction through the budget item tonight or additionally because they're already working on a short-term plan along with the RFP that we're contemplating right now.

That is correct. I think the one nuance is that we have a standard process that we use for requests like this, and we treat it in as sort of a there's a queue that occurs, and we can. We typically have enough budget for a certain number and staff availability for a certain number in a year, and so that's the piece where We're just looking at trying to figure out how to prioritize the requests that we do receive at the same. It's not so much a funding side of things, I believe, as it is just which one comes first. So certainly five J. We can move forward without that direction. If you would like to give a specific direction under the budget, you can. But if not, we will continue to work on this and we are hearing. the desire for this to happen quickly you know same time same you know is what we're looking at for other improvements related to the quick build pieces of south broad um we hear and understand that concern so i just i'll make sure maybe during a break if we have a moment to check in with staff to make sure we don't need that specific direction on prioritization but otherwise we're good i believe overall

Thank you very much. And thank you for bringing that up, Council Member. With that, can we have a motion, please? Council Member Marks.

I'd like to move the staff recommendation for the consent items all the way from 5A through 5K.

Sounds good. Thank you. Council Member Schwarzman.

I will second approval of the consent agenda.

Thank you. City Clerk, can we have roll call, please?

Council Member Marks. Yes. Council Member Schwarzman. Yes. Council Member Boswell.

Yes.

Vice Mayor Francis.

Yes, with recusal on item 5J. Mayor Stewart.

Yes. Thank you so much. A motion passes. And thank you to the community. With that we will take a quick five minute break and then we'll come back to talk about the budget.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Someone can be free.

All right, we'll come back. Thank you so much for the break. And we're gonna return back for the public hearing and business items. Our first item will be adoption of the fiscal year 26-27 budget supplement. And so I wanna just remind people if you have comments, public comments, we have those yellow slips right there where the deputy city manager is and also right outside if it's more convenient outside the door. And with that, we'll bring it back to Emily Francis and Riley Coon. So sorry, Emily. I am so sorry. Finance directory, director, okay, I can't do it. Finance director, Emily Jackson, thank you.

And we'll just throw you for another loop and we're gonna, I'm gonna take an opportunity to kick things off as we make our budget presentation. We've got a slide up there reminding everybody what our recommendation is, which is adopting a resolution to adopt the budget. Talk through our user fee cost recovery goals because we will be kicking off a process in this next year to go undertake a comprehensive user fee study. uh and then get an update briefly on uh sloma san luis obispo museum of arts progress on phase one of their grant with the city but first off i'd like to take a couple minutes to highlight some information that were was included and is included in the city manager's message which is the first few pages of our budget book and document um it was uh Oddly, maybe a great experience for me to review and help put together this year's message because it really provided an opportunity to highlight a lot of the amazing work that we've done over the last year, because this is actually the second year of our two year financial plan. And so we have a lot of things to be very proud about accomplishing over this past fiscal year, which we will be concluding this June. So. July 1st for us is a new year and so we're almost to the end of our year and so again lots of things to celebrate. So first want to highlight some of our major capital projects. You see some photos up there of some of those. One our water resource recovery facility upgrade or we call our WARF was completed this year. It is the largest single capital improvement project to date for the city. took years to build and it was completed this year of course we completed our cultural arts district parking structure and then began construction on the regetti community park project which will add nearly 11 and a quarter acres of new amenities including pickleball courts bike facilities walking paths event space playgrounds and rec areas to the regetti ranch area which we were incredibly proud to bring forward. We took care of new paving on Tank Farm Road with new striping, approved the Higuera Complete Streets Project, completed the Mid-Higuera Bypass Project, which most people don't see, but it is an incredibly important flood control project we've been working on for decades with the County of San Luis Obispo and the Department of Water Resources at the state. We also made significant progress on our Mission Plaza enhancements project. So hopefully folks have had an opportunity to use our new restrooms there, which were opened, and we are in the process of working with a local business to open a kiosk cafe in the plaza. We restored all of our fixed route transit services to pre-pandemic levels, and that took a lot of concerted effort by a lot of people to essentially restore our services. And that, as well as adding electric buses, charging infrastructure, and new rider technologies to help make using our buses easier. We completed a Laguna Lake bike park project, and I would love to take a moment to really highlight That was a unique opportunity for staff to work directly with community volunteers to build that project ourselves together. So it was truly, I think of it as sort of a sweat equity project that we did together and really built something amazing that's being used every day in our community. Um, we also made a lot of progress on a number of programs, operations and other initiatives, and that includes developing and kicking off a public information campaign about our new citywide single vote election system. We have an internally articulated and now will be externally articulated goal of we want people to hear about this so much you ask us to please stop. And we're getting there. So this is another opportunity. We're kicking off that information campaign because it's so important that people are able to vote and exercise their vote in a way that it can be counted. So remember, this November, vote for one, the top two vote getters get the seats. We launched a slow grown business support program, which is a free service that helps businesses navigate through our city processes and access resources. We completed our biennial community academy program. We had more than 30 participants and it was incredibly successful. really big shout out to Natalie Harnett for her work on that program she really put it together and was the cruise director director for everyone through that process and I know we all had a ton of fun through that and thanks so much to Natalie we adopted new fire hazard severity zone maps which was a huge lift but also has enabled us to get out in the community we got to announce an event that we're holding on June 13th to really help get that information out We obtained recognition from the state as a clean California community. So really recognizing efforts to reduce litter, improve public spaces, and foster community pride. And I really want to highlight this too. We worked in partnership with Cal Poly to ensure a significant reduction in illegal parties. St. Patrick's Day weekend and completely eliminated illegal street parties. So that was a huge undertaking and work effort. Incredibly big lift by our police department in particular, as well as our fire department, all of our first responders, and that was no small feet and I want to highlight that too. We took a lot of steps forward on housing. We now have almost 3200 housing units that we've permitted in this city since 2019. That's huge. We helped to deliver the Maxine Lewis Grove apartments, providing 39 permanent supportive housing units. We are helping to advance an additional 357 affordable housing units over the next five years and this includes 75 permanent supportive housing units and those are super important because that's what's truly needed to help folks who were recently unhoused. you know, be able to remain housed. We've worked with internal teams and community partners to close and remediate 258 encampments over the past year. This amounted to 42 tons of trash and debris with a lot of work by our community action team and mobile crisis unit. which made 740 unique contacts with individuals experiencing homelessness. This included referrals for 162 folks to mental health and substance abuse treatment, 111 housing referrals, and helped to reunify 26 people with family or support agencies. And that's incredibly important because that helped them receive the help they need. So we just wanted to Thank you for giving me a moment to really highlight a lot of this work, um, because, uh, we've been incredibly busy, but this is the work that our community has asked for, and that we really take a lot of pride in delivering and the budget is how we do it because it all requires funding and resources. Uh, and so next up, um. We are showing a long, uh, general fund, long term. forecast that is, well, our general fund is budgeted and in balance, both general fund and all of our funds for this fiscal year. We did, however, had to take a lot of work to get to this point. We were forecasting a deficit in the twenty seven, twenty eight year, largely related to the need to open an additional fire station in our community in order to make sure we had enough funding to do both that and all of the other things that we need to do. Plus. us like all other agencies pretty much in the state and a lot of folks in the nation saw a reduction in revenues or a slowdown in revenues and so while our costs went up our revenues slowed down and we know we have a new fire station to open in a couple of years so on March 3rd we brought forward a really comprehensive look at a number of reductions that we knew we would need to take to bring us back into balance and proposed about $1.1 million in reduction. So those were budget cuts that we went through very carefully to make sure we could provide on an ongoing basis to bring our spending within what we were forecasting to be our revenues in the future. We're really proud of the work. It took a lot of effort by every single department in our city to look very closely at our spending. Knowing that, you know, our funding, as I try to remind folks whenever an opportunity come up to talk about our funding sources, we fund ourselves through our citizens, through taxes. And so it's incredibly important that we are careful with our spending and that we look to our spending before looking to asking for more money from them. And so we took that process very seriously to come up with these reductions. We're really proud that there will be no layoffs as a result of these reductions. However, we are eliminating four and a half positions. Those were all vacant and some of them were held vacant very purposefully to make sure that they could be Considered as part of this reduction process. We saw this as essentially a right sizing to make sure that we are being very responsible going forward and made sure that we're constraining our budget growth. So we will talk a little bit about and you'll see in some of the information in the staff report that we constrained the the process we went through for considering increases to just normal operating costs a lot of them are passed through through contracts as well as any new items that we felt we needed to fund and ended up coming up with a Much smaller list and smaller amount than we have seen in prior years again, just knowing that's what we need to do to be fiscally responsible coming forward. So thank you for allowing me a chance to kick things off, highlight a lot of the amazing work and give just a preview of. what we went through to get to this point and we're really proud of what we've been able to put together and and to present to you all this evening and certainly happy to answer questions as we go along so thank you so much thank you very much that's a great uh entrance into this report and i love seeing the many pages in the beginning of this budget reports showing all of the wonderful things we've done this year and with that i'll pass it back to emily jackson

Thank you. Good evening, Council. I'm really happy to be here this evening. This item before you tonight is a culmination of several months of a lot of work with all of our departments. I want to take a moment before we dive into the details to thank all of our departments and staff who contributed towards this effort. A lot of them are in the room and hopefully some of them are taking some well-deserved time off before they come back in tomorrow morning. But this is truly a team effort. The budget obviously touches every single employee in our organization, and everybody contributes to this recommendation before you in some way. And so we're lucky to have such a great team and so much good partnership that helps support the finance department in delivering this to council every year. Like the city manager noted, we are seeking adoption of second year of the two year financial plan, which was initially adopted back in June of 2025. The focus of this document, this document is much smaller than the two year financial plan that you saw last year. And the reason for that is that this is truly just a supplement to what you adopted back in June of 2025. So the focus of the document is really on the changes compared to what we had initially expected when we put the 2527 financial plan together. As you're aware, many of the recommendations before you this evening were already discussed in the comprehensive budget preview that we provided on March 3rd. And so our hope is that we can keep the staff presentation relatively short this evening to allow for plenty of time for public comment from members of our community questions and deliberation from council. In total, the budget that we're seeking adoption of for all funds is just under 225 million. And so With that amount of money, it's really important that we answer all your questions and provide plenty of time for deliberation so you're all comfortable with the recommendations before you this evening. And with that, I'm going to kick it back over to Riley to walk through the details.

Thank you. The first slide I'd like to share tonight compares the recommended budget for next year with the year two assumption from the financial plan. Staff see a slightly improved revenue outlook with many adjustments both up and down, but the improvements largely driven by a correction to a conservative budget for development fees, which have been highly volatile and hard to forecast in recent years. expenditures are budgeted slightly up year over year and more than the revenue increase, and this is largely driven by a one-time basically an accounting adjustment transfer between the general fund and the capital outlay fund to close out the winter 2023 emergency storm projects. So after the use of fund balance, the recommended budget actually does indicate a surplus for the next year. And moving on to the forecast for the general fund retaining some of that surplus will actually be necessary in order to offset some of the one time increase in expenditures to open that fifth fire station. But in the long run, it does look like the previously forecasted deficit for the general fund has been closed out. I should point out that additional funding for the operating reserve, which is slightly below policy levels may also be necessary to retain in future years. Among the recommended actions necessary to close the deficit were the set of budget reductions that the city manager spoke to. These were reviewed and discussed in detail on March 3rd with the budget preview and based on council's direction, they were included in the recommended budget without change. These are the result of a very thoughtful, coordinated process with all departments and carefully designed to mitigate impacts to the community and to the city at large. Critically, as we've said, no layoffs. All positions recommended for elimination here were vacant, and most were vacant for quite some time. And the published document includes much more detail. We've shown high level here and happy to take any questions on those details. The budget also includes some cost increases, and this is somewhat of a departure from recent history. No across-the-board inflationary adjustments were made initially. Departments had to request each and every increase to line items with an analysis to support. The only across-the-board adjustment that we ultimately recommended was to fuel. We assumed a 20% increase for fuel prices citywide so that if we're wrong, we'll at least be wrong evenly throughout the year and we can come back to correct that at the right time. Also in the general fund, there's a number of many small lines from nearly every department because we were so broad in what was required to be brought forward as a budget request. But some representative items are critical public safety contracts, increased public outreach items, and the cost to generally maintain service levels. And one thing that was noted in the report is this exercise saved about $150,000 versus a pure CPI adjustment, or it resulted in about a 2% annual increase to operating expenditures budgets. So I think that that exercise was worthwhile. Within the water funds, the primary increase was source of supply or purchased water. In the sewer funds, we had a large increase recommended for the biosolids hauling contract. As the water resource recovery facility becomes mature, now fully online, staff have a better understanding of what those operations cost. In the parking funds the recommendation is largely driven by the cost to accept increased revenue from a new parking structure. And in the transit fund we're seeing the fuel price increases that we spoke to earlier and also increased activity from implementation of the short-range transit plan. What's typically presented in the budget is the significant operating budget changes and these are all the new things that have been recommended In the general fund, the recommendation is much, much lower than in recent years at about $300,000, about a quarter to a half of the $500,000 to $1.2 million in recent years. This includes critical safety investments like body-worn cameras and electrical panel inspections. It also includes policy-required items like a user fee study. And for the general fund, zero new full-time employees, although one position is reclassified upwards to address some recruitment challenges. In the water fund, there's a recommended one-time expenditure for water treatment plant coverage to assist with regulatory compliance. The water and sewer funds also include a shared allocation of a special projects manager, a new employee added, but fully offset with reductions to operating budgets. And the recommendation for the parking fund is a reorganization of five half-time parking compliance officers to two full-time. Moving on to major city goals, please report that 86% of tasks from the 2025-27 financial plan are on track, completed, or on track to be completed timely. And we have 17 tasks with language or timeline changes and just one task no longer recommended. And no significant issues with the original recommended work plans. So as indicated on March 3rd, there were some recommended changes, They've largely affect learning since work programs kicked off or externalities that we've since found out about. And with that, I'll hand it to our Assistant Director of Public Works for update on the capital budget.

Thank you, Riley. Madeline Casenta, assistant public works director. During this supplemental budget, we are not doing a full true-up like we did in a previous financial plan, but rather looking at aligning projects with anticipated project delivery. So one of the projects that we looked at was the 1042 Walnut project tenant improvements, which is the police station. This, we did not deprioritize or take any resources away from the project, but rather looked at what the funding need was currently and looked at where we were within the design phase. we currently are in a 12-month window where we're needing to really spend time on the design of that project and will not enter into construction until we hit the next financial year so looking at that we're looking at reallocating funding into projects that can currently use that funding including ruggedty park bridge abutments, the storm drain, some storm drain projects, California TAF roundabout and replacements of some pedestrian crossing improvements downtown among some others that are listed in your report. We also, in the CAP, I just wanted to highlight some of the big things that we are doing in the upcoming year, which includes some transportation, recreation, and downtown improvements, which also include replacement of the pergola in Mission Plaza, which you may have noticed we were working on earlier this year, but we'll be back again after concerts in the plaza and before the holiday season. Um, but in addition, um, we're planning for the 2027 paving project and as part of that, um, looking at curb ramps along the Grand Avenue corridor to see how we can upgrade some ADA improvements along that area for more details. Please feel free to ask any questions or reference the report. I'll pass it back.

Thank you, Madeline. So that concludes the presentation relative to the recommended budget. We did have two other items that the city manager highlighted in her introductory remarks. I'm gonna cover those really quickly and open it up for question deliberation from council after that. The first item in addition to adoption of the budget is just a quick update on SLOMA's progress towards their phase one grant funding requirements. The information about the progress, fairly significant progress that they've made so far is included on this slide. As a part of this item this evening, we're just recommending that you receive and discuss, if desired, the update and potential next steps, but we don't have a firm recommendation other than to note that our plan is to return for a conversation about potential additional funding with the year-end budget report next February once we have our audited numbers finalized. the next item that we wanted to bring your council's attention to this evening was our user fee cost recovery policy fiscal policies are typically adopted every two years with adoption of the two-year financial plan and so the user fee cost recovery was amended based upon the last user fee study and then adopted by council in June of 2025. Believe it or not, we are getting ready to do the next user fee study to comply with the make sure we're doing this every three years to study our fees and our processes for delivering certain services to the community. And so we wanted to take this opportunity before we get an RFP out on the streets to get a consultant on board to give council the opportunity to discuss, review and provide, if necessary, alternate direction to staff relative to cost recovery levels so that we can make sure to factor that in to the upcoming user fee study. I think it's important to note that per Council's request during the last process, we will be making two stops with Council on the user fee study. We plan to come back after we work with the consultant and all of our staff and have calculated what the fees should be consistent with cost recovery levels as stated in the policy. We're planning to come back and preview the recommendations for Council in March of next year and then take any feedback from Council at that point, make any necessary adjustments, and then return in April for adoption of the fee schedule so that we can wait the proper amount of time, 60 days, before the fees can go into effect on July 1st. This item is is a placeholder this evening in case Council would like to provide additional or alternate direction to staff relative to cost recovery goals. And this slide includes just kind of a high level summary of what the policy currently says. It focuses both on kind of conceptual reasons that would favor low versus high cost recovery for certain different types of services, but also identifies more specific cost recovery levels for individual fees or categories of fees. So with that, that concludes our presentation this evening and we are back on the recommendations and would invite at this point any questions, comments from council and community.

Will we do the museum presentations as update now or later?

I believe we're handling that as a part of general public or public comment.

Okay, great. Thank you. Just making sure. Well, thank you for a very thorough report. And I also thank you for just spending some time. I know not every single one of us, but most of us kind of have 12,000 questions ahead of time. So I appreciate you spending that time. And I also appreciate you looking at March versus February when we're in the middle of the major city goal priorities and figuring out what to do with the budget next. So thank you very much. City Manager.

Thank you very much. I've got one after having a chance to confer with staff on the question we talked about earlier, which was when and how we would potentially install some speed calming features on near Broad Street. We do have a potential solution. And because it's somewhat, you know, because it's budget related, I thought it might be helpful to have clarification and perhaps a request of council for direction and ahead of when we get public comment, just so folks can hear what we're thinking of in case there's anybody here who would like to speak to that issue. So with that, perhaps I could ask Madeline Kacinta, our assistant public works director, or really anybody over here who might want to be able to come up and provide more information.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right.

I think I'm just going to stand here the rest of the night. Madeline Cosentos, Assistant Public Works Director. Yeah, I just wanted to give a little clarification on that project and how we might be able to implement some quick build on within that corridor. So Lawton and Funxton Avenue is currently within the 2026 roadway ceiling project and so one of the thoughts behind potentially installing something like a temporary speed hump in that area would be to wrap it up within that project. And so that would likely work if it was a quick build, making sure that we are evaluating and doing more long term education outreach for the long term need of if we were doing a permanent installation of a speed hump or something more long term that would stay. But that's always the, the larger concern is if we're really impacting the community, we want to make sure we're doing the education and outreach.

if it's a temporary feature that allows staff to be a little bit more nimble if it's not working out we can always remove and take a look at that thank you uh vice mayor yeah just wanted to quickly follow up with the city attorney just for the record um because lawton and funston is more than a half mile from my residence uh am i allowed to be a part of this conversation uh since it's now removing it from the discussion of broad street in general

If it's more than a half mile from from your house, I don't see a concern there. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you and thank you for that clarification as well about the project list and Morris is going. All right. Um, city manager.

Thank you. One additional clarification relating to SLOMA and their grant agreement. We have a few opportunities to talk about the phase two portion of what they have requested. We think we should take another look when we come back with our year end results, which we typically do around October. We think this year may be more like November, December in order to make sure we have a little more accurate on our reporting that would give us a better sense of where we ended the current fiscal year and whether we may have a potentially unassigned fund balance available we would not be recommending we actually allocate or say appropriate money at that time typically we like to do that just two times a year when we do our budget and then when we do our second quarter or mid-year budget report that typically comes back to you all in February, and so what we would say, if we get to that point, and there's lots of ifs and we receive direction, we would go work on an amendment to the agreement and try to have that back in February. so that's kind of what we're thinking depending on how we end the year and what the direction is at that point in time about potential future allocations of that funding we usually do spend a fair amount of time talking about year end and where unassigned fund balance may go if our audit confirms that that's the funding we have available so that's why it's important for us to do things in that sequence we get a sense of where we ended we make sure we get the audited results before we actually appropriate any money which happens later in February. So hopefully that makes sense as well.

That does. Thank you. Thank you. And there's the timeline aspect and if there's money. All right. With that, any initial questions before we go to public comment? Council Member Boswell.

Thank you. Just a few. First, I'm happy to see that we've got a budget that is balanced and maybe even puts us a little tiny little bit in the black for the following year. Of course, I'm looking out at the year after that and seeing the brackets again showing us potentially in a deficit. And I know we continue to be worried about inflation and inflationary effects on construction. A couple of things that we're doing to get ourselves in balance on this current budget cycle are the no base CPI adjustment for the budgets and then also essentially eliminating some unbilled positions. That's good, but that's harder to do a second time, isn't it? so when we're looking at the the next financial plan and the next set of budgets we're going to be in a more difficult position am i thinking i'm just trying to think a little bit ahead so i just want to make sure i'm thinking about that correctly

Yeah, I think that's a, that's a really good question. Um, potentially I, you know, we, as Riley noted during his presentation, things have performed better this year than we had initially expected. And so we're trying to balance the optimism and the cautious, uh, you know, with cautious budgeting on for on a go forward basis. Things are a little bit wild out there. The market is responding in ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to respond and it's hard to know how long that will last. You know, I will say that we spent months on identifying budget reductions and the intent was that um they were things that we would be able to get rid of and continue to sustain operations at the same level that we're currently providing them today um you know i i would say in a lot of cases we've uh i don't know that anything was easy to cut i should say that but we've cut you know the quote unquote easier things and so it certainly makes it a little bit more difficult as we go further. And if we need to go through that exercise again, I do expect that it would be more difficult than it was the time before. But one of the things that we heard from departments and one of the things that we did internally within finance is we took a look at what do we what have we historically relied on consultants for versus what do we do in house? And so You know, I can say in my own department, we came up with a pretty small handful of things that we've been contracting out that we've determined that we can do in-house, probably for less money than we were paying somebody else to do it. And so, you know, The reduction exercises are also a really good opportunity to look at how we do business. It had been a while since we had looked at how we had produced, for example, the state controller street report, which we're legally required to do. Back in the day, it made a lot of sense to contract it out and we realize that today it doesn't make sense. And so we're going to do it in house. And so, again, I think nothing, nothing is an easy reduction. And I think that, yes, if, if we, if we are in a position to need to reduce more, it will be harder every time that we have to do it. But. part of the reason for taking action now is to mitigate against the potential for future higher deficit and higher number of necessary recommended reductions. Thanks.

The TAF roundabout project, if I recall correctly, we're estimating about 2.5 million of increased costs there. That's part of one of our budget adjustments is to push some funding over to that project, is that just because the cost of everything has gone up? Is that why we're seeing an increase in that or has there been, it hasn't been a redesign or something of that nature, right? It's just an inflationary cost?

I think they may want to phone a friend.

Brian Nelson, City Engineer. Thank you for the question. Yeah, it's effectively to accommodate the increase in cost escalation that we've observed through the design with the updated 100% estimate received from the consultant just a few months ago. So that's the, no design changes have created that increase. It's really just the cost escalation of construction that we've observed over numerous years.

Great, great. Thanks. Hopefully when the eventually we go out to bid and the bids come in, we'll have been very conservative in our estimates.

Yeah, the intention is that we won't need any more money, but we still have yet to bid the project and see what those bids look like too. So we're looking at that probably later in the year.

Great, thank you. And I think City Manager wanted to add in on that.

Thank you. Not on the cost escalations on the specific project. Thank you. But back on your question related to the process of budget reductions and next steps. Councilmember Boswell, I really appreciate the question because I think we're trying to provide a little bit of insight into what we went through to come up with the list of reductions and what things will look like going forward if revenues don't significantly increase because the reality, as you mentioned, is what we've presented is a list of reductions that we don't believe will create significant impacts to the community. What that means is more reductions, if we do need to do them in the future, will likely or undoubtedly create impacts to the community and they would come. It depends on where we're looking at cuts, but Everything we do is to serve a member of the community in some way, or run certain programs that people are using. And so if we do get in a position where we need to make additional reductions, which I think we don't anticipate needing to do that to continue our course. But if we were to add new programs, as an example, if we're looking to add something new to our slate of programs, if we if we're looking to significantly increase a program or staffing in a particular area, that's when we're going to start looking at reductions that will be needed in other areas that will come with a cost to most likely a service that's being used in the community. So I just want to kind of forecast that a little bit for anybody listening now or in the future for our next financial planning process, because our financial planning process is when we love hearing from everybody in the community about what they would like to see us do and accomplish over the next two years. In a significantly constrained budget situation, it's a lot harder to do that without having to make cuts other places that will impact somebody. Um, and so we're just trying to let folks know that that may be coming. It just, it depends a little bit on what we would be looking to add. It depends a lot on our economic picture going forward. Um, as well as other choices that we could hear from our community. Um. If people want something new, and we can't get there without making cuts that will create potentially harm somewhere or cut surfaces that somebody really wants it or needs. Um, there are other revenue generating things that we can talk about as well. But again, that's coming from the people themselves, meaning we would be looking at, you know, other revenue sources are typically, um, taxes in some form, uh, or fees. And so that's just the struggle we constantly have around the work that we do. We want to provide the services that folks are needing and asking for, but we're obviously constrained in that. But I just want to reflect a little more and thank you for the question so that it's helping get that message out as we were already thinking about our next financial plan for sure. And so it's never too early to start contemplating what might happen then.

Thank you. Thanks for that additional clarification. I mean, definitely the decisions we make tonight about our next year budget affect the kinds of decisions we can make next year when we go into our next financial planning cycle. So just the last question about the cost recovery principles, my understanding. So that's that's unchanged from the previous set of principles. That's correct. I do recall some discussions this year about challenges with large-scale events and user fee recovery on large-scale events. Is there any thing you need from us tonight that wouldn't be in here that would be helpful direction on that or anything to discuss?

I don't know that there is specific direction that we need from council at this point on on that item. That is 1 of the things that we have put on paper that we are actively trying to address through this new user fee study. And so our 1st step is going to happen before we even get a consultant on board and in the next. couple of weeks, I'm hoping that we'll be able to pull together all of our departments who are involved in supporting or preparing for events in some way. And this could include First Amendment events, other types of special events that are not normal and planned. And, you know, we're going to have we're going to kind of do an audit of what are all the things that we do, what can we reasonably recover costs for reasonably recover costs for and identify any potential holes. And so, you know, that that that may result in additional fees or restructuring of the fees. But, you know, our. Absent any direction to the contrary in the user fee cost recovery policy, our intent is to calculate the fees that would require, that would recover the city's costs. And so that's, again, absent any changes to the policy, that's what we would plan to do and bring to council next March for any feedback that you have before adoption in April.

Great. Thanks, Anne. Answer my question. I'm good, thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Shoresman. Thank you. Yeah, I have a couple of different questions, but since Council Member Boswell was just talking about cost recovery, I'll start there. I noticed that in the mid-range cost recovery activities, A particular event that we don't host in the city anymore is still listed and the triathlon is listed and I'm just wondering if that is being left there for a potential comeback or is it meant to represent some other type of event that would be similar to that? Or if we should maybe replace it with, you know, I don't know, something more along the lines of what Council Member Boswell saying is that supposed to represent like a large scale event.

I believe Dr. Avakian will come up and share some input on that too. Thank you.

uh good evening thanks for uh the question greg evakian director for parks and recreation uh it's twofold one little fingers crossed maybe a little bit on that as as i hope but um when we modify this we didn't really rearrange or add any new subject matter we kind of slid a couple from a high to a low or a mid at our last financial plan meeting but we didn't officially adopt or redo the entire structure for a cost recovery. So it's still listed listed on there. But I think this is our opportunity as we circle around for our next financial plan to look at that and probably just generic terminology for maybe a large city style event. Lunar New Year, for example, has become something of a of all play that we used to do with the triathlon. So that's an opportunity to kind of look at those things.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, that would it would make sense to me to like generalize the term a little bit more rather than

Stating some very specific type of 40 years of tradition was hard to kind of erase that, I think, for all of us emotionally. So I think we might be ready there. Yeah.

Yeah. Special place in my heart, too. Would love to see it come back. But no times change.

No worries.

OK, thank you for that. Then just jumping around just a little bit. It wasn't really talked about in this particular report. I know we've talked about it many, many times before, but our pension liabilities. Does this particular budget, does it anticipate making just our regular required payments to CalPERS or does it anticipate any additional payments?

So, uh, the, the budget presumes that we will continue to make our normal payments are unfunded liability payments. Uh, those are about 2526 million dollars a year. Um, and our ability to make our additional discretionary payments relies upon the availability of unassigned fund balance at the end of the year. So, I think Council has given pretty good direction on prioritization of use of unassigned fund balance. You have a CalPERS and unassigned fund balance. I'm getting the name of that wrong, but you do have a fiscal policy, which you most recently adopted again in June of 25 that prioritizes CalPERS pension payments as the first use of unassigned fund balance at the end of any given year.

Okay, so kind of looking ahead, sort of like Council Member Boswell does, the better you all get at predicting how much we're going to have at the end of the year or not, the potentially less likely there will be for those additional payments that we have been lucky to be able to make in the past. Correct. And we did we removed the $2 million placeholder for the trust. And didn't we decide to remove that at a previous meeting recently?

Yes. We unassigned it, and we are including it in our 2526 ADP to CalPERS. So the ADP just from the general fund will be about $4.4 million, where it's normally about $2.4 million, so a one-time $2 million bump.

Okay, and we are regular ADP payments would be the amount that we have to pay to CalPERS is each year is that number is created based on increases in our in our regular in our employee pool and our staffing costs correct so it, it goes up incrementally over the years we have.

um increases in salaries and benefits costs and things like yeah yeah and it's important to note that that's something that's directed by us as an organization so the adp is entirely discretionary it's above and beyond What we are required to pay to CalPERS every year for a number of years, we started making the back in fiscal year 2018 19. we've made about we've made over 28Million in thus far. So we're on a good path, but the, the, the amount was relatively stagnant for a number of years. And about 2 years ago, we had a discussion about inflating. the ADP so that it was it was having the same impact even as the pension liability grew with the increased number of staff and increase the ongoing increase in compensation due to cost of living adjustments and other things.

Right. Forgive me. I use the term ADP and I didn't mean that. I meant the required payments that we have to make are those incrementally raised by CalPERS to when they give us the number each year.

Yes. So we make a normal payment and then an unfunded accrued liability payment and CalPERS tells us what those are.

Right. Okay. Sure.

Thank you, director Jackson, just to get you to finish your thought there with our ADP is, I believe we gave direction to continue to apply the escalator to that ADP so when we're determining it we're adding additional to that and just want to make sure that that direction had been given in the previous meeting.

Yes, I think we're very clear on that. And our recommendation, just like it was back with unassigned fund balance from 24-25, I anticipate our plan is that our recommendations for use of unassigned fund balance will factor in what the ADP should be, including the inflator, based upon staffing.

Thank you so much, and thank you.

yeah and assuming that's assuming that we have enough money at the end of the year to do an adp on top of the required amount yeah okay thank you um one last question it's kind of maybe a little bit more of a specific question about the proposed changes to one of the work items in particular um it's on page 343 of the packet under the cultural vitality economic resilience and fiscal sustainability and i believe Director Jackson, you can probably answer this one because it's the 5D about the business license. I know you did this past year, I believe it was, or maybe it was two years ago now, but you've done a lot of work on the collection of our business tax and refining that process and getting more backed payments, if you will. People caught up on their business licenses over the last year. I'm curious what the rewording of that language means. It sounds like you're anticipating even doing some more work on that process.

Yes, so I would say that we we've made a lot of good progress. Part of that is because we're spending more money to mail regular communications out to people. We I think. We've done what we can do at the staff level. I think we can, we're still working. We're planning to work as soon as the busy season of business licenses has passed us this year with our communications team to improve the website to just make sure that information is reorganized and more accessible to business operators within the community. Um, but I think we've really nibbled around the edges of what we can do without any council involvement. And so there are a number of issues and that we've identified related to our ability to enforce the municipal code that we, we would like to, we're planning to do a study session with council on, um. in early 2027. And I think it's going to be an opportunity to get some, to kind of identify some of the issues. Um, we already have in mind some proposed solutions to some of those. Some of those are things that we can do on our own, and we are doing them on our own. But there are things that are going to require direction and a certain comfort level, even if it's not, you know, amendments to the muni code or passage of a resolution that we need to. We need to have a good sense of what councils comfort level is, especially as it relates to things like enforcement efforts.

okay thank you for that clarification i would have thought that you would have checked that one off your list so when i saw more things on there i was curious what they would be so thank you we got a lot of ideas now that you have a lot of experience you have a lot of ideas all right thank you so much thank you looking forward to those council member marks

Thank you. Um, yeah, I had a question about the fire station. So we have actually two that we're talking about, right? We have the temporary fire station, uh, out there in Avila ranch development area, and then we have fire station number five. And so I just would like a little bit of clarity about, uh, in terms of the, uh, this budget and then the upcoming budget, what exactly are we talking about? When you say the fire station, what do you mean?

Yes, thank you for the question. When we talk about staffing an additional fire station, we do mean staffing at the interim station that's planned to be built within the Avalo Ranch development. Um, we do have some planning efforts budgeted in the capital improvement plan for a more permanent 5th fired. Uh, that's it will also be it would replace the interim station and avala ranch. The reason for the additional planning efforts is to identify a more ideal location. so this one will serve the southern part of the city but um it would be better if we had that station located say closer to tank farm road in order to have just quicker access to other parts of our city that also Drive a lot of our call volume. So we're really looking at response times within, um, all of our city and seeing where it is that we need to, like, where would be the ideal location? Um, for this 5th fire station, the avlo ranch development project. Um. had uh pursued and identified this is an interim station an idea that it would be kind of a stop gap um that concept really came out of a study done back in 2016. I think there may be somebody in the audience who is a little familiar with that um study around the need for an additional fire station and it did identify the potential for an interim location in an area once development reached a certain area and so that's really what we're talking about today or what we're planning for opening at the essentially the beginning of 2028 to serve that part of of the city but we know that's not the best location and so we want to plan for and look at a really a larger permanent location that would be more ideal

So the immediate budget, um, uh, how do I say the need immediate budget need is for the interim, and then there should be some money allocated for the planning effort for a station.

Correct that's right and that permanent station will also require a very large capital contribution. Um, I'm not sure that anybody really builds a fire station. That's of the scale that we would need for less than 30Million dollars as an example. And I'm probably thinking it's probably more like 50 and now it's been a few seconds. So that's 52Million. So you get where I'm going with, uh. So that will be a large planning and capital undertaking for us as we go through the future upcoming years.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. I had a question about it's a user fee question about what we're charging for, or the fees that we're requiring for charging EVs in the parking structure. Is that included in this budget? Or is this something that's just being planned at this point?

I'm happy to well, I've got my mic and light on happy to take that on. Our parking rates are not addressed in our user fee studies. Generally. Those are done through a separate rate study process. The ev charging rates are actually established by the city manager pursuant to a prior. uh direction from the city council and so we are continuing to evaluate our charging rates that are existing in our current what's called lot four which is in the marsh street structure at the bottom floor and then also the rates that are currently in effect in our new structure in the cultural arts district parking garage and we just had a conversation about this yesterday actually and are continually looking at ways of refining and how we might set those in a way that will both encourage people to use them as well as make sure that we're recovering costs and doing it appropriately from that standpoint. So it wouldn't be addressed in this upcoming user fee study.

Okay, so but the EV charge, the EV charging is in the user fee.

It is not.

Oh, it isn't? No. I thought it was in there. Okay, thank you. Let's see, in terms of the going back to the business licenses, again, we keep our I keep some of us keep saying we need to list each rental unit separately. And i'm wondering how that is reflected or not reflected in the budget we're looking at right now it's somewhat tied up with the rental registry idea in that it would be kind of a first step right now the my understanding is that if someone owns a bunch of rentals, they just need to have one business license. And so that makes it hard for tenants and residents in general to know whether their landlord is actually paying that business license. So to what extent is an effort toward holding landlords more accountable on that level included in this budget document we're looking at right now?

Yeah, so there's not specific appropriation recommendations to move that effort forward. That is 1 of the items that we would like to discuss with council in the upcoming business license. Study session is the question of. How should business licenses be structured? The code currently requires that you have a business license for each physical location that you have. So we've got a couple of pretty good examples of that in the city right now. We've got Scout, Black Horse, and Slow DoCo off the top of my head, which all have multiple locations, same business. they all have individual business licenses for each of their physical addresses. So six among the three businesses. We we don't see the same thing with residential rentals. And so that's that's that's one of the things that we would like to discuss with council is what should the requirement be? We've heard, you know, in the past very much along the lines of what you're saying that we should require a business license for each physical address regardless of business type and so that is an option it's also an option may not meet the needs of you know a potential of rental housing enforcement but there is an option to also just have the property management company have one license and then everything under under that license for all the properties that are owned. So different agencies do it differently and they're both options and there's upsides and downsides to both. I think the difficulty that we have and one of the things that we discussed as part of the rental registry study session a couple of months ago is that we don't have a way of knowing for sure where all of the rental houses are. And so we try to gather information when a rental housing business is opening, when they apply for a new license. We attempt to get a listing from them of all of the addresses that they have that they're planning to cover under that business license. But we can only go on the information that they voluntarily tell us, and we don't have the ability or the capacity to go out and do an audit of all of the rental housing properties within the city limits. But that is one of the topics for consideration in the study session.

Yeah, well, study sessions are great. But it's also wonderful to get things done sometimes. So let's see if I have some more questions. Ah, let's see. The request that we got through an email for having some funds set aside for ADA curb cutouts in the neighborhoods. Is that something that can be accommodated within this budget or is this something that Council would have to direct?

Um, I may want to phone a friend on that again, but, you know, I, like, Madeline highlighted in her presentation of the aside from the, the really large scale capital projects that we do in some years transportation infrastructure is. one of the single largest kind of categories of work that we do in any given year. And regardless of what the actual project is, there's always pedestrian improvements and pedestrian improvements included in those projects, even if it's just a paving project that's intended to support Um, you know, bicycles and cars, there's, there's, we, we usually have to touch a sidewalk and we'll do a curb ramp replacement at that point as well. And so wherever you see transportation projects, I think it's reasonable to assume that there's some curb ramp work being done in that area as well. But I'll, I'll let Brian, it looks like provide more details.

Yeah, thank you for the question. Brian Nelson, city engineer. We do incorporate ADA improvements into our roadway paving projects. So by federal law, we actually have to upgrade curb ramps if we're paving the adjacent street. So a recent example of that is the paving work on Sacramento and Tank Farm where we upgraded the ramps on those roadways. Those ramps, in some cases, they look like they exist and they don't need to be upgraded, but oftentimes federal standards get more stringent over the years. So even though there are ramps that are existing, we do have to replace them to current standards, which basically look like specific widths for the ramps and the landings as well as the slopes that meet the professional or the public rights away guide published by the federal government. So in addition to that, we also look at incorporating as funding allows some ongoing ramp improvements that we've received from the community. So over the years, we do get emails, we get requests for corners that don't have ramps, that there's no physical way to get down to the street level or are inaccessible to those with mobility challenges. And in recent history, we've capitalized on grant funding if it's available to incorporate of smaller projects to just do neighborhood ramp improvements where we can. And sometimes in addition to the grant funding, we utilize completed projects funds if available to do that. So, as we look forward to the next funding the budget year, you know we can look for opportunities to to utilize completed projects funding to make some headway on those. Those neighborhood rent requests could look like surveys design work and trying to leverage some future capital funding to implement some of those with future paving projects, for example.

OK, so I noticed that the ADA ramp update for the downtown is called out as a separate item, but not for the rest of the city or the residential area.

There's a sidewalk maintenance capital improvement project. Yeah, that incorporates both street tree sidewalk replacements, so uplifts of the sidewalk caused by street trees that create, you know, slope issues or grade separation from street trees. It also in some cases does replace curb ramps on a, you know, one off basis. So within the budget, there is an item in there. There is one curb ramp we've identified that we'd like to replace within that funding amount within that sidewalk item. Yes.

Thank you. I think that's all the questions that I have.

I'm going to ask a real quick follow-up to that too. So if someone is in their neighborhood and they see that a curb ramp, the yellow placard is coming up or something of that sort, there's a crack that's not good. Anyway, going to their ask slow or reaching out to us online, I mean, that would be the way to maybe get one of them taken care of quicker if there's an actual problem near someone's home, right?

Yeah, it's very helpful to know. So we have thousands of curb ramps, thousands of corners. We don't always know what the specific issues users are encountering is in the urgency. So ask slow is a great resource to receive those requests. Email is oftentimes a way we get those requests in. What email should we use? uh the the public works email address or phone number any staff um email address city engineer director whoever it will get funneled to the right place there's a the contact link on the website we'll get you there great thank you so much yeah all right vice mayor

Yeah, thank you to my colleagues for all the wonderful questions so far. Um, just 1 more question on the fee recovery and this is probably for director Avakian here. Uh, we'd had a kind of lengthy discussion about, um, potentially looking at sort of tiered rate structures for residents and non residents. And there's some discussion here under number 5 about, um. Cost recovery activities less than 100% should have a differential in rates between residents and non-residents. And I guess my question is just kind of about the study that's coming up and whether or not we're going to look at some of the things that tend to fill up quickly, like swim lessons and childcare. If there's any way to kind of ensure that that tiering system sort of encourages that residents are, if not first in line, at least kind of more likely to get to those spots.

the prioritized thank you stole my word thank you uh well great question and i think this is another opportunity we just for the first time incorporated the resident non-resident fee in our last study and right now still assessing how that goes and in the first year of act um Other agencies that we did survey throughout this process have even a pre-registration timeline. So it could be something incorporating, especially like a swim lesson program that's highly impacted, not a lot of opportunity because it's kind of a seasonal format and small ratios of classes that you could do. Maybe it's a two-week early bird registration for residents, and then you fill in after that. It'll just come down to probably some equity and kind of assessing that on value and fairness. At the same time, we want to kind of look at what other agencies are experiencing. Is it successful? Does it make it more complicated? So it's not just necessarily about the fee recovery, but also an equitable access to our programs.

Absolutely. I know in other communities that I've been a member of, there's oftentimes sort of a recreation card that you utilize in order to get access to all the different recreation facilities. And I'm wondering if that's something that could help unlock being able to determine easily and accessing all these different resources on a resident or non-resident basis. Those things are available to the non-residents, but kind of identify them as a non-resident. So when they... go and they tap it or use it however they're going to. It kind of helps navigate that system.

I've used that system I guess about 25 years ago. But yeah, it was valued at that point. I think the other portion of this is looking at our scholarship And also, like some of our school district students might be from out of the area, but we consider them residents because they're within our school district for most of our programs. And just kind of, again, finding all those kind of punch lists and making sure that we're being accessible for everybody.

Really glad that's on your radar, making sure that all of our school-aged kids have access to all of those resources at a resident rate.

That's one of your priorities and one of our priorities.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. And can you stay right there for one more minute? Kind of tying along with that same conversation, we were talking about the child care and different low, medium, high as far as the recovery. And at one point, we said child care is one of the high priorities, but it's gone into the medium cost recovery. And so I think you said the key word right there, which is the scholarship. Because one of the things that we were concerned, I was concerned about was if people are coming from low income households and yet having to pay the full high price, I was worried about that. Now, do we know anything about the CAPSLO subsidies? Are those still here? How does that work for someone that's coming and saying, I need some help?

Yeah, we're in a good place right now in our area, both our school district, CAPSLO, and the city, thanks to the financial contributions by the council on our scholarships, multiple avenues and tools they can apply for. So we have our city scholarships around 39 to 40,000 that we budget every year that are utilized for qualified families. And they get a different tier based on their household income. So it's either $1,000 or a $500 per child kind of opportunity. CAPSLO also has their funding, which they pay directly to the families. So we help administer that, but it's really through CAPSLO, so it's removed from the city's responsibility, but we track that as well. And then the school district also provides opportunities. for supporting their clienteles. So it depends on the program with what we do. We have before school, we have our TK program and our afterschool programs, and they all have different tiers and categories based on that. So it's a little complicated, but we have a lot of different opportunities for families to apply. And I don't know if they double dip or triple dip or have that opportunity, but I know that we can track our city scholarships. And then we also track the CAPSLO because we help facilitate those. Yeah, thank you.

Perfect. Thank you. Well, thank you to my colleagues. You've asked all of my questions short of that last one. So I do have one more question, I think, around the business licenses, but I think I'll come back to that later. So with that, we're going to do a five-minute seventh inning stretch, and then we'll be back.

Thank you. Which is great. Thank you.

thank you

Oh, you are? Yeah, we'll be there.

Thank you all. We'll get right back started for public comment. City Clerk.

We have five speakers. We'll start off with Stephen Barish, followed by Leslie Halls and Leigh Ann Standish.

Good evening members of the city council. Um, as you know, I was the 1st, public member of the city's finance committee for over 5 years. I had access to a lot of the city records and I really appreciate Michelle's comment about CalPERS because that is our 1 single largest debt in the city. I've kept kind of quiet for three years since I got off that committee, but I'd like to get some feedback, not just tonight necessarily, about how we're going to deal with our city's insolvency. Now, insolvency means in simple terms that we own more in debts than we have in assets. We've had the city buildings appraised in the last 10 years and then updated. Insolvency is kind of like you filling out a loan application. You have to list all your assets. You have to list all your liabilities. I'm sure some of you have gone out for loans in the last 5 years, and it's been really, really difficult. The banks have been very nitpicky on who they give loans to, because they don't want credit. Extended for too long, but insolvency creates a problem in terms of our borrowing rates. It creates a problem with review of our assets and our priorities for physical improvements. I happen to be both an architect and have a business degree and I really sense the city has not really tackled. the long-term insolvency issues. We're not going bankrupt, that's not an issue, but we are in a situation where our debt is becoming larger and larger. For example, CalPERS, the interest on our unfunded liability is over a million two a month. I mean, it's really high. If you're paying 30 million or so a year, you can see how that interest on the unfunded liability has compounded. I think we should really have some kind of focus group on the city console, looking at our long term debt obligations. Outside of what kind of projects we think the public needs wants or desires, because this insolvency problem has been kicked down the road for many years. And unfortunately, this console is saddled with having to deal with the impacts of that insolvency in terms of bond ratings. and in terms of dealing with outside vendors. So it's not going to go away unless we really start focusing on it kind of soon. I'm done. I've got 15 seconds left. Thank you.

No buzzer for you. Thank you so much.

Good evening. My name is Leslie Halls. I've lived here since 1979 and served on a various number of committees over the years. I was very pleased that our Councilwoman Shoresman asked about the public employees retirement system debt because I want to address that. Nobody from staff here said anything about it. As you noticed, this was not on the agenda, I guess, but Michelle, thank you for bringing it up. You've inherited an enormous fiscal mess. It's not of your making. You inherited it. We owe over $260 million to CalPERS. $260 million. Let that sink in. That's a lot of debt for a city of 47,700 people. The interest alone on this debt is over a million dollars a month. A million dollars a month bleeding out of our city just to pay the interest, like the interest on your credit card that you never want to pay off. Like I say, you didn't create this mess, but you got to deal with it because now we're on the state's watch list and we're looking at insolvency. I don't think you want to be on the city council when the state calls this due and says pay up. The time to tackle this elephant in the room is now, and you're not going to do it by just leaving four positions vacant. You're not going to do it by just trimming the edges, if you will. We need to make some serious cuts in staffing because it is staffing that is driving this debt. This is in addition to other debts like for parking garages and the like. The more debt we have, the higher our interest payments are when we go for another bond. It's very simple. I think what you need to do is consider some cuts across the board, maybe 10 percent. There have been a lot of people hired in the last seven or eight years to do specific projects. Maybe those jobs aren't needed anymore. I know some of you are rolling your eyes at me at the thought of cutting staffing, but you don't want to cheat these city employees out of their retirement benefits that they've been working for and they have paid into. Don't think the state is going to come along and give you millions of dollars to pay this off when other cities are doing a better job and are not facing these kinds of problems. Again, this is not something you created. You inherited this mess and I've been following it for almost 20 years now and nobody has had the courage to say, we got to stop and take a look at this. I think you should really redraft this entire budget, take a look at where you can cut, A lot of these cuts will not impact the average person out on the street. It's going to impact people here at City Hall. It's going to impact some of these department heads, all of whom showed up tonight. But you know what? If they want to have a retirement, we need to make these tough decisions. And I guarantee you, with the good you have done for this city, with bike lanes, transportation, roundabouts, childcare, and everything else, nobody's going to oppose you because you decided to tackle the hard issues. Thank you.

Thank you.

After Leigh Ann Standish, we have Ermina Karim and Amy Lynn Hildebrand.

Well, greeting Council and Mayor. My name is Leigh Ann Standish. I'm the Executive Director of SLOMA, and I'm here to follow on Emily's update about our project. As you know if you've read our report, which is extensive and very pretty, Saloma has secured all the permits and entitlements we need for phase one. Our interior demolition is underway. Things are happening. We're on track for a grand opening in July of 27 and we couldn't have moved this fast without the incredible support of City staff every step of the way. The community has shown up in a really big way. The response has been extraordinary, thanks in large part to the City's early investment and enthusiasm. SLOMA has raised over $8.5 million from 32 million donors, hitting 100% of our construction goal for Phase 1. Our donor community is wonderfully diverse, spanning the private sector, foundations, and hundreds of individual supporters who believe in what we're building. Great things are coming to Downtown SLO. The expanded museum is going to be a real engine for downtown vitality. We're projecting more than 100,000 visitors in our first year alone, bringing energy, foot traffic and spending to local businesses while submitting San Luis Obispo's well-earned reputation as a cultural destination. And we're keeping the momentum going. The thing scares me. I had to stop and look. Even during construction, SLOMA stays committed with our community through partnerships with Downtown SLO, local businesses, and cultural organizations. We're continuing to activate public art, hosting pop-up programming, and launching a marketing campaign that keeps SLOMA visible and exciting right through opening day. We're thrilled about what's next. As phase one construction moves forward, we're looking ahead to phase two focused on property acquisition to secure SLOMA's future as a free, accessible resource for every resident and visitor. We're excited to work with the City towards securing additional commitment this fall and helping to realize this community gem for generations. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor Stewart and council members. As co-board chair of SLOMA and chair of the expansion project, I want to begin by thanking this council for its leadership. It's hard to believe it was less than eight months ago that you made a commitment to invest in a bold vision. And over the last six weeks, as DEMO has been really underway, you've been able to tangibly see that vision turn into reality. So projects like this do not move forward because of a single vote. So for that, I want to offer my sincere thanks to city staff. As you heard from Leanne, we've made incredible progress, and that's because many public servants have spent countless hours helping navigate permits, solve problems, answer questions, and really work collaboratively towards this shared goal. we are deeply grateful for the partnership. So I'm a little tired because a few hours ago I returned from New York and on Sunday I had the opportunity to visit the newly reopened and absolutely awe-inspiring Studio Museum in Harlem. And as I took in the space, and they've got this beautiful representation of the timeline, It's been a 60-year journey into this new home. It struck me that that museum wasn't really about a stunning building. It was the culmination of decades of community belief, philanthropy, and civic leadership. The city's November commitment helped signal that this project matters, and in return, as Leanne shared, the community has had an incredible response. What excites me most is that the return on the city's modest investment, which currently is about 4% of the total funds raised to date, will be measured not only in dollars, but in an ROI of experiences. Families gathering downtown, children experiencing art for the first time, artists being able to see their work in their community, visitors spending more time in our downtown, and future generations inheriting a community asset that they can be proud of. And while tonight is an update, I will leave you with this thought. Momentum matters. The progress we are celebrating today was made possible because leadership came early. The city investment signals confidence. Confidence drives philanthropy and philanthropy creates a lasting community asset in the heart of our downtown. So as we move into this next phase of the effort, our focus, as Leanne noted, is shifting to securing this long-term future, a long-term future for this community asset. We look forward to continuing this conversation with you in the coming months. And for tonight, I will end with a simple thank you.

Thank you. And lastly.

Amy Lynn Hildebrand.

thank you city council for taking public comments and i do want to commend some things that you have done you have been quote careful with your spending you have been aiming towards right sizing you are aiming towards being fiscally responsible and you have a quote balanced budget unquote I grew up in San Luis and I want to stay here. I have friends that leave this city because they can't afford this city. I have friends who can live here because they've been here a long time, but their children cannot live here. I'm concerned. That's why I'm here tonight. I'm here to beg you. to look at this again. I want to commend you, Michelle Shorman, for asking some tough questions about that debt. The debt interest alone is $1.2 million per month. I can't fathom that kind of money, even though my bachelor's is from Cal Poly in business administration. And I want to ask you a very important question, all of you. What could you spend on with $1.2 million more a month? I want you to think about it a lot. And I want you to consider the impact of compound interest, which makes every single month worse. And I want you to think about people like me that are horrified at the idea of living the community they grew up in, they birthed their child in, and the thought that many people are leaving this community because it's becoming absolutely inaffordable. And I'm not alone. But some of my friends are working two jobs, some of them are working three because we love this Community so i'm begging you to look at your budget again. I know I really do know that it's not easy to cut but you're going to have to if you're going to be able to do for this Community what we deserve. I'm just gonna ask you, and I'm gonna thank you for what you've already done, but I'm gonna ask you to go deeper. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Any other commenters?

No.

Okay, thank you.

Well, thank you. To everyone who spoke, we really appreciate your input. And as always, I thank people who emailed us already and shared their thoughts. There was a lot of input. And this budget's a lot of money, and we're trying to figure out how to manage this community on a regular basis. And I am so thankful for all of the departments who went and looked through your budgets and figured out what can we do. And to be able to be at this point where we have this balanced budget and a little bit more is definitely better than we were looking at two years ago. And I thank you, Councillor Boswell, for mentioning that as well. So with that, I just wondered, first and foremost, if there's any response from staff before we get into additional questions or deliberation. City Manager.

Thank you very much. Just a few comments that we want to make sure to kind of be clear on. First is that our current unfunded liability with CalPERS, so that's the amount that we've accrued that we pay that 24 to 26 million dollars a year toward, is just over one hundred and eighty eight million dollars. And of course, that's a very big number, but it's not two hundred and sixty million. That's the current amount that we at least that was as of June 30th of twenty twenty four. It takes CalPERS a while to catch up. our additional payments in terms of what they report back to us so it does literally take them an entire year to get back to us on where we're at with our unfunded liability amount what we've been paying to them in additional discretionary payments above and beyond what we are required to pay it does bring that amount down the struggle that we have is that it's also reflects what happens in the market and so if the markets do well then our Unfunded liability amount can do better and if the markets don't do well, then it can kind of take a hit. So it doesn't mean we don't keep trying because we definitely do. Um, so just wanted to make that clear. That's where we're at with our unfunded liability amount. Um, also wanted to make sure and assure folks. Um, we are not on a state watch list related to our budget. Um, we do. receive awards for our budget, the way we put it together and provide that information to the public. And we're not in any danger of insolvency. That's not a term that we would take lightly if that were even the faintest possibility. I do appreciate the recognition that bankruptcy is not in our future, because that is true as well. We are in very solid standing. Our current bond rating is a double A bond rating. And so bonding agencies look At our debt portfolio before they give us a rating we did go through this just a couple years ago when we issued bonds related to our parking structure that we enabled us to build a new $40 million asset and so again when they look at our overall credit rating they look at all of our assets. and all of our liabilities and to assure people who are on the market buying those bonds that they will get their money back after we repay it. So I just want to let folks know that those questions that came up, we of course are consistently looking at them. Our CalPERS needs are an ongoing conversation. I know we talk about that with you all. at least yearly if not more when we look at making that additional discretionary payment if you recall i know i do we got stuck in a little bit of a loop that i had created to some degree talking about how much additional additional payments we were going to be making to calpers to address that debt overall so i just wanted to thank you for the moment to provide a little bit of clarity and if there's any additional information that maybe needs to be added happy to do that too.

yeah i think i think the city manager covered it really well i think the only thing that i would add is that we in addition to having a rating from standard and poor's a couple of years ago related to the issuance of the debt for the cultural arts district parking structure um fitch is the other rating agency that rates us and we meet with them they do a full review every couple of years and they do annual surveillances i talk to them just in February of this year. And based on that conversation, I provided a lot of follow-up information at their request related to our overall financial position and our plans moving forward. And they affirmed our AA bond rating. And just to be clear, a AA bond rating from an industry standpoint represents a very strong capacity to meet financial commitments.

thank you that was my question because i remember us discussing this during our cultural arts district parking structure conversation and that was actually how we were able to borrow a little bit less which was really helpful for us as a community so thank you for bringing that up and i appreciate it and thank you city manager as well um you know i just i just looked real quick and i i see that the calpers stopped um printing a um watch list so i don't know where that would be but something that's good to know that we're not on it so i appreciate that So, bringing it back to deliberation, I wanted to first just say I thank you all to the Council for your many questions. I think all of us are trying to look at how do we continue to, of course, not just stay balanced, but find this balance of what we can do and what we can't do. As we heard the needs of safety earlier, for many neighborhoods and communities, as well as trying to figure out how we can help with substandard housing and business licenses and code enforcement. We have a wide range of things, let alone parks and fun things for the summer that we're getting excited about. So this covers a multitude of conversation and a multitude of services and programs. And so I just really appreciate, again, all of the time it's been taken to look at how we can do this even better with less expenses when possible. And I also know that one thing that we do I'll never forget a couple years back when I said, yes, please go look for free money, please. And so that's something that I know that staff, you take great care and is looking at, are there grants available? Is there funding available? Whether it's federal, whether it's state, whether it's nonprofit, a partner that we can work with and figure out how we can still make things happen when times are a little tough at different times. So thank you for that.

With that, I'll bring it back to the Council. Council Member Schwarzman.

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. Of course, as soon as I start to talk, Of course as soon as I start to talk my frog appears in my throat. So thank you for kicking us off Mayor. Just want to start out by thanking staff for the very thorough yet succinct report and thank you for the time that you took earlier. I think it was late last week to kind of give me at least a briefing in advance of this so there wasn't really any big surprises in the report when I went to go read it and I did ask a fair number of questions so I appreciate getting those answers in advance. I know that staff and leadership worked incredibly hard this last year in this cycle to look for ways that we could continue our commitments to the community without um making any cuts that were going to be really really felt by our community members but i still know i've had to go through this process myself in my in my everyday job and i know it's not fun and it's difficult and i really appreciate all the Digging deep and looking carefully at every single line item to see where we can again make those cuts, but still try to avoid negative impacts on the community. So thank you for that. and I also recognize that as you all get better at this as I mentioned in my questions there's likely going to be less and less of those year-end funds as you get better at predicting how much we're going to how much we're going to need and how much our forecasting shows us you as you start to get those numbers closer and closer together it means those year-end balances at the end of the year are likely to get smaller and so We've been able to do a lot of really cool one-time things with that money at the end of the year, and that's going to get harder and harder to do. So as we do that, I just want to re-emphasize that I think it's important for us to continue to stick to our priorities when those numbers shrink. of you know paying down our pension liabilities and also saving for some of the big projects that we have coming up. We have some pretty big commitments that we've made in the new fire station, the Prado Road overpass, the Prado Bridge, the police station. We've got some pretty big projects that are going to be very expensive and again I'm not a big fan of Borrowing money if we don't have to. So I recognize what our public commenter said about, you know, the difficulty and having that debt sort of hanging over our heads as a city. I know it's necessary sometimes. And again, it's been, it's enabled us to do some pretty big, important things that our community is benefiting now. But I always want to try to minimize that as much as we can. So. um i'm prepared to support the recommended supplemental budget as is i think i will go back just because it was mentioned earlier i think by our city manager about supporting short-term solutions in the meadow park broad street neighborhood there and i'm i'm pretty content with what staff have said that they can do with the paving project i'm hesitant to put too much additional funds especially out of the broad street project itself we set aside a very definite amount of money for that project and we also obtained a pretty reasonable size grant to do that project and so i'm a little hesitant to promise to dedicate some of those funds to a short-term project when we don't really know what that project is really going to result in yet so if staff can be creative with the short-term solutions um out of the already established pots of money that we have for this year that would be my preference and if we do get to the point where we maybe need to prioritize some of those um ntm i was trying to think through the uh acronym the neighborhood transportation management projects and reprioritize them i would personally rather that recommendation or that conversation go to the active transportation committee first and have them make recommendations about how to reprioritize things if we needed to go that way first they they have the ability to do the deep dive and then ears to the ground um on that um better than i think even we do um just from here making those decisions um without that information so i'll stop there and hear what my colleagues have to say thank you vice mayor

Yeah, thank you so much. I'll just second all of the thanks for the hard work from staff and administration getting us here today. I know there were some scary projections of numbers a while back, and thanks to an economy that's been very weird and all of your hard work, I'm glad we're in a much better place, so definitely appreciated. uh you know looking ahead i i was appreciating kind of the kickoff from council member uh boswell kind of thinking about um you know our our needs in the future and any projects that we've got our eye on uh it's gonna get a little trickier to carve out extra funds for those things and uh you know we we've been making some real promises to the community in terms of investing in uh tenant protections as well as all the big projects mentioned by council member shoresman so Um, definitely supportive of the budget as proposed here, but, you know, need to think a little bit about where where we're going to find the funds to make sure that we're funding these things sustainably and keeping our promises to the community. Um, also wanted to second Council member Schwarzman's comments about balancing the immediate needs of the neighborhood around Broad and Funston. You know, I'm very cautious about making sure that we're not slowing down the long-term project there. It sounds like we've got some good solutions in place by kind of utilizing the paving project as an opportunity to look at options there. I know this is a problem area in our community and so I don't want to make people wait as they are out with their families and really concerned about the immediate needs there. But sometimes, you know, when we jump ahead too much, we miss out on kind of thinking about the big picture there. So kind of careful balance from staff. And I trust that you all will do that really well. I know we were asked here about the user fee cost recovery. I think our priorities here look really good. I am interested in kind of seeing what creative ideas come out of here in terms of thinking about our resident versus non-resident and kind of higher cost recovery on those types of uses. Our large-scale events, you know, we have to do a lot of evaluation of some of the the different types of events that we host in our city and how to make sure that we're doing that in a responsible way. I trust that there'll be some good answers that come out of that study. And on the topic of SLOMA, I'm interested in exploring a scenario where some portion of the funds are allocated annually, but I want to have that conversation at year end when we have some clarity on our numbers and maybe thinking about rather than lump sum kind of portioning things out over a little longer time. I think there's some interesting ways that we could potentially handle that. I know we have some uncertainty here. So how do we do this in a responsible way, but also investing in kind of the future of our community here on this front. So I will leave it there for now and see what my colleagues have to say.

Thank you. I definitely appreciate, as we keep talking about where we're at right now with the budget, the user fees and as far as the levels where they're at. One thing that I definitely heard though was we're able to cobble this together with the scholarship fees and the CAPSO money, and so I just want to think about do we have to structure our fees differently if we didn't have that additional funding? And so as we talk to the consultants and understanding what is done in other markets, I know it's part of the process. I would be really interested in hearing that because if something, I mean, as we saw what happened to CAPSO recently in this county, you know, they lost some funding. And so if that continued to happen or federal continues to take money, then we won't have the money that we think we do to make this work. So as far as the cost then this could be a concern. So that's kind of one of the things. The other part is I know that parking rates are not a part of this and it shouldn't be and I understand that. but I do see a disproportionate recovery, for lack of a better word, when it comes to parking at Toro and Marsh and parking at our Cultural Arts District parking structure, which I know that you're working on it right now, City Manager, but I just want to make sure that is thought about because we're asking EV... drivers to pay different costs for their recovery in a sense. And while we're very excited there's another place so they can park and charge, it's a different price. I wonder almost with the outreaches a lot of our conversation maybe as we talk about our different CIP projects that we could talk about also what is happening with pedestrians so as they can see that outcome as well. So when we see our money and what it's being sent for in the community, it is what's being spent for all different forms of transportation or mobility. I know that outreach costs money and that's why I mention it. And then I know that the Fire Station five is interim and eventually permanent. But I also am super concerned about the construction costs and where that goes. So kind of in the Council of Restores, if we need to save some to do that, that we're thinking about that. I know that it's hard when you have money sitting there and we want to spend it on something else. But as we look at Prado Overpass, Prado Bridge, Fire. I mean, we could keep going with the entire list and there are just huge costs for construction. So I think that's not a bad idea. Similar to that we talked, you mentioned property management with multiple addresses. for business licenses just wanting to see what other cities do for their business licenses around the user fees because we also have not just individuals that own multiple properties but we also have trusts and so what does that look like is that the similar property management is that similar as a individual owner, how do we just really have a good handle on what's available in the 23,000 doors in our community? Not behind the doors, that's not what I'm asking. So I think those are, oh and then as far as Broad Street, I think you know with the paving project if it makes sense to do some of the quick build. Hey, whatever we can do. I think that's something we've talked about over and over is when a quick build makes sense for safety, whether it's for any form of mobility, I think I'm always for that.

So with that, I think I've answered some of the questions for the user fees.

I'm in favor of this draft budget and very thankful for the hard work. And Councilmember Boswell, you're next.

Thank you, just add a few things. First, thanks staff for making this job a lot easier. I mean, first of all, the forecast from last year were pretty dead on. And so when we made a bunch of tough decisions last year and wondered, You know, where would we find ourselves a year from now? What kind of tough decisions might we have to make in terms of possibly cutting programs? But we didn't have to do that because we had good budget estimates and we've delivered on them. So thanks for that. And then, you know, the other really important thing out of this budget, and, you know, for me, this is my first financial plan, so now I'm really seeing the value of putting a lot of work into that financial plan for two years. It certainly makes the second budget year much easier to deal with. But I really appreciate that work plan that we put together for the major city goals, which has like, I don't know, 80 items on it or some crazy number of items. Maybe it's more. You may know the number by any chance. Anyhow, trivia question, how many items are actually on there? there's a lot of items there's a lot of items on that major city goals work plan that we've not had to modify we've not had to say we can't do some of those programs so it's it's very satisfying to be here and know that we can continue on this work plan that we put together last year and put so much effort into and really reflects and tremendous amount of community input. We can continue to deliver on that commitment to the community this year. So thanks for all of that. I'll be supporting the budget as presented. And same for also supporting the direction that is recommended for the user fee study.

Thank you. I also want to say that going back to when we asked for trade-offs in this last year, we've really seen a real clear reality around the trade-offs that we asked for. And I just want to thank staff for that because as people bring us things and we're like, we really want to do that too. And we realize we can't. And by staying, sticking with those work plans, that's why we're here today. So thank you for that too. Council Member Marks.

Thank you. Well, I appreciate all the comments. I get to go last, so now I appreciate all the comments of my colleagues. I do want to acknowledge the importance of continuing to be as responsible as we can in terms of our PERS liability. Back in the day, I remember there was a PERS holiday there was a time where PERS said, we're not going to charge the cities anything because we made so much money. And I said, no, we, we still have to keep making the payments. I lost, I lost that. It's one of those things where it's like, yeah, I was right. But anyway, one, one of the re one of the reasons I was right, but Hey, you know, but so, uh, In the past, the deep, deep, dark, dim, distant past, we have been less responsible. And I want to acknowledge, although they're not here right now, but the role of residents who are concerned about our PERS liability in terms of just keeping it on the radar screen. and it's really hard because it's a you know like they say moving the goal posts uh depending you know we keep paying it's not like a loan where you can actually say oh good you know we could just make an extra payment now and then and then the interest rate will go down it's not like that so anyway i i feel like we're on the good course with the purse liability um In terms of the overall financial picture, I do think that one thing we haven't talked about is actually if the city would look at its assets, not just from the point of accumulating more and more assets, but also from the point of view, is there any way we can realize some of those assets? And I'll give you an example of that parking structure parking lot on Higuera and Toro next to Petra. I was very uncomfortable with us buying it in the first place. And I understand that, you know, it's providing more places for people to park. But do we really need to own that? And does the parking fund really need to owe the general fund? money. And so that puts a pressure on the parking fund. And, you know, I'd rather sell just me personally, I'd rather sell that lot on Higuera and put the money into the fire station, which we really need. So it's just, it's just a question in general. I do support the item in front of us tonight, but just when we're looking down the road, you know, are there, Are there any? Do we really need to own as much as we do? Probably yes, for most of it. But there might be some ways that we can actually realize some money from what we own. I wanted to say that I appreciate all the concern about what's happening at Lawson and or Lawton and Funston in terms of the need for traffic calming. We could put up signs that say no cut through traffic, which we have on Johnson, but that's not that there's not any signage like that there right now. But it's pretty obvious also with what people were talking about in terms of King Street and South Street, that that whole corridor is very problematic. And I think that we need to look at it as a corridor and do what we can to help the neighborhood really feel as safe as possible. I really support the idea of looking at future deficits and trying to uh you know be as responsible and thrifty as we can be um at the same time looking for opportunities and grants are one opportunity one kind of opportunity but there are other opportunities that are out there i appreciate the testimony from um slow ma um and uh really support what the city manager was saying is let's look at if we have any allocated fund balance at the end of the whole budget cycle and see what what we might be able to afford. In terms of the user fee, I am concerned about inadvertently discouraging people from using those chargers in our street garage. A lot of them are empty. I'm over there a lot because the post office is here. So, you know, I see they're empty. And I know people are working during the day. They could be charging their cars. And I think that I've done a little bit of research. I think that other cities vastly reduce the parking fee for electric charger vehicles. for cars that are actually charging. They also limit the amount of time that you can charge. And then you have to move your car. So it's a big complicated thing. But I think we need to take that seriously because we have our sustainability and climate action goals. At the same time, we're making it financially impossible for people to actually use the facilities that we built for them to use. Let me just see that. And I do want to thank staff, the entire staff for being so taking such a fine grained approach to, you know, not just sit well to the estimates of inflation, for example, you know, asking people for the exact dollar amounts that incurred rather than just blanket, we just make an assumption of so much for the inflation. So I really appreciate this effort and I think we're basically in good shape. So I'll stop right there.

Nice, thank you. I think there was one that you said, okay, so with King Court, I know that there was a very thorough email sent by Luke Schwartz regarding King Court and it sounded as though there was potential in a closer future than there was before to have an actual traffic signal built after the pedestrian beacon. Can you just, you can just shake your head and say yes or if you want to add any two cents to that. You want to add some two cents. That way the people that are watching YouTube can hear.

Yes, so you're correct. The current project as designed added elements to the project that allowed for a full signalized intersection. We pushed pause on that waiting for vehicle preemption from emergency services. And so. um we have recently connected with our emergency services team with our new fire chief and we have found that that might be a a sooner option for us to look into the project as designed can still move forward with construction so there's no need to pause on that but we may come back to council for a future discussion just to make sure that we have clarification. Right now the project is on hold with construction just due to some PG&E and timing issues with purchasing of the equipment. So we have a little bit of time to come back to Council and just make sure we have that clarification. But it looks like we do have a path forward and we can get back some communication to the community and to Council.

Wonderful news. Thank you so much. City Manager?

Thank you, uh, I realized this was a topic that I wanted a moment to clarify as well, because I heard our prior comments and thought wait. Okay. So we're putting the pedestrian beacon on hold until we come back to talk about a signalized. project and as you're shaking your head that answer is incorrect but i just want to make sure for i think both myself and anybody else who may be listening are still here what we intend to do is to move forward with the beacon project at the same time we will be evaluating moving forward on a pro a next step a next phase for that same intersection that will be fully signalized We may come back to Council just to make sure everybody's clear and on the same page, but people will see a project go forward that puts a beacon up that is the same style as what's on Broad Street while we continue working on a full signal. Okay, I'm seeing a face that maybe that's not correct. Let's Yeah.

I guess both of those things are true. But the the pedestrian that the full signalized intersection might just because of the timing of, you know, having to wait on PG&E and the equipment might allow for us actually to install the full signalized intersection and not actually um construct the hybrid beacon um just because of that timing so we will move forward with the current construction project but just because it's on pause right now and we already have that The way that that project is designed, it's about 90% of that would allow for a future signalized intersection. So there's only minor elements that we would have to change to turn into a full signalized intersection. So it's basically a change order to the project that would get us there. So that's the only portion that we would bring back to council and just make sure that we're clear on a path moving forward, do a little bit of community outreach It's the timing of that that is the question. I do not believe that the community would see the pedestrian hybrid beacon without a full intersection. We would come back to council to get that green light.

Okay, that helps me certainly. And I think it's more of a, it's kind of a horse race issue based on timing of components for the original projects, which was the beacon. Since we're delayed on some of those pieces that we can't really control, we're going to take that time to try to bring back something that's actually the full scale intersection.

Thank you for that clarification, because as we were talking about the budget, what we're spending where, I think that was the kind of the conversation earlier was how do we bring this back to the conversation of the budget. So that's why I brought it up and thought it would just have some clarification would be good. Council Member Shoresman.

Thanks. Yeah, I want to follow up on the budget piece because my understanding is that at least most of the beacon is grant funded. Would there be additional expense or cost to going forward with the full signalized intersection that we haven't contemplated in our existing budget that we're looking at?

Not that I know of right now, but we can come back to council and if there is an existing costs, we can look at bringing that back and potentially using completed projects or another funding method. The most important thing is that we do have a grant deadline of using those funds.

And so that's why we want to keep moving forward with the project and the grant would allow a full signalized beacon as well as the hybrid. It's not specifically for the beacon. Correct? Yes. Okay. That's important. Thank you.

Vice Mayor.

Thank you. Do we have an updated kind of estimated timeline for when we would see either the beacon or the signalized intersection completed with the delay that's currently in place?

I'll ask our City Engineer Brian Nelson.

Yeah, as Madeline said, the contract's currently on hold for PG&E. We're also waiting on material delivery for the signal equipment as well as the mast arms. I think the current estimated completion date is September, late September, for the project, the pedestrian hybrid project as currently designed. We still, as of today, we're talking about the other elements needed to convert to a signal. Those are minor, is my understanding, but there will likely be a schedule impact. Right now, I don't, I haven't heard any concerns about completing the project within the grant window.

Excellent. Yeah, I think the last time we got an update, it was kind of early September, right after the beginning of school, but glad to hear that we're still on track for that old estimate. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Well, with that, can I get a motion to adopt a draft resolution? Vice Mayor?

Yeah. Do we want to put up the recommendations? I move approval of the recommendations as drafted by staff here and leave it there.

Thank you, Council Member Shoresman.

I'll second that.

Thank you, City Clerk. Can we have roll call?

Vice Mayor Francis. Council Member Shoresman. Yes. Council Member Boswell.

Yes.

Council Member Marks. Yes, Mayor Stewart.

Yes, and the motion passes 5-0. Thank you so much for this conversation and look forward to the future changes. With that, I will Get us ready to move on to the next and almost final topic, which is with Deputy City Manager Greg Herman and Deputy City Clerk Sarah Armas to receive a presentation on the feasibility of advisory body compensation. Wow. No problem.

okay thank you mayor and council members we're happy to be here tonight for this item this of course is a follow-up to a recommendation from the council compensation committee related to advisory body compensation we'll go through all the details of the analysis that we did related to advisory body member compensation i do just want to take a moment before we do that to acknowledge the support of our partner department from finance and human resources and pulling together all of that information and also to our deputy city clerk sarah armis who took the lead on pulling all of this together and will be providing the majority of the presentation i think we recognize that the recommendation that we're putting forward is not direct compensation to advisory body members as envisioned in some of the work around the feasibility of looking at a 25 per meeting level of compensation but i think the core principle uh that was trying to be addressed with the 25 compensation was to offset costs that folks may incur by nature of participating on an advisory body and an interest in wanting to limit or reduce where we can out of pocket spending that people would need to make to just be there and participate in that process so we put forward the recommendation that we think is most feasible in terms of being able to do that and for tonight's presentation i'll hand it over to sarah

Thank you, Deputy City Manager. Again, my name is Sarah Armas, Deputy City Clerk within the Clerk's Office under Administration Department. Good evening, Mayor, members of Council. I will be presenting a brief analysis on the impacts of a $25 per meeting compensation program. The study was conducted based on review of the data provided for Council Compensation Committee, as well as an analysis of the current process for our advisory bodies who are compensated, Planning Commission and Architectural Review Commission. I'll also briefly touch on the three alternate methods that we explored, with the final method being our recommendation to minimize costs of advisory body participation with only minor administrative impacts. Staff's recommendation tonight is before you here on the screen, receiving the report on the feasibility of implementing such a program, adopting a draft resolution amending the advisory body handbook to add a parking and food budget section, and to continue the current system of monetary compensation only for Planning Commission and Architectural Review Commission members. So we'll briefly look back as to how the idea of a $25 meeting program was decided. At the May 21st, 2025 city council meeting, council opted to form a council compensation committee in lieu of a standard CPI increase. This decision is part of the council's biannual review of mayor and council member compensation packages. Review of planning commission and architectural review commission compensation has been done in conjunction with mayor and council compensation since 2001. When council chose to form the compensation committee, they directed the committee to also look at the additional city advisory bodies to see if compensation would be warranted based on their time and work commitments for their respective committees. The council compensation committee met monthly from September through December of last year, reviewing data provided by the clerk's office and human resources that would assist them in forming a recommendation to the city council. At the January 13th, 2026 city council meeting, council approved the committee's recommendations as following. Increased salary and additional funding for mayor and council members, no change to the compensation for planning commission and architectural review commission, and direction to staff to explore the feasibility of an opt-in pilot program to provide $25 per meeting for all city advisory bodies. Quite a mouthful. Staff began with reviewing the data provided to the Council Compensation Committee to gauge community member interest in compensation. Two surveys related to advisory body compensation were distributed in October of 2025. The first we reviewed was distributed to advisory body members currently serving and advisory body members who had previously served up to six years ago from 2025. The recipients were asked various questions regarding time commitment and whether the compensation they received or didn't receive was appropriate. In the table before you, you see the results of the question, do you feel the current stipend or lack of stipend is appropriate for the body that you serve or served on? Of the 53 responses, roughly 41% of the respondents ranked to the current compensation mostly appropriate for their role, ranking seven to 10. The common themes of these responses were the importance of advisory body participation being voluntary, the small amount of meetings actually being attended, and the difficulty in finding a common dollar amount that would be fair across all the various committees and commissions. 23% of the respondents ranking zero to three felt that their current compensation was inappropriate. Common themes for these responses stated that compensation could provide offsets to cost barriers to serve as an incentive to participate or an incentive to participate as participation could potentially be a large time commitment for some. The other survey created to assist the Council Compensation Committee was posted on the Open City Hall Forum available on the Slow City website. City News subscribers were notified they could fill out a brief survey consisting of three questions. Whether they would consider or have considered applying to an advisory body, if compensation would influence their decision to apply, and if there are any barriers preventing community members from applying. Staff reviewed responses to the second question and categorized them into four varying levels of influence. As you see on the table before you, there was an almost even number of responses that stated compensation had a major influence or no influence at all, a difference of 104 for no influence and 102 for major influence. Again, common themes were discovered to be time commitment demands and monetary incentives to participate, usually referenced in the major influence responses versus the importance of volunteerism, the no influence responses. In response to the question on barriers, the issues of parking, childcare costs, food, and time commitment were repeatedly mentioned. After analyzing the survey data, staff began to assess the different ways that city would begin to compensate 78 additional advisory body members. The Clerk's Office, in collaboration with Human Resources and Finance, reviewed the current method of compensation for Planning Commission, Architectural Review Commission, what will refer to moving forward as the employee style method. In addition to the employee style method, three alternate methods were reviewed, the independent contractor or vendor method, the gift card method, and a food and parking budget option. I'll now briefly explain the differences between the four. So... So the employee sell method. So again, current process. Planning Commission and Architectural Review Commission are paid on a quarterly basis with the final distribution amount being taxed. Staff and Finance estimated that if the remaining advisory bodies were to be compensated at $25 per meeting under this model, their take-home amount for one meeting attended would be roughly $19.01 after taxes. We have various bodies that meet at different schedules. So some of our bodies are meeting regularly on a monthly basis. Others meet on more of a bi-monthly basis. So we have like our Active Transportation Committee and Mass Transportation Committee that meet every other month. And then we do have a few that are meeting on an as needed basis. So obviously these are all going to be receiving different amounts at each fiscal quarter. The estimated budget needed to compensate all of these bodies, and this is just for the monetary compensation piece, is estimated to be about $14,250, sorry, money numbers. As that number was stated in the Council Compensation Committee recommendations previously when discussing this. Looking back at the original direction from Council on the opt-in or opt-out piece of compensating these bodies, I do want to highlight that although it was included in the independent contractor method section of the report, this does apply to this employee style method classification that we can give the advisory body members an opt-in or opt-out option so if they don't want to receive compensation and remain voluntary we can do that however we can't change the positions classification so we can't reclassify them as employees essentially like they can not take payment but they would still be considered employees and held to the same standards which i'll go over The impact on administrative workload for staff and additional requirements for the advisory body members themselves were found to be even more significant than the financial costs alone. So summarized on the table before you are some of the impacts staff perceive being necessary to ensure proper compensation and compliance with city employee requirements as they stand. So new requirements for these advisory body members under this model would include live scan services and I-9 verification upon appointment to ensure we are putting their information in our payroll system correctly. As employees, they would be required to partake in applicable state and city trainings such as harassment and discrimination and workplace violence. This would be in addition to some of the other requirements we already asked of some of our advisory body members, such as completion of conflict of interest statements, biennial ethics training, and regular onboarding tasks. Several impacts to our current payroll system are also noted. The cost of a license to add 78 members into our payroll system is around $30,000 annually. Currently, there is a single administrative assistant in the Community Development Department who inputs meeting attendance for Planning Commission and Architectural Review Commission via time cards in the payroll system. Seeing as there's multiple departments who staff these various committees and commissions, depending on their purview, a review and refinement of our current procedures would most likely be necessary to ensure consistency and understanding of accurate time card entry across the agency. Formal training would need to take place to ensure staff and administration, Parks and Recreation, and Public Works understand the process and deadlines so finance can review time cards and distribute paychecks properly. Human resources and the clerk's office would also need to increase follow up with new advisory body members to ensure proper compliance upon appointment. although difficult to kind of quantify how much additional staffing is needed based on our analysis of the current existing process and what would be required to make sure we have the administrative bandwidth to take on all these new members. Human resources estimated at least a 0.5 FTE administrative assistant position, while finance estimates periodically others within the department might need to be pulled from their current workload to assist payroll staff. Taking all these impacts into account, staff isn't recommending moving forward with the employee style method at this time. Moving on to the independent contractor or vendor method. This was discovered early on in our analysis as a popular method for other cities within the state. This method essentially distributes compensation to advisory bodies without payroll tax withholding as if it were for a service rendered. Although $25 would be the initial take home amount, this would still need to be reported as taxable income on their personal taxes. When we were studying the legality of this method, it was determined that the duties and responsibilities of our advisory body members don't necessarily fit under an independent contractor method style of service. Compensating these members as such could position the city to be out of compliance with federal and state labor laws as we're potentially looking at them doing a little bit more than just what an independent contractor would essentially be doing for a city. So with that, again, a reminder that they can't necessarily opt in or out of the classification of what they're working as. They can opt out of payment, but not what the requirements would be. So again, we're not recommending moving forward with this method. Providing gift cards was also a method briefly explored as this model was suggested during one of the deliberations by the Council Compensation Committee. It's not a method that's currently being used by any agency to regularly compensate their advisory body members. Staff have deemed this is an insufficient substitution for regular compensation as it could still potentially require members to report these gift cards as income tax if distributed on a regular basis for services rendered to the organization. So again, deemed infeasible and not recommended. The last method explored by staff was the creation of a food and parking budget to be used for all advisory members for their meetings. As previously mentioned in the survey results, parking and food were noted regularly as potential barriers for community members to participate. A majority of the meetings begin at 5 to 5.30, so it doesn't allow those working to have much time in between the end of their workday and the beginning of their meeting. Staff proposed that providing increased three-hour parking validations and a snack budget could alleviate some of the issues for those who struggle to find parking in the City Hall back lot or for those who don't have enough time for a full meal before the meeting starts. I just want to note two things about this proposal that we're not recommending full meal orders to be placed prior to these meetings. They don't really have a standard process for regular full meal orders. That's cost effective, cost effective or consistent. And although we can provide these parking validations, also like to know that we aren't guaranteeing parking spaces in these parking facilities. So after assessing the cost of $25 per advisory body member for food and a three-hour parking validation provided each meeting per their regular meeting schedule, it would in total cost $3,470 annually. Parking validation and snack slash drink orders would be handled by the clerk's office to ensure both are fully stocked. And of course, these would be available but always optional for members to participate in. So we are recommending the food and parking budget mostly because all those standard monetary compensation was noted as potentially being an offset to barrier. These are tangible benefits that we are providing to kind of get ahead of that and offset these costs of participation, as mentioned by the community members without creating a disproportionate administrative burden on staff. So this is the end of my presentation. We have our three recommendations here. And again, I'd like to echo my thanks to Human Resources, Finance, Attorney's Office, and various other staff within the organization who discussed this in depth with me. So available for any questions.

Thank you. Appreciate that. I know it was a extra kind of work action after the Compensation Committee, so we appreciate that. Vice Mayor.

Yeah, thank you for such a fantastic presentation. Just a couple of quick questions. So I wonder if you could go into a little bit more detail on the kind of pitfalls of the gift card method and if we have an understanding what the threshold is for when you have to report income tax with gift cards.

Thank you for the question. I might lean on a little bit of help here from Greg, but Mr. Herman, we When discussing this as a potential method for for compensating them regularly, I know that we discussed that dollar amount that threshold that needed that would essentially be reportable. And it just didn't with the way that these advisory bodies are meeting currently, it just is hard to predict how often they're going to meet at a certain point. You know, right now we actually are. We're not, many of them aren't meeting per their regular meeting schedule, but that can always change. It could call for these advisory bodies to meet more than their regular meeting schedule in the future. It's just kind of hard to determine. I don't know if you have anything to add.

the thank you for the question and greg's just fine um i think the i think the the tester threshold is that is it being used um in place of regular compensation and so i don't know that we have a specific line that that crosses but if if we are clearly trying to comp in some compensate someone via a gift card and uh in lieu of what we would otherwise be doing via regular compensation i think that's where we clearly get into the legal issues associated with it

Was there any discussion of potentially doing it as not a like meeting per meeting type of compensation, but maybe like an annual sort of thank you? I was thinking maybe in line with kind of when we did the buy local program and have it be local business gift cards, kind of give people that evening out as a thank you for their service and have it be a one time annually or biannually or something like that.

I think that could be an option that we could look at more if we're seeing this as sort of like a gift to acknowledge participation and whether or not that would allow us to steer clear of some of those laws. But I don't know that I have a specific answer on that unless any of my colleagues feel like they're clear on that at this moment.

Okay, I'll leave it there then. Thank you.

Thank you. I asked that same question before Councilmember Schwarzman.

Thanks. Yeah, just to kind of piggyback on that a little bit. I feel like the purpose of this discussion initially was to try and help encourage folks who couldn't afford to essentially be on an advisory body or increase diversity. So that feels a little bit, it feels like it's changing the purpose a little bit, but anyway. The question that I was going to ask is more related to the data, and I'm guessing that you won't be able to answer this, but I'm going to try it anyway. I think it's kind of fascinating that in the table you showed that the compensation, whether or not it was a major influence or no influence Was yeah, I think that's just fascinating that about the same number of people think that the compensation is either a major influence in them. They're they're wanting to participate or it's like no influence at all. And I'm just curious if you had the ability to drill down on the folks that answered in those 2 ways and see if there were any commonalities between the people that. Thought that a major it would majorly influence their, um. They're interested in participating versus those who had no interest in participating.

Yeah, actually, I can't answer that question. Um, I did kind of, you know, assess the 2 responses together and there wasn't a clear correlation between the people that were ranking it as a major influence and also saying that the barriers were, you know, X, Y and Z. It would vary. Some would say that it is a major influence and it costs a lot to have someone watch my kid for an X3 amount of hours. But sometimes they say it would be a major influence and then they would say, I don't really have any barriers that's preventing me from participating or I've tried before be some other reason. I'm not a statistician, but I didn't necessarily see a clear correlation between the two.

okay that's interesting um which you kind you mentioned child care which is the one other area that um i feel like i talked to deputy director herman about this already it's like i feel like that's the one other barrier from a lot of the populations um you know, difficulties in getting to especially an after hours meeting. It's one thing if you can satisfy that that food need coming straight from work and paying for the parking. But the child care issue is one that we still haven't really cracked. And I'm just wondering if there were any ideas that came up as to how we could manage that.

Again, I'll start and if Greg has anything to add, I'll let him add it. But we focus on the food and parking because those were something that we could immediately offer. We have the ability to offer the validations. We already established the attendee participation program for an hour. We do, for council, provide a little snack. uh basket that's something that you know something we have familiarity with and we're able to kind of tackle that at a sooner uh time frame um i think with the child care cost aspect of it it would probably require a little bit more in-depth research and um you know it is something that we could maybe look into but i think it would require a little bit more from staff to kind of assess it as an option but let me know if you have any thoughts

Yep. Thanks for the question. I think we just acknowledge that that was the hardest of the three to address. You know, we've taken different approaches with really large public meetings where we know there's going to be a lot of folks there, like our community forum, we provide child care. That's not really a great fit for this solution. Clearly, there would be a cost associated with that, and kind of matching up that with need might be really difficult. I think the reality is that if we wanted to compensate people for costs associated with child care would probably need to do that via the employee compensation method.

I figured but I just thought I'd ask it's I don't have a good solution for it either. So just curious, though. Thank you.

Thank you, council member marks.

Thank you. Yeah, I just quickly looked up the 1099, the IRS 1099 form requirements. For years, it's been $600. That if you earn $600, you have to file a 1099. But it's just been raised to 2000. So I don't think that that's a barrier. But in terms of just, making people feel um welcome and appreciated uh uh i think uh well i'm not in deliberation now but i just want to say that i think uh the recommendation is very practical and easy to do it also could be something we could do for a year or two and then see what what uh what happens so you know the gift card thing uh i i just somehow i just don't like that because it is volunteer work so anyway i'll talk more later thanks okay i don't see any other questions on the list do you have any public comment i do not okay

We'll bring him right back for deliberation. So there you go. Thank you for that amount for the independent contractor. I think what I heard was it's not so much the amount but the paying in lieu of money. Is that correct?

for the independent contractor or that was more along the lines of like how we are compensating them for is the issue with the legality of it because if you think about what roles and responsibilities the advisory body members are doing we we kind of assessed it there's a there's a employee classification tests the apc dynamics test that i referenced in my report that has these three kind of stipulations as to how you can classify an employee versus otherwise and overall it's not a simple yes or no answer that all of these advisory bodies fit under that specific assessment so that was kind of more of the um we were talking about when it came to the independent contract method the gift card method um thinking about it now just the fact that it wasn't necessarily a substitution for compensating them for their time also like getting into the nitty-gritty of like where are we going to you know get these gift cards are we going to partner with someone i know We had talked with staff. One of the Council Compensation Committee members had brought that up as a trial for one of the advisory bodies that they were looking to compensate them that way, and they were partnering with specific bank, I think is what she was saying. So again, where do we decide where we're going to get these gift cards regularly? So that was kind of one of the I didn't really highlight that in my report, but that was one of the issues we ran into when discussing like the gift card method, this like as a method of compensation. I don't know if I answered your question, but.

That did. Thank you. I was just trying to make sure I was there was kind of two lanes there and I wanted to make sure we got those. All right. Any

movement any motions any questions where are we at councilman um i guess i'll just a a quick comment slash question i know it came up in a gender review today that either zero or not very many other cities even offer parking validation uh to community members so i feel like we're already a little bit ahead in sort of this I don't know in even considering this policy, and I do think that, although it's not compensation, at least providing parking for folks when they're here for 3 hours at the end of a work day, or even in the middle of the day where it might be harder to find parking, I think is is a nice benefit. It is in some ways. Maybe if it's not compensation, it is a small thank you for for your service and and having snacks is reasonable. I do. I do want to kind of keep it on our radar to think about ways that maybe in the future we might be able to do either compensation or some sort of subsidy of childcare, but I'm content enough with this approach to support the staff's recommendation tonight. Sorry, I'm starting to lose my words.

That's okay. Thank you. Council Member Marks.

Yeah, I think the staff recommendation makes perfect sense. It's, you know, the other question that I would have that's somewhat unrelated, but it's whether people could participate via Zoom if they had small children, you know, if they didn't want, you know, I mean, and just with my own experience, when the kids are really little, um i want to spend as much time with them as i could you know and so i mean there may that may be a disincentive for volunteering for something that takes place in the evening just because of your personal wish to spend especially if you're working all day and then you've just got a little bit of time with the kids in mind anyway so i think i think it would be a good way to go the staff recommendation and I do want to say with the snacks, they should be somewhat substantial snacks in that if they are coming straight from work, everyone knows that when your blood sugar goes down, you stop making good decisions. You just start fantasizing about food. Anyway, I will, at the right time, like to move the staff recommendation.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Yeah, you know, as Council Member Shoresman pointed out earlier, kind of the intended spirit of this discussion was to kind of promote more demographic and socioeconomic diversity on our advisory bodies and I know that there are a lot of barriers to doing that at this stage, but I just kind of want to keep this conversation alive i'm. willing to support this pilot today, I think, compensating for the three hours of parking and having some some food is you know, a nice first step, but it doesn't. really get at the essence of what we're trying to solve here. And so I want to just kind of encourage us all to keep thinking about how we can have an advisory body group that really is representative of all the people in the city. And I think that might require us getting a little more creative here with some compensation or some child care and trying to figure out this tough nut to crack. But I'll be willing to support this on a pilot basis while we keep thinking through this.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I know that this was the goal was to help people who are not able to come to the table. And I hope that, you know, in two years this is looked at again. And at the same time, to be realistic as to what what changes right in between now and then um i think that this is a great move parking was something that we heard quite a bit from members and people who turned in for the survey that that's that is like i'm trying to get from work to the uh committee meeting so i think this would be very helpful and of course blood sugar absolutely um a little snack to keep us going i think i think makes a lot of sense so i'm i'm in support of this um recommendation and I think if nothing else, Parks and Rec and childcare, it just seems logical that we'd put those two together if people needed it. But I think it's a longer-term goal that maybe we can work on in the future. So that's what I have. Council Member Marks, you said you wanted to move?

Move the staff recommendation.

Great. Thank you very much. Council Member Shoresman?

I'll go ahead and second it.

Thank you, City Clerk. Can we have roll call?

Council Member Marks? Yes. Council Member Schwarzman? Yes. Council Member Boswell? Yes. Vice Mayor Francis? Yes. Mayor Stewart?

Yes. And thank you. The motion passes 5-0. And with that, all we have left is the liaison reports and communications. Vice Mayor.

I'll jump right in here. On 520, I had the opportunity to go to one of our day of welcomes. It's for our new employees and it was a small group from IT and the police and public works, but actually the small group made it really fun because we just got to have kind of a roundtable discussion and have it be pretty informal and got so many awesome questions from this new group of employees and excited to see what they do in the city. We had our Investment Oversight Committee meeting on the 21st, and kind of a big focus of that discussion was talking about our ESG strategy, so that's environmental, social, and governance strategy. There are some companies that we're currently invested in. We just kind of were wondering how they're retaining the rating that they currently have under the ESG ratings and wanting to get a little more information about how the third parties that that give the ESG ratings determine that and make sure that we're investing aligned with our philosophy here at the city. On the 21st, I also got to attend the advisory body lunch with the mayor, which is always one of my very favorite events, getting to hear what the advisory bodies are not only working on, but excited about and really just left inspired. So thank you, thank you. We just finished talking about all of our lovely advisory body members and just so grateful to all their service. And I'll leave it there.

Thank you, Council Member Shoresman.

Yeah, just a couple things. It hasn't been very long since our last meeting. So last Wednesday, I believe it was, I was able to attend a History Center event recognizing Mia Lawrence and the semi-quincentennial display that they have in the History Center. And Really good display and Mia created this just a great display with a lot of Chicano heritage memorabilia in it. And then on Sunday, I think it was, no Saturday, food bank open house over at their warehouse and really fun competition to watch them fill no cook bags and they turn that into a fun competition. It's always fun to watch and lots of great food too appropriately at the food bank. Lots of great food there. Then yesterday, one of my favorite times of the year is always community service awards for our local high school students. So I helped give out the mayor's award at Slow High last night to, I don't know, it was like 120 kids. um so a lot of and got to hear some of the stories of what they're doing to earn their hours and just always fun to see our young people doing so much good stuff for our community and just want to close with a little congratulations and um we've got a slow high school graduation this friday afternoon i have a graduate so congratulations to all the slow high schoolers graduating on Friday and then to all the Cal Poly students graduating I think the following weekend. So congratulations to everybody.

Thank you. Council Member Marks.

Thanks. Well, on the 20th, I had an air pollution control district meeting, and it was about the budget, same, you know, this time of year. They are under budget. They're basically always, it's a very thrifty organization. One thing that I learned that was somewhat concerning was that there's no ozone monitor in the city of San Luis Obispo. There was one up until I think the year 2021 when our ratings were so good with ozone that they decided that CARB, the mothership of all the air pollution control districts, the California Air Resources Board decided that we didn't need one. However, there is one in Morro Bay and the ozone, and ozone travels kind of like in a cloud, And there are pretty high ratings, ozone ratings in Morro Bay, which is near the ocean. So I'm concerned that we don't have an ozone monitor. I put a little bit of pressure during the board meeting on on them and I'm following that up with the Carl Tupper was the executive director, but I do think that the city staff at some point should check in with the air pollution control district because it's I think it's really important those zones can have very damaging health effects on people. And tomorrow is the RAC meeting, the Water Resources Advisory Committee meeting, and we're going to be talking about uh among other things uh the slow base and gsa i asked a question of staff about whether we needed to an update is due in uh january 2027 so i asked if we needed to appoint um two members to be part of that base in GSA. Since we had one, we had two members, Emily Francis and Andy Pease back when. But it turns out that the update was going to come to the whole council in January. So this body will serve as the we will be doing the hearing for the update. On the 25th, I went to the veterans memorial celebration for Memorial Day. And it was packed. It was very emotional. And it was really very, how do I say it was just very low key in in certain ways, but it was really solid. It was great seeing the whole community come together like that. And then on the 31st, I went to with some other council members as well. A celebration of the third year of the tenants union and send off for Tyler Corey, who's as a student has really been kind of a spark plug for getting the whole thing going. uh he's now going to be doing an internship with the city of san luis the city of long beach he's hoping to become the city manager someday he said so we'll see um and that's about my my events in terms of my um announcements i wanted to let people know that city farm slow has got a farm stand on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1. And then on Wednesdays, they've added another day from 2.30 to 6 p.m. And people who, it's a pay what you can is the motto. People are given up to $30 worth of discount on these organic vegetables. And a lot of people are coming now that the word is out and getting basically free organic vegetables. So whether you want to pay the price that is listed, or you want to donate some more, or if you know somebody who's feeling food insecure, who wants some great food, now's the time and lots of beautiful, beautiful vegetables. Okay, that's all I have.

Do you have a name for the little lamb?

Millie won. We did not name the lamb Compost.

I'm glad Compost did not win as a name. That's fantastic. Millie. Thank you. Council Member Boswell.

I like Compost.

You don't want to name a goat Compost.

They're good at that, though. We're good at that. Just a couple things to mention, attended the CAPSLO board meeting on the 21st. Nothing in particular to report out of that. And then attended the Slow Food Bank open house and just always want to thank them for feeding our community.

Well, thank you. Yes, I also got to attend the Slow Food Bank open house. It was a lot of fun. And I just want to say congratulations to Rate, the mortgage company. I saw Donna Lewis and her whole team just killed it. They made 10 no-cook bags in record time, filled them all accurately, but saw some additional idlers, Cal Poly, and what was the fourth group? Which was it? Thank you, Columbia Bank. All did amazing jobs filling those food banks, no cooked food bags. Also on the 21st, yes, advisory body, quarterly advisory body is one of my favorite times to be able to see what's happening, not just in our community and in our committees, but with the volunteers who give their time. And so that's really a wonderful full circle for today. Got to say, Thank you to Isaac Pummel and Mark Cabaliza, the student body presidents of Cal Poly and Cuesta at the Student Community Liaison Committee, SCLC. And hello and welcome to Sean Chilton and Tanner Schindlerly, which will be serving their schools in the next year. A big congratulations to Louisa's for 50 years of Louisa's Place. They had a fabulous pancake competition and I feel like I talked about that before, but it was an amazing experience to watch. Whale Rock. Wow, it's the end of the night. Whale Rock Commission was on Thursday the 28th and I just have to say City Manager McDonnell was the chair of the committee. Thank you very much for your service. I know that rotates around. but this is our partnership with Cal Poly and with CMC and just great to see not just the the water of course that we help provide here in this community but the work that was done has secured more water to not disappear out of our dam also continued to rebuild the fences so we could keep any cow matter out of the water and keep us safe and clean. And so I just thought there were a lot of projects they did together and it was really great. So if you have free time and you're interested in water, check it out. It's a really good report. And it's a whole year of their projects. On the 30th, I got to spend a little time with one of the Laguna Middle School community service project recipients. She gathered people who had gone through the Tech Trek eighth grade middle school program and people who are going into the tech track this this summer and these young women are looking at you know what they're going to do in the long run whether it's with stem science and technology but also with potential public policy and leadership in the future so that was really great and opa i went to the greek festival it's been happening since 2009 wonderful food wonderful dancing and just a wonderful experience, so I'm very thankful to them. Tomorrow I'll be talking with many people in our community, in our county, with SLOCOG, the SLO County Council of Governments. We'll be talking about the ballot initiative and potentially putting a sales tax on the ballot in November to help us with our infrastructure to become a self-help county. So that's one of the big topics, but actually the agenda is pretty large if you want to take a look at what we'll be doing. I just want to say congratulations to Peyton, but I also want to say congratulations to all those who just graduated just in the last week or two at Mission, at Cuesta, and are coming up this year, I'm sorry, this week at Slow High and all of the Slow Coastal along with the Cal Poly next week. And lastly, I hope everyone got out their vote. I see many of us were our I voted stickers and look forward to seeing what happens with the primaries at this time. Thank you so much. And we'll see you all for our last meeting of the year on June 16th.