City Council - Regular Meeting

Good morning. Let's call to order the special council meeting budget workshop of May 19th, 2029 at 1101 a.m. The city does not tolerate disruptive behavior in our meetings. This council meeting is considered a limited public forum, which means that council can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. Speaker comments must be limited to the agenda item being considered by council. If a speaker's comments are not related to an agenda item, the presiding officer will rule that speaker out of order. A speaker will not be ruled out of order because of a disagreement with the content of their speech. Location and online meeting details are available on the council agenda. Scan the QR code on the screen or click the language access and translation link on the council agenda to read and listen along in more than 60 different languages. Use the show captions button to view captions on Zoom. First, city clerk, may we please have roll call?

Yes. Mayor Klein?

Present.

Vice Mayor Millinger?

Present.

Councilmember Cisneros. Present. Councilmember Sarindabhasan. Present. Councilmember Sell. Present. Councilmember Chang. Present. Councilmember Lay. Present. Thank you, seven present.

Thank you very much. Members of the public will now have an opportunity to address the council on the budget workshop. Individuals are limited to one appearance. If there are many speakers, I may shorten the time. No other items will be discussed during the workshop. Please submit a speaker card to the city clerk, raise your digital hand now, or dial star nine in your telephone to indicate that you wish to speak. I will call on members of the public participating in person first, followed by remote participants. Speakers will have three minutes to speak. Let me start reading off the names. I'll read off two names. The first person in the lectern and the next person be waiting nearby. First up is Zachary K followed by Tara M. Zach, you have to hit the button in front of you. Sorry. Okay.

Please hold on, Steve. Zachary, let me get this queued up for you. Yes. Okay, we're ready, Zachary. Can you go full screen?

Naturally, today we'll be hearing about the unfunded pension liability. At the Council Priority Projects Workshop on February 26, 2026, Councilmember Richard Mellinger took a shot in the dark at the size of the unfunded pension liability. He speculated it was in the $80 to $100 million range. A Santa Clara County civil grand jury did a report on the pension and other post-employment benefits. Here is a page from it talking about the issue in an introduction. Here's, in this table from it, we see Sunnyvale's total unfunded liability back then at $242,100,000.

Moving to pension costs, we've had significant increases over the past 10 years. Our current unfunded liability is still just shy of 270 million. I'll let John speak to the unfunded liability in more detail, but we're currently at about $250 million for both safety and miscellaneous, split $125 million even.

What is the latest, most recent estimate we have as to Sunnyvale's unfunded liability for the pension fund?

We received that, I don't have the exact date, but maybe we received that in the spring of this year.

And we were told it was $200 million unfunded liability for the pension fund?

I believe it's $250 million for both miscellaneous and safety.

And it was an additional $100 million shortfall for the retirement medical?

I believe it was $60 million. for the retiree medical as the unfunded liability. But we're currently, that last valuation was done two years ago, so we're currently in the process of updating that valuation.

So if we add up those two approximations, that's a $310 million unfunded liability. Is that correct? That's correct.

As I mentioned before, it's about $290 million, and so if you look at our liability of about a billion dollars and our net asset value of about $724, that gets you to the $290 million unfunded level, about 71% funded.

It is amazing how loose of the total number is over the years. Since the stock market has been booming, perhaps the unfunded pension availability is a little better. Naturally, we'll get an update on the total number today.

Thank you. Next up is Tara M followed by Theresa L.

Good morning. I'm Tara Martin Milius. I'm a resident for a long time and clearly older senior. So I have come here to thank you for all that you do for all of us, because we are things in the city work for the most part. We're safe, we're sound, we have responsible people that are making policy and executing the policy and creating a great place for us to live. the budget balances for 10 years and it has a 20-year plan. This has saved us tremendously. It also has made us fairly conservative in our activities financially. So I can't say that that's good or bad, but it works. and I'm happy to be here. So this is, that budget makes such a difference. And we're, I think everybody is thankful that we have such a stable kind of a thing. We're slowly getting cleaner water and air. Thank you very much for all your sustainability work. We are, our environmental buildings, our buildings are getting more environmental. Thank you so much for net zero city hall. And. I have a personal thank you. As the executive director of Leadership Sunnyvale, a very, very small nonprofit, I thank you for all the work that you all do that continues to support all the small nonprofits in the city. It makes such a difference, I think, for all of us and certainly for our leadership group as well. So I am deeply appreciative to what Council brings what our staff brings what our reserve staff brings everybody supports it's it's the community that supports us all so thank you so much thank you uh next up is Teresa L followed by Charlene now

Hello, thank you for the opportunity to speak. We are with Sunken Gardens Ladies Golf Club. That is a nine hole course in Sunnyvale and we're here to ask you to consider a senior rate or a club rate for Sunken Gardens. We're almost 50 members strong and we're very excited that we're going to be celebrating our 50 year anniversary at Sunken Gardens this year. It's wonderful. 98% of our members are retirees and many are over 80. golf provides not only a way to stay physically active but it also provides a social connection which we all know is vitally important as we age however the cost of sunken gardens is becoming prohibitive It has raised, over the last seven years, gone up 50%. And as you can see from the slide here, the course fees for other clubs that they pay at other nine-hole courses is, we are 30 to 73% higher. And if you check out the last line, which is the other Sunnyvale course, it's an 18-hole course. They pay $37 for 18 holes, which is about a little over $18 for nine holes, where we're paying $26 for nine holes. The Ladies Club brings a variety of benefits to Sunken Gardens. Most of our members play twice a week and we play year round. We have tournaments at Sunken Gardens. However, the other ladies at other clubs that we bring in express concern about the cost and our members are considering only playing once a week. We are concerned about our ability to bring in new members. We want to stay viable, but the new members have choices. For other clubs, they're less expensive. But we love Sunken Gardens, and we've been there for 50 years, and we want to be there for another 50 years. But we need the support from Sunnyvale to provide a reduced senior rate or a club rate for Sunken Gardens. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up is Charlene L followed by Jeff N.

Thank you. My name is Charlene Liu. I'm speaking on CPP 2026-13, Reinventing Safe Routes to School. Safe routes to school serves a vital role for our children. It helps create an environment for children to move around freely, thus improving their physical and mental health. The staff CPP proposal is a good start, but we need some fundamental changes to the program beyond those proposals to make it successful. And I have three points I want to make on what needs to change. Number one, the program needs to specify metrics and goals. Without them, the program won't make progress, as is the case today. The city needs to partner with school districts to do annual travel tallies and to set goals. A desirable goal is to increase active transportation rate to school by at least 1% per year. Another desirable goal is to have 100% school participation within a couple of years of this new program. Point number two, Safe Routes to School needs to be moved from DPS to transportation. Following best practices is a policy decision that you as council members can make. Putting Safe Routes to School in transportation is a best practice, practiced by all Bay Area cities, except Sunnyvale. Safe Routes to School is innately tied to transportation. The single biggest reason why parents do not allow their children to walk or bike to school is lack of safety. Our streets are inherently unsafe. No amount of enforcement will fix that. Only changes to the transportation infrastructure can fix that. Point number three, Sunnyvale Safe Routes to School needs more staff. Currently less than half a staff person is allocated to Safe Routes to School in Sunnyvale. Mountain View in contrast has a full-time staff person for a city that's just over half the size of Sunnyvale. Cupertino has one and a half Safe Routes to School staff people for a city that has one third the population of Sunnyvale. San Jose has a whole Safe Routes to School team. Likewise, Sunnyvale needs staff, more staff to run this program, several staff. To conclude, if we accept only what staff proposes, Safe Routes to School will continue to make no progress. We need annual travel tallies and goals. We need Safe Routes to School housed under transportation, not DPS. And we need to hire several staff people to Safe Routes to School. Thank you.

Thank you. Jeff N followed by Jonathan B.

Hello, dear honorable mayor, vice mayor, and city council. My name is Jeff Nabhan, and I'm the chair of the Sustainability Commission. I am here to provide recommendations on behalf of the Sustainability Commission. We have eight recommendations that I've also emailed to you. First, we fully support the budget supplement item 1, 2026-13, safe routes to school, and 2026-4, sidewalk maintenance backlog. Second, we want to maintain and enhance the sustainable librarian activities. We encourage expansion of the sustainability library activities to the Lakewood Library and also request sustainable librarian position to be considered for another term or a longer term position. Third, we recommend updating CPP 2026-1 to include an objective to evaluate the impacts on climate action playbook goals. And we'd like to support budget supplement two, item 2B-1, support implementation of street Chi repopulation with an equity lens. Fifth, we would like to expand to community college and high school students with the goal of increasing participation, sorry, expand outreach for safe routes to school working groups through the inclusion of student representatives, CPP2026-13, and the advisory committee, CPP2026-11. Sixth, we would like to recommend considering expansion of Sunnyvale citywide micro transit service to include local community colleges. Seventh, we would like to recommend rephrasing using computer assistance within CPP2026-22 to ensure the goal of removing AI is achieved and clarify the intent. And eighth, we do not support budget supplement two, item 2A1 to remove one FTE park worker, one. Thank you.

Thank you. Next is Jonathan B. followed by Kevin J.

Good morning. My name is Jonathan Blum. I want to first acknowledge there are many worthy projects under consideration. I want to express my support specifically for the Safe Routes to School program. Keeping our students safe on their way to school, and of course on their way home, should of course be an important priority. The program does need some modifications to make it more effective, including metrics to assess progress, regular meetings with stakeholders at the school, and an adequate level of staffing. Perhaps most important, I believe the program should be moved to the Department of Transportation. I want to be clear, that does not reflect any disrespect for our wonderful public safety officers. But this is fundamentally a transportation problem, and asking safety officers to solve the transportation problem is a bit like asking transportation engineers to fight fires and solve crimes. It's just not a good match for their skill sets. And I think that mismatch has not served the program well. That's probably why our neighboring communities have this program under transportation rather than safety. I HOPE THE COUNCIL WILL TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE SOME NEEDED MODIFICATIONS. I ALSO WANT TO MENTION THE SIDEWALK REPAIR PROJECT. SIDEWALKS ARE KIND OF MUNDANE, YET THEY'RE IMPORTANT FOR PEDESTRIAN MOBILITY AND SAFETY. I USE A WHEELCHAIR TO GO ANY SUBSTANTIAL DISTANCE. A FEW MONTHS AGO I WAS ON MY WAY TO THE NO KINGS RALLY IN MY WHEELCHAIR WHEN ONE WHEEL FELL INTO A HOLE IN THE SIDEWALK. FORTUNATELY MY WIFE WAS ABLE TO PULL ME OUT AND LUCKILY THERE WAS AN ADJACENT LAWN WE WERE ABLE TO ROLL ONTO TO GET AROUND THE PROBLEM. point is not to invoke pity but to point out that for people with limited mobility modest defects in a sidewalk can be effectively be a brick wall or worse a sand trap i hope the council and staff will come up with a good plan to get these things fixed at an accelerated rate thank you very much thank you and my last card in the room is kevin j

good morning kevin jackson speaking on behalf of sunnyvale safe streets i want to ask you to support council priority project 2026-13 reinventing and revitalizing sunnyvale safe routes to school program This is a small but important program to enable and encourage students to safely use healthy and environmentally responsible transportation. The benefits for students as well as the community will continue for the rest of their lives. I want to see this program succeed, and fortunately, there are many excellent examples we can emulate in order to make sure that happens, including the ones in Cupertino, Palo Alto, and the original Sunnyvale program as it was developed by the county health department. Among the factors these programs share that make them effective are the program leaders are people who work in the traffic engineering space. They hold regular meetings with engagement from all stakeholders, and they have clear goals and metrics with frequent monitoring and reporting on how well those are being achieved. So please approve this study and make sure it has the elements required to ensure success. Thank you very much.

Thank you. That was my last speaker card in the room. City Clerk, do we have any remote speakers wishing to speak on this item?

Yes, Mayor, we have Crystal W. Crystal, you've been unmuted and have three minutes to address Council.

Hi, this is Crystal Wickham. Thank you, Council and staff, for your work on the budget this year and every year. It's a huge undertaking. I'm speaking in support of the Sustainability Commission's recommendations as communicated by Chair Nabhan just a moment ago. And specifically for 2026-13, on reinventing and revitalizing the Safe Routes to School program, I hope you will consider the changes as recommended by prior speakers. I was active in the volunteer aspects of the Safe Routes to School program when my children were at Sunnyvale schools. And in combination with the Climate Action Playbook, this is such a vital program, and I hope we can make it as successful as possible. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mayor, that was the final remote speaker wishing to address Council.

Thank you. I'll go ahead and close public comment and let's move to our one item today. Our special count item 26-0011, special counts meeting budget workshop. So let me kick off our budget workshop for the day. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our big, our third big workshop for the year. You know, our lives continue to be uncertain, especially I'll say, fiscally at the federal, at the state, and even at the county level. But having council and staff who focus on prudent decisions from a city standpoint, I think has served our city very well in the past. You know, please remember at the end of the day, the city is, at the end of the day, the city is a business and a balanced budget and planning for our future is very critical. you know our our city alternates between um projects here and operations here and and this year is an operations year uh which to me is actually fantastic because finally we're continuing that effort to to a certain degree right sizing our city staff levels that we started a few years ago and so I'M REALLY HAPPY TO SEE WHERE THIS BUDGET IS TAKING US. SO TODAY'S WORKSHOP IS CRITICAL FOR COUNCIL TO GIVE THAT FINAL DIRECTION FOR NEXT FISCAL YEAR. SO SUNNYVALE, OF COURSE, AS WAS MENTIONED EARLIER, IS KNOWN FOR ITS FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY FROM OUR 10-YEAR BALANCED BUDGET TO OUR 20-YEAR PLAN. you know, it's critical that these policies that we have in place have served us well over the last few years, as well as over the last few decades, to say the least. So let's keep all that in mind as we're making, you know, reviewing the budget today and making those final recommendations. I'll now turn it over to the city manager to kick off our budget workshop presentation.

All right, thank you mayor TIM Kirby city manager and I am feeding back a little bit so I try to back off this Mike a little hopefully you can all hear me welcome everybody today, can I have the presentation up please. And maybe, can we take a job for the volume, a little bit. To end my feedback when you get a chance, please, thank you. All right, welcome to the 2627 recommended budget workshop. We've got a busy day in front of us and we're on a compressed timeframe also and have a regular meeting tonight. So we'll be moving quickly through our slides. I do thank you, Mayor, for a very accurate welcome. And I just want to jump right into just a high-level overview. I want to start by saying what we're managing is a diverse, welcoming, and highly connected community. And our diversity is our strength, and it's foundational to our community. And so it's something that we're always thinking about in the context of even fiscal management. We have a wonderful, over my time here, which is several decades, we've really developed into a wonderful community that's a combination of both well-established and older neighborhoods and brand new neighborhoods. And so very exciting place to live and work for a lot of people. Our economy is also one of our strengths and it's extremely diverse. It is an innovation economy. And during my time here, I've seen it reinvent and revitalize itself multiple times over and over again through innovation. starting with the dot-com bubble all the way through to now we're in an AI boom. So just a very diverse economic base and commercial base. We still have a private sector making major investments in the community. The most significant right now is probably Applied Materials. Constructing it's a multi billion dollar epic center, which is a research center over on our case, which is just a wonderful product project that's underway. We also have a very vibrant downtown. We have multiple companies moving in in the process of doing tenant improvements downtown. And so just our economy continues to be really the bedrock of our of our municipality. It's going to move. I can feel it. Oh, it moved. I'm watching. Here I am watching my computer. This clicker does not move my computer. It only moves the slides on the screen. Like, why is it not moving? So economic uncertainty does continue as everybody feels. Residential property values are still increasing, but they've moderated to some extent. The job market is holding up. Unemployment remains low, but longer term unemployment is increasing. Consumer sentiment is low, but yet we still see strong consumer spending. And then, of course, we have all the global events that are going on and are putting pressures on our economy locally and nationally. So this budget follows the same principles that we typically follow. It supports council policy and strategic priorities. This year is a focus on operations. If you look at our budget for the public's benefit, it's two volumes. One is operating and one is capital. If you look at last year's capital budget and this year's capital budget, it's almost identical. This year was really a focus on operations. Next year we'll focus on capital improvements. This budget continues our efforts to right size our operations. We had gone decades without increasing our number of employees and we've recently taken measures to start to grow our workforce to meet increasing demands. The budget meets all legal requirements and we are balanced to 10 and 20 years per charter and council policy. Here's a quick overview of our budget total revenue for 2627 and this is a 1 year snapshot. You'll hear throughout the day. We'll move between single year numbers and 20 year numbers. And so we'll do our best to call out when we're talking about 20 years. And when we're talking about a single year in this case, we're looking at 1 year. So 650Million in revenue. 425Million dollar operating budget this year is a 213Million dollar capital budget. You will see that number fluctuates significantly depending on which capital projects are underway. And then other expenditures, which are things like debt service and other payments that we make. About 80Million for a total of 717,718Million. And then we are using reserves and the finance director, Matt Pollen, who's going to take on, I think, with this staff, the bulk of this presentation, we'll get a little bit into what what reserves what that means by use of reserves. Speaking of what we're trying to address here, we continue to experience a lot of unfunded mandates from the state and increasing demands in services. But recent state and federal mandates include website accessibility, open meeting laws, housing laws, and even financial training that are just imposed on us. And then we have to absorb those and figure out how to fund and implement them. We are not immune to inflation and increasing costs and service. So I'm sorry for that little ring there. I know they're working on that. So I'm going to keep going here, but apologies for that. Labor materials and supplies all continue to increase as the cost for day-to-day living increases. That impacts our compensation plans. For materials and supplies, we are seeing increases just like everybody else is. in their home budgets and everything else. And then technology and software, which has become a larger and larger portion of what we do, continues to increase in cost as well. So this is a quick snapshot of our budgeted positions by fiscal year over the last five years. Prior to this five years, it was flat for 20. So we had not really grown for a long time. Over the past five years, we've added 55 positions, which amounts to 6% growth. And you can see broken from bulk of our workforce is non-management. Then we have public safety officers. And then we also have management or quote exempt employees. So that's a little breakdown there, but this gives you an idea. We're adding a net of 14 positions this year. And again, finance, we'll get into that a little bit more. So some of the things that we've added and just reemphasizing the mayor's point about we're running a municipal corporation, we run a highly complex set of services to the community. We are not like a private company where you would produce a single product or a small group of products, we are providing an extremely diverse set of services from preschool programs to public safety. So just a very diverse set. We categorize those into council's strategic priority areas. So I won't read all of these, but I'll give you a few highlights. We're trying to be responsive to the community and an effective city government. We're proposing to add a community crime reduction team, which is for public safety officers and a lieutenant. That team will be, and the chief will get into this a little bit later, will be focused on proactive crime prevention as well as any other hot topics that come up. throughout the year. We are also expanding our permitting and policy planning efforts, and also we're having to meet open meeting requirements, open meeting requirements. We're also trying to make sure we meet our accessibility and engaged in welcoming community goal. So, 1 of the probably the biggest ad there is we're adding another community engagement position in the city's communications officer office to help us with public outreach meetings. This particular position, although out of the city manager's office will be focused on public works and. community development outreach. We recently added a community engagement manager in the public safety department to help with community engagement through our public safety department. For sustainability and climate action, we made some pretty big strides on active transportation and climate action on the last budget, adding quite a few positions to support that. So we are continuing that. This year we also um are implementing a micro transit um through a grant program and in this budget cycle we're stabilizing that service over the 20 years so we're making that a permanent service instead of a one that was going to be on a five-year pilot We are, of course, challenged with the whole state with housing and homelessness. And so in this budget, we really have taken on that challenge even more than we have in the past. We're proposing to set aside 43M over 20 years to support unhoused efforts. The actual spending of that will be defined a little bit later through the development of programs that are currently underway. But we wanted to park that money that is currently money that was available in what's called our service level set aside, which is a reserve that we use for new services. And in addition, we're continuing funding for our street outreach, for our case management, and our mobile hygiene services. And then lastly, we're continuing to make investments in modern and public infrastructure. And that's more of a focus during a capital year, but we continue those investments going forward. So we have a stable fiscal outlook. Matt's going to get into this. Matt Pollin will get into this a little bit more. But again, we are really looking to right size our operations and meet community demand where we can. We are seeing moderate development at moderation of development activity, and we are continuing to spend down our reserves to address long term liabilities that we have. Our general fund, which is the city's biggest fund, our approach to that general fund budgeting and financial planning is maintained consistent with our past practice. We continue to spend more than we're bringing in in the midterm until our pension liabilities are paid off. But that strategy is an intentional use of reserves. And that actually is getting better. We're getting closer to paying that off every year. So we continue that strategy. You can see our primary discretionary reserve in the general fund is called the Budget Stabilization Fund. This is the fund that we use to manage economic cycles and also manage known costs that we have that we're trying to manage over the longer term. primarily pensions. So we measure the health of this fund based on a percent of annual revenue. So this slide shows you the current adopted budget versus what's proposed. So we're in a little bit of a better position over the near term and over the entire plan. And you can see we started about 30% of revenue. We have a policy goal of the budget stabilization fund has to be no less than 15% of revenue in the first two years. So we do meet that. Um, goal, and then we end, we drop to a low of 5% of revenue projection and then we climb back out once we dig ourselves out of the pension liability and get back up to 16% of revenue out there towards the end of the 20 year plan. The service level set aside is a reserve that's established under Council policy. It comes and goes from our budget depending on what our fiscal condition is. It has been there the past few years. It was funded most recently at the amount of $3.5 million and $24.25 million. It is now fully utilized in this budget. um here are some of the things that it has been spent on to date um so the special events manager this was uh um something that um we faced a few years ago where we were having an increasing and increasing demand for community events we wanted to provide more support for the community to enable those that's part of our welcoming community, strategical, and it's also really reflects the diversity of our community and our changing community that demand for more events and more diversity in the events that we're supporting. We had the micro transit grants. That's a grant match. and operations, we funded the traffic calming program, which was an additional staff to support traffic calming projects, and then additional funding for community and neighborhood grant events. So that again, goes to that first item where we were stepping up our support for community events. And then again, mentioned street outreach services, which is for our unhoused residents. What we're recommending in this budget is use of the remainder of the service level set aside for two purposes. One is to stabilize the citywide microtransit service after the grant funding runs out after five years, and then also to set aside funding that will be more, will come back to council in a public setting to talk about how to use that funding, but to support future unhoused services. I'll just say now for council's benefit and this is not sufficient to meet the types of programs that we're looking at. So this will get us part of the way there, but it won't get us all the way there necessarily. Council priority projects. We're carrying 17 current council priority projects that are already underway, recommending seven of nine council priority projects to be funded or move forward. Total one year cost is 1.5 million, 12 million over 20 years. The bulk of that 12 million is sidewalks. um the recommended recommendations are based on both our fiscal capacity and also our staff capacity to deliver projects and additions if we wanted to change that mix we'll have to have that discussion towards the end and talk about what would come off the table or what what can be removed to fund any additional council priority projects and what's next so we have where matt and his team are going to go over citywide overview of revenues and expenditures then we will break a little bit for lunch and then we will go into departmental operating budget review We'll look for council action on those council priority projects and the budget supplements. We'll pause throughout for council questions. So a busy day in front of us. We're looking to end at 6 PM so we can get a dinner break before our regular meeting. So we're going to try to stay on task on that. And in conclusion, this budget supports our mission of building community trust by delivering exceptional services. It sustains and improves existing essential services while protecting our long-term financial stability. This is consistent with our practice over my time here of presenting just a strategic use of reserves, responding to demand increases, and working to really do things in a sustainable way. Again, volume one is the operating budget. Volume two is the project's budget. And with that, I will turn it over to Matt, and he'll go into a more detailed presentation and citywide budget overview.

Thank you, Tim. Good morning, Mayor and Council and Sunnyvale residents. I'm Matt Paulin, your finance director, giving the citywide budget overview portion of the presentation. So just a quick overview of where we are in the process today is our council workshop where we'll talk about the recommended budget and seek council direction on the budget supplements. On June the 2nd, we'll have a public hearing on the budget and the fee schedule. And hopefully on June 16th, we'll have another meeting to adopt the budget, the fee schedule and utility rates. So our overview, Tim hit on this a little bit, overview of our proposed fiscal year 26-27 budget, all funds revenues of 648.3 million, expenditures of 717.7 million, which means that we need to draw on our reserves of 69.4 million. I believe that we provided an appendix to the deck. We have a slide that shows by funds where we're drawing from reserves. The majority of those draws are from the general fund and the utility, excuse me, the housing and park dedication funds for planned projects. And we'll talk more about the planned use of the general fund reserve to address our pension liabilities. So, where do our revenues come from? They come mostly from taxes and service fees and service fees are utility, mainly utility fees and permitting fees with a smattering of other revenue sources that you can see on the pie chart in front of you. Development fees are actually impact fees. That other category is a variety of things, including our investment earnings. I always like to tout our investment earning city team and our consultants manage the city's idle cash and earn interest on that cash while preserving the liquidity of the city's funds. We do a great job of earning money for our programs and to support city services, and I'm very proud of that. So our citywide revenues by fund. You can see that 42% of our revenues are the general fund. As Tim said, that's our largest most in our discretionary fund, followed by mainly our utility funds between the wastewater water and the solid waste funds that comprises the vast majority of our revenues with some other ones mixed in there. As you can see on the pie chart in front of you. So how do we spend those revenues it's mostly operating as Tim said this is an operating budget cycle we go every other year operating and then capital this is an operating cycle you can see that four hundred twenty five million operating expenditures. With a couple hundred million in projects and then seventy nine million in debt service and other which includes civic center rent lease payments and transfer to our employee payroll and benefits funds. So our citywide expenditures by funds. You can see here that the general fund is 40% and combined with the utilities funds, the water, wastewater and solid waste. That's over 80% of our expenditures with several other funds that you can see in the pie chart in front of you. So how are those? What kind of expenditures do we have by type? we're missing it okay okay all right all right yeah looks like we got a slide that might have fallen out here Operating budget by department, you can see here the changes you are every year from our adopted current year budget to the proposed budget in front of you. These expenditures total about 507Million, which is an increase of 36 and a half million over the adopted budget. We do have a related slide in the appendix that shows a little more detail on the changes and departmental budgets. Tim talked about our growth in positions year over year. You can see here's our total citywide count of positions, a little over 991. that 0.27 is just an interesting artifact in how we count some of our casual positions, particularly in LRS that give us some kind of odd numbers here, but a little over 991, which is Tim said about 6% growth from fiscal year 23 with a number of service level adjustments that we'll go through and the department directors in particular will go through when they go through their department sections. Okay, so to talk a little bit about the general fund, which again is our largest fund, and I'll hand it over to Curtis Mock, our budget manager.

So good morning, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council members. My name is Curtis Mock, budget manager, Department of Finance. So today we'll do an overview of some of the major funds that we have in the city of Sunnyvale. First, we'll take a look at the general fund, the main fund of the city. This funding source is for many essential city services for the Sunnyvale community, like public safety, library and recreation, and park maintenance. but it's also funds internal city programs or departments such as finance and human resources so i'd like to highlight some of the trends for the major general fund revenues here's the breakdown of the property tax we like to include this slide every year to show how the tax is divided between the various agencies that are funded by a property tax allocation was largely locked in when proposition 13 was enacted in 1978 and eraf this includes eraf which are funds that go to the states fulfilled its school funding obligations this slide shows the assessed valuation of residential and commercial properties in sunnyvale which has a direct correlation to the secured property tax. The base growth is the 2% assessed value or AV growth limit set by Prop 13, plus set up assessments from changes in ownership. Property tax is slowing, but it's still growing. We're projecting a little under 5% growth for fiscal year 26, 27, and remain cautious throughout the 20-year plan. The growth decrease is primarily due to the commercial sector, which is slowed due to vacancies in some of the larger spaces. This prompted appeals and reductions in assessed valuations. But when those start to become filled, we should see a bounce back in that area. We've gone to sales tax. This is a similar side to the property tax bill. For every dollar of taxable sales in Sunnyvale, the city gets one cent. The largest chunk goes to the state and the rest go to the county and various transportation agencies. This slide hasn't changed in a few years, but it did this year. The voters passed Measure A last year, which added to the county's sales tax rate by 5.8%, raising the total sales tax in Sunnyville to 9.75%. The city does not receive any funds from this increase. This chart shows the sales and use tax trend in Sunnyvale. It includes a Prop 172 half-cent sales tax that's collected by the state and exclusive to public safety, which is based on the county's ratio of sales tax collections relative to the statewide totals. This is about 2.3 million of this number in fiscal year 26-27. dip you see in fiscal year 2526 is due to a lower estimate provided by our consultants as we were preparing the current 2526 year budget due to the rapidly changing economic conditions caused by global events we chose not to revise the current year assumptions until we know the actuals at the end of the year we do expect the revenue to be higher than the estimate estimated and the excess will be part of the year-end consideration that will be brought before council in December. This is shown as a dotted line, but the budget reflects the solid line. The city has a very diverse sales tax base. Business and industry is the largest percentage, which are sales made by business to other businesses and driven by the medical and biotech sector. also of note is the city's auto sales and dining also note that state and county pool section of the pie which accounts for online sales made in the county and is distributed based on each jurisdiction's share of total taxable sales this piece has been growing and accounts for much of the city's sales tax growth The next major revenue source is transient occupancy tax, or TOT. This slide shows how TOT has been recovering in hotel rate and occupancy over the last five fiscal years. Now we'll briefly discuss general fund expenditures. This slide shows expenditures by type. As you can see from the chart, most of the general fund expenditures come from the city operations at 87%. The operations are or include public safety salaries and miscellaneous salaries, as well as all the goods and services and internal service charges and utility charges. Included in the transfers to other funds is a subsidy for Youth and Neighborhood Services and $2 million in transfer for infrastructure to invest in the city facilities. Here's an additional breakdown of the general fund operating expenditures by type. The largest is the salaries and benefits at 61.9%. This total is projected to be, these totals are projected by using current MOUs and use local trend analysis for several, for salary surveys to update the 26, 27 budget numbers. Operational goods and services are up 8% compared to what was planned in fiscal year 2526 adopted as cost for goods continue to rise. Internal service charges increase. Increase internal service charges increase this year for requirements, especially related to technology related projects. And this this slide here, the largest reserve in the general fund is the budget stabilization fund reserve or bsf the bsf must be 15% of the total projected revenues for the first two years of the 20 year plan and does not go below $0 in any year. Currently, the BSF is planned to be 30% of revenues in fiscal year 26-27 and 26% of revenues in fiscal year 27-28. 5% is the low point for the BSF, which occurs in fiscal year 35-36. But by the end of the 20-year plan in fiscal year 45-46, the BSF is planned to be at 16% of revenues. CONTINUENCY RESERVES IS REQUIRED TO BE 15% OF THE OPERATING BUDGET IN FISCAL YEAR 26-27 AND THEN GROWS BY INFLATION FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE 20 YEARS WE'LL PAUSE HERE FOR A MOMENT AND WOULD LIKE TO ASK IF THERE'S ANY QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL FUND BEFORE WE GET INTO THE OTHER MAJOR CITY FUNDS THANK YOU UM QUESTIONS FROM COUNCIL COUNCIL MEMBER SHRINIVASAN

Thank you. Actually, I had questions on slide 15, the general BSF comparison. In the year 40 and 41, there seems to be a stagnation. Previous slide, 40 and 41. Sorry, 15, slide 51.5.

And they and they might actually be slightly off so. I think it's a little bit.

Yes, the the one. Yes, thank you. So in the year 40 and 41 from adopted to recommend that somehow there seems to be a stagnation. Is that because of we are projecting more expenditure or then the revenue or draw down from the BSF? If not, I can ask offline.

Yeah, we'll look at that and get back to you.

Okay. And then on slide 35. Yeah. Dotted to solid line. Yes. Both seem to be the same thing this year, right? 26, 27. The dotted versus solid line, projected versus budget. What is the difference we are looking at from budgetary point of view?

Yeah, the main difference is in twenty five, twenty six, and that's because we did not make an adjustment to our projections for twenty five, twenty six, because we don't have actuals for that year for that year as of right now and chose not to make that that change to be a little bit more conservative. But for twenty six, twenty seven, we are budgeting what we think that it will be and what our consultants have informed us that that they project.

okay very good yeah I I kind of understood that but I wanted to uh uh and then the next day is slide 40. and then we we heard from one of the members of the public about the unfunded pension fund my understanding is where is that yeah pension and uh retiree medical is 37 38 37.8 million dollars Yes, the green pie. So my understanding is though it's about $250 million or whatever the unfunded liability as of now, over the years we are allocating money to pay for that. Is that correct assumption?

Yes. So our current liability, our pension liability is about $477 million. And so this represents 1 year's payment of that liability to CalPERS. We do have a plan. We've talked about the intentionality of using the general fund reserves. We also have a pension trust, which is a special fund that we've been putting resources into over the last several years to help us pay for our annual pension costs. So, I don't know if you all recall last year was the 1st year in the general fund 20 year financial plan where we call our pension debt. There's a technical term unfunded, accrued liability that that was actually 0 for the 1st time in the 20th year of the general fund financial plan. the good news is this year that zero has moved up a couple more years in the plan and that's due to a few different reasons so that bill is always due to a combination of it's largely driven by calipers investment returns calipers had a really good year in its last full year the data lags a little bit from june 30th 2024 but they had a really good year they have a 6.8 investment target that they need to meet they uh it was 11 almost 12 returns which gives us a credit when they do that when they don't meet that 6.8 we get another bill that we have to pay hopefully i think they're on track to meet their uh and exceed their investment target again this year so hopefully we'll get another credit um on our bill So between that and this is a little wonky, so forgive me for kind of getting into this assumption return. CalPERS had a risk mitigation strategy for years like this last 2024 fiscal year. When they beat that investment target, they automatically lowered that 6.8%. They call that the risk mitigation policy. Well, they did away with that policy and now they make it a discretionary action of the board in order to reduce that. So our actuary pulled that through and really that would have really significantly reduced our liability, but we didn't take that assumption to be conservative. So we assume that that 6.8% was gonna slowly reduce over time, I think to eventually 6%, that we were gonna have to pay more. But even with those assumptions and starting to use that pension trust that I mentioned earlier to start smoothing out our contributions, we're gonna pay down that pension debt by I think the 18th year of the plan, somewhere around there, I wanna say now, in combination with using general fund reserves. So we have a plan to address that debt. It's going to take us several more years, and hopefully CalPERS can hold up its end of the bargain and sustain its investment returns. But we have a plan.

OK, thank you for that explanation. Just quickly, Matt, you also actually have a slide in your next section of the presentation that illustrates that.

Yeah, UAL, there is a slide on UAL. Slide 33 regarding the property tax assessed value. I had asked the Monday question on this, and then here the assumption is we are expecting 4.92% growth, whereas when I look at the property tax as a revenue growth, it's less than 2%, which is a good assumption, I think. And then my question was answered. uh so i just wanted to bring it up saying that this is a very physically conservative prudent policy on the city thank you very much thank you other questions council member cell okay back to the budget stabilization fund comparison slide uh 15.

So at the end of the year last year, we had some money and then we put it, budget stabilization, yeah. We had some money when we put it in the general fund. So that money that we put back in, how does that respond to the low point of that, the low point? Like, I think we put in 9 million or something like that. At the end of the year. So does that mean if we did not put that $9 million in, the dip would be $9 million lower?

That's right. Yeah. But you did a combination of things, if memory serves, at the end of the year. Money fell to the BSF. You put more money towards the pension trust that I mentioned earlier and a couple million more towards the library project. Okay.

Yeah.

But if you wouldn't have put those funds at the end of the year, that low point would be that much lower.

So what's the health of that low point? Like, is that healthy low point? Or what are your thoughts?

Yes. 5% of revenue is a really good measuring stick. And for being a low point and taking this long of a look at the general fund, yes, that's a very positive low point as far as low points go.

Okay. So today we know decide let's spend a you know x more and that got lower then you'd probably be a little concerned

We would. I think we had a paragraph in the summary where if we added, I think it's where we always use like a million dollars, what that would do to the low point. And I think that's one of the powers of the 20-year plan, as we can see the ongoing compounded effect of spending a dollar today, what that means 10, 15, 20 years from now, what impact that has on our reserves.

Because ongoing costs would be accumulated. That's right. Okay. That's all my questions.

Thank you. Council Member Lay.

Thank you. And thank you for the presentation. I appreciate this breakdown too. A level that a general a person can understand like myself. I told you during our during our meeting that this all seems like magic being able to project that far into the future. But thank you. I have somewhat granular questions about the sales tax and I think we've talked about in the past about how online sales taxes that's still being hammered out. I'm curious about some of our companies in Sunnyvale where we're not Where we have some very big companies that do very big software sales. And so, for example, for Google, where does that sales tax end up? Like we're not the headquarters, but for example, we do happen to headquarter Google Workspace. So do we get the sales tax from international sales of Google Workspace or the ones that are bought in this area? Or how does that work?

That's a great question. I'm not sure if I know the answer to how. Connie?

I can try to help you a little bit. So some of the software stuff is not taxable. So we'll start off with that. And it doesn't matter where the headquarters are located. It really depends on where the product is used and sold. So you mentioned Google, so we'll just use that as an example. They pay use and sales tax based on different uses. So depending on some of the projects, when they move into a building and they buy chairs and desks and laptops, so we may get some of that use portion, again, depending on where it's used and where it's delivered. There's a lot of nuances to it. Also, sometimes the bulk of our business-to-business sales tax, that's where it's significant for the city. So when Google sells to applied materials, let's just say, if it's tangible personal property, that's where... the taxes. And I'm sure we can probably get a number. I don't know off the top of my head, but it used to be business to business sales tax used to be bigger than business to consumer tax for Sunnyvale. So I'm sure we can probably look at that breakdown. I don't have the data.

I think, yeah, you're right, Connie. It's actually, I think we were just talking about this, that that business to business was 40 plus percent of our total. Correct. And you can see how that's shrunk over time. And that online sales portion has grown.

Yeah, and then, um, I think. To the degree that we've talked about, we have talked about this in the past, but could you remind me what the status quo is regarding on online sales taxes for, um, for things like Amazon purchases. Like, how that sales tax is being hammered out at the state level or otherwise.

So there have been various efforts that haven't resulted in any changes thus far because when you start talking about reallocation of a finite pie creates winners and losers and those are very difficult conversations to have the league has grappled with that for quite a quite a long time. There was a city managers working group that worked on this for a number of years. that made recommendations to the League of Cities board, which chose not to carry those forward to have a member carry a bill or bills. So those conversations continue. But anytime you're you're trying to chop up a finite pie, those are tough conversations.

Great, thank you. That's all my questions.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I want to take one more look at that BSF chart, please, and I want to talk about that 5% low point. God, I'm going to sneeze. OK, we're going to try this. So it is council policy that for the first two years of the budget, there's the one first two years of the budget cycle that the BSF does not go below 15%. Now, we are currently in line with that policy. However, come 20, what, 30, we start to go out of compliance with that policy. Now, that is a council policy. We can suspend that policy. We are not because it is a policy, not in the Charter, etc, etc. We can suspend that we can violate our own policies even though we don't like to. But as we are starting to get closer to that point, you know what are some of the options that we're thinking about to try to keep us, you know, as best in compliance with that policy as possible.

Well, my understanding of the policy is it's 15% in the first two years and it just needs to be positive thereafter. So right, so we're positive thereafter. How much positive do we need to be? Do we want to be? That's why we're here. That's what we're talking about, right? 5% is the rule of thumb that we've used historically and traditionally is my understanding, which is, again, is a nice, good number that we feel comfortable with, especially given the uncertainties that we have out there now.

sure and i get i understand that and i mean i'm i'm comfortable with that five percent mid you know low point for you know out in 10 years but you know as we start to approach that as we start to approach that 15 line you know in three or four years you know is staff going to be looking at how we can try to you know keep reserves higher and providing options on that front

Yeah, so I think I understand your question because I've asked that exact same question before, but think of the 20 year plan more like a idea of how to spend resources so that we never get to a point where we're out of resources. However, that we acknowledge that a lot of things will happen now between now and year 12 of the of this financial plan and so what we could have done this year is instead of a lot of the budget recommendations that we are making we could have not had those and and had the bsf to a point where it probably would have been 15 of revenues in that year But that's not council policy. And we look to a certain degree of what we need in terms of service levels right now. So we plan and allow for that 5%. But a lot of things will change. And a couple of years before that, we make the correct decisions to make sure that we abide by the council policy.

Okay, I'm going to signal that I'm generally okay with this curve as we're seeing it. Obviously, this is a projection. It's subject to change. It gets recalculated annually, etc., etc., etc., but I'm generally okay with this. but remember that the policy line is not in 12 years it's in like four looking at this graph um and so as we start to approach that policy line you know in future budgets you know i think it's going to be important for us to get more options in like budget supplement two in terms of you know things that we may want to consider cutting or holding or putting off etc etc to try and keep our reserves at a healthy level and at some point we are also likely going to want to talk about revenue measures again you know not this year but in the future uh i think that's all i've got on the general fund discussion and i'm going to turn my microphone off now thank you vice mayor councilmember cisneros

Yes, thank you for distilling, and as was said, distilling very complicated information into Words and concepts that we, we can all kind of get our heads around so that we can get that bigger picture before we go into the nitty gritty details. I think it's really important to keep this perspective and something that stood out to me is that business and industry occupancy of commercial and office space has a huge cascading impact on our budget that we may not. I may not necessarily recognize every day in that it touches sales tax, TOT from business travel, that's a major driver of our revenue, and then our property tax revenue and also successful property tax appeals that may be there. So I was wondering if staff had a feel for our office and commercial space stock as we have it now. And if we have enough room to continue to grow and accommodate new businesses that may be wanting to come in, expansion of business, all economy dependent. But if there are any additional constraints on occupancy for commercial and office space that we may consider.

Yes, yes and no. It really depends on the market. And this is why the city, I think we've done a really good job on trying to maintain a diversity of different type of spaces. And this is where sometimes from a policy perspective, there could be a little bit of tension between trying to convert some of those older, we call it industrial tilt up spaces for class A or for residential. Because usually for startups, when you're starting out, sometimes those are the spaces you want to go to. Or when a startup is starting and they're growing, they still don't want to move to a Class A. So we really are cognizant when we recommend zoning changes from that industrial space to either class A or a different type of use. And we really try to keep our pulse or finger on the market to see where that's going. Right now, we're starting to see a lot more mixture of, you know, sort of like industrial office warehousing space where before you saw a pretty clear differentiation of, you know, this is where the office was, this is where we do our warehousing and industrial space. Now you're doing a little bit of everything in the same space. So this is something that we're currently watching and it's part of our economic development strategic plan to make sure that we have that. And we respond to a fluctuation, Sunnyvale is a desirable location. So we do get a lot of demand for that conversion, especially for some of that, what some of our property owners or developers will say that it's underutilized space, but we really do want to keep that for some of those uses.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that, especially as we're thinking about how the supply chain seems to be not closing in, but not shrinking, but maybe compacting a little bit, wanting to reduce the travel between different pieces in that supply chain. The reason why I ask this as part of the budget is because I'm always thinking about how much elasticity is in here, how much volatility is in these different pieces, especially when I see something that will have a cascading, oh, like it impacted this, this, this, and the other thing, and that overall graph. And I know we're in uncertain times, and right now I'm seeing this as very healthy and able to withstand some hits.

we got to take some hits we can take the hits and that's ultimately um what i wanted to come away from this portion uh seeing and and that really helps answer that question so thank you all thank you and i just have a quick question so if you bring up the slide um again our favorite slide um so it would be useful so from a revenue growth and you know the 15 of revenue um Of this is based upon 15% of revenues for the 1st, 2 years, but that revenue is also increasing, meaning that the threshold of that 15% is also increasing, which, which is kind of a 2 edged sword. It's like, okay, we're happy that we're getting additional revenue. That being said, the reserve threshold. continues to move upwards to meet our 15%. It would be useful to conceivably put where the revenue, conceivably on the same graph, where the revenue expectation is, because that 15%, and this is our classic graph, but that being said, overlaying where the revenue growth is and where that 15% is, I think will be useful for future councils. to realize you know where that policy decision ultimately needs to be made and looking at this you know it's 2031 probably or you know where where we get close to that 15 um for the upcoming two years and you know that's for future councils to look at but i do think that as an additional um additional slide i do think that that would be useful in the long run um and then

Mayor, if I can just, I'm sorry to interrupt while you're on that subject. Another good point to keep in mind, and that's a great one that we do return to above 15% by the end of the 20-year plan. So that's an important point. But also we carry a contingency reserve. So when we're talking about 5% of revenues That's on top of in that low point year, almost $50 million of projected reserve for contingencies. So that $50 million is based on a percent of our operating cost and then inflated over that time. It really, I think it's 25% of operating costs. So it really reflects us. If we lost all of our revenue overnight, we could continue to operate just on that contingency reserve for three months. So I think it's just important to keep that part in mind. That's also part of the equation when we're looking at our financial health.

Yeah, and I appreciate that. You know, it's like we do have certain funds that could be utilized to make sure that we meet our goals at the end of the day. But yeah, it's in whether or not there's a downturn in the economy, whether or not there's a disaster, you know, how we would respond. You know, I think that we have good fiscal responsibility to deal with that. um the only other comment that i just want to make is you know i think it's important to continue to look at additional revenue um creation you know from for you know we have at least one budget supplement item that's talking about bringing in additional funds you know this is uh you know we have our status quo and luckily our property values continue to move up i know you know looking at other cities right now or they're seeing continual news that every sale is less than the previous assessed value of that property and we're not seeing that in our city thank goodness but but it is important to continue to look at new revenue measures um whether or not it goes in front of the the voters or whether or not it's continual new funds coming into the city i think is important but i'll get off my soapbox and throw it back to you for the next section

So just if I may, member Srini Vasan, we had you had a question about how when the BSF kind of plateaued for a couple years, that's looking at the financial plan is largely driven by for whatever reason, those are transfers to the benefits fund, which are the pension costs kind of stay steady for a couple of years. So that's why that stays elevated for them. And then it continues that downward trend.

Thank you for the explanation, but what was, yeah, I will take it offline. I think there is some, thank you.

Okay, so I will continue on with the other funds. Yeah, we're gonna get caught up here. okay so utility funds so utility funds are enterprise funds that generate revenues through fees for water wastewater and solid waste services utility rates are based on cost of service and are evaluated annually the fiscal year this fiscal year the projected increase increases are unchanged for water and sewer in the recommended budget and one percent reduction for solid waste rates from the original projection Notices of rate increases were mailed May 1st to all customers. The public hearing is also scheduled for June 16th, a June 16th council meeting. Here are the major drivers, cost drivers for utility funds. For water fund, rising costs to purchase water from the city's two wholesale providers, Valley Water and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission or SFPUC. and replacement of aging infrastructure, such as water mains. For the wastewater fund, the Sunnyvale Clean Water Program is a long-term project to replace the city's aging water pollution control plant. And another driver is the replacement of aging infrastructures as well for things such as sewer water mains, sewer mains. And for the solid waste fund, rising costs for operational contracts Specialty solid waste and recycling collections and smart station and landfill operations. This chart shows the annual increase increases for cities, the city's wholesale providers for the next 10 years this assumption these assumptions are included in the financial plan for fiscal year 2627. Wholesale water costs, this chart shows the wholesale water costs by cost per acre foot for water purchase from the two wholesale providers. Historically SFPUC was the more costly source of water, but recently Valley Waters rates have surpassed the SFPUC rates. This change is reflected in the financial plans. We have a minimum purchase agreements in place with both of these wholesale water providers.

Curtis, if I can just jump in really quick, sorry to interrupt. Council, I just wanted to share that we gave you some information here on the utilities. We do have a fully noticed public hearing on the utility rates. So a few questions I think are okay, but I'd encourage Council to hold your questions on utility financials until we get to that noticed public hearing. So that's all in the

in the place that uh so so anybody who's looking for to provide input on rates can do it at that time okay uh fiscal year 26 27 golf fees are projected at six six million dollars which is an increase of five percent compared to the fiscal year 25 26 adopted budget while overall golf revenues are projected to increase by 4.6 percent There has been an increase in a number of rounds played over the last few years, with continued growth expected throughout the 20-year plan. Due to increased golf revenues, the fund is projected to remain self-sustaining through fiscal year 28-29 before requiring general fund support beginning in 29-30. Revenues come from various building related permit fees, plan checks, and engineering services. Development fees are reviewed and adjusted on an ongoing basis to ensure full cost recovery, but actual receipts can vary significantly from year to year because they are highly sensitive to market conditions. Recent changes in California housing laws required high density development BOOSTING PROJECT SIZES AND LEADING TO HIGHER PERMIT AND PLAN CHECK FEES. THE BUDGET OFFICE IS TAKING A CONSERVATIVE APPROACH FOR REVENUE PROJECTIONS IN THE FIRST YEAR OF THE NEW LAW IMPLEMENTATION AS WE AWAIT FULL YEAR DATA TO REASSESS FUTURE PROJECTIONS. DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISE REVENUE SUPPORTS PROJECTS AND OPERATIONS OF THE CITY'S DEVELOPMENT REVIEW and regulate regulations across multiple departments such as CDD DPS DPW ESD LRS OCA and OCM the recommended budget includes the city council priority project for streamlining the permitting process that aims to evaluate and enhance the city's efficiency in processing permit applications City collects park in lieu fees for housing projects that do not dedicate land for parks or open space. Various projects are currently underway or planned in the 20-year horizon to ensure that park and recreational facilities are in good working order and can meet the demands of increased public use. Effective January 1, 2025, Senate Bill 937 amends the Mitigation Fee Act to deferred development impact fees on qualifying residential and mixed use projects until final inspection or certificate of occupancy rather than at the time of building permit issuance. But the impact is expected to stabilize within two to three years. Programmed in the current year coming up and coming up in the next budget year, ARE VARIOUS PROJECTS SUCH AS LAKEWOOD PARK RENOVATION ENHANCEMENT, COMMUNITY CENTER GROUNDS RENOVATION ENHANCEMENT, SUNNYVILLE BAYLANDS PARK INFRASTRUCTURE, AND PLAZA DE SOUL PHASE 2. THE TOTAL FOR FISCAL YEAR 26-27 BUDGET FOR THE STREETS PROJECTS IS 14.1 MILLION. FUNDING IS COMPRISED OF MANY DIFFERENT FUNDING SOURCES SUCH AS road maintenance and rehabilitation account rmra or rmra gas tax vehicle registration fee or vrf measure b and general fund some of the projects that are funded by the streets funding is goes towards pavement opera pavement rehabilitation annual slurry seal and gutter replacement sidewalk curb and gutter replacement traffic signal hardware and wiring, and safe routes to schools. The General Services Fund plans for the internal service charges or rental rates that is assessed to each operating program or fund. These charges are used to fairly distribute costs, making the cost easier to see and support budgeting by showing the full cost of operating each department's programs and its services common examples that may be included in the internal service charges are information technology services fleet maintenance and equipment facilities maintenance centralized printing and copying citywide insurance risk insurance and risk management and other administrative services Charters are typically based on usage measures, such as number of computers, number of vehicles, building space, or employees. This slide shows what the major cost drivers are for internal service funds. So for fleet services, drivers such as fuel, parts, and vehicles continue to rise in costs AND A RECENT PURCHASE OF THREE REPLACEMENT FIRE APPARATUS TRUCKS FOR PUBLIC SAFETY. FACILITIES MANAGEMENT SERVICES, SOME OF THE DRIVERS FOR THE FACILITIES MANAGEMENT SERVICES IS A NEW CONTRACT FOR SECURITY SERVICE FOR THE CIVIC CENTER BUILDING, ADDITION OF THE NEW FACILITIES SUCH AS LAKEWOOD BRANCH LIBRARY, AN ANTICIPATED REPLACEMENT OF EQUIPMENT for other new facilities such as the City Hall and the DPS EOC. Technology and communication services cost drivers include an evolving technological environment, significant cost increases in IT contracts, and enhanced cybersecurity. update updated the is the unfunded accrual accrued liability or ual amortized schedule projected liabilities are reduced and primarily driven by calpers's strong investment performance which yielded an 11.6 return in fiscal year 24-25 under the current trajectory the city is on track to achieve full pension funding by fiscal year 43-44. The city plans to begin using the trust to offset CalPERS UAL payments and stabilize the budget starting in fiscal year 26-27 with an initial $6 million withdrawal. The trust is projected to be fully drawn down by the end of fiscal year 35-36. For property and liability insurance, it is currently a hard market. with high premiums, stricter underwriting standards, and reduced availability of coverage. Current self-insured retention, or SIR, is $1 million. Fiscal year 26-27 general liability will increase 25% and then projects at 6% annual, an annual increase for future years. Property insurance remains the same as fiscal year 25-26. with insurance our other insurance will increase six percent and all and all project other insurances will increase by by six percent and all projected years will increase at three percent thereafter uh this concludes the citywide budget overview portion of the workshop we'll pause here for any questions or comments you may have on this section

Thank you. First up is Vice Mayor Mellinger.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Could we get the slides about the water rates back? I think that that is 45. Slide 45. Yeah. No, forward. Forward. One more. There we go. Okay, so I am the city's representative to the Bay Area Water Supply Conservation Agency, which is the 26 member agency purchasing union purchasers union for those who buy water from SFPUC, which we do. SFPUC was initially targeting, I think, a 1.9% increase this year and then gave us a 7% increase, which was a very unpleasant surprise to our board. I want to comment on this briefly, which is one of the counterintuitive dynamics in water rates is that the more you conserve, the more expensive your water gets. And the reason for that is water infrastructure has very substantial fixed costs. uh maintaining water mains uh dams pumping systems everything else um that cost is not particularly driven by the amount of water that is used and so if you are using less water the amount of rates and uh monsoor uh uh nasa who is here can comment more on this i'm sure if he but um The less water you use, the more expensive that water has to get to cover those fixed costs, which is something that we've been seeing in the Bay Area. Every time there's a drought, demand hardens, people conserve, and when the drought ends, they don't use as much after. And so I wanted to give that as some color for members of the public looking at these rates. One thing I will say is I am seeing the valley water rates are very concerning. and i would like to ask what staff is doing to advocate for valley water to be more responsible with its rate setting i believe council member srinivasan is our representative there go ahead council members yes

uh that is a good overview and then this is i am chair of valley water commission we are the body which recommends to the board which ultimately decides the rate and then my understanding is it used to be 9.9 for next possible 10 years or so because of the new reservoir they were scheduled to build pacheco pass reservoir which didn't get funding so the rates got decreased to 9.4 for next four years and then the We are in what is called North County, which has got some of the reservoirs assigned to us, and then they are being retrofitted. Most of these reservoirs and water bodies were built in 50s and 60s, so they need to be retrofitted. Case in point, Anderson Dam is fully discharged. There is no water there, and then they are retrofitting. earthquake uh seismic retrofitting there so the question this i've been very very hard on the valley water staff about this but this is what they tell us the the northern county reservoirs needs to be retrofitted and then we have about four or five of them assigned to from palo alto to cupatino sunnyvale saratoga and all those places that's the rate increase but the good news is they are less than sfp you see so so far yeah

Thank you and I do understand this again is the fixed capital costs and you know what the concern I I will say is if you know demand continues to decline. You know, investing in reservoir capacity could cause a further cost spiral. Okay, a couple other questions not related to water. I recall, and this is for Director Ryan, that we were at some point, you know, as part of our housing element, we were looking at reforms to our park and loo fees. um i seem to recall the possibility of discussing you know we're switching from per unit to per square foot i also seem to recall the possibility of commercial park and loo fees being discussed could you speak to any of that

Thank you. There are several things that are going on right now as we examine the park dedication requirements, which include the fees. During last year's budget, we essentially artificially lowered the fee to comply with the housing element requirement or the program to reduce the fees by an average of 30%. So we accomplished that with the valuation being lowered. What we've been looking at is what is the park dedication requirement, the per acre requirement, and we're looking at both density and unit sizes. There's a correlation. The higher the density, the smaller the units. There are some anomalies out there, and so we'll be looking at to what extent that could suggest a different approach, but the state has requested that mitigation fees be based on unit size. We actually have two requirements for park dedication, and one is due to associated with subdivision of property, and that has a different set of rules than the one that's based under the fee mitigation, so Quimby Act and fee mitigation. So we're trying to join those two different items, but we will look at both. We'll give the council both of those pieces of information when we come to you later this year.

And are we looking at commercial in lieu fees for parks?

Not at this point. That would require a fairly extensive feasibility study in order to do that.

OK, thank you. Last question is regarding the irrevocable pension trust. Historically, as ERAF returns have exceeded, and I know we're targeting a higher ERAF return going forward, which I think is a good thing, but as ERAF returns come in in December and we have a budget surplus, we've typically taken a lot of that surplus and put it into the irrevocable pension trust. If we are lucky enough to have such surpluses in the coming years, is the plan to continue to boost the irrevocable pension trust or to simply use it to directly pay down debt? Or is this like the last we're going to be putting any money into that trust?

We really haven't talked about how we handle year-end surplus, if we're fortunate enough to have it. But since we're drawing down the trust, I wouldn't anticipate that we want to continue to contribute to it in the meantime. But that could certainly be one of the options that we'll talk about.

Sorry, would or would not want to continue to contribute?

Would not want to continue to contribute, yeah, since we're drawing on it.

okay thank you very much um I believe that does it for Vice Mayor I'm sorry I I just a little nuance there there is a council policy that does prioritize that so we would have to look we'll have to look at that as we move forward since we're shifting approach here and now we're drawing from the trust we have a council policy that says with urine surpluses those would be prioritized to pay down long-term pension debt so we'd want to take a look at that when we get to that point

OK, I do have one last question. Actually, I do have one other thing which is on golf. If we could get those slides back, I believe this is. 47. So couple things we did get a question about, you know, a possible club or senior rate at Sunken Gardens. I assume that the appropriate meeting for that would be the June 16th rate meeting.

Yeah, we'll have a public hearing on fees.

Okay. I'd love to have some options for that at that meeting. And then second, my understanding is starting in 2930, we're going to be looking at subsidizing golf and tennis to the tune of $500,000 per year. Now, I am familiar with all of the reasons why. golf and, you know, the golf tennis subsidy makes sense that, you know, we're getting substantial cost recovery from these programs that we would not be getting if they were a simple public park. That said, as we look at the increased demand on services for things like unhoused services, as we look at you know, our BSF starting to drop towards that 5% line, you know, something that I think is a very obvious area where we should be looking at for savings and economies would be that Gulf subsidy, because as was pointed out earlier, you know a million dollars per year and a 20-year budget cycle adds up very quickly a half million dollars per year in a 20-year budget cycle adds up very quickly so even if we could bring that uh subsidy down to 400 000 300 000 instead that would provide some very useful cushion as we head into the lean years with the pension thank you thank you council member chang

Thank you. Back to water on slide 45. Could you also describe the relationship? I know in the Monday morning questions about 98% is purchased from SFPUC and Valley Water, but the relationship also with Cal Water?

do we purchase water for them or is it yeah so most of us are environmental services uh cal water serves 1 000 homes in sunnyvale we have no enterprise with them or relationship with them as far as rates so they set their own rates based on the cpuc and we set our rates based on council action

OK, thank you. I know in the future meetings, we might be having a discussion about something related to a well. So do we purchase from their wells?

no we don't we have our own wells we have seven wells they have uh few wells in sunnyvale and copertino so we don't well we do have enter ties in case of an emergency so if our water is shut off for any reason we can get water from them and we can provide them water okay thank you um for the next question is related to slide 47 on golf there's a

banner that says fiscal strategy is gone. I just wanted to clarify that that means that because of if there's an fee increase that it would be self-sustaining or what does that mean?

So that was a little tongue in cheek, but fiscal strategies is something that we program in there when there's a future action that's needed in order to make the fund balance. And what we're able to do in the last couple of years is to program the general fund to make that transfer, which eliminated fiscal, it took the place of the fiscal strategy. So when we had talked about these slides, we wanted more. Bang and oof and so we thought we would throw that in there. Okay.

Thank you. Because I was a little confused by that. And then the later line that says, but then in fiscal year 29 and 30, there is additional general fund support.

Yeah, council member, the fiscal strategies were essentially assumed operating savings. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you. For the fee meeting, we're going to have on June 16th. Could we also have a breakdown of the cost per. the municipal golf course versus the sunken gardens one. And then in the budget, it mentioned an increase in popularity in pickleball, and that was some of the recouping of the funds. If we could also see more of that in that breakdown on the June 16th meeting.

The pickleball at the tennis center,

Just kind of what the funds, how much of the breakdown is coming from tennis, pickleball, and golf separately?

Oh, yeah, we can provide tennis and golf separately. We'll have to check in with the vendor to see if they have numbers on the tennis center operators, see if they have numbers on pickleball specifically.

Okay, thank you. My last question is related to the main library fund. It's more a general question. As we're putting in $20 million this year, is there flexibility with interest that is earned from that fund for creation of pilot programs or other things like that?

That's a, that's a great question that that fund doesn't accrue interest. It accrue. We accrue interest at the at a different level. The fund is identified for infrastructure for the library council could. Propose, you know. pilot programs through the Council priority projects process or if it's small pilot programs we could we could take that offline if you had specific interests and we could get back to Council on what that might look like okay thank you thank you uh Councilmember Srinivasan

Thank you. Thanks for asking the fiscal strategy gone. I had that question and then there was another UAL gone also in the Red Board phase. I'm talking, I have a question on slide. 44 utility fund major cost driver my question is regarding solid waste fund i know we have a capital improvement coming up for sorting and then the second related question is does this cater to the cupertino also will be using our facilities so

So we're tag-teaming here.

Maybe you can borrow it from there.

But to answer your question, yes, the capital project is included in the costs, and Cupertino will also be part of that. We'll also be getting a reciprocal revenue from Cupertino that will subsidize our fund once that happens.

Okay. And then... talking about the whole wholesale water cost and then I wanted to answer add a couple of things to vice mayor's question one of the things Valley Water uh does is they project 50-year drought projection so they look at water security based on that they build the capacity of reservoirs and then whether that is required or not but in the past it has worked very well for But the main thing what I noticed was there was no fund allocated for retrofitting or renovating all these reservoirs when they had excess surplus fund. So that's the problem we are facing now. So I just wanted to bring it up. And then on the slide of 46, it talks about per acre foot.

uh is there a way how much acre by foot we get from each of them you don't have to answer that you can respond to me or respond to the council no i think i kind of have an idea so in total we buy 18 000 acre feet a year from both agencies about 45 percent from valley water 53 percent from sfpuc So it's about 8,000 from Valley Water and 10,000 from SFPC on average.

OK, thank you and then regarding the fees discussion of golf, I would also request a analysis of users. We talk about number of rounds, but then user breakdown of various the two golf courses and then within that if we can get residents and non residents and then whatever the breakdown we have, that would be very useful. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you. Unfortunately, a number of my questions have been asked and answered, but I do have one remaining. Some time ago, residents brought a concern to Council, and that was that our tennis courts specifically felt clogged with private private teachers or private lessons. So the concern was basically this municipal resource being used for private profit or enterprise, and it's interfering with others use. I've been thinking about that ever since. And as we're talking about discounts and the fees schedule, I was wondering if we do anything to capture, how often our facilities for golf and tennis are used for private lessons or teaching, and if we've considered going down a route in order to kind of be able to capture some resources from that, because it's used for private profit.

I think if we can take that, I don't know if Michelle has anything, but maybe we'll take that as a follow up. I can share that private instruction is part of the on all the tennis courts as part of the agreement that we have with lifetime tennis. So it's not just limited to their tennis center. It's also in certain courts throughout, but we can we can definitely take that as a follow up. I think that would be best.

Yeah, that's really what it was intended, like, teeing up for that conversation. The mayor made a really good point about new revenue streams being really important part of our strategy that we should keep an eye on and thinking about ways, especially when there's a need for discounts and other ways to use the resources there. So, thank you. I appreciate the follow up that meeting. Not necessary today.

And I neglected to mention that we take our standard practices to take follow ups out of this meeting, and they end up being an attachment to the actual adoption RTC in June. So you will get written follow ups like you do for Monday 8am questions out of this meeting.

Very good.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Lay.

Thank you. Just a quick follow-up to Councilmember Sweeney-Vausen's request about the breakdown for the golf usage. I wasn't sure if he caught senior golf usage separated out in that, and I would appreciate seeing that as well. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Sell.

Okay. I just had a brief question. So on slide 52, fleet services. So I went to a conference. In the conference, people were saying that some cities are converting to leasing their fleet. And then leasing offers, then you don't have to take care of long-term capital costs. And then you get the efficiencies of the leasing company buying at power. So I was just wondering if that was an idea, and where might that idea be placed? Not a good idea or like any thoughts I can take a shot at that.

We do actually lease or golf carts, so in each case we actually look at the. the cost effectiveness we don't want to lease police vehicles or specialized vehicles which actually cost a lot of money and given the fact that we have our own fleet services maintenance in those cases it actually works out more cost effective to to actually buy the vehicles and maintain them

Okay. So what you're saying is most of our vehicles are specialized and we don't have a lot of just normal vehicles.

That's correct.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. That's all council questions for now. So let's go ahead and take a lunch break and we will come back at 125. Okay. Thank you.

know matt are you taking yes uh thank you mayor uh we're now going to move on to the next uh section uh can i have the record bring up the presentation we're getting ready to go into the departmental presentations by department and the first up is office of the city manager of sarah

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Sarah Johnson-Rios, Assistant City Manager. And I will start with the mission of the City Manager's Office, which is to essentially support staff in delivering all of the exceptional services that the city provides by providing strategic guidance, policymaking direction, including through the City Council, and fostering collaboration. so in the upcoming fiscal year 26-27 we have several goals we are aiming to continue to support advancing your strategic priorities by focusing on what's outlined for the public in the city's work plan which includes council priority projects former study issue projects that are still ongoing and other key strategic initiatives across the city We're also going to continue our enhanced funding and legislative advocacy efforts, and we will be managing an election this November for three council seats and potentially ballot measures pending council direction after the Charter Review Committee was convened recently. and we'll be launching and stabilizing a new constituent relationship management software this summer which for anyone listening is replacing access sunnyvale and we'll be supporting that launch and stabilization going forward Of course, we'll be continuing our equity access and inclusion work, including reviewing the results of the ongoing community equity assessment, focusing on data driven decision making with an equity lens and continuing our work on our ADA transition plan. We're also continuing to support organizational development efforts now in partnership with the new human resources director who's here with us today. And our staff will continue to implement the economic development strategic plan and continue the expansion of communications and community engagement work across the organization. A lot of the work I just described will build on successes that we had in fiscal year 25-26. So here are a few highlights. Today is actually the culmination of the update to your council priority projects selection process. which has changed the way that you identify new priorities for staff and changed the way that the public engages in that process. And we thank the public for continuing to engage in this process this year. We also worked with IT to launch the new dashboard that I mentioned. And again, that's on the city's website. It's one place where you can get updated information about council priority projects and a number of city priority efforts. We also convened and led a charter review committee in partnership with the office of the city attorney. And you'll be hearing the culmination of that work later tonight at your main meeting. We began the community equity assessment, which was from prior council direction, and we're working to better understand how residents experience city programs and services with the aim of reducing barriers and making services fair and inclusive. Additionally, by expanding the communications team, we increase that level of service. As you'll recall, we had an updated and improved State of the City event, and we've significantly enhanced the city's social media presence. We've actually increased posts by more than 200% from prior years. We also brought back the tech business expo to showcase innovative technology from the Sunnyvale business community. And I do want to invite everyone to join us for the next one, which is coming up on October 15th this year in 2026. As I mentioned, economic development staff continues to implement the strategic plan and have several notable deals with companies that are moving into city line, as well as new retail and hotels that are coming online. We have made significant progress this year on digital accessibility compliance, including tools to bring historical documents into compliance, and we've also trained staff on creating compliant documents. We revamped and delivered a four quarter management training program. We have over 100 managers here at the city and we focus on leadership and organizational development content. This year we achieved satisfaction scores ranging from 93 to 99% for each meeting. So creating a meaningful program there for our managers. And we officially completed the implementation of the ERP's learning module and transitioned that system to IT for ongoing operations and, of course, human resources and finance as well. So high level budget highlights for the office of the city manager's office are here on this slide. You can note that the head count here, the total includes the mayor and council members and the staffing count. So net of the elected positions, the office of the city manager and fiscal year 2526 has 22.5 FTE. I'll talk about these changes a bit more detail on the next slide. So this breaks out our recommended changes into baseline adjustments and our proposed service level adjustments. First with baseline adjustments, the recommended budget adds a staff office assistant, which is an existing position housed in Nova. And we're recommending moving that into the office of the city manager to effectively be a city hall receptionist. This is based on data that we've been able to gather since moving into City Hall that the vast majority of walk-ins to City Hall are seeking services that extend beyond NovaWorks. And so wanting to ensure that we're appropriately resourcing that need. The recommended budget also reclassifies the deputy city manager position to an assistant city manager position to provide additional leadership capacity for the city manager's office. And the vacant DCM position, the other one, is being evaluated. This budget also removes a term limited IT manager, which was associated with the ERP implementation project. And then moving on to the service level adjustments, we are, as I mentioned, continuing to expand our communications and community engagement work in the city. And so recommending adding a community engagement coordinator position to assist really citywide and managing community engagement, but focusing heavily on the departments such as public works and community development, which have a high volume of community engagement activities. We also are recommending reclassifying a part-time deputy city clerk position to a full-time deputy city clerk position. That's really to support both an increased volume and public records act requests, and also to support ongoing unfunded state mandates, which are continuing to expand requirements for virtual meetings, et cetera. And then a couple of non personnel changes. This budget recommends adding $110,000 in contract services for it's actually equity access and inclusion, staff training, and then 10,000 to support belonging in Sunnyvale. This is an additional 10,000 over the baseline to support belonging in Sunnyvale community engagement events, which will be public facing. And with that, I'm available. And of course, Mr. Kirby and Ms. Rosales are available as well for any questions.

Any questions from Council on OCM? Council Member Chang?

Thank you. I was wondering for the $110,000 in contract services, does that include the increase if there is an increase to the committees, the Teen Advisory Committee, the Disability Act?

Good question, Councilmember. That's actually separate. So the staff committees would be incorporated into a variety of different operating departments where those committees are housed. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you for that. And this is all very exciting news showing When we think about our priorities, I really see this as teeing us up to be able to take on that capacity, and there's a lot of thought behind it. I'm particularly interested in the community engagement coordinator. Is this person's workload going to be primarily within our existing community outreach efforts that we have planned, or is this to provide additional meetings with the community? And I'm just trying to get a sense of what piece of community engagement is so broad, which piece this full-time position is looking to support the most?

Thank you, Council Member Cisneros. I think first and foremost, this is part of our theme of right-sizing the budget to meet existing service demands. So that will be the baseline and the staff members first priority will be to ensure that there are consistent standards, potentially toolkits, resources available across the city to bring quality and consistency to our community engagement efforts on current projects.

Okay, that's actually very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Lay.

Thank you. I just want to express also my excitement for this new position. I think that it is important for us to remain in contact with community and with regards to recent events, I think that having this person in place and in the future would potentially mitigate some of the fires that we've seen pop up. So thank you so much.

Thank you, Council Member Tso.

So for this equity access inclusion programming and this belonging in Sunnyvale, were there details about it, like bullet items, what it would be doing there? Or could it be a follow up item of like bullet points that relate to that?

Okay, follow up. Yeah, we'll take that as a follow up.

Okay, sounds great.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Could you remind me the details on the rollout for the CRM? You mentioned that we're going to be starting testing in summer. When do we expect it to be rolled out fully?

Uh, we, we haven't publicized a specific date yet. Excuse me. Uh, we, I do want to let the public know that we, we have publicized a date for public input meeting, which is on May 28th. So if anyone is listening and would like to join that, um, please find that information on the city's website. Uh, and then we'll be, we'll be finalizing our testing and going live this summer.

Oh, actual live this summer.

That's the plan.

Oh, very nice. Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask about, and Mr. City Manager, if you want to, we can discuss this at another time in the meeting if you'd prefer. At various points, the idea of a performance auditor as part of the office of the city manager has been floated. and I know that I had had some discussions in my one-on-ones with you about the possibility of that topic we're not including that in this year's uh proposed budget um can you say a little more about that topic and you know uh if there is an appetite from Council to have some something similar to that role added you know what options might there be

Yes, so just by way of background, a performance auditor is a little bit different than you might experience with a typical financial auditor. A performance auditor is looking at metrics, data collection, making sure that the methodology around that is sound, making sure that our reporting out is sound, and then sometimes also looking at operational processes to make sure they align with best practice or meeting community needs. We set aside in this recommended budget a $250,000 allocation for unplanned or unanticipated initiatives that might come up. What we'd like to do is potentially start by taking a look at bringing on a service to look at just the totality of our performance measures, the data, what we're collecting, what makes the most sense, and go from there on expanding that into potential other more targeted areas and or operational audits.

OK, I would love to see an entry on the work plan for that at an appropriate time.

I think we can do that.

And then the last thing I'm just going to I'm going to say is, you know, appreciate. I think that this is I think that what we're seeing in this department, there's a lot of good stuff. I think that, as my colleague said, the community engagement manager is going to be very helpful, especially considering some of the friction that we've seen this year.

and i'm just going to say that if in the city manager's judgment you know additional resources are needed in this department i'm very happy to have that discussion thank you thank you um and i just had one follow-up so kind of on the community engagement portion and i don't know if this falls into ocm or i.t um one of the one so appreciate community engagement the other half of that is getting feedback from our residents. And have we looked at standardizing how we're doing polling or what tools, what software we're doing? Because it's been kind of hit or miss on whether or not it's CDD or public works or, you know, in any of the departments, like whatever, often whatever consultant comes in and says, this is our standard. Have we looked at that across kind of the organization? I would assume this would fall in kind of OCM to set up that, that, or,

it would and i'll invite others to jump in if they'd like to provide more detail but we do have that in your project budget actually so um last year we included a project to evaluate our um we're currently beginning the process of evaluating systems to collect feedback uh and and to engage with the public online so that we can bring some more consistency to that okay i appreciate that and i didn't remember that that project was there thank you councilmember srinivasan

Thank you. Adding to that, it might be a good exercise to build a database of our residents contact points, email texts, or phone numbers like that. So that in case of any community engagement, we can target them. So

I think I think that's a great idea. And we already have processes in place, people can opt in to certain topics by sharing their information. There's also different ways with business license, neighborhood association. So we already have that data. And we can definitely aggregate and ensure that based on topic or areas, we can reach out to those residents.

thanks for that answer but that's part of gov delivery right that's the company but do they share the information with us do we have access to the email addresses of our residents my understanding is that we we do yes okay okay thank you thank you that's all council questions and pass it to our city attorney

Thank you. Thank you, mayor and council members. I am Rebecca Moon, the city attorney, and I'm here to give a brief presentation on the city attorney's office. So the Office of the City Attorney provides legal advice and services to the city council, city officials, boards and commissions. Our role is to protect the legal interests of the city and ensure that the actions of the city are legal. We also represent the city, its officers and employees in administrative matters and civil litigation involving official city business. We prepare contracts, ordinances, resolutions, and other legal documents involving the city. And we also can prosecute violations of the municipal code and assist with civil code enforcement matters. Overall, we have three main areas of responsibility, which are advisory, providing legal representation and litigation and other administrative and court related matters. And then finally management and administration of the office. The goals that we have for the coming fiscal year, of course, the very first goal is to support the council's strategic priorities and the work plan. We also monitor new legislation, and I would like to focus this coming year on more proactive training and education for city staff and officials on new laws and legal issues that pertain to their work. I also want to work on strengthening OCA's capacities through professional development, cross-training, and succession planning so that our staff attorneys all have a broad base of expertise in different areas of municipal law. We also have an interesting project that I'm hoping we'll complete this year, which is a project we're doing with IT and the city clerk to find what's called an e-discovery system. This would assist us with the review and timely response to public records requests and also litigation discovery. Our current email archiving system only has fairly basic search functionality and it's, you know, it's built as an archiving system, not really as a discovery system. So finding email that's responsive to a request and extracting it, redacting it is very time consuming. And so we're really hopeful that this e-discovery system will not just help the city attorney's office, but also citywide with managing this large amount of public records that we have due to the retention, the long retention periods on email. And finally, I came up with a vision statement for our office, which is similar to the city's, to build client trust by providing excellent legal services. Some recent accomplishments, we assisted the Community Development Department in updating the housing element. We worked on this SB 79 ordinance to exempt historic Murphy Avenue from redevelopment under SB 79. We also worked on a new zoning framework for the village centers to hopefully ensure that we have sufficient mixed use and retail in the remaining village centers. This next bullet, somehow I didn't notice before this went live that the wording had been shortened a bit. So I wish I could say we've successfully achieved full compliance with ADA requirements for digital accessibility, but that is still a work in progress. The goal is to successfully achieve full compliance. And I know we'll make more progress on that this year with with the city manager's office and with Connie. Thank you, Connie. I also wanted to note one proactive project that the city attorney's office did, which was we saw a need for IT contracts to have standard terms and conditions, which we had never had before. And it was creating a lot of sort of ad hoc negotiation with different providers. And so Melissa Troncay, senior assistant city attorney, worked with Kathleen Franco-Simmons. Sorry, not Kathleen Franco-Simmons. I'm having a flashback. Kathleen Foster. Sorry, Kathleen. To come up with these standard specs, which I think are going to be very helpful in making sure we have protection for the city. We have so many more IT contracts and so many more complicated IT issues that we're working on these days. And finally, I just want to note we've resolved a receivership case, which resulted in a substantial recovery of fees and costs, as well as clearing the site, meeting a lot of neighborhood concerns, and hopefully in the next year or two, a new home will be built there. This is our budget overview. No, no changes anticipated. We have seven full time positions, five attorneys and two staff. And that's it. I'm ready to answer questions.

Thank you. Are there any questions from Council? Council Member Srinivasan?

I like what you mentioned about ediscovery. That's really exciting. I would imagine redacting would have been really, really time consuming of for documents. So is that AI based or any thoughts on that or?

So I think that most of the what they call e-discovery platforms now do have AI. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So those are my questions. That would be an awesome. When do you expect it to be completed?

Hopefully in the next few months. Okay.

No.

Sorry, Kathleen Boutte Foster, Chief Information Officer. It's actually more than just eDiscovery. The city actually has an eDiscovery tool, but this is more about Public Records Act and being able to do automated redaction, collecting cases, being able to provide all that information, not just for city attorney's office, but for HR and any CRM request that comes through. The project is going to go to RFP and be published within the RFP process of our procurement very soon. It's in queue, so it should be published hopefully in the next couple of months. And then we have to go through the RFP process of selecting a vendor and then implementing. So we'll be published soon, but we won't be live soon.

Okay. And then I am assuming any public documents which needs to be redacted could be useful also.

100%. So the time savings that we're hoping for is not just on the redaction piece, but on duplicate requests, so that it's not searching all of the emails or documents every time, that it would actually just search the Delta, so that we can go ahead and have less staff time going through the same documents.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Next up is Councilmember Cisneros.

Yes, thank you very much. All good news. Good shape here. I'm particularly appreciative of seeing more proactive training and education on new legislation. Things are moving really fast. We've already talked a lot about the instability we're seeing nationally, globally, and how even though it's on a national global state scale, it all comes back down to us and we do have impacts. And so I was wondering to the extent that you're gonna be doing this additional proactive training and education for the city staff, what does that entail on top of what you've already needed to spend so much time on when maybe we read something on social media, a decision made on social media and we have to figure out how does that affect us in Sunnyvale and how does that help us handle that influx of new information?

Well, it's, you know, it's an important role, I think, for our office that we absorb into, you know, we have so much time and we just make time for it. I think it also, you know, saves us time. It may require an input of time, but then hopefully we have fewer mistakes, we have fewer questions down the road, so it saves us time later.

OK, so you just on level, you're noticing that if you front load some of some of that work over time when it hits and becomes relevant here, then right.

OK. And will there be like a repository where people can refer back to?

So, yeah, we have you know, we have some training videos that we did a few years ago for boards and commissions that we recorded and we're uh you know we can hopefully work with hr maybe to have some recorded training that is available on the city's training platform that'd be very cool all right thank you so much thank you next is council member cell um yeah with sb79 impacting our mobile home community and then

impacting Murphy, like when that legislation were percolating through, are there like services, consultants that would be able to look at the percolating legislation and be able to like give the city's perspective like You know, this might be the result of that. You know, if you're a city, you could like advocate to get this into as opposed to like the laws passed and then legal needs to figure out how do we, you know, adjust to it? Like, is there anything that could happen during the legislature? We have a consultant, but I was just wondering if there's anything that legal and our consultant could work on before the legislation becomes law.

Yeah, and I'll pass this over to Sarah because we are actually already doing a lot of that with our lobbyists.

Yes, Council Member Sell, our lobbyist Townsend is doing that for us and with us. And so on something like SB 79, specifically, the city was absolutely engaged before that passed. And actually, we coordinate most often with the city attorney's office to ensure that any legal considerations are incorporated into our advocacy, consistent with council policy direction.

Okay, great. And then that that funding for that is X amount. And that's a good amount that we're funding that they're able to do all this with legal and everything.

Yes, we're not recommending any changes to their contract. Okay, great. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Chang.

Thank you. With the proactive training and education, I wonder if it could extend to board and commissions. We recently got, especially around recusals, we recently had a BPAC meeting that got really confusing because it wasn't until later where two of them said they lived near the project. So, more of that?

Yeah, we do some training with the board and commission members when they're first appointed, but refresher training I think is important. So yeah, definitely we'll look at that too. Great, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Lay.

Thank you. And thank you for your work. I want to say just as a broad overview of the things that are coming up, I appreciate your office taking the steps to look at things proactively and to save time for recurring tasks. I think that's a great way to look at operations. And I thank you for taking that view. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. That's all council questions. And we'll move on to our chief information officer. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Kathleen Boutte Foster, Chief Information Officer for the City of Sunnyvale here. Next slide. I'm here to talk about the IT department. And as many of you might know, we are a centralized IT department. That means that all IT costs and contracts and procurement and actions and activities go through our office. And then it goes into the departments for actual use. And we pride ourselves on being a partner strategically and operationally with every department and every city agency that we work with to try to make sure that we're reducing costs where we can, making sure that we don't have any duplicate systems or any type of waste as it relates to IT purchases. And so we are very happy to be partners with all of our group. We have an IT governance structure that every department participates on, which helps me to make sure that we are keeping our priorities, not just by what the biggest needs are or the most big groups with departments that have a lot of funds, but with what the actual need of the community and the actual citywide perspective. We do this, next slide, by our four divisions So we have an admin fiscal performance division we have our infrastructure services, which is everything behind the scenes our wi fi the cell phone connectivity. We have our applications analytics, which is everything from software solutions to reporting the dashboards and then a project management office that centrally looks at any it project. Of course, at the bottom of that is all of our it security and cyber security processor. All of these groups by nature are completely reliant on one another and therefore we make sure that we have everyone working together. Next slide, please. So as it relates to our goals, we have very lofty goals. And hopefully some of these seem familiar to you. But being in Silicon Valley and in an area where IT is flourishing with a lot of really great talent, we try to pride ourselves on making sure that talent wants to come to our department. And I have a very good track record of keeping our staff. I'm very excited about that. Now with HR's help, we're recruiting a lot of great staff as well. So we want to maintain that. More importantly though, we also know that the fiscal operations are critical. And so we are trying our best to look at different ways to maintain costs and to be able to still project our abilities of being innovative, doing things with technology and using these services, but also not having all of our financials go in the wrong direction. And so we do pride ourselves on a really good strong budget with finance department. We do want to protect and secure the city's infrastructure. And so I'm sorry, this is a literal case of leapfrog where the city goes ahead and puts in protections in place. The bad guys learn about different ways of doing things. We then have to put different protections in place. They learn about doing more things. So it is a case of leapfrog. We're trying to make sure we're doing this in a smart way. So we'll talk about some of that in a bit. We do have a two-year IT strategic plan. And this is something that is a big shout out to our governance, both IT solutions and IT steering teams, because we work collectively. as a city to establish goals that are strategic for IT citywide, not just within the department. And this looks at how we wanna have our future over the next couple of years and what are the priorities we wanna have as it relates to not just usage, but what types of systems and what types of things we're gonna put in place. We also need to make sure that we're having things as reliable and secure as possible. And this isn't just from a cybersecurity standpoint, this is from a stability standpoint. So making sure that we have our data center, that we have our co-location facility that has disaster recovery, making sure that we have all of our mobile applications that we support being available for folks. So we wanna be able to know that our services are available to the public when they need it and how they need it. We also are about to establish our GIS or geographic information system program. I am so thrilled and thankful to OCM and HR and the city council for allowing us to have a GIS coordinator. She is onsite and already hitting the ground running. And we are working with our consultant as well to establish a roadmap so that we can look at what are our priorities going forward. And again, making sure that the things that we need the most go first. and then looking at everything else in due time. So we're definitely staffing up. A lot of good work over the summer with our internships are going to be coming through here. So very excited about our new GIS program.

Thank you for your support there.

AI. Artificial intelligence is prevalent in everything and everywhere. In places that you wouldn't expect it to be, we are seeing it pop up in almost every new solution, technology tool, Even any type of gadget has an AI component. So to the earlier question, is the PRA tool going to have AI? 100% sure it'll have some level of AI, I'm certain. But we want to do this responsibly. And that's the part that takes a lot of work, making sure the data classification is correct, making sure that the way that is being used is correct. So the idea of what Melissa and the city attorney's office did with creating that terms and conditions we have a fantastic addendum that we've already seen has kept our ai providers in check for making sure that our information isn't used to be marketed for others making sure that the modeling of that is being done in a responsible way how they source the data is being done in a responsible and a safe way so it's been a really great addition to our way of working with those vendors and lastly of course we are in the still in the midst of all this legacy migration and modernization and so to what Sarah mentioned earlier, we are doing a new CRM. We are looking at with CHIEF a fantastic new computer aided dispatch system. And it is a huge lift for public safety to go into this type of a new application from basically a green screen almost to a web-based application with tons of data processing and AI and GIS related to it. So we've got a lot working there. We are very excited that the Environmental Services Department and Public Works will be able to capitalize on what looks to be a very good RFP soon to be finishing, where we have a consolidated system for work order management or computerized maintenance management system. So when you think of street pothole requests or water sewer requests, those are all gonna funnel in, it looks like, to a consolidated system, which is fantastic. And lastly, once the CAD is done, the public safety folks are not gonna get a chance to breathe. We did this to the Port ERP team. We're gonna do it now again to the DPS team. Once the public safety CAD goes through, boom, we're going to get into records management. So we want to make sure that we're doing, again, ways of records management that makes it less time and less cumbersome for the staff to get their job done. As it relates to our major accomplishments, there's been a lot of big things that have happened. Some folks have already talked about some of these, but I will talk about one that I'm most proud of, which is we are in our eighth consecutive year of earning the MESAC Excellence Award. And this thing is a bear. It's just starting again for the next year. It is a full IT audit, which also includes financials, operations, project management standards, everything that you can imagine that touches IT, they infiltrate and ask questions about. So we have continued to see that level of excellence and we hope to continue to do it again. Going over to AI and in public safety, there's been some really good improvements. So we are ready. as it relates to FIFA and having AI translation for our CAD. We are ready for our alternate public safety if something, God forbid, terrible happens. We are ready to perform. We also have created our own Sunnyvale-specific large language model, or LLM. So we are using Sunnyvale-specific tools that now allow us to really leverage AI to look up things like, does this policy exist? Or what do I do with that? So make it easier for city staff and our folks to be able to do things like create a report to council. Wi-Fi continues to be a wonderful thing that council has provided us the support for, and so we continue to roll that out with most of the parks and recreation projects. So the new community grounds, you'll see some Wi-Fi. It's already live, actually. Shh, don't tell anybody. uh the work plan is live and then i i do want to also mention that rebecca very kindly talked about ada and while we did and we were very much almost ready to go with the april 2026 deadline thank goodness the government federal government went ahead and pushed that out another year so we can make it even more easy for our staff to be trained and have the right tools rather than a knee-jerk reaction We've been increasing the network bandwidth, both on the city side, as well as the library side. So things are a lot quicker and we also have a fail over internet service provider now. So that if things go bad, we do have another vendor that can provide that support. And I'm gonna end with the lightliest highlight here. in response to a fraudulent attack on the city. Library Recreation Services and IT, luckily we were in the middle of an RFP, but with our vendor, quickly and in three months' time, jumped from one recreation management system to a completely new web-based online recreation management system. And I thank the community and the public for hanging in there with us because I know that was difficult, but we were able to make that happen and keep our public's information safe. We were getting hit with all kinds of different attacks, and that vendor that we had previously was not supporting that. So we're very glad to have a three-month rapid deployment of a new recreation management system. Hope everyone's enjoying that. On the budget, you will see, yes, I apologize. I have increased our costs and I don't mean to, but here's the honest truth. All departments have technology that has gone up. It looks bad for me because it looks like my systems and my things are going up. The reality is IT doesn't own or have anything that isn't a department related item, right? There's very few things that are IT only. The cost of, let's say, doing translation for the CAD, yes, that increases. Doing ADA and having PDFs that are accessible online, that increases our costs. Yes, there is a little bit of a cost in our ongoing operations, but we again are trying to use technology in the right way. So we've eliminated the term-limited positions. We've let those go ahead and expire and term out. However, with the new amount of equipment that we have, not only on our network, our server, and our cybersecurity needs, you will see that we did add another FTE that was term-limited, but now we'll have a full-time position, hopefully, to recruit for in this recommended budget. Next slide. The other highlights here is we continue to negotiate longer term contracts and subscriptions. This helps us to make sure that we can maintain the costs as much as possible. So where we can, we are putting in at least five or 10 years of actual costs that we can manage. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the 10th year. I'm certain we'll have some strong armed negotiations at that time with those vendors, but at least that gives us a little bit of breathing room and some consistency each time. We are seeing significant annual increases in maintenance and support, which is beyond CPI. And for those that don't know, the city for the longest time has been standardizing on about a 3% CPI for all of our 20 year financial plan. This is the first year, and I'm so grateful and thankful to the budget office and the city manager's office for allowing this to occur that we're being realistic. So over the last few years, let's not even talk about federal government and tariffs. That's a whole nother ball game, but we've seen a consistent increase. with software costs about 5 to 8% going up on an annual basis, hardware costs from a 7 to 10% on an annual basis. So for the first time, we've gone from projecting 20 years of 3% cost to saying we're going to do the 5%, yes, it's the minimum, and the 7%, which is a lot more realistic. So in future years, it'll be a lot easier for me to understand and show to everybody that it's not just technology because we're adding, it's because these things cost more over time, period. So thank you to that. We're also seeing a big increase in use of technology overall. So even all of our field staff now, I can say, have gone from having flip phones or non smartphones to now either having a smartphone or a tablet in their hands to go ahead and make sure that that field work order management is more streamlined. Data doesn't have to be reentered or put onto paper anymore. we can get our staff the tools that they need. As it relates to service level adjustments beyond that senior network systems engineer, I am thrilled to say we are in a partnership with both Palo Alto and Cupertino, and I'm hoping Mountain View once they get their piece done, and possibly even in the near future, Santa Clara City, to have a virtual chief information security officer partnership in this recommended budget. What this means is rather than the city paying for a VC, so ourselves on staff, which is very expensive, or having a consultant or a contracted position, which is even more expensive. We're doing this as a shared group. So we get the benefit of that service, but we don't have to pay the huge cost. And the reason why those agencies work well for us is we are very similar in the tools that we use and the partnerships that we have outside of these groups. So even though this is a partnership, the contract stands alone. So if they all decide they don't want to do it, we still have the same agreement with that vendor no matter what. So there isn't a tie financially, which is fantastic. It's truly a regional partnership. Accessibility I talked about a little bit. The other part of our service level adjustments is for overtime. As many of you might know, SB 707 requires open meetings. And if there's at least an hour of downtime to be able to work any technology issues, that means my staff needs to be here and available somewhere for you to go ahead and have that call. So that's what that's for. And then we are enhancing cybersecurity. We are looking at different NIST-based requirements for security to implement. And of course, more AI, more AI all over, but more importantly for emergency response. And this one, we were able to quickly get in place for not only the Super Bowl, but also for FIFA. So we're very excited for all these partnerships. Questions for me?

Sure. Vice Mayor?

Thank you very much. And thank you for an excellent presentation. There's a lot of really good stuff here. I am very excited about the CRM. So let's start with that. Excuse me. um spring is in the air yes um so you mentioned you know we're upgrading all of our city staff to have you know real smartphones and tablets and so when they're out in the field they're not just putting things down on a clipboard can we make sure that each of those smartphones and tablets has the new my sunnyvale app installed so that people can file tickets with a pre-populated account

So they will not only be able to have that integration when it comes to the actual phone itself, but we're actually creating on the backend integrations to their work order systems directly. Now I'm bummed that we aren't gonna be ready with the new CMMS or the work order management system that ESD and Public Works is using. So we are doing an integration to the current system. And when we have the new system, we'll do another integration. And what this means is not only do they have app on their phone, but when they find that piece that they need to do, that they have to work on on their side, it goes back to the CRM automatically.

Awesome. Okay, on a darker note, one of the things that keeps me up at night is ransomware attacks. Many public agencies have been hit by this. Canvas, the e-learning platform, got hit for it during university finals weeks. That was very bad for them. I think Oakland got basically shut down by that, what, a year and a half ago? Other cities in the area have been hit. i would like and this might be a question for the city attorney i think that it might be worth having a council closed session security briefing on what contingency plans there are and what the operations you know what the operational planning we've done is in the event of such an attack um you know i've recently been uh tasked at my day job at looking into the you know whether we were affected by the mini shy hulud attack that hit last week where someone managed to poison very popular NPM packages, which was then used to poison more packages downstream. So there's a lot of very concerning stuff happening. And I was wondering if that is something we could look at getting on the docket.

Yes, there is a Brown Act provision that allows us to do closed sessions on cybersecurity. So we would just need to put that on an agenda.

Okay. I would ask that we consider including that within this fiscal year. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Srinivasan.

Thank you very much. Really good progress. So you mentioned IT governance task team. What is that? Who are all part of that?

Happy to elaborate. So our IT Solutions Committee consists of at least one and for the larger departments up to three members that really represent the city departments in their operations and their needs. And so it's only internal, it is not a community task force.

Next question. Correct.

Yeah. And then the IT, the IT Steering Committee has all the department heads plus the city manager and the assistant city managers. So it is all internal. However, the focus that I've been trying to do as the chair of both of those is to make sure that we're having a citywide lens. Now, I know that there are options for us to look at maybe an advisory for a community that we've talked about before. And certainly that's something we can look into. But the governance that we have today is really trying to make sure that internally, at least, we're making all the right priorities and not letting one department go ahead and do whatever they want.

that makes absolute sense that way it's a coordinated effort rather than individual departments coming up with their own requirements that's a great effort and then on slide 29 modernization systems those are all those four items are extremely good Is there a way we can have the data exposed on a dashboard, whichever is public data? This is slide 29. Yeah, that one. Oh, the other one. The previous one, yes.

So most of these are already on the work plan dashboard that are already there. The only one, actually, no, all of these are on the work plan. My apologies. They're all, all four are on the work plan, I believe.

Oh, public safety is also, I know CRM is there, but... Public safety. The CAD, I thought the camera, I would have to double check. Yeah, you can come back with that. And then I really like the Sunnyvale specific AI LLM and then that would be very useful. Is there a, one of the problems having chatbot for Sunnyvale would be our data is not that clean enough, but this LLM might be useful there. So you may want to explain whenever we are in a position to look into chatbot, that might be one useful thing. And then virtual CISO, that's my favorite thing. That's congratulations on working with other cities. I have seen other organizations, not only in California, but in other parts of the country coming up with a cybersecurity initiative. Those are amazing. They have amazing track record and then solving some of the crimes. And then as Vice Mayor pointed out, malware attacks are becoming very, very common. Foster City is the current example. And then you also mentioned about In the contracts, you are looking at adding how our data can be used. Do we have any idea on what happens if a vendor goes rogue? Or do we have any way of knowing that? Because people can, with AI, they can easily massage the data or sell the data or harvest the data.

In all honesty, there's no way for us 100% pretending to know. So that's why the contracts are there. That's why the legal pieces are in place so that it would hopefully discourage, but it definitely doesn't confine them to doing the right thing.

That's exactly what I thought. I'm also interested in knowing about cybersecurity practices. As you know, i had contact with cso and california office of emergency supply emergency systems anyway good work thank you very much councilmember chang

Council Member Lay.

Yes, thank you. And thank you for the great work that you're doing in this. It's good to see that we in Sunnyvale and Silicon Valley are leaning on this new AI technology and that we have in-house experts. I want to agree with my colleagues. I'm very excited for the new MySunny. And I think I see hints of the logo popping up on our website, like it hasn't launched yet, but I see a happy sunny face. And that's very exciting. I know a lot of residents are also very excited to see the new CRM launch. to replace Access Sunnyvale. And I think that has been the work of a number of years or a good number of years now. So thank you very much for your work on that. I don't actually have any questions. I just wanted to express my appreciation. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Chang.

Yes, thank you. I'm really excited for the new CRM as a person who submits a lot of tickets. I had a question. I know the DOJ extended the compliance date or year for the ADA-related website accessibility, but I just wanted to ask where we're at with that.

Yeah, definitely. So in partnership with the City Manager's Office, we actually, the City Manager's Office has more responsibility because they have the ADA coordination role in their office. But from a support standpoint from IT, We've gone ahead and made sure that we did the assessment of all of our websites that are related to the city website, the NOVA website, library domains, all of that. We've gone through and remediated everything that was brought up in that assessment. There are a few other domains that we actually didn't get a chance to do a full assessment on. So like the Clean Water Action site itself. So those we're going to continue to go forward with with now that we have more time, we're going to take our due diligence and do that much more diligently i said that already the the mobile apps that we have there's only three mobile apps in the city and they're actually vendor owned at the moment and so those have already been tested and they've been fixed and any other vendor that has a link to our website whether it's I'm just going to pick randomly if it's your pet license, let's say. That application that is run by another vendor, we're going and working with them to make sure they're being compliant. So the year that the federal government has extended this to so far is really going to be used to get all these third-party apps to be compliant. We've done our part. We've even put in the PDF accessibility viewer for the website. We do realize that's a tough training item for staff to create accessible PDFs. It's like mini coding for some. So we are continuing to look at some tools to make that part a little easier when we create accessible from the beginning. And the other big point that we're still trying to work through is all of the GIS maps. So GIS by nature is a tricky thing to have as a compliant map itself. PDF, no problem. But interactive map, much more difficult. So we're working with our GIS provider to make sure, again, that third party is accessible. So everything beyond third party, we're good.

Thanks, Kathleen. If I could also add, so that's from the technology part of it, also from the operation part of it, we've done a lot of training. We trained our staff on how to create accessible documents from the beginning. We're also monitoring to ensure that, you know, since we did the audit on our websites and the different pages in the mobile app, so we don't add additional information that's not ADA compliant. So we're working through that. We're working to an internal process. on how to ensure that everything that we add going forward is compliant. So we're addressing not just the technical part of it with Kathleen and her staff help, but we're also addressing the processes and the operations part of it and the content that gets put on the website.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And I'll just pile on, you know, thank you for the CRM. Thank you for looking forward to trying out the Sunnyvale LOM to a certain degree. I did have a question that wasn't mentioned, Granicus. So we've seen, let's say issues with Granicus multiple times in the last few months. They're pretty much a standardized standard for most cities. What is happening with Granicus? If you can do a short summary.

Granicus, like any of the larger vendors that tend to end up with a monopoly of services, is taking advantage. I will be very honest about that. We have complained to them about their service levels and their support, and we continue to do so. And certainly the city manager's office and IT have done a great job of trying to make sure that we can push as much as we can.

having said that on the project list for the couple of years out in the budget we already have a look at whether or not we want to replace granicus in the future okay so it's there thank you just checking it you know it's it's it's so intertwined not just in staff reports but kind of throughout the system that i just wanted to we hope that'll keep them on their toes okay good um that's all of your questions thank you very much next we'll move on to the director of human resources Heather?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council Members. Heather Ruiz, Human Resources Director. So a little bit about Human Resources. Our mission is to support a high performing, safe and engaged workforce through responsive, customer focused services. With tracks develops and retains talent that provides clear and consistent employee and Labor Relations guidance administers comprehensive benefits and human resources information systems. advances organizational development and training and proactively manages workplace safety medical leave workers compensation and liability. To minimize risk and support our employees that's a mouthful, but the the what essentially go back when the our structure is what you see up there, which is divided into four separate divisions recruitment classification employee benefits risk management and employee and Labor relations next slide. Our department goals are to improve the workplace safety, reduce risk, and support employees' health outcomes, attract and retain qualified diverse workforce through modern hiring practices and support all of the rest of the departments in doing their great work, strengthening our labor relations and successfully negotiating our collective bargaining agreements, Expand our workforce capability through training and performance management. So a lot of this is being done in conjunction with the Office of the City Manager as well. And I think that you'll see in some of our budget requests some additional resources dedicated to this. To deliver reliable benefits and HR systems to support employees and operations. And advance our organizational effectiveness to strategic workforce and engagement initiatives.

Next slide.

Some of our accomplishments are we did a lot of work on modernizing our recruitment with new online testing platforms and completed a complete management classification study. The second portion of that's still to be done. We have improved our hiring efficiency, reducing our time to post by 33% and time to establish a list by 20%. We're currently at an average of 74 days from requisition to eligible list, which is really quite a good measure and in the public sector. given the requirements of civil service rules. We've expanded our workforce development with new on-demand trainings and hope to do more in that area in the future. We've strengthened our labor relations and successfully negotiated two MOUs previously and currently in negotiations with another two of our bargaining groups. We've completed the employee engagement survey and partnered with departments to guide organization-wide improvements related to the feedback from that survey. and enhanced operational efficiency with new workers' compensation administrator and insurance verification system. Go ahead, next slide. Overall, HR's budget is increasing slightly. That's mostly due to the position adds that we are proposing. So we are proposing the changes for this fiscal year to end one term limited principal HR analyst position and add instead one term limited HR technician position. This position would end in fiscal year 27-28. We're also proposing to add two ongoing senior HR analyst positions. And I'll talk a little bit more in the next slide about what we're proposing to do with those. go ahead next slide so the increases in goods and services are to fund training safety and professional services to meet workforce growth retirements and higher service and compliance demands as laws change the staffing increase of net two ftes would be to support our risk management function and to support our the workload demands and strengthen our long-term capacity of our workforce our proposal is to add a position that would do organization-wide training and development with the goal of creating comprehensive training programs for employees we have a lot of great individual things going on but there isn't sort of a cohesive plan for all of it and it isn't integrated there's a lot of things in city manager's office some things in human resources as well as other departments so the goal with that position would be to bring all of that together and create a comprehensive training and development service for employees and then the second position would be to add to risk management assist with employee safety leaves workers compensation and insurance requirements which just continue to get increasingly more complex We do have some funding in here to implement a case management system in employee relations. This will improve our consistency, tracking and reporting of employee complaints, investigations, discipline processes, help us stay on track and move those along in a timely manner. And then it's some additional funding for the cultural competency training aligned with what's being done in Office of City Manager equity access and inclusion efforts. So with that, I will take questions. Thank you.

Vice Mayor?

Real quick, something I wanted to ask. What is the progress on the recruitment for Department of Public Works director?

Let me take that one.

We actually do, it just closed last week, so we do have a pool of candidates that are currently under evaluation by the recruiter. We have an outside recruiter doing that one, and the candidate presentation for that, I believe, is next week, if I'm not mistaken. The recruiter will come in and make a presentation based on their initial evaluation of candidates to the city manager, assistant city manager, and we'll decide who moves forward to the interviews.

All right, thank you. Thank you. Council Member Shrena Vossen.

Thank you. You mentioned...

training funding for training uh i'm assuming that this training would be department specific right yes both department specific and citywide so i think there's a number of things that citywide employees all need to have a knowledge base on leadership elements customer service elements so there's a lot of things that would be offered citywide to all employees or to all supervisors or managers But then, yes, to the extent that there are specific department needs, we could figure out how those incorporate into our training plans. As I've been orienting myself to the organization, I've been out at a lot of the department meetings and taking tours and getting out and listening to our employees. And that is one of the biggest things that I've heard from employees is just more training, more access to training, both from a technical standpoint as well as sort of what I call soft skills, your leadership development, customer service. And having that integrated model, what I'd love to see ultimately is employees could see a track for, here's where I want to go in my career. Here's some training things that will support that track for me. So I know if I take these classes, those classes, I will be well set up when the next opportunity comes up to compete for a promotion or to move.

Thank you. Thanks for mentioning soft skills. That was my next question, but thanks.

Very important. Thanks. Thank you. Council Member Sell.

Hi, thank you for this. And I was wondering, since you're a new director, HR director for Sunnyvale, are there certain things that you bring a new perspective for this? And so you see this and you'd like us to go a little in a certain direction that's different than we've been going. Are you observing anything like that or anything?

Certainly. I'll tell you, I see a lot of great things happening in Sunnyvale. So there's always room for improvement. I'm a person that believes in continuous improvement. I think we can always get better. There are some systems and processes I think that could be streamlined and make us more efficient. But probably the training and development is the biggest area where we've talked. uh was a priority set for for me by the assistant city manager and city manager and just something that i'm hearing across the organization is we have a lot of opportunity for improvement there thank you thank you councilmember cisneros

Yes, thank you and welcome. Thank you. Your first budget workshop. It's good. We're not in too much trouble this year, so we like to make a good impression. So how many vacant positions do we have organization-wide, especially as we're talking about staffing leveling? You know, we're right-sizing our staffing right now. Is there an area where we're seeing positions open for a longer period of time than normal? And how are we using our budgetary resources in the coming year to strategically move those positions from being vacant to being fully staffed so that we can see kind of what our capacity is organizationally?

Sure. Great question. And I'll give you a little preview of the presentation you'll hear from me later this evening as well. I do have a presentation on your regular agenda tonight on the vacancies. So we're currently as of the middle of April, which is the date we pulled these numbers at about 71.7 vacant FTEs across the city, which equates to a 7.6% vacancy rate. That's really quite good for an organization our size. You're just always going to have some turnover and churn. I actually do have some slides in that presentation if anybody would like to refer to those that breaks it down both by department and by bargaining unit. So I'll share more details on that in the presentation this evening. But we definitely, the pockets that we see where we struggle are those harder to fill positions. We have difficult positions in public safety, in IT, in engineering, particularly in utilities. So I think there's pockets where we compete for talent and where the market is very competitive. So you will see some of those positions be vacant a little bit longer. But we do have a fairly high success rate in filling our positions and moving through that list of vacancies.

Okay, great. So the strategy with the budget going through 26-27 is just to really do what we're doing, but it looks like we're also looking to do some more analysis and kind of drill down on that. Okay, and we'll hear more about it this evening. No spoilers. All right. We're all very excited. Thank you. This is all really, really good news. Thank you.

Thank you. And kind of continuing on that thought, and it's not specific to HR, but it's something I talked with the Director of Finance about previously. It would be good to see before you got here, but department by department kind of breakdown on FTEs and kind of what's been budgeted over the last five years or so or longer would be actually preferable just to see how our our employee count has fluctuated. The open vacancies is always just a snapshot in time. So it's not an easy sort of thing. It's like, OK, at this date, this is what we had in what department. But from an allotted standpoint, from a budgetary standpoint, it's good to have where that threshold is. And then one of the things that I always ask for, if possible, as you're doing those surveys and evaluating our employees, how many are living in the city, how many living in the county, how many living without outside of the county and that's for all departments but it's also specifically for public safety which is critical when there's an emergency so that data is always good to have from in front of council at some point and that's all council questions i'll pass it to the director of finance or the assistant director of finance

Actually, it will be assistant director, Mike Dennis, assistant director of finance. Good afternoon, mayor, vice mayor, and city council. I'm here to talk about finance as quickly as possible. Next slide, please. The finance department missions to maintain a strong, secure, financial position for the city by providing a wide variety of financial and analytical services to council staff and the public. And what you see here are some of the awards we proudly display in our lobby. The one on the left is for investment policy with the Association of Public Treasurers. The one on the right is excellence in procurement from the National Procurement Institute. The two in the middle are for the budget and the ACFER from the GFOA, the Government Finance Officers Association. Next slide, please. So, the finance department provides a full suite of financial services to the city. The financial management analysis department or division provides department oversight, ERP system support and other systems as well as payroll for the entire city. Accounting and financial services maintains the accounting records and prepares the annual comprehensive financial report or the ACFER. We have our budget division, takes care of budget preparation, analysis and management, and led the heavy lift that we have here today. By charter, the city is required to have a centralized purchasing division. And so our purchase division has a hand in all procurement for everything within the citywide and the city of Sunnyvale. So the business and enterprise services is a name change. It's replacing our utility billing division. And the main driver of that is that that division also handles some other things like business license. And so people were a little confused when they're directed to utility billing to handle their business licenses. So we change, we propose a change for the name of division to business and enterprise services, although now they're calling themselves the best division. Good for them, I guess. And finally, our non-utility revenue management handles tax collection and also internal audit services. Next slide, please. So the goals for the finance division that is for transparency through our financial documents and statements, all our deliverables are created to the highest standard available in the industry. And we're audited by external independent auditors for our financial statements, federal grant spending, and numerous other audits. We also strive to provide excellent customer service to residents in forms of our utility billing and other services, businesses in form of like business licenses as previously mentioned, city staff. We are an internal service department that's here to serve other departments and also the council. We're responding to council priorities. Finally, similar to our mission statement, we strive to maintain a strong, secure position for the city. Our goal is to provide consistent long-term service levels that are sustainable. The 20-year plan, we talked about it a lot in the beginning this morning, but it allows us to plan and not add unsustainable service levels in a strong year that requires cuts or layoffs later. Next slide, please. uh some of our accomplishments um we did receive the gfoa award for both our budget um and the akfer and um just to uh a little aside on that the the awards isn't just for a sense of accomplishment or pat ourselves on the back but like i said it's the um highest level of standard for transparency purposes and it also helps us with our credit ratings which were recently affirmed by moody's and which leads to our next accomplishments we did issue 38 million in bonds to fund the smart station next gen and we're able to get you know that went really smoothly really well we we got a really good deal on that because of our rating and because we provide transparent statements And budgets, and so a work plan item is to increase the payments and we were able to increase that by 25%. 1 of the main roadblocks on that is people just aren't picking up their phones anymore. And so, in order to confirm information, sometimes it's hard to get a contact to them and we don't want to send funds without doing so. 1st. We revised the city's purchasing policy to streamline procurement, set our threshold levels more similar to neighboring cities, and kind of improve workflow for that purpose. And we achieved nearly 100% collection on all water, wastewater, and solid waste bills. We just have a few budget highlights other than the reclassification of a couple of positions for operational purposes and the expiration of a business systems analyst due to the ERP project ending. We're requesting or proposing one additional budget analyst. We haven't had growth in that division in a very long time. the overall city growth as we've talked about with the right sizing and um you know the budget document is a big lift right now we're drawing in a lot of different resources from the rest of the department in order to get that done and we'd like to give them a little bit more support and what it also would allow us to do is um is possibly do more of the design work in-house which is something that has been a challenge to for our timing purposes um so budget overview um you can see on the slide what it what it is our but our ft is goes up by half which accounts for the budget analyst position and then half a position because that term line position is only for a half a year previously and that's all any questions thank you are there any questions councilmember sell

I had a question when we were looking at streamlining the budget priority process, it was mentioned that there are certain departments like the finance department that has to do a little work on every council priority project. And I was just wondering, is that still the case? And do you have the resources to be able to not be any bottleneck to any department, even though you're a small, mighty group or anything like that? Great question.

Thank you for that. Yes, we are small, but mighty. We have sufficient resources to look at council priority projects. We review most of the RTCs. A lot of things run through our department, but we're able to throughput them and meet the organization's timelines.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Council Member Sreenivasan.

Thank you. Mike. Thank you. You're truly very, very budget oriented. I did a quick calculation. Your budget for FTE is almost the lowest amongst the departments who presented till now. So congratulations. You mentioned about ACH for suppliers, 25%. Why are 75% of them not adopting? I would think writing check is a big issue here.

You would think that suppliers would be anxious to sign up since they would get their money faster and more securely. But like Dennis was saying, our main challenge is just getting in contact with them. We focused on our main suppliers, our largest dollar suppliers, but we've got probably a couple thousand in total. So it's hard. People don't pick up the phone or respond to mail. It takes a lot of follow-up and back and forth.

Yeah. So they supply goods and services but not pick up the phone?

Not when we're trying to sign them up for . Exactly.

On the other side, what is the, any update on bill pay, online payment, the payments we receive? You mentioned something like 60,000 checks are processed annually or something like that? We still process checks, right, for utilities?

Yes, we still process a lot of manual checks, paper checks, yes.

Is there a way to get them online payment or any efforts on that? I remember we proposed some credit card payment or something like that.

Oh, you're on payments. Yes. Yes. We, uh, you and your colleagues approved us passing along the credit card convenience fees that we have to pay onto consumers. We're going to have some adjustments to that, uh, coming up and you'll see it in the fee schedule. Okay. Um, based on our experience, we have a lot of disparate payment systems in the city with their own rules. Nancy Grove on my staff did a lot of work over the last year to try to get us in line with that. It was a 2.7% aggregate average that we used. so we're to come back with a range to kind of uh fit within the technological limitations that a lot of our payment acceptance systems have but yes we're as many um online payments as we can uh support and encourage that's what we're trying to do absolutely okay thank you very much thank you councilmember chang i had a follow-up question to councilman machine of austin so i had a

I pay online, but then I had an ability for a refund and then I had to fill out a form and mail it back still is there a way that we can look into in the future just directly refunding it to the credit card payment.

We can we can certainly look into that yeah it's a great example, thank you.

Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Paulins. This may not be the right department, but I want to ask this. You know, I mentioned golf earlier. One of the things I've noticed is that the way we set golf and tennis rates is that the council kind of puts our finger in the wind and says, well, we think it should be this much this year. This is not. typically the way goods and services are priced in a capitalist economy. And so what I was wondering is, have we explored the option of more dynamic pricing models, perhaps within a predefined range, so that we can ensure that we can do our best to try and hit sort of equilibrium prices for things like golf and tennis fees?

I can answer that. So we do have dynamic pricing for golf. Okay. And when we set the rates annually, we do look at market pricing overall and how we compare to other golf courses in the area.

Right. And obviously, it's just sort of like you want to make sure that you're not leaving slots open, and you also want to make sure that you're not getting too many people signing up for slots. And that's kind of a function of pricing often. Thank you.

Thank you, that looks like all of Councilman relay sorry hi Thank you, and this was a question, I guess, also for the previous department, but when you say that a term limit position is up does that mean that they were hired for a specific project and then that project has ended now that's why it's gone.

Yes, usually for example, this example is the ERP project. The ERP project was sunset and these positions are created and hired just for a certain period of time. And once that period ended, the employment ended. Okay, thank you.

Thank you. That's all of the questions from council. Thank you.

So if I may just, I have one just quick, I can't, sorry, man, I just can't help myself. We mentioned our stellar credit ratings kind of in the beginning. And I just want to point out that that is something we should absolutely not take for granted. So for those of us in our personal finances, we have a credit score a bond rating is similar to a credit score for a municipal corporation and if we trust ai results online uh i pulled up i was curious what percentage of organizations have a triple a credit rating like sunnyvale does and it's around one percent or less so that's something we're in rarefied air here it's a lot of uh takes a lot of work and intentionality to keep those ratings which we just got through moody so that's something that we should all collectively be very proud of

Thank you and kudos. We'll move on to Public Works and our Interim Director, Ramana.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council. I'm Ramana Chinnakotla. I'm the Interim Director of Public Works. I just want to acknowledge that since I've been the Interim Director only for eight weeks, I also have our CRAC senior staff from Public Works here, Jim Stark, Angela Obiso, Tamara Davis, Sean Smith and Dennis in the back. So if I can't answer any questions, I'm going to ask them to come and answer the questions. Our mission for the Public Works Department is to provide high quality cost, effective infrastructure and public spaces that meet the evolving needs of Sunnyvale's residents and businesses. Yeah, there you go. Our vision is to engage in long range planning, maintenance and build out of the community's infrastructure to support an outstanding quality of life for the residents of the city of Sunnyvale. Our goals for 26, 27, did I miss one slide? Yeah, there you go. So public works in terms of our structure, we have five separate sections, administration, operations, which takes care of streets, facilities and fleet, traffic and transportation, parks, golf and trees, and our engineering department, which basically takes care of capital projects and also land development. Our 2627 goals partner with departments, the other departments to execute the city's capital improvement program, safeguard the city's infrastructure to ensure functionality, safety and efficiency to meet the needs of the residents. Some of our recent accomplishments in terms of construction projects. Sorry, I'm trying to talk and do this at the same time. Thank you. Much better. You'll be coming on Thursday for the inauguration of the community center grounds. We also renovated two playgrounds this year, Columbia Park and Cannery Park. These are now open to the public. Kwan Palace Park was inaugurated recently also. And then we also completed a very big portion of our clean water program, the site prep project in March of 2026. Some of the design projects that we completed. The Evelyn multi-use trail project is now out to bid. It's with procurement. The design is complete. The popular sidewalk projects design is also complete. We're getting ready to get the package to procurement. So hopefully this will go to bid in the summer and we'll start construction in the fall. We also were very successful in receiving grant funding to the tune of about $9 million. And we were also recipients of three American Public Works Association awards for three different projects. In terms of some of the studies that we've completed, you're familiar with the Tasman Drive Pedestrian Bicycle Improvement Study that we completed. We also completed the Matilda Avenue Bicycle Lane Study, the Hollenbeck Avenue Bicycle Lane Study, and also the Sunnyvale Caltrain Station Bicycle and Pedestrian Access Study. On our operations side, we've made a lot of progress on improving our sidewalks. We have removed about 1,700 sidewalk offsets, which has actually reduced our backlog from over 5,500 locations down to close to 3,800 right now. We've also continued to add to our electric fleet. We've added a cargo van and the first electric wheel loader, which is one of our first heavy equipment, electric equipment. And also, I believe now we have about 44 electric vehicles overall in the city. In terms of our overall budget, this shows our overall proposed budget. We have about a $5 million, approximately a $5 million increase for 26-27. We're adding two full-time equivalent positions. To go a little bit more deep into that, we are proposing to add two park maintenance workers. Again, we've added a lot of park space and also a lot of new amenities. We have not basically increased our park worker headcount. much over the last few years so this is an effort to right size that group in addition we've also we're exchanging two ground work grounds worker positions in streets to a maintenance worker too and a heavy equipment operator position these positions will be able to help us do more of our streets work and payment maintenance work that we're doing in-house On the fleet side, we're adding a lead equipment mechanic that will allow us to actually do a lot of the fire truck maintenance in-house, which we right now contract out. So it's actually going to be a very good positive addition to the overall service levels that the fleet department provides. um we are removing a traffic and transportation traffic engineer position which is term limited which has actually been already replaced by a full-time position and we're actually in recruitment for that so that's kind of how you get to the overall net two ftes um and then that the the other next column show you the one time some one-time costs um and then also ongoing costs In terms of other program budget increases, we are recommending that we increase the contract cost for security services to increase the security services at the city hall. That's about a $70,000 increase. And then also increasing our service levels for downtown, for downtown cleaning and power washing, which also includes the Caltrain garage and some parking lots nearby. And that's another $100,000. Um, a couple of other adjustments to the capital projects side. Uh, one of them is to add some money, uh, again, on an annual basis to, as we, uh, adjust our, uh, water utilities as we, sorry, as we, uh, do pavement, uh, rehab, uh, your manual covers and your. other things that are related to water and sewer they actually go out of the height changes so we have to retrofit those the manhole covers so that people don't trip and fall or have other issues so that's one of the things that we're doing as part of this adjustment and then also a two-year project to catch up on tree trimming at some of our city well sites Just to talk about some of the key initiatives that are coming up this year. We hope to complete and open the Lakewood Branch Library in the fall of 2026. And then we hope to commence construction for Fire Station 2 in early 2027. The clean water center and perimeter wall is going to start construction in early 2027. Poplar sidewalk in late 2026 and the Evelyn multi-use trail in late 2026 also. And then we also hope to begin design of our corporation yard fleet maintenance building in late 2026. On the traffic and transportation side, the citywide shuttle service is going to launch in the fall of 2026. The East Channel Trail Study will be completed next year. The Bernardo Avenue bicycle and pedestrian undercrossing will advance to final design. And then a couple of other projects that are two big grid separation projects will advance to environmental review, the Mary Avenue one and the Sunnyvale Avenue. Uh, in terms of parks, golfs and trees, uh, they continue to support the park capital improvement projects like the last farmer's project, the liquid project. Uh, there will be commencing street tree inventories, uh, to update our city street trees. Um, there will also be beginning design and construction of the new tennis court lighting, um, at the last farmer's tennis courts and, um, the, uh. Street tree planting with an equity lenses included in budget supplement too. And that's something that we'll work on if it gets approved on the street tree up on the street street operation side. We will be doing a lot more pavement. Maintenance will be slurry ceiling about 157 streets next year and chip ceiling and other 27 streets. We will be making a lot more improvements, also reducing your backlog on our sidewalk offsets. And then if the council priority project gets approved, we will be doing another about 1,100 locations of sidewalk improvements. on the fleet side we are tooling and training and getting ready for electrification so that requires a lot more training for our staff we're adding to the EV infrastructure and then EV technicians certification program is something we'll be working on so that concludes my presentation and I'll be happy to answer questions thank you Councilmember Cisneros

Yes, thank you. And I first want to say that when you brought up the accomplishments, I could think of many, many more accomplishments. And, you know, we'd be here until the council meeting if we were going to talk about them all. You're a very busy department and very visible too. So I know that this is, I'll try to be as brief as I can, because I know this is an area of great public concern and concern of my colleagues. um my question is you mentioned power washing downtown and i'll refrain from making a crow joke here but my question was about the cal train station at what point does our maintenance of that area end in cal train like caltrans responsibility for that maintenance end and how are we um working with um cal train to Because it's kind of an open area, right? Like the maintenance feels a little fluid between them. And I wanted to get a sense of who's responsible for what and how are you working with them?

I think the station itself is Caltrans responsibility, but the rest of the areas, there's some portions of the station that also fall within our responsibility. And then the garage area is something that we are also taking care of. But Jim, do you want to add anything, any more color to that?

And I'd love to hear more about the, you know, the station itself, but then the garage, because when we're thinking about upkeep and maintenance, that's something that a lot of residents and myself included are interested, the elevators, stairwells, etc.

Yeah, good question. So Jim Stark, Deputy Director of Public Works overseeing the park system. So yeah, the parks team does oversee most of the maintenance at the Caltrain station. So the parking garage, some of the landscaping that we contract out. We also consider that area, you know, Plaza del Sol is part of that, South Murphy is part of that. But specific to the Caltrains, I'll have to get back to you. I'm familiar with agreement, the agreement we have with the, we call it the multimodal station historically. There's a lot of things that we do in there, whether it's sweeping the floors, you know, like the street sweeper, there's pressure washing that occurs. But I don't know if there's an end date on that agreement. So that I will have to get back to you on. It could be in perpetuity. I'm not sure. I know it's an old agreement. It's been around for a while. So we'll have to get back to you on an end date. But pretty much the city shoulders the responsibility or parks department for that. the multimodal station for plaza del sol and for downtown murphy and i mean i can remember when there was there was no building where you know that huge apartment building is next to plaza del sol so it's definitely changed over the last 20 years

Absolutely, and so, and to that, to your point, I think. It might be a good idea to start looking into those agreements that we may have in perpetuity and see do the agreements that we have make sense for the urban landscape that we currently have and, like, right sizing feels like the phrase of the day and that might be another opportunity. So thank you very much. I appreciate that context and then. The tree trimming on the well sites. Now, back in, I remember one of the very few service cuts I've needed to be part of making is thinking about, you know, holding off on tree trimming for a period of time when we were dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic. I thought we were caught up on the tree trimming. Was the well sites separate from that? And a quarter million seems like a lot of money too.

Yeah, that's separate from this. We were actually caught up on our residential tree trimming or on our, not residential, but on our on our streets side. These are specific locations that are kind of hidden from everyone else. They are where we have our large water tanks, and there's a lot of trees that surround that. And we did that on purpose to basically make sure that there is enough coverage to hide the tanks from the surrounding areas. But now the trees have grown so much that we need to trim them and make them safe. This one is just a two-year contract to just get caught up on all those thoughts.

My question is, when did we stop doing that?

I didn't think they were ever done on a regular basis.

I think the maintenance staff and water did what they could for a lot of years. And now those trees have kind of just gotten so mature that it's beyond their skill set to really do much.

Okay, and I'm sure we'll figure out how to, you know, appropriately regularly deal with more mature trees going forward.

We will. And just to be clear, since this is the budget workshop, all those charters get charged to the water rate payers. Oh, great. Because it's a water site that needs maintenance.

Well, I like that news. Okay, and then one more question is the Caltrain grade separations. I love to see that that's headed over for environmental review, but do you have any updates on any grant funding for those grade separations? I gotta ask.

We continue to pursue grant funding any chance we get, but these are very large projects. But that's how we will most likely be able to fund any of these.

Yes, people are very excited about them, and I understand that that's how we're going to be able to do it, and we have limited options. But I had to ask for an update because I saw it on the list. Thank you all.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. So I've got a few questions here. I appreciate you calling out the park renovations for the cannery and Columbia. That said, you know, I did, I've received quite a bit of, you know, Let's say concern from some of the snail residents over the Columbia Park renovation that the playground equipment selected did not really fit and thematically with the neighborhood at all, and that they would have loved to have had input on, you know, maybe the perhaps the style of the playground equipment going forward. Is there a possibility? of having maybe a very lightweight community survey when we renovate a park, do a playground equipment replacement, what sort of themes and colors might be appreciated?

Yes, I think that's one of the reasons why we also have the new community engagement coordinator. That's something that we will be incorporating as a part of every single project, the outreach and engagement piece.

OK, I'm going to note for the record that I'm recused from discussions on the Mary Ave grade separation due to proximity, but I did want to comment on the Sunnyvale Ave grade separation. You know, with the cost, the severe cost escalation we've been seeing in grade separation projects since these plans were proposed or adopted. What five years ago now? I think that it is. worth bringing back options to council at some point on grade separation and whether down scoping uh might be appropriate um and i don't i'll let you answer that um certainly it's something that we've also been looking at uh in fact i had a conversation with the city manager just the other day so we will we will be looking at some other options as as we go along OK, I want to talk about the performance indicators for the Department of Public Works in the budget, and there were a couple. I feel like there are some performance indicators that could be added here that I think would be helpful. um one and i'm gonna list out three one is um red curbs painted that's a project that we rolled out in 2023 i didn't see an indicator for that um but i think that would be a useful little thing uh you know intersections feet whatever Second, I think that a really important performance indicator that should be included in future budgets is miles of bike lane added by class. Class 1, 2, 3, 4, 2B, etc. And then the third is quick build projects deployed in a given year. I would very much like to see these added as part of next year's budget as performance indicators. Mr. City Manager, is that something that you'd be willing to commit to?

Mark Warren, I think those are, I think I qualify those as workload indicators. If I could ask, I don't have an objection to that at all. If we can make that part of the motion when you adopt the budget to incorporate that into the following budget year, I think that would be helpful.

i will make a note to do that thank you um i'm just going to clarify that the curbs the red curve painting is going to basically once we have finished with it essentially it will be done so oh so there is actually a finish point for that coming there will be because you know this is essentially for are you talking about the one that you know with or within a certain the daylighting i don't think there's a finish from the contract that we said there's the

there's going to be a finish on the number of intersections that we have to daylight but there's not going to be a finish on the repainting because i think those last what seven years or so yeah so yeah there'll be some repainting but they won't be any new my new red curve okay um that is that is a uh do we have an idea of when that'll finish no but we can get back to you on that okay thank you okay and and i'll raise the question i thought

we from a budget from a contract standpoint we were going to cover x number of intersections but it was going to it wasn't going to cover the whole city and and we were just doing a lot of that on requests from from residents or for a lot of those uh mayor the the council added a person and the equipment to go around dedicated that's a full-time permanent position permanent permanent full-time position to go around and paint red curves but i didn't think that we had a a Timeline on when we would finish.

That I think we need to get back to you.

Yeah, I don't think we had a timeline, but the goal was to basically finish everything with the extra person. Okay.

So it was not going to be like next year. It's going to take quite a while to get through all of the red curbs of the entire system.

And I love the concept of figuring out where we are in that seven years or whatever. Council Member Sell.

So we've had some projects such as like Liz Palmas Park and renovating it, and then some concerns in the community and then staff acknowledging some concerns with some outreach meetings. And you mentioned that there's gonna be a new position that's gonna help to address those concerns. I was wondering just to give the community an overview, that new position coming in, How might the community, like, be introduced to these are the kind of things that will be different and improved so that the community can look forward to that? Is there a way of, you know, saying that so that the community could look for those improvements and be expecting those improvements? Or if those improvements were announced, then the community could also say, well, did you also consider X? I don't know. What do you think about that?

Well, actually the position that we're adding is going to be something that's going to happen. It'll take a little bit of time. We're not going to basically wait on that position to advance the last promise project. In terms of the last promise project, really the difference that we will be doing is we will be having a lot more focused group meetings with smaller groups where we're able to explain to them what the changes we're making are and why we're making those changes. we are bringing in an external facilitator who is actually really knowledgeable in running projects like this to help us with with that particular project so that's kind of what we will do for this one we actually had a couple of good community meetings and we got a good a lot of good engagement the third one was the one that we basically we Could have done a little better, but I think we're going to correct those those areas. But that's all I could probably tell you on the last promise project. It's not really connected to the community engagement coordinator. That's something that we wanna include to help us with future projects.

Okay. And council member, I think you're asking us, are we gonna do community outreach on community outreach?

No, I was just wondering, I keep telling the residents, it's gonna get better. And I just wanted them to know how it's gonna get better.

So that's good. I think it's gonna be organic. We're always taking feedback on how community outreach meetings go. So, I think to the extent that, um. We have a community engagement coordinator on board to support that they will receive the feedback through the implementing the actual meetings and make adjustments as they go.

okay and i did want to acknowledge that on this the uh each channel trail like when i observed those meetings you got like thousands of input on that and you had these ambassadors and that just seemed like wow that's pretty impressive so um you know more of that seems like great thank you thank you next up is councilmember chang

Oh, thank you. For the sidewalk repair offset, do we have a map of what areas specifically have been repaired?

That's a great question. We're actually trying to get that through our contractor. We will create a GIS map very soon, and we'll be able to share that with the council as part of a follow-up.

Great, thank you. I would also be curious, you know, for our PCI where we're at 75, if there's kind of a broader understanding of what areas are worse off than other areas.

We are working on it. That will take a little bit more time, but that's also in the cards. Great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Srinivasan.

Oh, sorry. Sorry. On the power washing in downtown Caltrain, I would like to see also us engaging with them too, because they are the ones that charge for the parking and then they don't clean probably as much as they should. And then there's also security issues there. And so that might be kind of a broader conversation.

Thank you. Council Member Srinivasan.

Thank you. In one of the slides, DPW recent accomplishment, you said repaired 1700 sidewalk offset, but down below you said. 1060 were fixed in two years. Where is the discrepancy? Still. there is no slide number on this particular slide but the previous slide is yeah coin the budget before that dpw recent accomplishment before that yes this is 1700 something like

Sorry, this is something that we're doing this year, the 1,700 locations. So by June, we would have completed 1,700 sidewalks offsets in this fiscal year, in 25-26.

Okay, but in subsequent slides, you said 1060 for two years.

That's for next two years, for 26, 27, and 27, 28. So that's basically what we are proposing to do in the next couple of years.

Okay, and then you also mentioned that there are 5,500 sidewalks to be fixed. My calculation says it might take more than eight years or six years.

It's more like 16, but yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I was very conservative. I gave you benefit of doubt. But anyway.

So the council priority project that's being recommended to the council will reduce the backlog to 12 years. We'll be able to fix everything in 12 years.

Okay. Instead of 16 years. Okay. And then you mentioned in the slide

the clean water peripheral wall uh is that for sea level rise so it should be more than 15 feet in that case right um so this is not designed for sea level rise yet it's basically um designed to address the 100 year flood um okay for the sea level rise you know we are working with valuable water on the shoreline study and you know that's intended to protect the entire shore against sea level rise yeah phase two is not happening phase three is us and then but that will be operational 20 40 if at all yeah it's something that we we need to plan for long term anyway so we are looking at other options but when this was designed um it was designed really only for the hundred year flood plane a hundred year flood event sorry and then i had asked about pci also

Uh, can we look at where the PCI is lower than whatever 78 or whatever the metric we use so that fixing them will bring the average right as a mathematics thing?

Yeah, so that's exactly how we decide on which locations to address. The ones that are basically kind of marginal, we go and slurry seal those. So that's an easy fix to bring up the PCI. The ones that are in really bad shape, the only way to fix them is go and do a complete rehab. In both cases, basically, we are using PCI as the criteria to address them. But unfortunately, as people always use the roads, as you keep fixing them, the other ones start getting... But our process always looks at PCI as the biggest criteria. And then we try to group projects together so that it can be all done in one capital project, for example.

Okay. by the way some cities are trying to use ai drive through for pci index calculations so anyway thank you thank you councilmember lay

Thank you. I want to 1st, express appreciation for some of these big projects, especially in district 6 that are going through this year for the liquid French library and the renovation of liquid park. I am new to this council and I know that the city and the council had been working towards this for a number of years and I'm very excited to see a new library in my part of town. I also want to express. gratitude for the sidewalk fixing. I'm excited to see that getting done potentially within 12 years. I know that's a fight against entropy because sidewalks will keep breaking and trees will keep rising. So that's, to some extent, just something that we're going to keep having to fight against. I'm curious, and this maybe went back to the earlier discussion from OCM, but regarding the new community engagement manager, kind of relating to what Council Member Sell was asking, So this person would be working interdepartmentally, including on projects such as Las Palmas, to be working with different city departments to work on community engagement. Am I correct in making that assertion?

Yeah, I think the focus is basically public works and CDD. These are the two departments that have a lot of these kind of projects that require public outreach. And I think that's the, you know, that's the emphasis.

Great. And then I also am curious about the Vice Mayor, your suggestion that the bike lanes be added as a KPI. Did you mean within this presentation or within the greater budget?

Within the budget document as part of either the workload or performance indicators.

Okay. Thank you. And then I also want to express support for seeing more information about that red curb, the daylighting curb painting. I think that would be good to know. And then I just have a quick question, a quick suggestion for my colleagues that for microphone hygiene, we refrain from having two microphones on next to each other in the future for feedback issues. Thank you.

Thank you. I have a few quick questions. the Evelyn multi-use trail. So you say it's going now under construction in the fall. None of that matches the work plan or the website. So hopefully those can, the work plan only covers design, does not cover implementation at all. So it would be good to update that those general dates from yet thank you we will update that in the next quarter okay and then something that the city manager and i've talked about previously and i think this is the right time to bring it up is um the automated counting of bikes and pedestrians over certain areas especially before we implement bike lanes and after

and i know i would love to hear you know either the city manager or or yourself talk a little bit about that um i think it's a great idea we already do the before counts before any project we do and angela tells me that we also have a count program that we can always incorporate the app incorporate the after counts for these kinds of projects but those but those are all

people the people centered as opposed to an automated you know automated reading you know using technology to to better better um evaluate what's happening in our community and especially conceivably what success or non-success we have as we add bike lanes into our community i'm going to have angela speak on the automated portions

Hello, Angela Obeso. Angela Obeso. Put a pause there so that AI gets my name right. I'm the transportation and traffic manager here at the city, and we've actually been looking into technology. Some cities have automated bike counters, and so we're researching that on a staff level to see if we could get maybe measure B money to pay for a system like that. San Diego is one example that has some of those devices. In addition to what you're talking about, we also have our automated traffic signal system that already detects vehicles and bikes for the signal system. We do have the ability, we just don't have staff resources to collect bike and ped counts from that system. So that is a functionality that we do have today. And we can get those counts out of our existing system where we have that system in place at the intersections we have.

But that's only for... So it's limited from that standpoint and doesn't really talk about the corridor where we have bike lanes overall. So, you know, and this is... Um, the reason I would love to see this pilot program move forward is I was encouraged by the city manager not to make it a project that we brought to council. So I'm hoping that this, you know, and waiting for measure B funds fine. If you need funding from council, from a pilot program, come back to us because the sooner we get this in place, the better we, the more information you have as well as council has on how successful we're, how we're changing behavior within the city. So I'll leave it at that point and vice mayor.

Uhm, thank you very much. I wanted to riff off of what the mayor was saying. Miss Obezo, sorry the you mentioned that we have the technology but not the people to get those counts. What type of service level adjustment would you need or employee head count adjustment would you need to be able to do those operations?

I think that's a question we'll have to think on a little bit more and get back to you. The limitations right now are the folks who are knowledgeable about using the signal system that we call it the ATMS. And I can't tell you off the top of my head what it stands for, but it's the automated traffic signal system that talks back to City Hall. um the people who are trained up in that system are also the ones responsible for maintaining all of those traffic signals the rfbs all the other electronic systems in our road so so we don't currently have staff that are trained up and have the time and capacity due to core services projects programs things like that but it's something that we can take back and and report back on

i would love to see that even if it's not part of you know this current budget i think that that could make a that that would that would that is worth considering as a budget adjustment thank you that's all of council questions um we will go ahead and take an 11 minute break and come back at 3 35. thank you all

and move on to NovaWorks.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council, Marlena Sessions, Department of Workforce Services, NovaWorks. We are so grateful that the city has hosted Nova for some 40 plus years now. By way of context, we do not get any sources of funding from the city of Sunnyvale. As you know, as well, by way of context, our service area is the seven northern Santa Clara cities and some 20 San Mateo County cities, the entire uh county which is uh 20 cities and totalities here um as well i want to thank you matt let's just keep it rolling here i want to just let you know about a new initiative that just a couple highlights today in lieu of time the back one please the launch in january of seven access points or connection sites in this case throughout san mateo county but this was a way that we found to bring services to the neighborhoods to the places where people live and work as we don't have our home offices obviously here in sunnyvale so we are sending our career advising team and our business liaisons on a very regular basis weekly to libraries, to the San Francisco airport, to adult schools to bring those services out into the communities. We hope to be able to expand this in the future. And the beauty of this is no money changes hands. We are taking advantage of the infrastructure that exists and some community partnerships that we already have. Very excited about our connections points. Thank you, Matt. This meaty slide talks about our accomplishments. However, it's really about the fact that NOVA is held to about 30 different performance measures at both the state and federal level. The punchline here is we are meeting or exceeding every one of those. I would say the concern here is the layoff events just keep on coming. And as you know, we've in both Sunnyvale and in the entire NOVA region, we've had a lot of impacted individuals and that is on the rise, unfortunately. would say that in in keeping with our mission we often compete for other grants and this is just one example of something called the tech sector correction grant that just finished it was about a three-year opportunity to put unemployed tech workers back to work we again happy news in terms of the goal accomplishment we exceeded every goal when a couple insights we found however is this was a much more mature worker of tech workers who we saw and it took longer for them to get back into the workforce those that we were able to help and in fact in some cases they had to take slight wage decreases but we're very pleased with this competitive grant that we just finished thank you matt I won't go into the goals. You see them here. I've referenced a couple of them, but the one I would highlight is anytime in these times we can advocate on behalf of our public workforce system, we do step up to do that. We don't lobby, but we do educate whenever asked, and we've had the opportunity to do that a couple of times this year in DC. Again, because of the uncertainty, we really want to amplify the work that we do. And thanks to, as our Assistant City Manager referenced earlier, thanks to the Office of City Manager, we are taking one of our positions and offloading it, if you will, to the Office of City Manager. That is going to be one of our front desk folks. So this year our FTE count went down by one, but costs continue to rise. It helps us a lot because we cannot expand our FTE count given the uncertainty of the federal funding right now. And again, anytime we have an opportunity to go for extra dollars in addition to the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act funding that we do get allocated on a regular basis, we do so. So this just gives you some ideas of some of the aggressive and successful funds that we've been able to procure in the last year or so. So we continue to do that. We did just get some great news last week that we competed for a grant with the State Employment Development Department on healthcare and we're successful. So that's another million that isn't showing up here, but really happy about that. And I will conclude there.

Thank you very much. Questions from council? Council Member Srinivasan.

Thank you. You mentioned about the youth adult service program, 112 participants. Can you expand on that? The young adult program? Young adults.

Yes, thank you. Absolutely. About three years ago, we reimagined what we do for young adults. Now, again, our federal guidelines tell us we have to serve between 17 and 24 year olds who are significantly barrier or disadvantaged. What we've really been emphasizing with this group since we restructured it is paid work experience so that they are getting their first jobs in many cases. And we often refer to the whole person model where we're giving them a lot of work supports, things like clothing, groceries, rent, in some cases, if they need anything that might pose a barrier for them to getting that job and keeping it. we're happy to be serving this number of young people we'd like to serve a lot more but again because we're really saturating each young person the cost per is quite high if you look at the wages we're paying them and that experience of of getting work support so it's a it's a great model and we're getting a lot of demand from employers for these young adult internships and the career advisors frankly are being very careful about making the match they're not just plugging kids into any job, they're making sure that they've done some assessment with the young person.

This is after high school?

This Oh, thank you. This is actually young people who are not attached, they are not attached to school, they are not attached to work. So in many cases, they have left high school, we do try to get them back either back into school or get into the GED program, and then on to college. But in many cases, these are folks who, by law are really disconnected.

Okay. Thank you very much and then. How about working with announced community? I think you and I we talked about it and then there was another program map your career.

that's correct yes and so we are happy to take the referrals that we've had from various community-based organizations we do a very deep assessment and and frankly we need to make sure that the individual is ready for work so we often do some assessment give them some services ask them to come back when they've addressed various barriers and continue on with that the numbers aren't large but we are able to successfully help if the again those other barriers are taken care of housing being one of them of course

Okay, thank you very much. Very welcome.

Thank you. Next is Council Member Sell.

I had a question. We have like really great community colleges and high school programs, and I've also heard, and we have labor, and I've heard that sometimes more people, more students are wanting to go on to apprenticeship programs instead of school, four year school or given all those, are you able to interact with those other identities? And sometimes I think like one organization can do a lot, but multiple organizations working together can be collaborative and create more solutions or what are you thinking in terms of the local educational labor and all of those?

or thank you, yes, thank you, Council member sell it's a great example is by law, happily, this is a really good thing that the workforce development boards. are represented by all of those different slots. So by law, we have a private sector majority. So industry has a louder voice, if you will. But there are always two higher education slots, apprenticeship and labor slots, community-based organizations. So the NovaWorks board actually acts as a great conduit. In fact, I was late today because I was at an executive committee meeting of the board. The Chancellor for the San Mateo College is on that board, and she had some connections she made for me right there on the spot. So we do have, I'd say, very healthy, real partnerships. And in fact, when I mentioned these connection sites at various community-based organizations, libraries, et cetera, That's based on the fact that we have some real relationships there and they want NOVA on site. And then we're able to offer whatever the need is of the individual and offer them if they may not know what an apprenticeship is or what programs are available at a community college. So I'd say that's one area we are very strong.

Okay, that's great. And I think it's great that you've had so many successes with grants and that it's really impressive. So if you ever need help with that or feel free to ask city manager.

Appreciate that. We have been very risk averse about federal grants this last 15, 16 months, but state and other community grants have been coming in well. Yeah.

Thank you. Council Member Cisneros.

Yes, thank you. And thank you for all your incredible work. This touches so many lives in our community, and I'm so proud that we in Sunnyvale House Nova workforce that serves such a massive land mass and a massive amount of people. So that's something to be excited about right now. I'm going to piggyback off what you were just saying about being risk averse in terms of the federal grants in the last 15, 16 months. As we know, federal government has implemented some new rules regarding their funding, specifically target programs that are focused on equity, looking to pull back that funding and de-emphasize that. I know that is really key to the work that you do at NOVA Works, but you also have these state grants and philanthropic funds. I'm just wondering, are you bifurcating your work a little bit to be able to to show or is that not as like so oh this money is coming from over here so this is going to this type of work or how are you thinking about that in or i know it's really hard to get ahead of the political whims of the current federal government um but i don't want our work to be jeopardized either

Absolutely. Thank you for the comment and question. I would say, keeping in mind that our base funding is federal, so happily we get an allocation, not a grant, if you will, each year. So we've got, I'd say that's 80% of our money. And we did just receive notification from the state last Friday that next year's allocation came through so that's really good news we are set for the next 14 months at least on the question about what grants go where we're very careful when I say we're risk averse we saw many of our colleagues especially about a year ago apply for these federal grants and then have them pulled back and so we've been while Nova's been successful in the past with federal competitive grants again that's aside from our our bones of allocation. We just have not gone for those, but that doesn't take away all the equity work that we do on a daily basis. And I guess to further your point, the philanthropic, the state, we do not go after any of those unless they fit right into the mission. They feed right into what NOVA's services are already. So we're very cognizant of not doing mission creep for sure.

Thank you very much. I think that's a really helpful distinction for us to think about how that funding is impacting what kind of work you do and also reassuring, actually, to kind of think about that allocation versus grant system. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for what your team does and jumping on all the WARN acts that we end up that you and I both end up seeing. So thank you. Thank you. That's all council questions. So we will move on to CDD.

Ms. Ryan?

All right, thank you. So I will be presenting Community Development Department. In the room, we do have Matt, our new Assistant Director of Community Development, a few of you were able to meet him at the last council meeting. So after this meeting, I'll bring them up to the three of you who didn't get a chance. And then other staff are online, ready to answer your tricky questions. The mission for the Community Development Department, we've had this mission for several years, and it's that we're innovative in promoting sustainable development while enhancing the economy, community character, and quality of life in Sunnyvale. Our goals are pretty simple for 2627. They're very similar to the goals that we prepared two years ago. There's just a little bit more emphasis on housing and unhoused programs, so a big chunk of the work that we do is development review and permitting, and we partner with every other department and one way or another, so some more specifically on the on the review of development applications and others. because of that support work that those departments provide. More than ever, we're reviewing and responding to local, regional, state, even federal, sometimes legislative bills that affect the programs in the department. We assist in the provision of affordable housing, either through the inclusionary requirements of new residential development or helping fund projects that are higher percentage, typically 100% affordable. Um, we, we do have a number of programs that are, um, that we're starting to put into place and, uh, several others on our list, um, which is to serve Sunnyvale's lower income and unhoused populations. We have, um, 44 programs in the housing element. So quite a number of those who will be working on this year. Um, and that is a subset of the approximately 30 items on the council priority list for, for this, um, this coming year. Um, accomplishments for 2526, this is always hard to do because you start preparing the slide before you finish things and you don't know whether you should put things on there. So I have a couple of updates for you at the very beginning of the fiscal year. We completed the village center master plan. with a companion zoning. We published our accessory dwelling unit toolkit and made that available. We entitled over 2000 housing units and entitled doesn't mean that they've started construction yet, but that means that they've gone through the process to receive approval to start that building. process. We adopted the state building codes, the 2025 building codes, which became effective on January 1st. Prior to that adoption, we included some sustainable type features on the engineering, excuse me, the electric Readiness side of of construction and this says that we have issued building permits valued at over 800 million. Well, that is true, but we are closer to. 100 ability. No, it's bigger number 8910. 1.1 billion. Oh, that's a big number. See, I can't do arithmetic in my head, but give me a spreadsheet. I'm I'm much better. So last year, all of last year was just under 800 million. So you can see that the valuation rate has gone up. It's not always new construction and new building. Oftentimes it's remodeling the interior of the building. And to one of the earlier questions about do we have enough space? Oftentimes it's an existing space is renovated to meet the needs of a particular business that wants to locate. Other accomplishments are we processed applications for 35 people interested in our below market rate program and 22 applications for the home rehabilitation program, which is we help seniors primarily, but other lower income households that need help maintaining their properties. We expanded the human services team so we were able to get those positions filled. We did present a draft of the first strategic plan to address homelessness. We're following up on the direction that the council provided us on that. And we've been managing the street outreach projects. contract which has been providing services now to 260 individuals so many of those people have had a number of contacts but it is 260 and unduplicated individuals and then the Ira D Hall Square affordable housing development opened on on Sonora Court in November Because of the Council interest in the programs for unhoused, we've just added a slide, a couple of slides here that were not in the first draft that we sent you. They just give you a little bit more information about the level of activity associated with providing services to the unhoused. Don't worry, I'm not going to read the whole slide to you, but this is available just so you can see and we can start putting together the dashboards to help you understand how that is changing over time. Hopefully we show that we're serving more people, but the number of people that need to be served is also going down. That's the goal. And then we do hear a lot from the community. We hear more from the community with concerns about encampments. And we actually have done fewer encampments year to date than we did the prior year. And it's hard to say how many people were associated with those because oftentimes by the time the abatement occurs, people have already left the area. We might not have known how many people were there, but certainly the number of locations has gone down. Overall, the budget has gone up just slightly, but that's because during the year we added two senior planner positions to the development services component of the planning division, and we added the assistant director of community development. Matt's only been here three and a half weeks now, so don't ask him too many questions yet. Next week, he'll be ready. And so that's what you see is the difference between the current fiscal year that we're in And the proposed year is that those actually already exist. We're still working on filling all of those positions. In addition to the council priority projects that I mentioned that will be handled through the existing budget that that that we or budget that will have, we are conducting a development services staffing assessment and Connie Vercelis and I are taking the lead on that. The consultant has completed their interviews of staff that work in the many departments that provide development services. So it's not just about looking at do we have the right number of staff we need in community development. It's also looking at public works and public safety, particularly fire prevention, public works, environmental services. So those are the main departments that are associated with development review. And after that time, will determine should we be requesting more staffing that would be handled with development services fees, which, by the way, we will be doing a review of our development fees as the year progresses. So we can look at the staffing needs and the development fee study at the same time. We have added budget for all of the planning commissioners to attend the Planning Commissioners Academy. And we have restructured the fees slightly to one of our streamlining efforts to be able to start the review process earlier. The applicant doesn't have to wait for a planner to calculate what the full amount of fees are. we'll get this first fee in place so that we can distribute their applications while we're doing that other calculation. So that'll gain a little bit of time, sometimes a week or more, depending upon how quickly the applicant can get that fee to us for the entire application. And that was my brief overview, very brief.

Thank you. We'll get to council questions. First up, Vice Mayor.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mayor Klein. And thank you very much for the presentation, Director Ryan. So as you know, I've received many, many concerns in my district, but also throughout the city regarding access to retail, potential loss of retail due to redevelopment. And I would appreciate it if we could get an update from the Department of Community Development on what the department is doing to help encourage retail development, especially grocery stores within the city, especially in underserved areas like North Sunnyvale.

We can give you that update, not at this moment, because I don't think there's enough time for it. And it is a partnership with the economic development staff and the community development staff.

If I could also just add to it, one of the things that we are constantly, from economic development perspective, looking to attract retailers for various reasons. I just want to point out that the latest number that we have for our retail vacancies, so one of the issues is just ensuring that there's adequate space for those types of uses. is we're at 2% citywide retail vacancy. So there's unfortunately not a lot of vacant spaces for additional attraction.

Which is, indeed, this is part of why I'm asking Director Ryan as well, is there's clearly a shortage of available retail space. And every time I talk to a developer, they make noises about how retail doesn't pencil, but there is still a very Clear shortage. And, you know, on the one hand, yes, I've got my policy proposal on retail economic development, which we'll be talking about at some point today. But also, you know, we need to be looking at how we grow the pie as well. And I'd love, you know, to get a follow up from CDD on that.

And certainly I think just a broad picture is with the Village Center Master Plan, we were very clear that some areas were commercial only, whereas the way that the general plan language was, it was mixed use. And unfortunately, fortunately, depending upon your perspective on these issues, a developer could use many of the state housing laws to avoid having to provide that commercial space. we do have a couple applications that came in before we completed that and so that that there is a challenge there we do have an incentive program for two of the sites and should be get should be getting the the retail on that and then we will continue to look for other areas that might be vulnerable if a site is zoned to allow housing we have to find another site for that housing to to be built. We can't just reset. Correct.

There can be no net down zonings. Something I would like to ask about as well is if hypothetically we've got a developer putting something through and that developer gets a lot of negative community feedback and decides to adjust the project to help meet that community feedback. what sort of streamlining is available for them to make those adjustments without having to kick off the process again and go through a full, start over again from square one. Because we do, if a developer is going to do that, we do want to encourage that and we don't want to put them through the wringer.

We do encourage that. That doesn't mean that the developer is quite prepared to do the little bit that we've asked them to do. Was that phrased okay?

I think so. You know, what I just say is, you know, if they're trying to do the right thing, let's give them as much help as we can.

We try.

Thank you. Thank you. Next up is Councilmember Cisneros.

Thank you. Really appreciate all of this work. This is a very difficult topic that I wish we could one day all just solve, but we're making really good progress. I have a couple of questions. For the BMR home buyer loans in the home rehabilitation, that's exciting. Does that represent, so the number of applications received, does that represent what we typically get or is that unusually high, unusually low?

There's a little dip that was low, and it has to do with the number of units coming online this year. But based on what's in the pipeline, I would expect us to be at or above the 60-70 that we would have in other years.

Okay, that makes sense. And why are you reporting that as applications received versus processed or accepted?

The staff time, we process every single application that we see. So the staff time is the same. If there are 50 applications and only three homes, it's still as much work. to do the 50 application. That is not the right number. Trying to be dramatic there. But it does help inform the demand for that type of housing unit as we look at other policy.

I think it'd be helpful actually to see that number, even if it's not as dramatic as three versus 50. I think giving council a perspective of this is the kind of demand we have for this, and this is the number of people that would like to have this. You know, maybe we can think about, okay, that's getting bigger. That's getting smaller. This is what we have online. I know that these resources are precious and so I just want to make sure that we have an accurate picture.

And then my next question, if I could just interrupt so on the 35 applications processing, I don't have the exact number and staff might send it to me in a 2nd, but it was. 26 closed. So that doesn't mean that the nine were just still waiting. It might have meant that they didn't qualify. Right. Right. Right, exactly.

Other reasons. Okay, that's actually really helpful. That brings a good picture. And then my next question is on abatements and like to just get a little bit of additional information, perhaps additional metrics, because I know we all want to ensure that there's compassionate and dignified process for the unhoused residents who are impacted by this. And, you know, the community's voice concerns recently, I think rightfully so, and we should be able to talk about how we're approaching that and always look for better ways. So, for example, the number of we hope contacts made to those who are being abated, like how often they were contacted ahead of time, knowing that what kind of assistance was offered, like, oh. after and you know it can't be here but like this is where you can go what's offered how many people accepted and if possible just because and i wouldn't necessarily need this if it was a larger number but especially because we do have a small number of these abatements happening like if they turn down resources i kind of want to know why Like, and I know that that would be anecdotal to Miho.

We don't know. Sometimes they choose not to engage. So we don't know why they chose not to engage. Sometimes it takes 70 contacts before they'll say, okay, So we don't always know the why.

Yeah, that's why I say if possible.

It would be great to know. It'll just be, as you say, anecdotal information. And I would caution the council of trying to come up with metrics associated with it. You're right. We're talking about human beings and human nature, and it's really hard to characterize.

You're absolutely right. And that moment in time does not matter. actually capture the for the process but what we can do is we hope contacts DPS contacts what support was offered and just be able to paint that picture of what those abatements look like so that um we can always improve there but I think that'd be helpful so thank you very much for all of this work and so much more to come thank you council member cell so you have the village centers

And in the middle of the village centers, you started seeing them not being mixed use, being mostly housing, and then you changed gears. And then for the ones that did not become more housing as opposed to mixed use, you were able to do commercial. I was just wondering, lessons learned, like for future mixed use kind of areas in Sunnyvale, are you like knowing that what happened with the village center? Does that give you insights of, maybe we need to go in and make certain mixed use areas like commercial so that the new areas don't become all just housing and they're what we envisioned like Moffett Park specific plan and those.

Well, that's essentially what we did with the village center master plans is we had to build in zoning that was not mixed use that it was commercial only. What we didn't know is that the state law would change to a point where the, so typically if you have a general plan and a zoning, it's the zoning that prevails. But the state law said no matter what, it's either one. And then the state also included provisions that If there's an aspect of the local regulations that make it more difficult or too costly, you can waive that or get a concession for that. I mean, that's automatically, they don't have to ask for it. Essentially, they just have to identify that they're asking for it. So we didn't anticipate that. So we will at least be using that lens on new areas. For SB 79, one of the things we wanna do is look at Moffett Park and see, Are we adequately protecting the areas that we say should be mixed use or could be mixed use, right? We have both situations in Moffitt Park to assure that we have the retail services that are needed for the 20,000 households that will eventually be there.

Okay.

So we're a little panicked too.

Yeah. And then it's really great that you thought outside of the box and then for the village centers, the last village centers, last two or whatever, that you thought of that. But I was just wondering, like thinking out of the box for the previous village center, I know you've tried to have a sort of like, if they do this, then, you know, we'll not make them do, you know, something. And if they do more retail, we will let them out of affordable housing or something like that.

That's exactly what we did.

Yeah. The incentive program. Yeah. Do you feel like there's takers on that?

Well, there are only two sites that qualify, and both of them have included that in their application. Okay.

One last thing. For Moffitt Park, you know, we envision that maybe there'll be more schools there. And so is there engagements with the school district to make sure that, you know, the thing that in the Moffitt Park is set aside for schools? Is that a good place still for schools or is there a certain engagement with the school districts as to checking with them that that's still a good site for the school?

We worked very closely with the school districts as we were developing the plans. We noted that it won't be right away that you'll need the school because you won't have enough students in that area. So they are aware of it, but you make a good point that it's probably good to check in periodically and let them know the status. They do receive notices when we have development applications come in, but to the extent we get preliminary word that someone's considering a development, we can revive those meetings with them. That would be great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Council Member Sreenivasan.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the presentation. My questions are mostly regarding metrics. For example, the performance indicator in your document for home fund, right? It says it is achieved 40 homes, 40 families. Of which, do we know how much

is the administrative cost versus how much has been given out i would like to see that in the performance it is it is controlled by the federal grant it says what the maximum could be and um i'm looking at um amanda do we know what that percentage for home funds 15 for our administrative cost 15 percent

So that is what Sunnyvale Community Services also have to do that?

No, that would be different.

Amanda Stolz, housing officer. For the Home Tiber program, Sunnyvale Community Services receives $350,000 to administer the program and a million dollars in subsidy every year. So $1.35 million.

Well, here it says $740,000.

That's how much they expended of the million dollars in subsidy last year.

Okay, so this is including the 350 or it's not it.

That's just the subsidy. So of the $1,000,000 they had allocated, they spent that 700,000.

So in addition, but we, in addition to the 350. Yes. Okay. and then do we have any indication how many are out of the program after two years or they get funding for two years right after that how many of them are stabilized and do we have any numbers on that

We are continuing to work with Sunnyvale Community Services so that we can all be more data driven and understanding placements after. We currently don't require that they track them after any given time after they end their two year subsidy. So it's certainly something that we have considered looking into, but would want to work closely with them on that.

okay i would like to see that number and then the next is uh you in your presentation you mentioned that we hope contacted about 260

personal that you they have um had conversations with 260 unique uh unique individuals exactly and unduplicated is that duplicated that is a good term by the way but as we know the pit count was around 400 or so so what happened to the not everybody so for example they might go to an RV and nobody's in the RV or they choose not to answer Okay, where they'll go and there there's evidence that somebody might be living there, but anytime they go, which is in 7 days a week, they're not there. Or the person says, I don't want to talk to you and that's not counted.

Okay. Okay. And then you also mentioned about dignity on wheels about 260 shower laundry. I didn't see that in the presentation, but then you showed the slide. That's OK. So do we know once again how many unique individuals are there or is that the same?

Yes, it's actually on the new slide that we gave you today, not on the one that we sent you previously. There are 111 unduplicated clients for dignity on wheels, which represented 427 showers. I don't know how many of those were one time and one person every time. And then laundry loads, 271. Okay.

This is for both the, we have twice a week, right?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. So this is including for both the days, right? It's including, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. So we provide that service twice a week, right? We hope, yes. Right. So this is 111 individuals are 441. Right, and that's year to date. Year to date.

Yeah, no, 111 clients have used their service.

Can we include that in the performance indicator slide in the next year budget? To the city managers?

Dave Kuntz, I think, with regards to unhoused services what we'd like to do is make make measurement part of the strategy to address homelessness, so if we can hang on to that until we can have that more comprehensive discussion. Dave Kuntz, Okay, and since since i've got the floor for a minute. I just want to clarify that there's a perception or even might 1 might call it misinformation that the city is not approaching this from a, um. John Potter, empathetic or trying to deliver services first, or making that effort as best we can first before we abate. And I want to be clear that we make. We take. We make a significant amount of effort and give a significant amount of notice before we abate. and that that's important to us and so i just want to clarify that for the public that there we are making a significant effort to support the unhoused and deliver supportive services prior to having the final step be abatement

okay thank you what he said yeah thank you uh the next day is uh you mentioned the Iradi Hall 175 units and then I know this for a fact of which 45 units were for announced uh personnel of which none of them went to previously Sunnyvale residents do we know what happened to the remaining 130 uh units how many are

lived and worked in sunnyville um we'll get that for you okay we've reached out not just to them um but to our other um affordable housing developments just so you can get a a character of when people moved in where they um identifying that they had lived or worked or hung out in sunnyville thank you you answered my next question and then thank you very very much so just as a reminder to council um i understand where

running late on time um i will ask to some degree if there are questions that you would like to ask of our directors um and i understand we had monday morning questions but but as part of this if you can send them i'll say before the end of the week and it'll become part of the the full response city manager agree with that yes that would be great okay thank you And I think that's, do you have a quick question? Council Member Lay, go ahead.

Okay, thank you. I want to say thank you. I think you have a lot on your plate that CDD does. It's one of the departments that is tasked with solving the housing crisis, solving the unhoused crisis, and that's a lot for anyone. I want to say that I really appreciate the work that you do with different community groups with Sunnyvale Community Services and as someone who attends the monthly meeting with the county, I think that's very helpful. And it's good to know that we are working with different organizations to solve these very big problems. Um, I am curious about, um, when the discussion about the further money that's going to go into on house services will be coming up. Um, Mr city manager.

We committed to, I think we've got, uh, the housing strategy, or the strategy to address on housed on. We're planning to take it in October. If I recall correctly, I'm just looking for. Head knobs that's that's our current plan. I don't want to commit 100% to that, but that's the tentative date. Okay, and that's when we'll be discussing where the budget allocation that will be approving or not approving soon will be that may come a little bit sooner because we did commit to come back on temporary parking options and a interim shelter option by end of September.

Okay, then I just want to note that I am cognizant of how all of these things interact that the safe parking I think is going to have a lot of will be under this department, but we'll also be interacting with the with the business community, depending on where that where that safe parking is, where the streets will be approved. I have received from my district a lot of complaints from the Perry Park neighborhood where there are currently a lot of RVs and I would like to get back with them with something. So thank you everyone for your hard work on this.

Thank you. That's all council questions. Thank you very much. Let's move on to Library and Recreational Services. Ms. Pereira.

Thank you. Michelle Pereira, Director of Library and Recreation Services. And our department mission and vision is Sunnyvale Public Library and the Sunnyvale Recreation Services Division work both individually and collectively to deliver exceptional and enriching community services to the City of Sunnyvale. And some of our department goals is to provide a wide range of library and recreation services and programs. We know we can't be all things to all people, but we certainly will give it our best shot. Also, it's important for us to provide a diverse variety of library materials, information and programs that really reflect the city of Sunnyvale's population. We want to ensure equal opportunities and access to recreation and I'll give you some highlights of our scholarship program in a few minutes. Also provides modernized and expanded spaces for the community and I will touch on that as well. Grow our art in public places program and there is a budget request to do that, and then also to facilitate the Art in Private Development program as well. We'll continue to do that. We want to support and develop a knowledgeable and creative and empathetic staff. That's very important to us, that our community really feels connected to our staff and trusts our staff. And then we prioritize equity, access, and inclusion through culturally inclusive programs and accessible services. And then last but not least, we provide and help facilitate large scale community events that we'll talk about a few of those. So as you can see here, the change from this fiscal year to next fiscal year is actually two FTE. You'll notice that in the subsequent year, in the next year, 2728, it goes back down to where it is now. And that's because two term limited positions will sunset and bring us back down to where we are today. Those positions are those two new ones that we're requesting a senior library assistant that will oversee our new literacy program at the library. The literacy program is geared to adults who did not learn to read as children. So this is really life changing for them as they become readers and are able to do and are able to not hide from some of the requirements that our society requires. So from filling out applications to reading a book to their grandchild, the literacy program really is a life-changing program for these learners. And then the other ask is a full time recreation coordinator one for our public art program. We have a we have had one person working on public art for I don't know how many years, probably 20 years now. And in order to build that program, we really do need a little bit more staffing. And then lastly, there's some money in there for library collections. I specifically wanted to call out a program that is basically we are going we have such long waiting lists for some of our books, sometimes 50, sometimes 100 people on the waiting list that we're going to be renting some books in order to get more on the shelf immediately and then we'll we'll give them back. And also we want to continue to grow that library of things that everyone loves so much. Um, just keep, I'm going to try and go quickly here. So some of the highlights for the year include, you know, we started that literacy program on grant money. We continue to receive grant money for it. We have 20 learners right now, pardon me, tutor learner pairs, and we've about 20 more on the waiting list who want to join the program. So that's quite a demand. Um, some of the collections that were continue, we've grown in the last year, probably the most significant is the library of things. We've introduced a lot of things like yodo players, which I know that comes in is is interested in stem kits. Our memory kits for seniors are very popular. And who needs more park passes and weed whackers? We do, right? Because they check out. And then we just purchased about 25,000 new items for the Lakewood branch. So those will be debuting soon. Also, it is important for us to get materials into the hands of children so they can start their own libraries at home. And we do that through giveaways during summer reading club during the winter reading club, our friends at the library support that and also through our partnership with the state library and the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. 1800 Sunnyvale kids have signed up for that so far and receive a free book every month. We are also committed to cultural programs. I won't go through all of these. I'm sure you have all attended one or more of these at some point or another. They continue to be exceptionally popular, and we do try to provide a wide range of cultural programs for the community. Also, it is important to us to serve our senior community and you've been to many things at the senior center. We have obviously, 1 of the most popular things is senior lunch and that. serves about 82 to 90 meals a day. We also have a second senior lunch program that is more geared to the Asian community. It's run by an organization that rents space from us and also does a lunch which serves about 100 people every day. So a lot of lunches going on every day. We've also got a great partnership with El Camino Health Care District, who provide grant money for us to do health and wellness programs specifically out of the Columbia Neighborhood Center, as well as food prep kits that families can pick up and make food at home. And then the city council increased the scholarship funds a couple of years ago that has just gone gangbusters. We expend that every year in 2025, 456 people were able to take advantage of those scholarship funds. The average was about 337 dollars. And because we did a lot of. very cheap swim recreation swim passes. That's why that number comes out like that. And I will say if you're interested, the sweet spot on those scholarships is about the eight and nine year old range. And they're loving the sports programming, dance, anything youth oriented. Our special event permits have also been super popular. We are thankful for that position, that recreation manager position. We had 94 applications last year and 82 were permitted. That's a lot of large scale special events happening in the community. Some of the ones the city is that our department is working on with other departments. Obviously, we've got the ground, the community center grounds, ribbon cutting happening on Thursday. We've got we have the corn palace ribbon cutting already this year. We had a 4th of July festival this fiscal year and one coming up on this coming July 4th. We had a great state of the city last year and looking forward to another one this September. Huge Lunar New Year event. I think some of the mayor's best pictures on Facebook came from that. And of course, we have a great big truck petting zoo on Wednesday tomorrow. What a 11 o'clock. So if you have kids and they love big trucks, I would encourage you to attend that. There will be some. I'm seeing a furrowed brow in the audience here. So Environmental Services, Public Works, and DPS will be bringing out their biggest trucks. We'll do a big truck story time, and then the kids can go climb all over these trucks and see them. So even if you're not a child, you're welcome to attend.

Out of idle curiosity, when and where will this event be happening?

For the child in your life, yes. 11 o'clock tomorrow morning. 11 to 1230. We will start at the amphitheater with a story time. We will cross the rainbow crosswalk. Thank you, Public Works. And we will end up in the library parking lot where all the trucks will be. You have to see it to believe it. Trust me. And then some of the capital improvement projects that LRS has worked on, obviously the artwork. So I do have a slide later that will tell you all the upcoming projects completion, but our work really happens way before that completion date. It's obviously getting a lot of these artworks through the application process, approval process, and then obviously fabrication. you will be seeing the Community Center grounds artwork and Plaza del Sol at your June 2nd meeting and I will tell you right now you're gonna have a really hard time selecting they're pretty fantastic um and then also that will be completed this year um the Lakewood um Library and Learning Center artwork as well as the um the interior mural should be done actually in about a month so looking forward to seeing that Here's some public art. a lot of upcoming projects these are the completion dates we're looking at on the left hand side so as you can see it should be a fun couple of years in terms of the public art is going to pop up around the city and then there's a lot of future projects and the list reason i listed so many future projects is because we are asking for a staff person to assist these are some of the things we'll be able to do like another round of the sunnyvale suns We also want to really look at being able to do some art benches and some murals as well. So, some of the key initiatives for 2627, obviously, we're going to open that Lakewood library and learning center mark your calendars for August 27th. I set it out loud. We're going to Ramon is looking at his watch. We're going to open that library and we do a 3 day opening and we'll send out more details. soon. We have been working, as Kathleen mentioned, actively with our ITD department to get active registration software completed, and we are just on the home stretch of that. we are looking forward to another community event a neighborhood grant program and um and the all of the community events that come out of that um there'll be another recreation scholarship program and we're going to continue to the modernization and expansion of library facilities and improvements to the community center so we're looking at um working with our friends in public works to do some cosmetic improvements to the main library that are very needed and we have already started talks with that we're also working with our friends in department of public works to look at a potential feasibility study for another branch library perhaps at the community center ground so just looking at what's what options we have for expansion and modernization of library services um also we have uh continued to build our student library cards in partnership with the local school districts currently all the third through eighth graders and sunnyvale school district do have a virtual library card and we just expanded that to the high school students at homestead and fremont And that should be completed by the end of the summer beginning of school year, which will bring another about 4,300 virtual cards for those those students. So our goal is to have every student having a library card. Oops, sorry. Also, we continue to evaluate our recreation programming needs and demands. We have several different programs in recreation that are just booming. Gymnastics, I think, is a good example of that. And then we have some programs that aren't that we need to really evaluate. So we're going to spend the year looking at those. And we're also really trying to take And we have already made changes on how we make sure that access to our facilities is as equitable as possible. So everyone gets a shot at using our facilities like our gyms, which are super popular. And then of course, as I mentioned, we want to grow the public art program. So just a quick, I'll finish here talking about Lakewood because that is the latest and greatest thing that's happening. It's gonna open in August. Just some of the things that you're gonna see in Lakewood. We will have a maker lab there that will be open after school, and we want to make sure that kids have access to things, obviously 3D printing and laser cutters, sewing machines, vinyl cutters, poster prints, heat presses, really a variety of things that I think kids will find really fun. and adults for that matter. There'll be weekly story times and children's events. We will be partnering with the elementary school to provide resources for those students. We want to make sure there's a social time and community engagement time for seniors there as well. So as we look at this is just our first stab at the hours, we want to keep them pretty standard. So we're going to open from 10 to 7 Monday through Wednesday, 10 to 5 Thursday through Saturday, and then we'll see where the demand is and adjust accordingly. We don't think it's going to be the exact same type of hours as the main library because we just don't know yet. We'll have to wait and see. A couple of cool things that I will mention about the Lakewood branch. Obviously, there's community meeting rooms that the community can rent and use and have meetings. There's also some private study rooms, and there's also a dedicated teen study room, which I think will be popular. and one of the neat things about lakewood also you can access the library after hours and pick up your holds there's a room just for your books that are on hold and you can access that with your library card and with that i'll be quiet and answer or try to answer any questions thank you first up vice mayor thank you very much mr mayor um

Awesome stuff. In the interest of time, I've only got one question, which is several years ago we had Drag Queen Storytime. I think we did that for a few years. I don't know if we've been doing that in recent years. Are there any plans to bring that back or try to bring that back for Pride Month?

um we we did one years ago we haven't we haven't done one um recently i think you know it's kind of i think that has moved on that trend a little bit um we do have um events that we do during pride month um uh national coming out day a variety of those things um but not a drag queen story time that is in the works yet okay i would love if we could look at bringing that back thank you thank you council member cisneros

Yes, thank you. And I'll just say first, my children made a budget recommendation to me. They don't often, they sometimes do that, actually. They recommended that we give the library $1,000 million. Okay. So. So moved. And that's to say the programming and the resources and the facilities are really enjoyed to the point where I'm loving seeing young generations being like, yes, give them your whole budget. I'm like, I don't know, but... We'll try to get there. My question is about the increased in programming and also kind of the infrastructure needs we have in the main library to support those. So this actually comes from I was very happy to join a sewing lab where two hours you can go and use the machines, which is really cool. But that's hard when a lot of the electric outlets aren't working in the room. And so when I'm seeing the programming increasing, I'm like, well, I want to make sure that we're also thinking about the needs of this. Can the space accommodate these really cool programs without overloading an extension cord? And it gets a little complicated, and everyone makes do, and it was wonderful, and it functioned anyway. But I wanted to get your thoughts on that. You know, is that part of what we're talking about here? Or are we looking at renovating strategically in that way to support the programming changes?

So a few parts to that question. Definitely when it comes to looking at how we can do more programs, luckily not everything involves an outlet, but we have used the plaza and outdoor space for larger scale programs. That's what we have to do. It's the best way to accommodate that. We've also done programs not on not at the library. So we can do library programs with our partners. We're certainly going to use Lakewood because Lakewood will have several community rooms that will be very useful for programming. When it comes to what we'd like to do at the main library, you know, we really need to do some replacement of the bathrooms, the flooring, painting, and definitely one of the spaces that needs some work is the program room. um so that needs to be updated you know um we're we'll do as much as we can um within the constraints that we we have obviously um but when it comes to programming you know we will try to do as much as we can with the space that we have awesome yeah and i just want to flag that that would be something i'd be interested in doing especially if it enhances our ability to do programming that would be a priority to me thank you thank you thank you councilmember chang

Thank you. And it's really exciting. The Lakewood branch is going to be opening early later in the fall. But I also still want to emphasize, I know we're exploring the community center, but southern parts of Sunnyvale, it's still four or five miles to City Hall and to the public library. So I know there's a new school opening, the Laurelwood Elementary School, if there's any opportunity for that partnership, too.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Sreenivasan.

very quickly you mentioned about uh features in the Lakewood library such as uh laser cutters 3D printing is that uh can public use that or how does how do somebody use that we will have lab hours okay okay thank you yes Councilmember

That's going to be very popular. And thank you also for mentioning the truck petting zoo tomorrow. I'm going to go and I hope my council colleagues go too. That sounds like a lot of fun. Always wanted to pet a truck. No, I'm very excited about all these upcoming programs that you've been that you are talking about here about the Lakewood Branch Library. I feel like that maker lab is going to be something a lot of people are interested in. I think that's going to be in high demand. i also want to thank you real quick and i'm not sure my council colleagues know this about the recreation scholarship programs that specifically benefited the children at the uh at the county at the county shelter in my district um there was a lot of programming gaps for um these families over the summer and lrs was able to help these families out with these scholarships. So it's really great that we're able to, as a city, make that partnership and support these families. I don't have any questions. I just want to tell you thank you for all your hard work, and I'm really excited about the Lakewood branch.

Thanks.

Thank you. That's all questions. Thank you. Oh, Council Member Selle, sorry.

So there's 20 million for, I guess, new libraries, library. Is that enough or will you be able to tell us next year like that was enough and ask for more? Just wondering.

20 million, sorry. Boy, that's a loaded question. I think we need to still do some feasibility work before I can answer that question. Okay.

And then with the scholarship program, is that like, over served or is that just enough or you have enough money there?

We do run out every year. But we're close.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. Thank you.

And I will just leave you with, you know, just a shameless plug that we do have a lot of programs coming up the 250th anniversary. So I will make sure you should get a copy of this.

Okay.

Thank you. Thank you very much. With that, we'll move on to DPS chief.

Good afternoon, Mayor, members of City Council, Dan Pistor, Chief of Public Safety. I want to start by saying that I'm happy to report that public safety continues to enjoy strong community support and confidence. Over 80% of our residents rate Sunnyville's overall safety as good or excellent. These results reflect the daily work of our personnel and the strong relationships they have built throughout the community. Every day our staff responds to emergencies, engages with residents and businesses, and works proactively to maintain the high level of service the Sunnyville community expects and deserves. Sunnyville continues to grow and evolve the city is now the 6 largest in the Bay Area and that growth comes with increased responsibility on our end to sure to ensure our community remains safe prepared and supported. The public safety proposed budget represents an investment in that safety providing DPS with the people the tools and resources necessary to meet the community's expectations for excellent service. With that we'll go to the next line. With everything we do, we always refer back to our mission and value statement, as we can cover right here. Excellence, integrity, professionalism, accountability, and community engagement are our core values, and that hasn't changed. Our department goals. I just wanted to highlight some stuff that we've been doing. Of course, we always are looking to reduce crime and be proactive in our policing efforts. We're excited about the rebuilding of Fire Station 2 and our training center. And we're spending a lot of times with our friends in IT. We're upgrading our CAD system that Kathleen had talked about, and it's a heavy lift. And we're modernizing our public safety technology, our body cameras, and very importantly, our less than lethal tools, which is always something that we are looking to go to before we have to use lethal tools. and then of course we're always striving to deliver high quality responsive public safety services to our residents i just want to say that public safety remains committed to supporting the goals and priorities set forth by the city council and the city manager's office and that hasn't changed and just to cover some recent accomplishments we've been very busy this year we responded to a two alarm fire on on kirkland that required the use of over 30 DPS personnel. We supported Super Bowl operations with our patrol units, our SWAT team, our canine, and our hazmat team from fire. We made two arrests in homicides, held a press conference on that to educate the community about it. We also made 24 arrests in organized crime, retail, theft, jewelry store robberies that plagued us in the beginning of the year. That was a combined effort with our partners throughout the region. We hired a public safety, media and engagement manager just to increase our communications with the community and keep them engaged with us and. Quite notable we reach full staffing this year, which is been something that we've been striving to do for. many many years now our oes office has been extremely busy we trained over 1800 city and community members in emergency readiness and we celebrated our 75th anniversary so looking pretty good for our age I just wanted to provide some crime numbers to the council just to let us let you know where we stand. Unfortunately, our trend line is not going in a direction that we would want it to go to. We are trending relatively even with the rest of the county. But as you can see here, we are overall heading in the wrong direction in property crimes. And in the next slide, in violent crimes, We're also heading in an upward trajectory. Some of our performance measures requires us to compare ourselves to Mountain View and Santa Clara, and they've also been traveling along the same lines as us. So we're not an outlier, but like everybody in the region, Sunnyville is not immune to crime that's occurring within our county and state. Next slide. I wanted to share with Council kind of a snapshot of our overall workload indicator. This data comes from our dispatch data, and as you can see, we are trending up in this area too with non-emergency calls, police emergencies, and fire and EMS emergencies. We're busy is the summary here. Next slide. I thought it would be informative for Council to see through our Access Sunnyville inquiries that we received from the public, just kind of the top concerns that we're hearing about routinely from the public. And by far, abandoned vehicles and RV parking that we've been doing a lot of discussion about has been a top priority. As you can see, it's doubled from 22-23 to 24-25. um overall neighborhood complaints and that's kind of a catch-all term but it could be anything from noise complaints to neighbor issues and then traffic of course remains to be something that we are constantly paying attention to but I think what this slide indicates is that our community is engaged our community is reaching out to us and letting us know what's happening and it also gives you a snapshot of the workload that the department is carrying And a snapshot of our budget. We are requesting a substantial increase in our budget. And we understand that. And we took a lot of time and energy thinking long and hard about the requests that we'll be covering in the next slide. But this is the budget picture moving forward. And to the meat and potatoes of it. We are looking at six service level adjustments. We're looking to add a community crime reduction team, and I'll get into more detail about that in the next slide. We are looking to convert our current. Oh, yes, Lieutenant into a civilian. Oh, yes, manager. And there's a few reasons for that. We can talk about it in a little bit, but. Our current system requires us to rotate our Oes manager every five years. Currently, we all know it's Lieutenant and Moscow, which is who has been doing an outstanding job. I wish I had a hundred of Dan Moskowitz. The problem is that I will be forced to rotate him at the end of the year. There's nothing I can do about that. We would have to invest in training and schooling up the next great lieutenant, and then we'll do it all again in five years. And I think it would really benefit the city to have some stability there. We are also looking to reclass one of our public safety dispatchers from a dispatcher in training to a full public safety dispatcher position. That's just a reclass that would allow us to provide some relief on our mandatory overtime. We are looking at adding some resources to our vehicle abatement officer. converting it for a reclass from 0.75 to a full time. That would bring us to four employees, so three full time and one part time. We're looking to put some money into our wellness program, about $15,000. We all know that public safety is a rough job, and we take home a lot of baggage, and we want to make sure we support our families and our department, our members, family members. So we have a pretty robust program, but we are always struggling to fund it. So I think adding some stable funding there would benefit our officers. And then we are looking to add one animal control vehicle to our fleet currently we have two animal control officers and one car. And that obviously provides us with limitations as far as getting out into the field and addressing calls quickly, especially when we're traveling down to South county to get to our animal shelter. So, let's talk about the, the big ask in our budget, which is our crime reduction team. So this team is nothing new in in our profession. It gives the, it gives the department the flexibility to meet the needs of our growing city. As you saw in some of our bar graphs, our community has significant public safety concerns and the team will be dedicated to responding to rising crime trends or quality of life issues brought up by our residents. And that's a really important piece here. Depending on the mission, the officers will either be in uniform or plain clothes. They're a hotspot team. So when we are seeing bothersome trends developing in the community, we're able to respond quickly. Currently, our model requires us to ask for or require officers to work overtime. And that's not always easily staffed by us. And quite frankly, officers don't always want to come in and do that. But this team would provide a dedicated team to handle whatever hotspot is happening in our communities until it's complete. The team is proactive in stopping crime. There will be, there will also be designated designated to our special events and have Saturday as their standard work week. And that's that's important. We've built that in to help with our overtime budget. We. which is kind of fortuitous that I follow LRS but we saw that a lot of our community events went from several hundred I remember when it was several hundred downtown now it's several thousand measured and that requires us to really provide a much larger public safety footprint to make sure that these events go off without an incident which requires us to mandatorily order people in on overtime and becomes very expensive this team will be working straight time because Saturday will be their straight time so at any given time I will start with five officers on the ground and that's that's tremendous um and next oh um yeah next slide okay so looking forward we're we're uh We're looking to decrease that trend line in both violent and property crime. I think that the community response team will be to do that. We're it's a sustained investment, and I think that's critical. I think we're doing well. I think overall the city of Sunday vote is a safe place to be. But as the chief, I would recommend that We continue to maintain and put energy into our proactive efforts to get that trend line going in the downward direction instead of the upward direction. Our demand for service continues to grow. We see increased calls to public safety. We see organized criminal organizations operating in the region. We're not immune to that. Those organizations come into the city. We need to be able to respond to that. We see larger community events involving thousands of people. and our downtown is robust and lively place to be, but it also requires more effort for us to keep it safe. Commitment to the community. This continued funding ensures that DPS can deliver that high quality responsive integrated public safety service that our community expects and is used to. And it continued investment in our in our staffing technology and specialized units are necessary to keep pace with the community needs ensure public safety levels remain high and we can respond to these incidences quickly real quick in closing As the city of Sunneville grows, so must the Department of Public Safety. Downtown is expanding, more community-focused spaces are opening up, and businesses are choosing Sunneville to be their home, bringing thousands of visitors alongside of our growing population. The Department of Public Safety is committed to providing excellent service, and a sustained investment is critical in meeting these increased demands. Our community expects and deserves a high level of service from their public safety department, and we must continue to invest in staffing, technology, and specialized units to remain the leaders in public safety and meet the expectations of our community. The decisions made in this budget are not simply about funding positions or programs. They're about protecting the quality of life our community members have expected and deserve. I WANT TO JUST TAKE A SECOND TO THANK CITY COUNCILOR. YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN STRONG SUPPORTERS OF PUBLIC SAFETY. YOUR LEADERSHIP ALLOWS US TO SERVE PROFESSIONALLY AND ENSURE OUR STAFF HAS THE TOOLS NEEDED TO SUCCEED. SO THANK YOU VERY MUCH. NEXT SLIDE. I JUST WANT TO TAKE A QUICK SECOND TO GO OVER SAFE ROUTES TO SCHOOL. I KNOW IT'S A PARTICULAR INTEREST TO THE COMMUNITY. Um, just a quick overview safe routes to school began in in 2008 to Santa Clara County health department. And the funds were supported, supported a full time safe routes to school coordinator. Ultimately, that position was made permanent in the city's operating budget. in 2019 2020 and it is a full-time position it's a cso safe routes infrastructure improvements are implemented by the department of public works in alignment with active transportation plan we took some time to look at our neighbors and see what they're doing and how we compare to them and this is what this chart indicates so of course sunnyville were the or the largest population um we have one staff met full-time staff member we have four districts 18 schools we don't have a website yet but it's coming um and walk and roll maps are coming and we do do a monthly newsletter so we are um trending with our neighbors there next slide Again, these are some of the event comparisons and, as you can see, we do participate like our neighbors in a lot of these events, the monthly working groups is going to be. is going to start happening soon and then we're making plans for that. But I just wanted to give you a quick snapshot of a side by side comparison of our neighbors and how we're doing. Next slide. In addition to our Safe Routes to School program, we have a very robust crossing guard program. We have 48 crossing guards at 47 intersections covering 18 schools at considerable cost. Next slide. And so when we look at our neighbors, although they're not as big as us, so we would expect numbers to be much lower, we are far and above performing much better when it comes to crossing guards coverage of our schools. in the final slide looking forward we're going to be working on our work groups we're going to be coordinating more with school districts and parents and transportation staff we always have we always have a great working relationship with dpw we will be updating our materials i do think that there's room for improvement with the department's education of the community and i'm excited that we have a public safety engagement manager now. We've already started planning on how we can let the community know all the great work that Safe Routes to School is doing. Our Safe Routes maps are in progress and we're hoping to have them by the end of the year. We're going to, like I said, increase awareness. We're going to create a web page and we have some funding built into that in our priority project. And then again, we're going to partner with DPW. And with that, I'll take any questions.

Thank you questions from council. Council member cell.

So, there's the revitalizations of safe route Cisco and some community members suggested, like, um, um, some metrics and would you be open to you'll have to, like, work with the consultant to make sure it makes sense. But some metrics they suggested was, um. Relationships with 100% that schools and increase, you know, 1% participation are those things that you will work with consultant to figure out those kind of strategies or. Public works too.

Yes, I think that the short answer there is yes, I would love to see what kind of matrix we can study and what would make sense. So it's something that we'll definitely take a look at.

Okay. And then 1 last thing. looking at the other the community members have mentioned that other cities have the safe routes to school in the public works kind of department but sunnyvale has it in the public safety department so any comments on that or

You know, I, I'm biased as a chief. I think it lives well with DPS. I think that the way we've kind of divided it up is that our community service officer Maria, who runs our safe route to school program takes care of the education piece takes care of coordinating enforcement with our traffic unit also works hand in glove with our. And arose in our, our officers that work in the schools. So, and then now that we have a community engagement manager position, there's going to be a lot of social media education. Things like that that can be happening now, when it comes to infrastructure, that's when we go over to our partners and in public works and we talk about. Sidewalk painting and curbs and lighting and all that type of stuff. But I do think that. the best place for it to be managed out of is DPS. And the reason I say that is because we already have a very robust outreach program. We are already in the schools and we're used to dealing and working with the community.

Okay, one last question. You mentioned that we're the sixth largest public safety force in the county, but we're the second largest city. So how do you make up for that?

So I'm sorry if I misspoke.

Oh, maybe I misheard too.

Yeah, we're the sixth largest city in the region. Okay. In the region now that we've recounted our population. And then we're the second largest city within Santa Clara County.

And then how does that compare the size of our public safety force? Is that equated with that? Like, do we have more public safety officers than the third largest or the second largest in our county here?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think what you're getting at is how are we right-sized, which is what you've been hearing a lot today. I think that with the proposal that's in front of you today, I think that will bring us much, much closer. I think I like to add resources to any department that I'm overseeing, take a step back, and make sure that it's making a positive impact. And then I'm not afraid to bring back a request to council if I think we need it.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Council member sharing the Boston.

Thank you. I'll make it really quick. You earlier said that you were fully staffed and then now you're asking for more staffing. How does that correlate?

Yes, so. We are fully staffed at 204, but the, the catch to that is we are never. Fully staffed. What I mean by that is we will never have 204 officers available at any given time because they will be on vacation, on training, injured on workers' comp, assigned to other duties. So what happens is we end up operating in the 180s, high 180s, right? And this is a lot of times what drives overtime. The problem is what we're also seeing is my department is trending on the young side about. 45% or so my department is within 10 years of service. So we think about what you're doing when you're a young officer, you're getting married, you're starting families, you're not necessarily wanting to be at work all the time and you're not necessarily thrilled to get ordered to come into work on your days off. So, in order for me to provide. The city manager and city council with the responsive department that can handle these trends that pop up in our profession. I need to have a dedicated group of officers that I can move around at any given time and they can change clothes and change mission, depending on what is happening in the community. So, I have to have that resource and right now I don't right now my option is to either pull officers off of their assigned duties. For instance, a great example is I pull our neighborhood resources. Officers out of the schools, and I assign them to. Fill in a blank duty, because that's that's a higher priority. There's more safety issues there and I have to protect the community. But with this CCRT team, I would be able to reassign them. So this team is gonna be dedicated to work on Saturday because we know we're gonna continue to have events on Saturday. And they also aren't gonna have set nine to five hours. It's gonna be depending on the mission.

More as a buffer?

Yes.

Okay. And then the next question is, do you envision using technology in the blanks, whatever that is, to help you out instead of staffing.

You're looking into the future, sir, we are going to be bringing forth to councils, several technology initiatives just this year. We just finished signing up. Our actual contract, and we are now in the process of rolling that out and so virtual reality training is coming to the department in the summer. We are using AI and report writing and it has been been instrumental in helping us roll that out. we are rolling out uh an updated taser version that's far more effective giving us less lethal tools so we don't have to resort to our handguns to solve real violent problems so yes the short answer is yes technology is always uh changing and evolving in the profession and i am confident to say now that with this new axon contract we will be on the cutting edge of okay the new technology thank you very much thank you council member chang

Thank you on the topic of safe routes to schools for the crossing guards, how are we coordinating when new schools are being added to our city.

Our safe routes to school coordinator would reach out to that and we will definitely be reaching out to.

Okay, thank you and then how do we manage, though, with the private schools, because the traffic is still within our city, though they might not be in this in the education jurisdiction.

So how do we decide where the crossing guards go.

Yeah, or how are we managing the traffic enforcement? So, you know, with basis and Peterson and Laura, what they're all going to be kind of in the same intersection.

Yeah, so that's it that particular area what we've ended up doing is we work with public works safe route and in our traffic unit and we kind of study. And that's an involving. program that's still going on that we're still looking at that because we know we get several complaints through that area all the time so it's a hot spot we're going to keep an eye on it and i know we're we're in constant contact with the schools

Okay, thank you. So then the community crime reduction that might have some flexibility for.

Oh, absolutely. Sorry. I'm sorry late in the day. Yes, absolutely. So that would be a perfect example, right? Like, if, if that, if we figure out that, that kind of. Those 3 schools are making making it really difficult until we find a permanent solution. They may be assigned there at in the morning and afternoon just to facilitate traffic backup or motorcycle officers. That could be a perfect example of their use.

Thank you.

Council member.

Um, is this the time to talk about the safe versus school project or should I save that if we're going to talk about the project itself?

We'll wait.

Okay.

Unless you have a specific question about the presentation.

No, no about the presentation. I, um, I do want to ask about the, about the, um, to say that I'm glad that we have room in the budget for the flex for this flexible team. I think it was talked about at least at some point in the past about, um. I believe the verbiage was a burglary suppression unit, and I think that was in response to some crimes that were happening at the time. But it seems like this might function in a similar way to respond to needs as they occur. For example, fireworks in a few months for the 250th. I'm wondering just, and this is a little bit granular, if you'll be hiring to fill those, is the team going to be up and running as soon as we approve the budget, and then you're going to move people around into that team, or are you going to hire newly for that team?

Well, luckily, it just it works out where we are projecting that in September and October that we may be slightly over on our full time positions, you know, because because our training program takes so long for us to complete. It's roughly a two year program from the time I hire an officer to the officers out on their own kind of working to be. We, it requires us to forecast and and look into the future as to where the department will be and and make the hires now for 2 years from now. Right? So, sometimes, depending on people's. Decision to retire or not retire or or injuries or people leaving the department for different reasons. That number fluctuates and it just so happens to be that in September and in that timeframe will be slightly over. So I anticipate that I will have the bandwidth to start the team right away. The goal would be to have the team up and running before we do our normal burglary suppression detail. Because again, Part of this team's mission is to save me overtime in my overtime budget. So city managers don't get mad at me anymore. And our burglary suppression detail is very effective. We see an enormous amount of work that happens out of there, but it's also very expensive. So this team would take care of that duty.

And then just curious, do the crossing guards come out of the DPS budget? It says it's contracted, but is that hired through DPS or how does that work?

Mayor Mrakas, The it's a CSO was measure be funds right it's a card no crossing guards are funded by the general fund out of the dps in the dps budget, it is a contracted service, so the actual crossing guards themselves are hired by the contractor. Mayor Mrakas, and trained and managed by the by the contractor they're called all city management services, thank you.

Mayor Mrakas, Thank you vice mayor.

Thank you. I will be brief couple questions. Your new way to crime suppression unit. Could that be tasked to traffic enforcement if the need arise for rose?

Yes.

Excellent. Sorry. Second question. This is sort of historical. you know, the narrative around SRTS is that we had this program, it was pretty good, and then for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, it sort of started to tail off, taper off around 2016 and has not really White come back up to snuff compared to some of our regional neighbors, which was the motivation. I think with respect to my colleague Council Member Lay for this policy proposal, you know, do you have any insight into sort of? Whether that's accurate, certainly there seems to have been the sense that this is kind of gone dormant a little bit that the meetings have stopped. You know you have a sense of sort of why that happened and you know how we can make sure that this stays a vital program going forward.

No, as I covered in the slides I think we are very comparable to our neighbors what I think might have happened here is that we. struggle to communicate all the good work that's being done in this program out to the Community and I think that's that's something that we now have a position a full time position to help us do that. So I I personally think that the work is being done there it's. We're comparable to our neighbors, but I do think that the department can do a bit of a better job. There's room for improvement in informing the community of what we are doing.

If I swear, if I can add to this is a 2 way street, the schools need to be engaged and be motivated to. Participate in safe routes to schools. So I think. for the city manager's office one of our jobs is to engage the superintendents of each school district and encourage them to encourage their parent teacher associations and their parent groups to um participate in in these in in things like monthly meetings and and organization you know organizational events thank you no further questions

Thank you. I had several questions. First, great to see that you have a public safety engagement manager promoting safe routes to schools and everything that public safety is doing. For the new Axon body cameras, I would love to see a yearly report on how many non-English Interactions we have, because that translation feature that's part of those cameras. So ultimately that 1 thing I is missing here is overtime hours and, you know, you're looking at the new detail to help with that. We added 3 new officers 2 years ago. We need from a council standpoint. we need to see how many overtime hours DPS is utilizing every year. And I understand it depends on vacation and sick leave and things of that nature, but we need to be able to see trends. And is it not just a continual budget? The city manager wants you to keep those in line. And from a city standpoint, normally when we look at other departments, A non-filled FTE is zero and we do either cut back programs or whatever slightly different for DPS where we have the overtime. So I would love to see that as part of an update at a later date, as well as just kind of where we are trending on number of staff and number of overtime hours. You talked about kind of community outreach. And I'll just throw this out there, from an at-risk youth standpoint, we no longer have the Sunnyvale Police Activity League. Whether or not that needs to be funded or whatever, to me, that leads to a certain amount of crime, and that's not violent crime, but general crime, graffiti, everything else that we're seeing in our community. The lack of that, and I don't know how you instill that on the younger officers that need, but that is something that's currently missing in our city that I don't see covered from a direction standpoint. And then lastly, public works. And so pedestrian, sorry, the crossing guard program, now's the time for you and the SRTS manager to reach out to those schools. Um, you know, figuring out what the right locations are 1 of the things that residents have done is put their own pedestrian flag program at least 1 crossing in the in the district in in our in the school districts here. And as I talked to Ramona. Conceivably, that's something that, you know, we would enable parents or whatever to deal with the non 48 intersections that that they come and say, we would like to have a crossing guard here that you can't meet those issues and enabling the students as well as the parents to make a little bit safer. And I'll leave my comments as short as possible, but. Would like to get those updates at a later date. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. No more questions. Thank you, Chief. We'll move on to our final department, environmental services.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council. I'm Mansoor Nasr, Interim Director of Environmental Services Department. I will be presenting ESD's operating budget, and I will make it very fast. So ESD's mission is to protect the environment while providing essential water, sewer, solid waste, and sustainability services. And our vision is for Sunnyvale to be a regional leader in environmental sustainability. We do our work with four divisions, water and sewer, the water pollution control plant, solid waste, and regulatory compliance and sustainability. Next, please. The proposed operating budget for 2627 is $197 million. Most of the increase is due to the solid waste contract and the cost of water, and that represents about $9 million. Our FTEs will not be changing, and I'll explain it in the next slide. Next, please. uh so the key service adjustments in this budget include sewer pipe cleaning equipment a new ev charging program we're also requesting the addition of a control system manager and a management analyst position as well as reclassifying two existing positions to the water distribution supervisor and the environmental chemist next please Some of our accomplishments on the water side, we were able to go without value water supply for six months from November 1st to the end of April without any interruptions. And we also concluded the tier two contract with sfpuc which allows sunnyvale to reduce its minimum requirements or purchase requirements by 20 and it doesn't impact our long-term individual supply guarantee on the sewer side We responded to more than 1700 calls, cleaned over 100 miles of sewer pipe and completed more than 25 miles of CCTV inspections for stormwater. We responded to more than 190 flood calls and provided more than 2500 sandbags. Our lab processed more than 35,000

What's that?

Yeah. For sustainability and regulatory programs. Our lab processed more than 35,000 tests and maintained 100% compliance record. We also achieved 100% trash reduction goal and also did 1,000 yearly inspections of cleaning of trash capture devices. We secured $4.6 million in grant funding and we also launched our existing building electrification campaign. Our environmental compliance team completed more than 1,695 inspections of local businesses and restaurants. For solid waste and the plant, our bag opener and shredder increased facility diversion by 15 to 20%, up to about 5,750 tons. And our new food scraps processing system increased organics recovery by 40%, up to 11,630 tons. We also launched a mini grant program providing 33 restaurants with free reusable foodware. and rolled out a no-cost bulky item pickup program for 1,200 multifamily dwellings in January 2026. The water pollution control plant We were awarded first place in the California Water Environment Association Engineering and Achievement Award for our headworks on primary treatment projects. We also completed repairs to oxidation pond levees, and we implemented a pH treatment procedure by using sodium hydroxide. Looking ahead for water and sewer, Valley Water is again planning to shut down its supply November 1, 2026 through end of April 2027. So we will be working diligently to make sure our customers are not impacted. Also, if the council approves the trenchless machine, we will be able to do 60 repairs every year without having to cut out the pavement. In addition, we plan to issue an RFP in partnership with the IT department for the advanced metering infrastructure, and we will also be implementing the computerized maintenance management system. In sustainability, and regulatory programs, we are working towards adding five acres of new green stormwater infrastructure, and we also expect the laboratory to meet 100% of its sampling requirements. We also plan to launch our energy benchmarking and building performance standards programs and continue the live electric campaign through 2028. We will also develop and implement a strategy to expand EV charging infrastructure. On the solid waste side, We will continue working to meet SB 1383 requirements by increasing organics diversion from 50% to 75%. We will also complete the smart station next gen retrofit project. For the water pollution control plant, we plan to restart the recycled water production this summer by June. And we we also want to maintain uninterrupted plant operation during the construction of the clean water program. So in closing, this budget reflects our commitment to providing reliable utility services and protecting the environment. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Are there questions from council? Council member Cisneros.

Yes, super quickly on the multifamily bulky item pickup. Does the rollout in January represent, was that a full rollout? I don't think.

That was a full rollout.

That was a full rollout.

Okay. So, so far up to through April, we've made 363 appointments and picked up 595 items.

That's wonderful, thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

Thank you very much. I just wanted to thank the Department for all the hard work and you personally for all the hard work on the Tier 2 plan with SFPUC. Because we do not get all of our water from SFPUC, they require us to have a minimum purchasing level That has bitten us in the past when due to water conservation efforts after a drought, demand has not rebounded to the minimum purchase level and we've been left on the hook for that. So getting a 20% reduction is going to be very helpful for the city going forward and will help our rate payers. I just wanted to thank you for all the hard work that you and your team have put in on this.

Thank you. Council Member Sreenivasan.

very quickly I am really excited I am excited about the recycling plant we briefly talked about that during lunch uh I think that will be a very good way to reduce our wholesale purchase so thank you thank you council member lay oh no other questions thank you and I'll pass it back to Matt