City Council - Regular Meeting

Right.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, residents of Tulare, staff, and fellow council members. Welcome to the Tulare City Council meeting for Tuesday, June 6, 2026. As we start our meeting, we will start off with our Pledge of Allegiance and Invocation. John Meyer, pastor of Calvary Chapel, Tulare, will lead us in an invocation. And councilmen, please remain standing for the invocation as Councilmember Jose Sagala will lead our Pledge of Allegiance.

Good evening, let's pray.

Lord, on this election day and finals week, and in graduation for many of our students,

We're thankful for your blessing and abundant provision. We trust because of your great faithfulness it will continue. Remember how the psalmist said that promotion comes neither from the east nor from the west nor from the south. But you're the judge. You put down one and lift up another. We trust that you will have your way in these things and we pray for it. And Lord, we remember also how your word says there is no authority except from you, and the authorities that exist are appointed by you, that they are your servants to do good. So we ask you for your blessing on our mayor, and we're thankful for our mayor, this council, our city leaders. and the authorities that you've given to us. We pray that they know and do the good that you intend. Lord, again, bless this council meeting, guide these proceedings, grant wisdom, and the courage to carry out the wisdom that you give. Thank you that you give the ability to do what you've called each of us to accomplish. To that end, we ask not just for the governing authorities present here, but for all of us in Tulare, that we would use the abilities that you've given to fulfill our calling individually and as a city for the sake of our beloved residents and to the praise of your great and holy name. Father, we ask all this with thanksgiving and trust by the leading of your spirit and in the name of your son, the Lord Jesus, who has come into this world and is coming again. Until then, because of the cross, we'll save and help all who call upon his name. We do that now. Having the assurance of your love and great faithfulness along with access to your very throne of grace, we might find mercy and grace to help in our time of need, which is now and always. So we thank you in advance for the answers that are sure to come as a result of our prayers together in Jesus' name. Amen.

The next item on our agenda is proclamations and recognitions. And the first one will be 3.1 resolution of remembrance for Flora Johnson. And if I may, I want to invite up front with me board members for Grandma's house and any friends or relatives that are here on behalf of this remembrance for Flora Johnson. Oh, you can come up here. So Flora Ann Johnson was a pillar in our community, which doesn't describe the dynamic engagement, involvement, and just the persona to humanity that Flora Johnson provided to City of Tulare and everyone that knew her. Flora Johnson was the founding... pillar behind grandma's house. And unfortunately, Miss Johnson left us to be with the Lord a few months back. But with that, the city council did a resolution of remembrance. And so in in with that it was a request and we thought appropriate is we surely want to present this resolution at that time to grandma's house in remembrance of Florida Johnson, a recognition towards that activity. And I think, of course, what her legacy was in Tulare. And of course, for that was a request by grandma's house. If the council would bring this resolution in front of the public again. So I'd like to read this resolution. And then I want to offer some relatives as well as the board for grandma's house to offer some comments. Resolution of Remembrance. for Flora Ann Johnson. Whereas Flora Ann Snowden was born April 4th, 1945 in Altus, Oklahoma, as the second child of a parent, she was raised in a community marked by hardship and segregation. Despite these challenges, her family persevered and in 1958 moved to California in pursuit of a better life. And whereas in 1960, the family settled in Tulare, where Flora attended Tulare Union High School, graduating with the class of 1963. During her high school years, she participated in track and was introduced to Mount Zion Temple Church, which would become a cornerstone of her spiritual life. And whereas on June 19, 1982, Flora married the love of her life, Deacon Lonnie Johnson. Together, they made their home in Oakland, California, were blessed with three children. Flora's career and education flourished as she served in various roles, including trainer, vice principal, and principal, earning numerous accolades along the way, including Teacher of the Year. And whereas in 2008, Flora Johnson founded Grandma's House, a vision of hope, an afterschool tutoring and math academy dedicated to supporting youth. In 2014, the program expanded with the purchase and renovation of a facility that became a vibrant learning center. Guided by the belief that it takes a village to raise a child, Flora's vision provided critical educational support for at-risk youth in the community. And whereas her unwavering, Dedication to youth, education, and community service, Flora Johnson received numerous honors, including the Charles Parker Award from College of the Sequoias, Promise Keeper Recognition from PAW District 7, Region 3, Tulare Chamber of Commerce Women of the Year, and Nonprofit of the Year, and Tulare City Councilwoman of the Year, among many other honors and recognitions. And whereas Flora Ann Johnson departed this life on October 29, 2025, she leaves behind a legacy of loving kindness, compassionate service, and steadfast faith. Flora's lifelong commitment to children, education, and community upliftment will continue to inspire generations to come. And it was therefore resolved that the city council of the city of Tulare hereby honors and remembers Flora Ann Johnson for her extraordinary contributions to the city of Tulare and its residents and extends its deepest gratitude for her life of service, leadership, and love. This was dedicated November 18th 2025 by the mayor and vice mayor and city council members and with that. I just want to pass the microphone if perhaps if relatives or from grandma's house board, if you would like to say a few comments of the resolution of remembrance and remembrance of floor jobs.

I'd like to say good evening to everyone. My name is Frances Torrance and I am one of Flora Johnson's sisters. She's going to be missed very much. Flora, when our mother passed at the age of 45, Flora became the matriarch of our family. We look to her for guidance and leadership in a lot of things that we've done. She's going to be missed very much by everyone in the community. And her saying was, it takes a village to raise children. And it does take a village. I want to say thank you to Mayor Isherwood, the city council, all the community that helped bring Grandma's House to fruition. If it had not been for Tulare, our city, our community workers, everyone lended a hand to help grandma's house come to fruition. So we want to say thank you. Thank you. And we appreciate everybody for the prayers for the manual labor. Anything that you did, if you just thought about grandma's house, we want to say thank you.

I'm going I'm and I'm also one of Flora Johnson sisters said I wasn't gonna cry. But when the mayor talked about when we first came to Tulare, and my mother was raising nine children by herself, I remember when she said to me, and I was about eight years old, she said, in Tulare is where we will make our home. We will live and we will die in Tulare. And for that reason, I've been here. I found this community to be a wonderful support When Flora got the vision for Grandma's house, the city got behind her. The city got behind her. The community got behind her. The people got behind her. And Grandma's house was able to succeed. because of you and because of everything that the city council, the city of Tulare gave to grandma's house. They gave to grandma's house. They're still giving to grandma's house. And we're trusting God that we will be able to carry on grandma's house with the help of the Lord and with the help of the city of Tulare behind us. Thank you so much.

Al, I know you and I volunteered. You've, by all means, we're kind of a chief volunteer down at Grandma's house. We worked together on the CDBG grant, worked together paving stones, Buddy Jones and pouring the asphalt driveway. So a lot of memories. and appreciate the chance that we could get together and do this remembrance. Every time we get together, we tend to cry. We're doing very good tonight, by the way. We're doing very good. But with that is glad that we could take a reverent moment of the legacy for Grandma's House, Legacy of Hope as its title, but that community bond that was talked about when, and amongst the volunteers and community for the children. Thank you for being here. And we present this plaque to you to take back to grandma's house. Thank you. The next item on our agenda is a proclamation for National Salvation Army Week. Is Major Vasquez here?

Yes.

Major Vasquez, if you would please join me up front. And if you have guests, yes, they are welcome to come up front as well. Good evening. Welcome. We are blessed to have our local Salvation Army representatives with us tonight for this proclamation of National Salvation Army Week. Whereas the Salvation Army has faithfully served communities across the United States and around the world by providing food, shelter, disaster relief, rehabilitation service, youth programs, and spiritual support to individuals and families in need. And whereas National Salvation Army Week was first declared by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 to recognize the organization's compassionate service and dedication to helping others. And whereas it is fitting to recognize the positive impact and meaningful contributions made by the Salvation Army within our community and beyond. And whereas the city of Tulare recognizes and appreciates the dedicated service provided by the Salvation Army to residents throughout the city, throughout the community, offering assistance, compassion, and support to individuals and families in times of need. Now, therefore, we, the city of Tulare, that we, the City Council of the City of Tulare, do hereby proclaim and recognition the week of May 11th through 17th, 2026, as National Salvation Army Week. And if you would please join with me in applauding our local Salvation Army. And maybe that's it. You have some, if you'd like to introduce yourself and your fine individuals with you and speak on the Salvation Army.

Thank you.

Yes, I have my wife, Major Karen. By the way, she's the boss. She tells me what to do. So, you know, and then my grandson visited from Texas, you know, special day for him as well. And I just would like to thank, you know, Patrick Major and the city council for this proclamation. And on behalf of the hundreds of families that we help throughout the year with basic assistance of food, toys, clothing, and especially during Christmas time, we provide a specific assistance for children. And during the summer, we provide summer camp for underprivileged children. And we also wrap all of this with a message of hope. We believe that God has placed us here to help those in need, and it is with the support of the community that we're able to do this. We thank the city of Tulare, the distinguished Majors Patrick, Aisha Wood, and the council members for the proclamation of the National Salvation Army Week right here in Tulare. And thanks to the advisory board that we have right here in our county, we're able to provide assistance and continue to look forward to help families in need. And as always, we depend on the grace of God and the support of the community. So thank you for this recommendation. Thank you. Yes.

Thank you. Thank you.

Give this to you. Oh, can we take a picture. What generally what we do well, we can do a picture right now. Because we do pictures of that. That word.

Yeah.

Right.

Thank you.

Oh, yes. Yeah. Maybe that's what's in your bathroom. This is the city of Tulare-Chelsea. Presented from council members on behalf of the city. Thank you for all you do. Thank you for being here.

I have the honor and the privilege of giving out the proclamation for LGBTQ Pride Month. Is there a representative for the organization here tonight?

Okay.

Whereas the city of Tulare supports the rights of every citizen to experience equality and freedom from discrimination. And whereas all people, regardless of age, gender identity, race, color, religion, marital status, national origin, sexual orientation, or physical challenges have the right to be treated on the basis of their intrinsic value as human beings. And whereas the city of Tulare values, the diversity, and its commitment to ensuring Tulare is a welcoming, inclusive, and safe community for all, including our LGBTQ families, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. And whereas, while society at large increasingly supports LGBTQ equality, it is essential to acknowledge that the need for education and awareness remains vital to end discrimination and prejudice. And whereas the source of LGBT+, Center community driven mission developed through collaboration with the LGBTQ youth leaders and stakeholders focuses on creating safe, supportive and inclusive spaces where LGBTQ people can learn, grow, belong and thrive, serving as a vital resource in the Central Valley. Guided by its vision of a community where all LGBTQ people are valued and celebrated, and whereas the City of Tulare appreciates the value and dignity of each person, recognizes the importance of equality and freedom, and acknowledges positive contributions made by the members of the LGBTQ community to actively promote principles of equality, acceptance, and love. Now, therefore, we, the City Council of the City of Tulare, do hereby proclaim the month of June, 2026, as LGBTQ Pride Month, in the City of Tulare and urges all residents to respect and honor our diverse community and celebrate and build a culture of inclusiveness and acceptance. Signed by the Mayor and the entire City Council.

I believe you might tell everybody what you've been handing out and where it's come from and kind of promote a little bit before I read the proclamation.

Yeah, we handed out some Rosa Brothers milk. to the city council and the staff that's up here in honor of our Salute to Dairy event that we're doing as the Chamber of Commerce, just honoring our local dairy industry. We were given specific instructions to give Mr. Medeiros his root beer flavored.

Many of the people on the council have waited and not opened theirs, but some of us couldn't wait. And I've drank most of mine, but not all of it. I've left enough for a toast at the end. It was mentioned by the major earlier that we all are here for a purpose. We're all here to serve. Those on the council are here to serve the community. And what we want to do when we leave is leave this community in a better place than it was when we got here. I grew up on a dairy. That makes it special to me. And it's funny because I had an older brother and a younger brother, and we had a dairy operation with my grandfather and my uncle. And at some point I realized, as I used to say, only so many calves can drink from the tit. And excuse me putting it that way, but in dairy terms, that's what it was. And I had to go out and find another way to make a living. And I find myself here. So God had his own path. But National Dairy Month is important to me and it's very important to this community. And in that regard, I would like to read this proclamation. Whereas June has been celebrated as National Dairy Month since 1937 as a way to promote the consumption of dairy products and to thank those involved in the dairy industry for their labors. And whereas the Dietary Guidelines for Americans report published by the United States Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services recommends consuming three servings of dairy products each day as part of a balanced diet. And this is my one. Whereas since 1969, the California Milk Advisory Board was established. whose mission to spread the word with extraordinary dairy products made with real California milk. Whereas California has taken the lead as the dairy producing state in the nation with Tulare County as the largest dairy producing county in the nation with a gross value of approximately $2.27 billion in milk production representing over a quarter of the total crop and livestock value. Whereas the Tulare County itself on its vibrant agricultural sector, of which the dairy industry represents a key part. And whereas in addition to fluid melt, dairy processors in Tulare produce a variety of products, including cheese, ice cream, butter, yogurt, and powdered milk. And whereas the dairy industry contributes in innumerable ways to the state and local communities' economic prosperity, now therefore we, the City Council of Tulare, do hereby proclaim the month of 2026 as National Dairy Month in the city of Tulare and encourage all citizens to celebrate the valuable contributions that the dairy industry has made to our community and beyond. And that's signed by the mayor, vice mayor, and all city council members. And we in the city limits of Tulare, and I don't believe any city in the nation, I could be corrected, can claim this, but we in the city of Tulare have six, I believe, producing entities processing milk. Is that a fair statement?

I believe that's correct.

Six, I believe it is? Five? Well, if you include Rosa Brothers. But I don't think anybody else is close. So that puts the city of Tulare in a select few at the very least. Congratulations to the dairy industry and everybody who has a job in relation to it. And I want to present this to you. And I also would invite everybody to toast the dairy industry. On my fellow function. If you have anything else to say, go ahead.

I don't want to make you guys miserable.

All right, moving forward on our agenda is item for public comment. Members of the public wishing to comment on any item not appearing on the agenda may address the City Council at this time. State law prevents Council from acting on any matter not on the agenda. However, your comments may be referred to staff for follow-up. This is also the time for the public to comment on items listed under the consent calendar or to request an item from the consent calendar be pulled for discussion purposes. Comments related to a public hearing and general business items will be heard at that time those items are discussed. In fairness, to all who wish to speak, public comment is limited for a total of 15 minutes with each speaker allowed three minutes, unless otherwise extended by council. Please begin your comments by stating your name and providing your city of residence. For those that wish to provide public comment while attending the meeting remotely, press 9 on your phone to raise your hand or click raise hand if you are participating in the webinar. So with public comment, I'm going to go to the yellow cards first. And the first one that I have is Mr. Ray Vallejo. Good evening, Mr. Vallejo. Welcome. You can speak at either one. We prefer, Ray, if you don't mind, we prefer you taking that one and speaking to the council, if you would, please. There you go. Thank you. Good evening.

Good evening, Council. My name is Ray Vallejo. I am formerly a resident at the Tulare Caris Temporary Encampment. I am here tonight to formally request an immediate independent investigation into severe municipal safety and sanitation code failures at Tulare Caris Temporary Encampment, located at 1370 South O Street, and critically the targeted staff retaliation and document fraud that immediately followed my whistleblowing. The paper trail of retaliation is undeniable. The Tulare Fire Marshal formally engaged with my safety reports on May 12th, acknowledging my official incident logs regarding severe site hazards. Yet less than 24 hours after this documented escalation on May 13th, facility staff slammed me with a retaliatory final notice threatening to terminate my access. I was supposed to be given 72 hours to correct my area and clean up, but the paper only gave me less than 48 hours. To protect my rights against this immediate pushback, I filed a formal government claim on May 15th. In response, the staff's misconduct escalated on May 26th. I was served a termination notice based on a completely fabricated tire burning incident. That official city document shows a blank administrative forgery and X was placed next to an internal hearing option without my authorization or signature, altering my legal appeal choices to force me onto probation. Fabricating violations, forging official documents, and threatening eviction within 24 hours of a resident contacting the fire marshal is a severe breach of public trust and creates immense legal liability for the city of Tulare. As the city reviews my active claims within the statutory window, I am asking council tonight to direct city management to launch an immediate outside investigation into the Tulare Cares facility oversight and the conduct of the staff involved. My complete digital evidence logs are on file and I expect a safe, fair resolution. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Valero. The next yellow card I have is from Erica Mejia. Good evening, Erica.

Good evening, my name is Erica Mejia, and I'm a resident here in Tulare. I have a business for over 30 years with my family, but the reason I'm here is because for 17 years I've had my business downtown, and recently people have been calling because I park on the 20-minute zone, because there's only two parking of 20-minute zone, and I have my delivery vans sometimes, and for some reason somebody's been calling, or I don't know. but they can't give me any more information. I've been given a citation. for parking there more than 20 minutes. And I'm here because I would like to request and see either I could get a parking space for my delivery vans because sometimes I go on deliveries when I come back, there's no parking and I don't have a back door that I could park in the back. So I'm here requesting if by any chance I could get my own parking for my business or at least a loading or unloading because it's been very difficult. going on deliveries, delivering funerals, and now getting citations. I just don't think it's fair. Okay, thank you.

Just want to make sure as you're aware with the rules and also Mr. Vallejo is we can't make decisions or actions or quorum on issues during public comment. Your information, what you presented is heard and we do have your information on the yellow card and we will have staff follow back up.

Okay, thank you.

Is there anyone in chambers who wishes to make public comment tonight? Okay, Madam Clerk, do we have anyone on the phone? All right. Good evening.

Good evening. My name is Alberto Aguilar, and I've been a resident of Tulare since 1985. I want to thank you for the proclamation that was given to Mrs. Johnson. I met her in 2008 and have been helping there ever since. I thoroughly enjoy doing what she does for the community. It's a blessing, and it will continue to be so as long as we continue to go ahead and provide the help that she needs or that the organization needs. But I've got a couple of things I want to go ahead and request today. The first thing is that it was a decision that was made by the city council to go ahead and form a committee to do the name change or look into the name change of the Cesar Chavez Park. And I've heard nothing coming forth from that committee or whether or not there's going to be any meetings or what's even going on. It was also brought up during your meeting whether or not the city even owned that park or was it the school that owned it. But what I would like to do is find out, if possible, when the meetings are going to be held, because I would like to be kept informed. I want to go ahead and be able to participate. The second thing is that there was a gentleman here at the last meeting that I attended that was complaining about how the alleys look with all the debris and the weeds. There's some alleys that are actually a fire hazard. And I've contacted your city. safety officer about the alley right behind Grandma's house. And what I'd like to do, because I know you're all pretty busy, what I'd like to do, get me some kind of a trash can out there big enough and I'll clean it up for you. I'll do it for free. We need to get this thing. There's a safety hazard. We can't have it around where children are. All it takes is a match and that thing's going to light up. The other thing is that up in the Delago Park, I was asked to go look at a fence, and there are trees that are parked there, that are planted there, next to fences that are six feet tall, and the trees are hanging over the fences into people's properties, and the leaves and droppings from those seeds are falling into people's pools. If the trees belong to the city, they should have the responsibility to go ahead and trim those trees. And again, if you don't have the personnel or time Give me the authority I've driven for you. Okay? We need to go ahead and make sure that we respect other people's properties and we try to go ahead and keep the city clean and beautiful. I hope I'm not boring somebody to sleep over here. Okay? That's all I have. Thank you very much. Y'all have a wonderful day. And you got my email address and my phone number.

Thank you.

Thank you, Al. Okay.

You may want to check our website. The first meeting for the committee is on Thursday. It's Thursday, 530 here at the council chambers. It's two council members, two commissioners, and two members of the Tulare City School Board. I think it's Mr. Epps. I can't remember her name. Is it Janice? Bless it, James. Yeah, James. And then we have two of our commissioners. I can't remember Eric's last name. I can't pronounce his last name, Eric. But then Ferenkoff and Mendoza. So, yeah. And the agenda is on the website.

Mr. Aguilar, for clarification, I don't know who's responsible for Live Oak, but I do know that property is owned by the school district, if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct, Brian?

Yeah, Live Oak, but I believe he brought up Delago.

Yeah, Delago.

Oh, Delago. You said Live Oak. Well, Delago's part of a maintenance agreement, I believe. Isn't that correct?

That's correct. Yes, we have a contract.

And we have confirmed that what has been known as Chavez Park is owned by the city school district, not by the city of Tulare. That's OK. OK. All right. And that'll be clarified, I believe, Mr. Segal and the vice.

Well, I think it could be a general consensus. We'll surely make sure with staff that the proper information and materials will be at that meeting and conveyed at the public meeting to its members and the public.

Okay. I'll be here Thursday. Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay. Any other public comment? All right. At this time, I'm going to move forward to item five, presentations. Update on the Highway 99 Widening Page Interchange project by Caltrans.

Yeah. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Here tonight to give you an update on the 99 page interchange and associated widening is Siobhan Conley. She is the project manager for Caltrans on this project. Good evening, Siobhan. Welcome.

Good evening.

Thank you so much, Mayor and Council members. Definitely appreciate the opportunity to present here today. Will the presentation be loaded? Oh, I don't, you can go ahead. Oh, is this what you're looking for?

Oh, there we go.

As I said, good evening, everyone. My name is Siobhan Conley. I'm the Caltrans project manager for the Tulare State Route 99 corridor and Page Multimodal Interchange Improvements Project. It's a mouthful, but essentially a Highway 99 project and a new interchange at Page Avenue in the city, the city of Tulare here. I can't even progress this. So the team here today that we've been working with, we've been so grateful to work with the city of Tulare staff, Michael Miller, the city engineer, Jan Bowen, and Michael Winton, both senior engineers. And may I say, I've worked on a lot of projects at Caltrans working with local agencies. And by far, I believe your staff has done a tremendous job working with us and being very understanding. So definitely want to give them a shout out and a great big appreciation for all of their help. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They deserve it. They literally deserve it. Absolutely. I work in project management at Caltrans. My supervisor, Chris Gardner, who is the office chief, and then myself, I'm the project manager, and Irene Lee is my colleague here, who is the design manager. And then the individual, once the project goes to construction, is Javier Huerta. So if you guys need any of our contact information, we're more than happy to give you guys that contact information. And The financial supporter of this project, although Caltrans is administering the project, the project is sponsored by TCAG, Tulare County Association of Governments, where Ted Smalley is the executive director.

Where is Mr. Smalley? He couldn't be there with us today?

He is not here. I made him aware. You know, he's actually out of the country. He told me last week. He's out of the country. Okay. Yes, on vacation. Yeah. I think he's in, like, El Salvador or something like that. Like, he's... Yeah, so today's agenda, we will be going over the project development process. What does a project entail in the Caltrans approach? And then go into some specific right-of-way impacts as they impact how Caltrans is going to be building the project and how it impacts businesses and residents here in the city of Tulare. Of course, there will be detours. This is a large, very large project. So we want to go over those and identify those items that have been concurred with the city as we've worked towards the project. Of course, the schedule and the funding summary and some outreach opportunities that we have taken and will continue to take. And then, of course, any questions that the city council may have. So as a part of the project development process, everyone says things take a really long time at Caltrans. They do. And it's for a reason. We're making sure that we're doing the best with public funds. And so there's a planning process, a project scoping, programming, project development, which is where we are now. We are currently in the last two items there when the plan specifications and estimates phase, as well as the right away phase. And as you can see highlighted in yellow is we're soon approaching the construction phase. This project in June of 2027 will be advertised to a contractor and awarded to a contractor. And then we will move forward to actually constructing the project. So the project is physically located on State Route 99 between just south of Avenue 200 and Prosperity Avenue with a widening of 99. We'll go from two lanes in each direction as it is existing to three lanes in each direction while also increasing the capacity on Page Avenue with four roundabouts and a new structure. So currently Page Avenue goes over Highway 99 and the finished product Highway 99 will go over Page. So I'll get to some of those specific details. So one idea is you guys all live here in Tulare, and you understand how congested that interchange is, right? We've got the Tulare Irrigation District, their main backbone canal that feeds water to the west side, and they also convey stormwater. So it's like threading a needle with getting that canal relocated. We're also going to be relocating Southern California Edison, both transmission. There's a lot of large power lines that cross Highway 99. We're going to be redoing those. The same thing as distribution, and they have some telecommunications. There are some other smaller lines. utility companies, we are replacing and relocating some city of Tulare water and sewer lines, fire hydrants, and then a plethora of other telecommunication lines as part of this project, right away certification, we need to have all of our agreements with right away utility with utility companies and property owners that we're acquiring for this project by October 9 of 2026. So we are fast approaching the completion and the wrap up of the right away phase on this project. So how does this project specifically impact the acquisitions of and impact businesses here in Tulare? So Roche Oil is currently the mobile station, right? They have a large parcel. They are currently, we're working with them to understand the right-of-way needs at their gas station and their truck stop, all of their facilities. So we're working with them to acquire We're also working with Loves and Flying J on some backflow preventer relocations and sidewalk improvements as part of the roundabout construction. And then Foster Drive, we will, on East Foster Drive, which is east of State Route 99, because of the new roundabouts, there are some design features that we've been working with your staff on to ensure that we have future city needs incorporated into how we're building those roundabouts. And as a part of that, we have to relocate some of the mini SCE buildings electric electric towers for transmission. And so that will be impacting some of those homeowners, we're working with them to acquire some aerial easements up in the because we're moving wires away from their homes, but we still have to buy the rights to put the wires up on their property, essentially. So we're working through that. So now I'm going to head into detours. And the pictures are kind of small, but we can work through them. And if you need me to go back, I can definitely do that. So as we said, there will be page, will no longer be an over-crossing, it will be an under-crossing, which means we have to close that off ramp. We're still working with our construction folks to understand how long it's gonna take to build that bridge and how long that closure will be, but we will definitely keep the city aware of how long that will be once we have that information. So as we're building, the roundabouts at the Blackstone intersection, Blackstone and Page and the State Route 99 on and off ramps, we will be closing Page Avenue and Blackstone. And so we are expecting traffic that would be needing to go through their local traffic to be able to access State Route 99 from the International Agri Center Way through K Street and La Spina. as identified here. And then once we're able to build that roundabout at Blackstone, we will then be able to have traffic flow through the roundabout and be able to use Blackstone, K and La Espina as we're finishing up the bridge and the rest of the roundabouts there at the off ramps. So they will again use international agri-center way. And so when I refer to international, you're saying that's not an exit currently. That's right. We're pretty much probably within the next few months that interchange will be open. So before we close anything for this project, and you'll see the schedule, this project is several years out still, but international will be accessible. So there will still be access available.

for residents um once we take one interchange offline there will be a new interchange essentially available yes sir i assume you may get to that but if i may mayor now seems to be a good time while construction while the conversion is being made from from uh page going over 99 to 999 going under page how will the 99 traffic

We will build...

While that's being conducted.

That's a great question. Thank you. I did miss that. We will build a temporary 99, two lanes in each direction. So that's why we're buying and relocating the TID canal because right along there... We have two temporary, we have a temporary detour essentially. So it's considered a shoe fly. So you'll kind of go around and stay on 99. So no traffic will be detoured off of 99 at any point. Traffic will stay. So we will just build temporary lanes for State Route 99. Thank you. No problem. All right.

Okay. Quick question.

So in terms of the access, I mean, the actual taking of or buying of the property, that's all state, none of the city won't be involved in that?

City has no financial responsibility.

I mean, no eminent domain that we would have to encounter?

That is correct.

So it would be all state eminent domain?

That's along State Route 99. That is correct.

Okay. Yeah, because we've had some problems with projects that we've had to initiate eminent domain because folks aren't playing along with what needs to happen. So I'm just curious to see if you guys would be the responsible party for that.

So we are acquiring all the right-of-way along State Route 99. to ensure that we are able to build anything for 99. We are working with the city and making sure that we can get like with loves and all those folks, we're meeting with them, making sure that everybody's aware of it, but by no means for anything on the base of the project, we have no financial responsibility or expectation from the city. And I'll get to that in terms of the cost and things like that and who's contributing. But as a part of the core project, no, there is no financial. But the city, let me be clear, the city has been a great partner at finding opportunities that they can take stress off of Caltrans and try to find opportunities so that they can say, you know what, let us take care of this. And so your engineers have been phenomenal and we've been working with, like I said, Michael Miller, city engineer, who's been helping us find different opportunities. But yes, the financial burden for this project is CalTrans.

I appreciate it. I wasn't focusing on the financing part, just more on the legalese. Like if, for example, you have a neighbor that you talked about getting their air rights, right? And they did not want to do that. There is an eminent domain process, right? Correct.

And we're going through that.

That would be, that would be the state, not the city.

Caltrans is working through that. Yes. For all of the items that I've talked about. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Our right away department is handling all of the eminent domain. Okay. So that's the closure at page moving now to the. closure at Bardsley Avenue. We will be rehabbing the pavement on the southbound on-ramp at Bardsley. So while that ramp is closed, we will be detouring traffic up to Page and at that time Page will be open. So as you'll see as I move through, as we close one element, we will keep another open. So there will not be, at this time we have no plans to have multiple interchanges closed at the same time. We want to maintain access for local traffic.

There's been a lot of discussion from Caltrans to put stoplights at that intersection just as was conducted at 137 and 99. Will that take place at this same time?

It will not. That is a separate project. It is a project that TCAG and Caltrans are working towards trying to develop, but that is not a part of this project. And similarly, when we rehab the northbound on-ramp at 137, traffic will be detoured around and using the Prosperity on-ramp for northbound traffic. Same at Prosperity, we will be rehabbing the pavement on the southbound on-ramp and then just diverting traffic down to 137. So I talked about all of that and now we get to talk about when is this going to happen, right? And so we have good news. We do have the plans, which my friend Irene, her team has been working tirelessly. They have submitted the 100% design plans, several hundred design sheets to our internal submittal to begin review. And that was completed earlier last month. As I indicated earlier, right away certification, we need to... be able to acquire all the land that it's going to take to build the project by October 9. And then we're going to be ready to move the plans to construction. Our date for that is here in October, we have to go to the CTC California Transportation Commission to allocate all of our funds, and I'll get to how much money that is later. But we're planning to do that in January, advertise, open the bids, award the project, and approve a contractor to begin work. All of that process will happen between January and June is our anticipation now. And then we're hoping that we will be able to complete the work on the project in January of 2031. So as you see, there is an asterisk there. We do plan to approve a contract. However, because of the large amount of utilities with TID, SE, and all those folks, cities, water, and sewer, there needs to be a delayed start. We won't allow the contractor to start work right away. We have to finish getting all those utilities out of the way. So there will be a delay so that construction will have a clean slate to start building the project on.

So, yes. I think the concern and One of the issues that will be brought up is as you divert traffic onto Blackstone during the construction, some of those areas have stop signs. And how is that traffic gonna come off the freeway and be able to smoothly transition Are you going to put in four-way stops? I mean, what's normal in that type of situation?

So as we're building the roundabouts, right? So let me go back here and we'll go back to like Las Pinas. So when we're building that roundabout that's shown there at Blackstone and Page, that's already constructed. But the phase just before that is we're going to be closing it there. So International Agri-Center, not only will it be open, but it will now connect to Blackstone. So all the way through. So if trucks get off of State Route 99, they can still go to Flying Jane Loves on Blackstone. But international... And Roche Oil. And Roche Oil. You'd have to get off on Barsley to go to Roche Oil. Okay. Yes, that's correct. But everyone will still have access to those businesses at that intersection. You just won't be able to do them all from the same interchange, if that makes sense. Got it. Thank you. So how do we, Caltrans plan to communicate this project as it's moving forward? So we're here at the city council today. And if you invite me to come back at any point, I would love to do so and keep you guys updated on what's going on in the project. We've had an open house already on May 5th. We had a public open house. It was a success. We had lots of residents come out, lots of great questions. We do plan on doing the same thing here in the fall as the project transitions to getting ready to go to construction, the plans getting ready to go to construction, right? And then as we have... Once construction activities start, the city's PIO and the state's PIO work really well together, and we will be doing commuter alerts and social media blasts. That has been successful. The traditional mailers just doesn't work as well anymore with how the community actually responds and the timeliness. So for this last public meeting, we did go door to door and do some handouts because we wanted to get some public interest. But by and large, we had a lot of people say they saw it on Facebook, they saw it on Instagram. So social media has really been successful for Caltrans to get the news out about how our projects are moving forward and the changes that are happening in construction. So here's the funding summary. very, very complicated, but want you to see that we have various streams of funds, right? And all of the funds are in millions. So a couple million from the national highway system, state bond, measure R, your local measure R through TCAG is... is proposed to give about $18 million of your tax dollars that are going right back into this project. So definitely thank you all for that. We've got some state fund, shared funds. And then we have a $98 million grant for construction from the federal government. So As of right now, in terms of all the funds for the total project from start to finish about $230 million. So, and as you can see, the city of Tulare is not a funding line. So definitely want to let you guys know that this, your tax dollars are coming back into the community, not asking for any, um, any funds from the city, city council to, to provide. Right. So definitely. Just wanted to be sure of that and make sure everyone understands that Caltrans is working with the funding partner, TCAG, to facilitate and make sure that we secure all these funds and keep them moving forward.

Before I even believe this slide, Mr. Mayor, can I make a quick comment? Two comments. One is, I could be wrong, but I believe this is probably the largest single transportation construction project in the city of Tulare's history, I think.

TCAG has said in Tulare County, and at least 27 years of his career at TCAG, he has never seen a project this large.

And I would say our project is complicated, right? Yes. And the second thing I want to just say is very important. This project, I mean, it doesn't happen without all those funding sources, but I would argue it doesn't even get off the ground without Measure R dollars. 100%. If we didn't have Measure R dollars to put in this project, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Tulare TCAC has been a large proponent of applying for grants to be able to get the TCEP and the InfraGrant. So Tulare County Measure R have been a huge supporter and literally we wouldn't have been able to get it done without them.

That's in part why I was asking about Mr. Smalley. Yes. Was so we could praise him in person as opposed to him hearing about it secondhand.

Yes. He is definitely a fan of this project and supports us and definitely making sure that we stay in good communication with you all. So I will pass that good news along to him. Okay. At this time, I'll take any questions if there are any.

I think we ought to give Ted a $230 million resolution recognition for that.

When it's complete, then the council at that time can do so. I think the only question I have that I think, first of all, thank you very much for the presentation.

Oh, no problem.

The community needs to hear what's going to happen and the progress is the timeline. That's all very important. I know there will be questions when that occurs as to how traffic flow will take place. And everybody would just have to understand is to have progress like this, there will be an inconvenience. So the diverted traffic onto Blackstone or onto La Spina, you can't have this type of project occur without that taking place.

And that is correct. My colleague and I, as we were driving down here, there is no other location that we can find that has four consecutive roundabouts. So this project is like none other designed and that we can find here in the state of California. So definitely something special, but it will take time and it will be difficult in construction, but Caltrans is committed to making sure we communicate and keep in touch with residents. That was a large traffic movement, was a large part of our public meeting, making sure that we walked residents through understanding how things are gonna move at that time, making sure that the public is aware that we will provide the community alerts in English and in Spanish. We don't want anyone to feel left out. We will have detour signs up. We will do our best to communicate in every way that we can to ensure that there is a smooth transition. Now for roundabouts, a new bridge on 99, will it be painful? Absolutely. but Caltrans is committed to making sure that we communicate as we go through this. And we definitely want you guys to hold us accountable to that. Please make sure that we understand and know whatever your issues or concerns are. And your team, like I said, has been just phenomenal to work with.

Well, and I would just add two things. One, It's going to be painful whether you do this or not. If you don't do this project, you continue to have degradation of that area, the road system, the traffic. It's like you don't solve it by closing your eyes and putting your hands over your eyes and hoping it gets better or disappears or something. You solve it by tackling the problem. So you put a little, you have some inconvenience for a few years to get much, much safer, much better, much more accessible outcome. Second thing is Melissa, if it's okay with Caltrans, we'd love to be able to put this presentation up on our website. So the public who weren't here, maybe I've heard about, they can come back. Is that okay with you?

Sure. I will have to double check on the numbers a little bit on how that gets out to the public because that could be a competitive bidding issue. So if someone has time to study those numbers, they could potentially. So we don't want to compromise that process, right?

You could also qualify or footnote it just saying these are current estimates.

Exactly. Yeah. So that would be the only thing, but we have no problem sharing this other information. Absolutely.

And our community will have to learn how to use roundabouts. Which very quickly.

Yeah.

I think everybody should, but it's time to do that.

Yeah. And they are definitely proven scientifically to be safe.

The one at Morrison is amazing.

Excuse me?

The roundabout at Morrison and at 137. Okay. I have to go through that all the time. I can tell you it makes it so much easier to get through that. So if people have enjoyed that as much as I have, it won't be such a

Awesome.

Any other comments?

Well, as you see from our council, your presentation is welcomed with open arms. And we thank you for the information. And of course, we look forward to taking this and sharing it more with the public. And as we said, we'll welcome you back for updates and look forward to seeing you in the future and watching the next steps.

Can I make one last comment? Yes, sir. You did a fantastic job. They're not going to reassign you before this thing is done.

I have no plans on it, and Ted Smalley has threatened everybody that I can't go anywhere.

Okay, well, he and I think a lot on it. There you go.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Steve, Vice Mayor Harrell has a question.

Is it on Foster Drive? Is Caltrans working as far down as the safe storage unit?

I'm going to have to have my colleague answer that specifically.

That's what I'd heard. I mean, that's my council district, and I also live on Foster Drive. So I was curious how far down you were going to be going.

Yeah. Good evening, everyone. My name is Irene Lee. I'm the Caltrans design manager, also designing this project as well. So you're talking about the East Foster? Yeah. So it went all the way to just feel to connect the existing, where the existing sidewalk is, that's where we're going to connect to. I would like to also bring back our design for the four roundabouts. It will include the 10-foot shared use path for the pedestrian and the bicyclist. So once this project is completed, it actually promote and improve a lot of the pedestrian and cyclist. And also our design is promoting the Page Avenue is gonna be at grade and so currently is going over 99. So once this project is being done, all the pedestrian actually doesn't have to go all the way up and go down. So it's gonna be flat at grade and while 99 will be elevated. So I would like to bring that in. So I hope that answers the question.

Thank you. All right, next item on our agenda, Presentations 5.2, Update on the Tulare Mail Theft Case by the Tulare Police Department.

Thank you, Mayor and members of Council. I want to take this opportunity before the presentation starts to welcome aboard our newest captain, Kevin Cruz. He's joining our ranks after a long recruitment process. He comes as a retired lieutenant from VICEV via the DA's office. So we're excited about his experience in education and training, and we think he's going to fit right in. I also want to take this time to show appreciation to our other remaining captains ray guerrero and greg merrill who couldn't make it tonight for filling in the void during the process and taking over some of the responsibilities but it's all going to be even evened out now all right thank you well welcome captain our appreciation to captains and uh that's our chief's given your recognition we'll of course welcome we'll see if he shows up tomorrow morning

Is there a relation to the Cruz family and Viceda, the milling company? No.

Okay.

Okay, good. Welcome anyway.

If he's related to that family, he probably wouldn't be a cop.

Yeah. Okay.

All right, well, a couple months ago, the mayor had asked us to do an update on our mail theft case that happened throughout the late 25 and early 26. So as you guys know, we launched a major investigation. These are the three individuals that were involved in the case. The one in the middle, Ku Vang, he is the ringleader, and we'll call him the key master, and I'll refer to that here in a few more minutes. I'm going to breeze through this presentation. If you guys could hold your questions till the end, I'd appreciate it, and we'll get through this together. So around November, around the holiday season, we started getting a rash of mailbox thefts throughout the entire city, all the way from Seminole and Mooney to the west, out to Pleasant and LaDonna. It was just the entire city was getting hit with our community mailboxes. Some citizens had identified some suspicious activity. One lady, genius, she mailed herself an AirTag, and that was stolen, and it ended up at our Target house in Fresno. So another vigilant citizen grabbed us a license plate off a suspicious vehicle that was hanging around these community mailboxes, and we started doing some surveillance. So we have several theft cases throughout. You'd be surprised. Many individuals don't report mail thefts. It's not unique to our city. We talked to the Postal Service, and they just take it as a loss, and they don't report it. Without that, we don't. generate the statistics to know that we're getting theft like this, but through some of the constituents and the council outreach, we figured out it was a big problem. So once we... started getting some footage together and some investigative techniques together. We ended up stopping a suspect vehicle. Actually, Corporal Wilson here was one of the main reasons this investigation went further than it did. We started hitting these things with our license plate readers and starting to couple patterns with these thefts. The three individuals that I showed you earlier were all on probation for the same offenses in Fresno County. Identity theft, mail theft, possession of burglary tools, conspiracy, just to name a few. So once we had identified the vehicle, a stop was made on that car and nobody was arrested. We didn't find anything at the time, but we had ended up seizing the vehicle and taking a ring of, mailbox keys. They were fabricated by the ringmaster, Ku Vang, and we stored the vehicle and then we conducted some search warrants and we placed some surveillance, electronic surveillance on the vehicle once it was released back to the owner. Once that vehicle was released, we noticed another pattern of thefts. and um but mostly in fresno we called the fresno police department and fresno county sheriffs advising them they had a high rate of theft probably happening but they were not aware of it early on they weren't interested in the case we called the postal inspector they also were not interested really in the case but we knew we had plenty of more investigation to do once we had seen that the uh This Honda was just, we have, I have to share some pictures for you, but we have, it looks like a crayon on a map. They're just going back and forth to these mailboxes and they identified thefts in Fresno. So we ended up writing search warrants and we served several, we served three search warrants in the city of Fresno for each of the suspects that live separately. There we located hundreds, maybe even thousands of pieces of stolen mail and, I got it behind here a little bit. Once those search warrants were served, we had participation from Fresno PD and the Postal Inspector that wanted to get in on the investigation as well with the multiple victims across the two counties. These are some of the recovered items. We found everything from DMV licenses, license plates, registration tags, passports, tuition checks, IRS refunds, you name it, we found it. We found fabricated cards, that thing in the middle, that black circle is a card press machine. They're making their own debit cards and using stolen information to implant the bank information on those cards and their frauding accounts. We found people's prescription pills, medicine, all the things that are difficult to replace. We found it in just the three locations. So once we booked these individuals into custody, the DA ended up filing 16 separate counts of felonies, including identity theft, mail theft, Burglary, possession of burglary tools, conspiracy, and a whole bunch of other things. Then we started making contact with the victims. Most of them that were local. We had victims that were businesses. We had victims that had Tulare addresses but lived out of the state or out of the county. So at the end of it all, the three suspects were made an offer, and they are currently serving three years in local custody. And we're still reaching out to some victims because we have pieces of mail that we just can't find an owner to either they've moved or relocated. We have a couple trash bags full of mail from Fresno that we're trying to get back to Fresno and we're having some communication issues there but we'll wrap that up.

And that concludes the presentation.

I know it was a lightning speed presentation, but in a nutshell, I want to thank our investigators, our patrol officers, and everybody else that was involved, our records division, the judges that signed the warrants, and everybody that came together to successfully prosecute this case. It was months long and hundreds of victims, and we did a great job. Thank you.

Yes, Chief, thank you to your department. I also appreciate your persistence and, of course, you jumping into this and keeping this going because the community was up in arms on this issue. If you were following social media or you were a victim yourself, it was going on in the community. And, of course, a lot of folks, you know, want to know what's happening. And to share with you is Artillery PD... was working behind the scenes. You were right there representing and, of course, working on this case. And so on behalf of everybody out there and the community as well, and I was sharing this information and hoping people were watching online, thank you for you and your department pushing forward because if it wouldn't have been your department's leadership, this would not have unraveled and we wouldn't have the convictions and our victims wouldn't have resolved. with this issue. So thank you for protecting Tulare. And for those that are listening at home that are aware of this, I hope this presentation does you well. And I hope that like myself, and of course, fellow council members, you too are proud of our police department for diving into this case. And if other council members have questions or comments on this. Vice Mayor.

Very quickly, I agree with the mayor. I'm very proud of Tulare PD. The investigation was great, but beyond that, this seems like a very organized operation. Did it appear to be outside these three individuals?

No, it was very contained within this small group. There's little outliers here and there. I think we picked up a couple warrant arrests outside of that, but these were the... They were the hoarders of it. They're the ones that kept it to themselves.

And the biggest concern is we're talking about three years local time. And what's the actual time? I mean, how long are they going to be in? They're out. And then are we looking at, nobody knows, but the amount of time is, I guess I was disappointed with what the court, with all the work our police department did to try to deal with this. What the court did, I think, is disappointing to a certain degree.

We can go back to 2014 and Prop 47 and realignment and local custody versus prison time. That's one of the biggest problems this case had. But they had time served. I'm sure they'll get credit. I'm sure they might be out in 18 months. I don't know. But they'll have priors, and if they do it again, they'll have restrictions. I don't know what the Fresno County Probation Department does, but they're obviously in violation.

But those cases are going on, too, up there?

Yes. Okay, good.

So were any of them currently on probation or on parole?

All on probation for the same offenses.

So the three years was essentially a plea deal by the DA's office?

Yes, sir.

when actually they would have got a lot longer if they'd gone without a plea deal and gone to state prison.

I don't know what the indicator was if they went to trial, but it was significant.

So you could be going through this again in 18 months. Not in Tulare. They're going to be right back out doing it again. And this only confirms what I've always said about Tulare PD. It's the best organization around. Your patrol people, your investigators, tremendous job.

Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Moving forward on our agenda, item six, communications.

No communications.

All right. Moving forward, item seven, council reports and items of request. Vice Mayor Harrell.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. May the 21st, in an insurance meeting. 21st, also the annual luncheon at Public Works. 22nd, the Great Hometown Heroes program at the Memorial Building. And then on the 24th, the Memorial Day event at the cemetery.

Mr. Medeiros?

I attended virtually the same things the Vice Mayor did. I also attended this morning a Citizens Advisory Committee meeting at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. Tomorrow I have a LAFCO meeting. Next week we have our Chamber meeting. Other than that, let's move on.

the 20th i attended the homeless task force and i want to be sure that everyone in our community knows on june the 5th they can come between 9 and 12 to visit the tulare cares shelter emergency shelter be an opportunity for you to go through and see that i have reported that at the task force i hope the community knows that this is something that's not happening anywhere else in the county or the state of california and so you need to come and see what we're doing in terms of the emergency homeless shelter. That's this Friday from 9 to 12. I attended on the 21st the Tulare Leadership Graduation for the Chamber, the Hometown Heroes program. On the 29th, I attended the Happy Trails night at the races to raise money. They were actually able to raise $25,000 to purchase two more horses because they no longer get horses donated to that entity. And so that was really exciting.

Really appreciate the wonderful community of Tulare in our respect and honor to our veterans. We had many Memorial Day events. We had the hometown heroes that was mentioned as well as Memorial Day event at our North Kern Tulare Cemetery. Also, I don't know if I touched on it before, the Veterans Memorial had an open house and it was great to see the improvements and all the work that has been taking place at our Memorial Hall. And moving forward is June 4th. Thursday night is the Tulare Youth Baseball's closing ceremonies. Be out there on June 4th. And then as you said, Shirley's to welcome the community for our tour on June 5th to our shelter. All right, moving forward is item eight, consent calendar. Council members, do you have direction or action on the consent calendar?

And we pull items 8.4 and 8.5.

8.6 for myself.

And I will need to pull 8.10 as I'll need to recuse myself and have the vice mayor handle the action on 8.10.

With that said, Mr. Mayor, then I will move to approve the consent calendar items 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.7, 8.8. And 8.9. Okay.

We have a motion. A second. And a second for approval of consent calendars. For the consent calendar, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, .7, .8, and .9. All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Okay. Item 8.4.

The reason I asked for this to be pulled is there was a lot of people in the downtown area that were involved at various times with the PBID proposals, and some were in favor, some were not. This somewhat, at this point, brings to a conclusion the attempts to move forward on that. And it was my opinion, and I mentioned this to our city manager, that instead of dealing with this on the consent calendar, I thought some discussion should be had so that the public's aware of where we're at, what we were doing, and what took place. I don't know that, I think this is informational as opposed to an action item. Is that correct?

We're just asking you to receive the report.

Maybe. So if we could have a verbal report on this before we finish reception of this manner.

Do you want it right now, or would you like to come back as a presentation anyway and get a summary?

No, I think it would be doable.

Okay. Jennifer, would that come from you?

All right, thank you very much. Yeah, so to kind of go back for the history on this, back in 2023, the city engaged services with a consultant, NBS and Civic Mike, to help us and support the formation of a downtown property-based business improvement district, a PBID. A lot of efforts were had, as Council Member Madero mentioned, of various stakeholder meetings, meeting with downtown property owners, answering questions. A lot of revisions were done over the last couple of years, changing the boundaries of the district, changing the type of benefits that would be offered as part of being in the PBID. And so with those changes, it also changed and it's always reducing the cost for the assessments for the PBID. And so in addition to the community meetings that were held with the consultant, we also formed our own committee of some of the stakeholders so that they would be able to have some more one-on-one interaction with other property owners to try and address some of those concerns as well. That also caused some more revisions and trying to get to a place where we could get that support. uh petitions had gone out a couple of times through these various revisions the last petition went out just a couple months ago in april but we still did not reach the threshold of having at least 50 percent of the property owners approving to move forward and so after basically two and a half years effort with the city staff and various property owners and council members being involved in this process. There's nothing further really at this point to do anything else. I am happy to report though that some of the downtown property owners and business owners that were involved in this process still want to see something happen. And so they are going to be looking at maybe forming their own nonprofit organization or some other efforts outside of a PBID type process to something that they can still kind of keep that momentum going to where they can be investing in the downtown with other business owners and property owners. So I am happy that they are still wanting to move forward with something, but it just may not involve a formal PBID type process.

Council, if I could just add another comment, you know, this is one of those things for the public who may not understand what this is, is, as you know, you pay your taxes and the city uses those taxes to do things all over the city. A lot of maintenance work. It's the same thing in the downtown. We, we collect taxes everywhere and we use those taxes generally throughout the city to provide maintenance. we can't take taxes from one area and move all those taxes to another area to take care of that area at a higher standard, right? We have to maintain a standard that's consistent throughout the city. Where you see higher standards in the city, for example, like if you take the Del Lago subdivision, That's because those property owners have voluntarily agreed to pay additional tax to have a higher standard of maintenance in that community. The PBIT is the same basic concept that in order to be able to have additional services in the downtown, largely PBITs are focused on maintenance, but it can include other things like marketing and promotions and special events and homeless mitigation, and all kinds of other things, then those property owners would pay additional tax. We currently have a PBID downtown, and then we have another district where business owners pay into it, but it's a voluntary program, so it doesn't really work very well. There's no mechanism to compel people to pay, and the PBID is the perfect way of doing that. And the theory behind it is as You have increased maintenance and it can city continues to invest money in the downtown. You sort of raise the overall. Proposition of the downtown and the property values and so you sort of as a property owner, you recoup those dollars over time by getting better tenants in your building. By selling your property for a higher price, so on and so forth. What I will also say is it's not uncommon that PBIDs don't always work in terms of getting approved. When you have cities that are, you have downtowns that are, and I'm not saying ours is exactly this. I think our downtown is very successful right now. And I think it's only going to get more successful. But when you're in a transition period from a downtown that's sort of a fledgling downtown, and you're trying to transition to a more vibrant, active downtown, you have to recognize there's different property owners with different goals. You know, some property owners that continue to invest money in their properties and. and they want to see the downtown thrive. There's other property owners that maybe over time, the property has changed hands. There's multiple errors to the property. It's not really on anyone's radar. They know the property's there, but they're happy using it as a tax write-off or they depreciate the property. And there's other motives behind what's happening with that property. You really need to get to the point in time where There is a large consensus among the property owners that we're really, we are all in like the city is all in a downtown and investing and turning, transforming the downtown. And when that happens, that's a great time. for a P bid to be created because without a P bid, what will happen is we will continue to invest the same dollars that we do now in the downtown and maintenance. And as maintenance costs continue to go up and increase at a higher rate than what we're putting into the downtown, the maintenance of downtown will go down. And so you want to get to the point where you have a PBID. We were hoping now was the time. As Jennifer mentioned, we went through two rounds of this. The first one, you had a tight schedule and I think people felt rushed. And I frankly felt like some folks felt like the city was pushing this. And so I myself backed out of that process to show people that's not the case because it's really the downtown property nurse PBID. Didn't get there, didn't get over the hump. And so it's unfortunate. I don't think it's the end of the world. You win some, you lose some. We did our best. We tried where it goes from here. Well, I don't know. But what staff recommendation is, we don't continue to carry this water. We wait until the property owners come back and say, hey, we really want to do this now. And I think that day will come. I can't tell you.

So I had a question, a couple of questions. So I know that what the city manager just talked about and staff, I mean, I felt that, you know, the city kind of bent backwards to try to appease some of the concerns of business folks in the first round in terms of, as you mentioned, schedules and feeling rushed and so forth. But, you know, it's a little disappointing to see that there isn't any support for it at this time. But I do know that... I think in the report is like 23% of its 23% of the vote, I guess, was for it. But was the city a big chunk of that?

Yes.

So that's even lower. Yeah.

Yeah. And I had the cities in there, even though you had not formally voted on it yet. But assuming the council was going to vote yes on it, that would have brought the total.

We were like double digits part of it. So I'm assuming that it's like even less than 10% of the businesses supported it.

Outside the city, I think it would have been around 12 or 13%, but the other thing I would add is keep in mind this 1st round, but I mean, 1st round is the 1st round of voting. If somebody doesn't turn in a vote, that's considered.

Opposition we had, because it only added up to, like, 60%.

Yeah, right. Right. 28. so there's people out there that supported it, but they never turned in the vote.

Yeah, that's what's happening today, election day. So I think for me, it's a little disappointing. I know given the investment and what I have thought the good alliances that have been built in relationships with downtown folks, that it was a little disappointing to hear that that was a result. But was there anything specific that came out? I didn't see anything specific in the report, but were there any specifics in terms of like they thought it was too much cost? Because I do know I met with Mark a year and a half ago, maybe a couple of years ago when we talked. I had shared with Mark that in the previous life of mine, I worked on PBIGS in LA in the San Fernando Valley and that whole process and how we, how they, how the councilman I worked for back then set it up in terms of like specific things that we could do, right? So I know we had that conversation a while ago. So even I was hoping that that would encourage more support, but that obviously didn't happen.

No, I think some of the key things in the first round were that, you know, there were a number of residents. We had a much, as you recall, in our downtown district, it's a much larger area. It's Inyo to the south, JK Street to the west. and cross street to cross street to know that i'm trying to think what the eastern boundary is right now but it seems interesting and yeah and and and there's some residential areas in there and we like that large area for all of our planning purposes because long term those areas will transform as far as downtown redevelopment goes doesn't mean that the houses will go away necessarily but you might have houses that become uh mixed use you might have home occupancies right anyways Some of the folks that were in a residential area, and we had two different zones, like higher intensity, higher cost, lower intensity, lower cost. We had some folks in residential areas that really didn't want to be in it, so we pulled them out completely. So we shrunk the district. That was one thing we did. We had four different types of services that were going to be offered. There were some folks that didn't agree with all those services, so we reduced the type of services. We reduced the administrative cost. One of the challenges that we have is... the PBID legislation has changed over time somewhat. And so how you have to do the engineer's report and how you have to calculate those costs, I don't know we have as much flexibility now maybe as perhaps in the past. I'm not an expert on it, but that's my understanding. And so I think the predominant concern was the cost. We had, for example, a couple of property owners that said, hey, I'd be willing to do it at X dollars. And we were at X dollars plus a little bit more. We couldn't get the costs down. And for those couple of properties, they're like, that's it. I said I can only go this high. So. um i think it's a worthwhile venture to pursue again in the future but i don't know there's more that we can come up with to to compel or convince people i think we just need to continue to see the success of downtown when people see all these great things happening but maintenance keeps going down they will call you and they will say why isn't the city maintaining this and we'll say we remember we had this discussion oh maybe we need to do something

And the last point is that I do appreciate there's some conversations about the nonprofit, but I would hope that the staff, city manager would kind of keep an eye on that because I think you don't want to have a hodgepodge of like, hey, we're starting a nonprofit for K Street between Kern and Inyo. And we're starting a nonprofit for Cross and Ann. So I think that would be... I mean, it would be good for the people that that are in that business, but I just I'm not sure how that would work. And then then they come to us for funding, which I think the whole point of it is that if we had the funding, we would take care of it. We don't. So I think just just kind of, you know, if you can keep us up to date on that, because I can definitely I definitely know and I can see that they're very active. uh, business folks that understand the people and may want to do their own thing, but it may just be their frontage, you know, the front block and that's it. So you guys can keep appraising that. That'd be great.

Yeah, I definitely plan to stay in touch with those individuals and, um, and assist them any way I can to just to follow up.

I agree with Mr Sagala that it's disappointing that those property owners that opposed this didn't see the future benefit. And I want to applaud those who did because they, in my opinion, based on what I saw, I think they understood how eventually you're going to get your money's worth back and increased value in the area, increased economic development. And what ended up happening as I understand what Jennifer indicated and what you, Mark, indicated is when they say, well, I only spend this much money in dollars, that leads a budget to where you can only do so much. with the money that's available to you. And it's a catch-22 because you're doomed to failure. And then those same people are put in a position to where they turn around and say, gee, I put that money in and I'm not getting the services that I expected. So I commend staff on at least pointing that out, that we can't get down to that level and succeed under the circumstances. And ultimately, it's the property owners who make that decision. and they've got to get to the point we can encourage, but it's up to the property owners to develop a program that will work. But I'm glad we went over this because it gave the public more of an indication of exactly what's transpired here.

Council, do we have action to receive the summary report? There's consensus, I believe. There's a consensus. I don't think we have to. Yeah, it's just received. Moving forward, 8.5.

I just wanted to go over with planning. I know Mr. Miller's not here, but there's aspects of this schedule that I think we should review before we approve it. Maybe a presentation should be made, and then we could discuss it. Who's going to present it? as there's dead silence in the room.

Our deputy city engineer is going. OK. Good evening, Mayor and Council. So I'll go ahead and just walk you through the International Agri-Center Way Extension project delivery schedule.

As you go through this, we'll do it the way you want. But can I make a suggestion? And this comes off of a meeting that we had last Wednesday at the International Agri-Center Board. of which I sit as the city representative. And in anticipation of this, I told them it was coming. I don't know what they had, but they had something I hadn't seen. And some of the comments were made. And based on those comments and discussions I had afterwards, I think we need to adjust some of this. Do you want to go through the whole thing? Or as you get to those spots, can I interject where I think the amendment ought to be?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not aware of what was provided to them or what they were shared that you didn't know about, but I'd be happy to walk through what we have. And if you want to make some adjustments, talk about it, we certainly can. So currently we're working through the NEPA process, which is a categorical exclusion, but it's requiring some special studies. That's ongoing. We're making good progress on that. We do expect to have that. environmental clearance completed by the end of August of 2026. So a couple more months for that process to wrap up. And then the next thing will be the right-of-way dedications. We've currently got one of the right-of-way dedications that's required from the Faria family. And then for the To proceed with the right-of-way certification process, we're going to need to have all the right-of-way dedications by the end of July of 26.

But you don't have the one from the Ag Center?

Correct.

Not currently. It's my understanding that what was brought up is the Ag Center, and I briefly mentioned this to the city attorney, the Ag Center is going to want to make sure that their current tenant on the property will have a license to continue to farm that property after the right-of-way is given. And I think that license should also include specific acknowledgment by the AgCenter that it's their obligation to remove the trees and improvements on the right-of-way property. agree on those. Right, Mr. Zamora?

Yes, that's correct.

And you're going to work with Mr. Bixler, the attorney for the International Agri-Center, promptly to get that done?

Yeah, so it's my understanding on the license. The license itself is fine. We're waiting on the specific property that the farmer needs to farm. So we need a description of that in order to put it into the license. That's what we're waiting on.

Yeah. And you should be able to work that out with Mr. Bix. Yes.

Okay. And then so we're going to request that the funding be allocated by the end of September of this year. That will happen once all of the right-of-ways have been acquired as well as the NEPA clearance has been approved. And then Once we have the funding allocation, we can begin to clear the right-of-way and perform, begin to performance of the utility relocations on the project. There's some utility poles that need to be moved.

Let's go back to number four. That was another issue. And I've had discussions with some of the fourier family members and i believe they're going to be okay with removing the trees and their improvements as soon as the crop is harvested in august early september the indications from from the ag center is i think they're reluctant to remove the trees and do the other improvements until the manner has gone out to bid. So I think 4 should read, work can begin at any time, but to be completed within 30 days after award of the construction contract. Will that work?

MARK MCQUEEN, Yeah, that should work. I don't see an issue with that in the past. I mean, as long as they're in agreement with performing within 30 days of the bid, we should be fine to be cleared for construction. I think where we run into issues is when that obligation is not met. So in other words, if we go out to bid and there's some delay in removing or relocating the trees or removing the irrigation stuff, that will in turn delay the project.

The concern that I'm hearing from them is there's a certain monetary commitment from the AgCenter as to how much they'll actually put up. And if the bids come in higher than everyone's anticipating, They want to at least be able to see that, so that between the city, all the partners, the city, the and the AgCenter can have an opportunity to have input on how that's going to be addressed. And the last thing they want to do is pull out trees, reconstruct, and then have a delay in the project when they can still be, their tenant can still be farming that property. So, and they've indicated several times at the meetings I've attended that given 30 days notice, given notice, they can have those trees out of there within 30 days.

Yeah, I think we'd be okay with that.

Okay. We got that? Whoever's taking notes?

Yes.

Okay, go ahead.

So once everything is clear, we can start the utility relocations, which we're anticipating to happen between October and complete by December, by the end of the year. Once all the utilities are moved... I'm sorry to interrupt.

Edison relocation projects can be very... time-consuming and a delay. I mean, are you confident that Edison can do that utility relocation with the time limits that you've indicated?

Yeah, my understanding is the engineer has been working with Edison on their relocation plans and they are pretty close to being complete. Once Edison completes their relocation plans, it's really just a matter of us approving them, making sure that all the rights away are available for them to move their utilities. And if once we have the right away certification, then the three months should be adequate for them to move their facilities. And then following the relocation of the utilities, we're looking at advertising. Well, I guess it would be concurrent with the relocation of the utilities. We look to advertise the project to bidders in early October, opening bids in November, and then awarding the project by the end of the year.

Is there any reason that can't be done earlier?

Which one, the advertisement or the opening bids?

All of them. I mean, the bid process. Why are we waiting until October?

Well, we want to make sure that we have all the right-of-way certifications. All the right-of-way has got to be in place. All the utilities at least need to be in progress and moving. The problem we run into is if we advertise it too early, then we have to do a delayed start for the utility relocation. So we want to make sure that the utility relocations have at least started before we advertise for the construction.

So it's standard practice to have the right-of-ways in place before the city goes out to bid.

Correct. That's correct.

You said exactly what I thought and exactly what I was hoping you would say. Because I've been trying to impress that on others, and I'm glad to hear you say that.

There's one other aspect I would argue is that's the most important piece. The secondary piece is just because we're getting closer to the end of the year, you have to also take into consideration the rainy season. So you don't want to award bid and get somebody to start construction in October, and then they go dark until January or whatever it is too, right?

We hope we get rain.

Well, that's right.

Yeah, so yeah, that's pretty typical. Have all the rights away before we advertise the project. That's a standard practice when federal funding is involved. Pretty much a standard practice for any funding that we like to see. Otherwise, we just risk introducing unnecessary delays to the contractor. And then so City Council Award of Construction, we're anticipating by the end of the year. And then usually there's, you know, four to six weeks of contractors preparing, getting all their submittals in, preparing their water pollution control, their SWEP and that kind of stuff, getting all their material submittals approved, and then right into construction in mid-January. then we're looking at about a roughly six month five to six month construction period or 100 to 120 working days for the project now the only concern and i'm i believe council would agree is uh the show next year is 9th 10th and 11th of february

So when people see, especially people from the World Ag Expo, when they see that we're starting work on January 11th with a show one month from that date, there's going to be alarms go off. Is there anything about their commencement date that's going to interfere with the show itself?

I don't believe so. In talking to Michael, we will make some accommodations to either we can do a couple of things. One of the things we can do is suspend work for that week or a couple of weeks within that period. We can direct the contractor to make sure that access is continually provided to the site and the parking areas. So I would expect there to be, if we were to begin construction prior to the Ag Show, I would suspect there to be some coordination that would have to occur to ensure that access is being maintained and so on.

In dealing with the board of the Ag Center, expectations of cooperation falls on deaf ears a lot. We need to a certain degree beyond that. What would you recommend? Would you recommend that first day of work say be 10 days after, two weeks after, maybe February 22nd as a possibility? Or would the language be sufficient to say first day of work January 11th, but in no event shall commencement of construction interfere with World Ag Expo?

Yeah, we could do it either way. We could certainly write some language in the special provisions about requiring some coordination. If there's specific items or specific access points they're looking for, we can add that into the contract documents and the contractor would be required to abide by those. At the council's direction, we can also certainly look at starting after the ag show if that appeases all the parties.

I would think that we can leave that day. Which would you prefer?

prefer to keep the date because again we're trying to we're trying to get things going sooner than later obviously i don't mind including a footnote to the effect that you know we the city acknowledges the world ag expo and will and will impress upon the contractor that their work is not to impede or to otherwise what about my language that in no event shall uh commencement uh negatively impact world ag x perfect can you add that language what

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Into the schedule. HAB-Jacques Juilland- Yes, like it's a footnote or something.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- It says that in the notes. If you don't mind. I mean, construction activities will have to accommodate IAC activities associated with the HAB-Jacques Juilland- Oh, I guess you're right.

It does say that I'm ready.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- I'm I understand the HAB-Jacques Juilland- Totally agree with all the objectives noted. It's just in in doing construction projects. And if I'm right, is that As this goes its path, and sometimes you can't put, we all, I'm not saying anything we don't know. It's tough to put it in a box, how it goes. But if I'm correct, you can pull the trigger on the notice to proceed. for the construction. So if we have some issues in that time, the city can control that notice to proceed with all things.

To a certain extent, contractors bidding and pricing and our contractual obligations to them, they don't allow that to sit out there forever.

No, not forever, but we're kind of picking it at a date weeks here, I'm just saying. I think the spirit of everything we're talking about.

I have no reservation whatsoever that our project, that we know how to do road projects. We do them every day. I have no reservation that we have plenty of tools and mechanisms by which we can ensure that the project gets completed, assuming the bids come in the ballpark of what we need them to be, which we feel pretty strongly that they will, and that we will make sure it doesn't impact International Agri Center. They don't build roads every day, so they have a lot of apprehension about everything, and it's difficult for us to help them and to help navigate all of this. I think also because I think they had an expectation an unrealistic expectation that this project would have been done by now. I'm not sure where that came from. But, you know, I would remind everyone this project wouldn't even be at this point had we not got the $4 million federal earmark. We would still be talking about how many years from now are we going to do this project, right? So we are where we are. We will do the best we can to make sure that all issues and matters are taken care of.

And, Mr. Mayor, let me clarify this. I didn't make these suggestions willy-nilly. I made these suggestions because for months I've been dealing with the AgCenter board who've had these concerns, and there's been a give and take. I've had the Faria family involved, had discussions with them. I've discussed them with Mr. Dredge, and I'm trying to find something that will enable everybody to be satisfied. That's why even though this note on B I appreciate, But the language will have to accommodate is somewhat vague. And I think the preference would be, shall in no event, if we add that up there, it probably made people more comfortable. And if there's consensus that that doesn't create any harm, I'd prefer that. I'd leave what's in there, and I'd also add the other.

Do we have any rebuttal on that?

I mean, I'm assuming the Faria family was involved in these conversations, right? Yeah. So they didn't bring those things up during the conversations?

They have their perspective.

Yeah, but they weren't involved in crafting this document and schedule? Was it done without them?

This was the city's document. All right, so this... We had conversations.

Yeah, but they've never brought this up. So now they're bringing it up through Mr. Medeiros.

Yeah. Okay. They've never brought it in. That's it. These are not my concerns.

I know you made that clear. So they're someone else's concerns, but I'm just asking, were they not involved in the process? The Faria family. The Farias don't have...

The Freas have concerns, but they don't have these concerns.

Well, whoever's concerns are, I mean, I'm hoping that they were part of the process. The IAC, yeah. So if that's not the case, it should be in the future.

The Frea family's advisor is Mr. Dredge. I've had ongoing discussions with Mr. Dredge on these issues, and I've also had discussion, a couple of different discussions with a member of their family.

Okay.

Council approved.

approves this revised or amended document this evening. Tomorrow morning, I'll be sending an email to everyone, to all of the parties, the attorneys, everyone that says, this is the schedule, guys. If you have questions.

And then I would also note, you encourage them to speak up at the time that this is being discussed, not now. But I had a couple of questions myself.

Can I finish the last one?

Oh, sure. The last 10 minutes. Go ahead.

I'll take more. I mean, I I am the representative on the AgCenter, and I guess, okay, say that again?

Did you represent me?

Yeah, thank you. So my last adjustment then to this would be if paragraph A should be first day of work, January 11th, 2027, and in addition to what's indicated in notes in 4B, in no event, shall construction negatively impact the 2027 World Ag Expo? That's the question? OK. Go ahead.

Any other comments?

Yes. Would it be possible to add the funding schedule. I know I've seen a funding schedule in the past. Would it be possible to add the funding schedule along with the construction schedule to see where money is going to be allocated, how much it's going to be, and so forth? Because the question I have for the city manager is, I think we have the setup where the city has the money from TCAC. and I'm not sure the congressional money's come in yet, but it's coming in, right?

Yeah.

So I think one of the conversation was, or the questions, Is any money going to be exchanged or the city is still going to pay itself? In other words, for example, if on the schedule says, you know, to do whatever's on the schedule, it's going to cost a million dollars. Then the money's with the city and then we're just paying it out of that fund. So it's not going to go to a third party and then come back.

No, that decision, council had previously said it didn't want the monies to go to the other party. So that's already been decided.

I want to make sure that's still in place. But I'd like to see if there's a way to put in the funding schedule as part of the schedule. In other words, when you go out, you know, to do a certain type of relocation or right away that there is a cost to it at that time as well.

The short answer is we could do something now that's very, very generic. Or we could do something that's more specific once we get the bids and we negotiate that contract, because then that will have information about when they're building us, building us. But we don't have that now. Am I right in that? Or am I wrong, Michael?

That's correct.

Yeah. So I'm not sure how to give that level of specificity now.

Once a project. I do know, I'm assuming. that some of the planning and some of the documents and all that have cost money. You and I have had that conversation where there's already been money spent. So just say that for the planning, we spent 200,000, 100,000, whatever, just kind of keep it as we move forward.

Oh, okay. From what you already know. Start it now.

Yeah, because there's already been an investment on plans and documents.

So, Council, I don't think we could do that to attach it to this this evening, but what you're asking for is I can start creating that schedule and then provide it to Council and then we just keep it updated as we go.

And I would appreciate that as long as we don't, you know, I don't want to delay this process, but I would like to add that on to it.

Yeah, and I'm glad you indicated that because this document was as a suggestion by Ted Smalley. Ted Smalley called a meeting here about a month ago that included our assistant city manager, Thomas, Ben Giuliani, Ted, and who else was there? It was a Zoom meeting, not a Zoom, but Teams, yeah, myself and Michael Miller were there. Yeah, there you go. And the end result was that Ted suggested this And that's why we're doing it. And then to circulate that amongst all the partners so everybody knew exactly what was going to take place and what the circumstances were so there'd be no more guessing. It would only confuse things to start throwing in dollar amounts. And I don't want to have to, myself personally, I don't want to have to go to the board and start dealing with that. I'm dealing with this. But I certainly appreciate what Mr. Scala is indicating as far as future knowledge to this council on funding issues. So unless there's other questions, with the adjustments indicated in our discussion, I'd like to propose and make a motion that we revise the schedule. And I make a motion to do so.

I'll make the second. And go to a vote with this. We have a motion and a second to receive and file the project delivery schedule for capital improvement projects for the International Agri-Central Way Extension. John Potter, Per the adjustments wording modification understanding as was presented by Councilman member Medeiros and as well as the city manager agreed to for their quest will counsel will be informed in the future of a funding schedule overlay that goes with this construction schedule.

John Potter, Other comments or questions.

John Potter, All in favor. Right.

Any opposed.

Okay. John Potter, 8.6

Mr. Mayor, Council, this item talks about the cooling and heating resilience center relocation. I don't know if we want to do a quick staff report or how we want to approach this, but I had a few questions and some suggestions on the item.

So I don't know if we want to have it presented or... Whatever, Councilor Brogdon, if you can either tell us what your questions are or revisions, or we can present however you'd like.

If you want to ask your questions, I think we'll have staff. I know Chief Ott is not here, but of course staff are available.

I think this is something that I know we have talked about in the past. I know Council Member Sayre and I have talked about this in the past about what triggers our cooling centers, what triggers our heating centers throughout the city, and to try to provide people relief from both the heat and the cold. So this particular item that's before us is indicating that the current cooling and heating resilience center that is located at the PSP clubhouse is going to be closed down. And instead, folks will be routed to the library as more of a central location, which makes sense. I've been personally to the PSP and prosperity and In the summertime and have seen no one use it and there's been issues about how people can get up there and transportation and so forth. So I'm glad that that particular issues. You know, being addressed, but I think what I have concerns with, or not necessarily concerned, but just like to bring the council for consideration is that. the staff report and the staff is recommending that that particular site of prosperity by the softball park be closed down and instead people routed to the library for the summer and heat and winter cold, which it makes sense. It's a location that's central. There's transit and other types of things that are close by that would allow people to hopefully take advantage of that. But As someone that comes to the library, I come to the library at least a couple of times a week to do some of my work, and I rent a little room and talk to the security guard and talk to the staff and observe a number of things that occur here in the library. I'm a little... concerned about the impact that they may have in regards to security and cleanliness of the restrooms and so forth. So one of the things that I know we do have a security guard that is present here, does a great job of addressing issues and taking a look around the perimeter and so forth. I think if we do open the shelter, I would recommend that there be a second guard. during the time that the shelters open to be able to assist that person. You know, I was here... The other day where a homeless individual left their cart right outside the library, went into the women's bathroom, and from what I understand, probably took a shower, was in there for a while. Her items were taken away from the front door because I guess staff thought it was junk. So that created an issue. And then there's been times where I've come in and so forth. So for me, what I'd like to recommend and I'm not sure how to proceed with it, would be that an additional security guard be added when the shelter is open to handle more individuals. And then second, that there would be additional resources for upkeeping the bathrooms, in terms of additional maintenance to the bathrooms. And then third, trying to do some more marketing. I know our city clerk now is doing marketing, so hopefully to be able to market that opportunity to the public more, that is a clean center or a place where you can go and stay warm. So that's what I like to put on the table. I look forward to the city manager's response on that, but I think that would help make things better for the people that take advantage of that opportunity.

Sorry, I have doubts. Security, maintenance, and marketing. If perhaps staff wanted to.

Um, so, you know, obviously, whatever council's prerogative is, uh, we will figure out how to make that happen. I don't think we're objectionable to those items. The only thing I would. Remind council is the homeless shelter is going to be opening in June. Um, we're going to finalize that date tomorrow. Um, and so I, you know, I'm not saying that no homeless individuals. We'll go into the library, but, you know, we believe that the majority of the homeless individuals will go to them will be at and or go to the homeless shelter. And we will also allow homeless individuals who are not guests at the shelter to come in there to escape the heat. In those instances, and so I'm, I'm thinking that the number of homeless individuals, and I'm not saying that. Any of the people that have come here that have caused, um. You know, um, damage to the facilities or left garbage or any of those things are necessarily all homeless individuals. It's just. If that is a segment of the population that has caused some challenges. I think that challenge will be removed when the shelter opens. Nonetheless, doing more marketing is not a problem whatsoever. That's an easy peasy one. There's no real cost to that one. If you do want us up keeping the bathrooms and guards, there is some cost. I don't have that off the top of my head. I don't think it's significant. We could try to find a way, if that's what council's prerogative is, to incorporate that and accommodate that through our existing budgets. You know, as we present the budget this evening, you'll see that in our general fund, we are now presenting a budget that is balanced and has a $20,000 surplus. So that could be a source of funding for that cost.

So Mr. Mayor, on the staff report, it says that a total of $15,500 was used for operational costs over a four-year period. So if we did it during the summer, even if things ballooned,

It wouldn't be more cost than 15,000 a year to have a security guard or additional bathroom cleaning so I guess the part which in the combination of this and perhaps from our parks or our fire department mark with this, I would imagine these issues were considered and mitigated and reviewed when staff is making this recommendation. So if I can, perhaps maybe instead of the decision of adding something, maybe the staffs, what was done in the assessment and the feasibility of, as I would imagine, these items being reviewed coming into the library? What does that look like?

Uh, well, thank you for the opportunity to address this issue. Um, we, we did a study pretty comprehensive study from 2022 when the heating and cooling resiliency center was moved to the prosperity sports park clubhouse. Um, from there, there, it has been activated 62 times and has been visited by 18 individuals. Total and in that time, um. So the cost of the activation per activation was approximately $250. If you break down the $15,500 that's been spent, it's approximately $250 to open that at that time. As far as the cost here, the library was chosen because one, of its central location. Two, there is a on-duty security guard already here. And three, the bathroom situation as far as the cleanliness and the upkeep is already covered by facility maintenance. And after hours, correct me if I'm wrong, but between the hours of 3 p.m. and midnight, a phone call can get somebody down here to clean the bathroom. So we already have people that are ready to meet the needs if there were a demand, as well as at the temporary shelter, we brought in the Tulare Care buses. So there are an actual cooling center there, as well as a plan when those do not work, for a transportation type system to get them here to the library so that they can utilize the facility. Does that answer your questions?

I'm not necessarily seeing you have to answer my question. I'm just trying to deeper, I think, understand Councilman Tagala bringing up those issues. And I think they're great questions. It was like, hey, how did you guys approach those questions? And you said you had some comments.

You answered one of my questions that I had, Mark, is when the shelter is open, the end of June, and you answered my question that people will be able to come to that facility that aren't guests in order to access cooling at this point and then heating when winter comes.

Yes.

And if only 18 individuals went to the... sports park we decided that maybe was because of transportation so we provided some transportation we put the buses at the encampment itself for cooling and heating so I think we at this point in time we need to kind of see what happens once the shelter opens before we add more security here to see how many people actually come here because if it was 18 at the sports park has it been 18 here

If I may, it's 18 over four years.

Right, yeah.

Not even 18 on a day. That's what I'm saying.

So to add an extra security guard and extra other stuff. Four to five people per year. And in fact, Jose went there one time. He was the only person to have been there in some time.

It's a far difference. I mean, there's 18 people across the street on any given day that can come over to the library. I mean, I don't know if anybody here has sat in those buses during the summer.

I've gone there.

Sat in them and talked to people in there. I've done that a few times where I've sat in the bus for 30 minutes and you know, it's a sauna, you know, I mean, I'm glad they're getting, I'm glad we have new shelter. But my point is that I think it's best to be prepared. I mean, are we talking thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to be able to put an extra security guard and make sure someone takes another look at the bathroom to make sure they're clean? I mean, was the library staff consulted in your report, Chief?

Uh, this information was shared with the parks department to directly consult it with the staff.

I'm asking was there a consultation?

I'd have to ask Brian.

Yes, I believe hiding is not notified. It's a staff knew about this. Okay. Yes. So I had 1, 1 point just real quick, just real quick. Also, as a reminder for the cooling centers, we do have 3 splash pads that are free and those are scattered throughout the city of Larry. So you have zoom all that is open every day from. but from 7 to 10 p.m., and then you have Mulcahy and also Del Lago that are open Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays from noon to 8. So, sorry, Scott, I just wanted to add that in.

No, no, and I appreciate that, but quite frankly, I think we would all be getting calls if homeless folks were starting to use the splash pads. So, I mean, that's something that's there for families and individuals, but I know that if some homeless individuals started using that, PD would be called right away. So, I mean, I don't see that as an option, but I guess what I want to do is I'd like the council to consider looking at adding that additional. As Council Member Sayers said, if we don't need it, we don't need it. If nobody shows up, nobody shows up, but I think the fact that it's closer to downtown, the fact that on any given day at the transit center, there's 20 to 25 individuals hanging out there that may not all be at the shelter. They're going to use a cooling center if it's right here. All I'm saying is just be prepared. The security guard that's there has got a lot to do. I don't know if he's there. He's probably gone already. But there's a lot he has to do to add additional, keep an eye on this person, keep an eye on that. I'm just saying it would make sense for us to add an additional security guard, which they get paid $16 an hour. Well, I just have a suggestion to it.

And I think in hearing the staff report and Councilman Sagal and Council, this addresses our concern. I think the spirit and context of what you're talking about, we were all on the same page. We surely want safety and security at our library. And I think that with that is... staff is hearing that spirit and context from us. And if we're in consensus with that, that if the need arises or if a situation we want, we support the resources necessary to address it. So if something were to happen where 18 or 20 were to come in, And I don't mean to get too in the aggregate, Councilman Seagal, if this addresses your concerns. We wouldn't want a response two weeks after that incident. But if we do have a group that comes in on a hot day, you have 10 or 18, and your staff makes that evaluation, that you have our support to take the necessary resources.

I already have that authority to do that. that yeah yeah that's within my my pertaining authority i think by you bringing it up it's mentioned here that's and chief odd is on the phone i think he's the one who drafted this report he wanted to share a comment okay yeah can you guys hear me okay can you hear me yes yeah okay fantastic first i want to say thank you to brandon west for

cover me while I'm on a class leave in Maryland. So thank you Brandon for covering me up there. But I just want to remind council that up until last year, our Tulare City Library was listed on the county website as a cooling center. But I did contact the Tulare County and had them take it off because obviously we weren't designating that as a cooling center. All of our other jurisdictions throughout Tulare County use their public libraries as cooling centers because obviously like we've kind of already established here today, they're readily available for the general public through multiple days and at the appropriate times when it's really, really hot or really, really cold in the wintertime. Additionally, we've also partnered with Like we did last year, I went over and talked to Lowe's and Home Depot and Target and Walmart and some of our big box stores. And I talked to those those managers of those of those those businesses and said, hey, would you be OK with me publicizing that your facility is a place for people to come when it's hot or cold? Knowing that, obviously, you know, those those places are heating and cooling places and obviously they can spend money while they're there. And every one of those businesses were more than glad to say, yes, please let people know that they can come here and get out of the hot and cold weather and spend their money here in the city to Larry to help our tax revenue. So other than the public library, moving it there just seems a lot more advantageous than the Prosperity Sports Park, especially since we're We're moving the homeless center to our permanent homeless shelter, and that's going to have heating and cooling there for our homeless population. But then for the rest of the community, that Tulare Library is very centrally located in the middle of the city, and I think it just makes it more accessible to everybody. So if there's any further questions, please let me know. Thank you.

I think perhaps with that too is, is I know we're focusing on homeless, but also if I'm correct, seniors or other individuals could come and participate with that. And, and I think perhaps in confirmation with staff, Ryan is our security guard, a security guard is stationed here the entire hours of operation. Is that correct? So if the cooling center were whatever, whatever schedule takes place, if the doors are open for whatever purpose, a security guard is here. Okay. All right. This one is authorize the relocation.

I'll make a motion to authorize the relocation of the cooling and heating resilience center from Prosperity Park to the Tulare Public Library in accordance with the recommendation of our fire chief.

I second it.

Before we take a vote, Mr. Mayor, I just want to understand what the city manager's understanding of this item. So in other words, the things that I've brought up, I just want to get an understanding of what he plans to do.

so even though council doesn't appear to be voting specifically on those items what what i have heard is there is a concern about uh advertising it more which we're committing to doing that's easy cheap and no problem um there's a desire to make sure the bathrooms are up kept and that if there's a problem uh requiring additional security that we you know move forward with making that happen so i have both of those things under my authority i'll have a meeting with executive tomorrow to talk about that and if we find ourselves in a situation where we need to pull the trigger to uh bring on additional security we'll do that otherwise we won't and you'll notify the city council in the event that that is done yeah happy to thank you okay we have a motion in a second all in favor aye any opposed

Okay, moving forward to item 8.10, and I need to pass the gavel over to Vice Mayor Harrell on 8.10. I need to recuse myself from this.

Mayor Harrell recusing himself on this. I don't believe he pulled this item.

Yeah, we did.

Did you pull this item? He pulled it so that you couldn't vote on it until he left. So now it's available for you to vote. So it can be a motion.

We can take a motion to accept 8.10.

I'll second the motion.

Okay. All those in favor of accepting 8.10, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries 4-0.

yeah.

Okay. Yes. Moving on to item 9.1, which is a public hearing, the active transportation plan adoption. And Stephen will be presenting that.

Good evening, Mayor Sherwood, members of the Council. The item before you was a request to adopt the City of Tulare 2026 Active Transportation Plan. The consulting firm TJKM was retained in order to assist with the preparation of the ATP. Tonight, I would like to introduce Ruta, who is the Vice President with TJKM. You may remember Ruta from a previous presentation. workshop that was held with Council in October. And Ruta returns here to provide a presentation on the Active Transportation Plan. Following the presentation, myself, Mario, Naya, and Ruta would be available to answer any of your questions.

Good evening.

Good evening, everyone. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council Members. Thank you for your time this evening. I know it's kind of late, but I'll try to keep it short. Agenda for today's presentation, why do we need ATP active transportation plan? What are the visions and goals for Tulare active transportation plan? A little bit recap on the collision data as well as the analysis. I also want to go through the high injury network that was derived based on the collision analysis that we did. What we did for public engagement and collaboration, also we do have a proposed pedestrian as well as bicycle facilities. that has been added to the existing facilities that we have today. And then because we have so many proposed projects, we definitely want to talk about implementation and the funding that is available out there. How do we go about going after the funds so that we can implement these improvements that we have identified? And then we can open it up to Q&A. Quickly, why do we need an ATP plan? We want to make sure that we promote walking, biking, and make transportation accessible for all modes of transportation. We also want to make sure that we improve safety and reduce collisions, especially for modes like involving pedestrians as well as bicycles. We want to close gaps that are there today. So if there is a gap in sidewalk infrastructure or pedestrian infrastructure or biking infrastructure, then we want to make sure that we close those gaps. We want to support healthy lifestyles for both walking and biking so that people can walk to park schools rather than taking their cars there. We want to prioritize investments and make sure that They are equally invested in underserved communities as well as disadvantaged communities. We want to provide accessible infrastructure for all ages and abilities, reduce vehicle trips, promote more pedestrian and bicycle activities, and then coordinate this implementation plan or effort, as I mentioned before, so that we can go after funding. And one of the most important thing is also that ATP does have a funding mechanism and they do need this ATP plan to be updated. And this is a living document. So it's not all said and done. We have to revisit in a few years, like three to five years, and come back and see what has worked for us, what has not worked for us, and make those adjustments later. We did go through vision and goals of Tulare ATP, and as I mentioned before, not going to read the entire vision statement, but we want to make sure that we do have a well-connected pedestrian and bicycle facility throughout our city so that we can bridge that gap. And then we did identify eight goals, safety enhancements, connectivity and accessibility and comfort, equity and inclusivity, promoting walking and biking, education and encouragement and enforcement, supporting healthy environment through sustainable transportation. Also collect the data from time to time and do performance measures, measurements on these investments that we do for proposed improvements. And then actively and effectively implement active transportation projects and programs. I had kind of gone through the collision analysis in my previous presentation also, but I just wanted to kind of give a quick recap. So throughout the city, we did see that we had 238 collisions that occurred on city streets and 58 collisions occurred on state route. When I say state route, we are including 137, which is Inyo, Tulare, and a little portion of M Street and Mooney. But we wanted to take a look at it because it is the main spine through our city and there are a lot of collisions. As you can see, we have 20% of the collisions occurring on state routes. So we wanted to kind of do an analysis for city separately from state routes so that we exactly know what's going on.

99 also?

We did not do 99.

What about 65?

No, no 65 either.

65 is within the city.

Oh, 65, Mooney is, yes. Yes, we did 65, sorry. Sorry, there are so many names to 137. Oh, sorry. So I kind of wanted to highlight on this that if you look at the collisions that involve pedestrians and bicycle, you kind of see that there is approximately 23% of these collisions that involve ped and bike. Here are the maps that show where these pedestrian and bicycle collisions have occurred. So on your left, you see all the collisions that have pedestrian mode involved in a collision. And to your right, you see that bicycle collisions, sorry, bicycle mode is involved within the collisions. As I mentioned before, we did look at the collisions on state routes. As you can see, there are a total of 58 injury collisions, 48% involve complaint of pain, and 22% fatal collisions. With 9% severe injury collisions and 21% visible injury collisions and also in this case, as you can see, we do have approximately 23% of collisions on state route also involving pedestrian and bicycle modes. I would like to mention that this data is for years from 2019 to 2023 so five years worth of data and at that time, that was the most latest data that we had so we kind of use the data from January of 2019 to December of 2023. Again, the collisions that have pedestrian mode involved is on your left, and then the bicycle mode involved, the figure is on your right. High injury network, we did look at high injury network and we thought that it would be good to separate out the high injury network for pedestrian mode as well as bicycle mode. So as you can see that we do have state route, SR 137, that is common between the two modes. And then for each mode, we do have four corridors that are identified as high injury network. For pedestrian, it is Braxley, Blackstone, J Street and K Street and then for bicycle network, we do have K Street, Bradsley again, F Street and D Street. Here are the two maps. Again, on your left is the pedestrian and on the right is the bicycle. It shows exactly where the corridors are. We also looked at what is the existing bicycle network that we have. While doing that, we looked at the limitations of connectivity, if there were discontinuous existing bike lanes, what were the classes that we have identified, class one, class two, and I will go through what is class one, class two, and class three in a little bit here, and if there were any gaps. But as you can see, in total, we have today 25.14 existing bicycle facilities within our city. that include Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 bike routes. Class 1, as you can see on the left-hand topmost corner, it says multi-use path. It's a separate path by itself. It can be used by bicycles as well as pedestrians. Class 2 bicycle lane is stripe bike lane. It does not have a buffer. So if you see the class, the difference between class two and class two buffer is there is a three to four feet buffer between the stripe bike lane and the vehicle traffic that that drives right along the same side. And then Class 3 bike routes is where the bicyclists are actually sharing the road with the vehicular traffic. And Class 4 bike lanes are separated bikeways. It's a little bit different from Class 2 buffer, and you see the pylons. So it does have... anything like pylons or concrete that is a physical barrier between the bicycle mode and the vehicular mode. So that's a little bit of difference that you see between the class two buffer versus class four separated bikeway. We also did bicycle level of stress analysis on the corridors, major corridors, and we saw that if you are not a skilled bicycle rider, then definitely the stress level for a person to ride the bike is pretty high. And we have identified some corridors. Just the top three being Cross Avenue, Cherry Street, and Blackstone Street. Again, I do know that Cross Avenue does have a Class 2 bike lane, but in future, if there is room later on, we could always separate it by a buffer or we can convert that to a Class 4. But still, it does rank high on the bicycle stress analysis. Similar exercise was done for pedestrian network. And as you can see that today, we do have 7.91 class one bike paths, which are used by pedestrian as well as bikes. And then we do have 363.85 miles of sidewalks. As a part of the community engagement and collaboration and reaching out to the stakeholders, we did have a project website specifically for this particular project. We did have interactive GIS map where people could go in, zoom into an intersection level or a corridor level and let us know what their issues are, just in case if people cannot come out, they don't have time in their busy schedules, then we were able to incorporate their comments through interactive GIS dashboard. We also had a map-based input dashboard. We have also taken all the existing as well as proposed facilities and we have embedded that into our ArcGIS. So now Citi has a full-blown ArcGIS inventory for pedestrians as well as bicycle facilities. We did use Street Story report for getting comments from community as well and that were integrated within our proposed improvements. And then we did have a pop-up event at the community health fair. So when we look at the proposed bicycle facilities throughout the city, now we are proposing a total of 116.66 proposed bicycle facilities. Some of them are class one, like 58.09, class two is 46.14, class three is 10.01, and class four is 2.41. We did have some prioritization matrix and criteria also incorporated into this so that we can kind of decide which class would be better on certain corridors. And that also depends on the write-off way that we have through these corridors. Sometimes we do want to put a better bicycle facility like class four or class two buffer, but if there is not enough write-off way, Then it's just not possible for us to put that right right now, but we can definitely face it later on. So, based on that we do have a list of proposed bicycle facilities and this just provides you a list of them, we do want to note that some of these proposed bicycle facilities are also part of our CIP projects. Similarly, we did propose some improvements for pedestrian facilities too, like high visibility crosswalks around the school zones to increase the safety around school, new or upgrade signalized crossings or unsignalized crossings, corridor safety improvements, sidewalk gap closures, pedestrian safety lights, and trail crossing enhancements. We do have trails around us but we do need to enhance the crossing so we did look into that part too and for each of these proposed improvements we have a list of locations that we have identified kind of not going to go through the list but like for example on the first one we have 11 projects that we have identified the map on the right shows you exactly the locations that we are proposing. And in this case, we are proposing that we do look at the crosswalk improvements and have some high visibility crosswalks or RRFB stands for rectangular rapid flashing beacon. So if we can improve that crossing from that perspective, then that would be really good for us. Similar to this, there are a few other slides that I have that shows other improvements. For example, signal improvement in that we were looking into pedestrian flashing beacon upgrades, intersection improvements, adding leading pedestrian intervals or high visibility crosswalk at some of these intersections. Also looking into pedestrian countdown heads. so that a pedestrian crossing a particular intersection, they exactly know how much time is remaining for them to get from one point to another point. Similarly, we do have another slide for corridor safety improvement, which involves upgrades to your medians, installing concrete medians with pedestrian fencing, because we do see that sometimes people just cross a particular corridor mid-block crossing where there is no crosswalk, and they do end up into crashes and collisions where they lose life. So we want to make sure that we kind of avoid that and have some pedestrian fencing over those concrete medians. So we are discouraging them to cross at locations that they're not supposed to cross. Sidewalk gap closures. Again, a couple of locations that we are proposing that we should look into sidewalk gap closures. Pedestrian safety lighting. Again, we do have six corridors that we are proposing that we should upgrade the pedestrian safety lighting. And then trail crossing enhancements, looking into crosswalk lighting, RRFBs, signage, proposed improvements that will help to enhance safety at the trail crossings. And then we do have some citywide programs or projects that we have identified. And the reason is that we want to make sure that we keep a track of everything that we are implementing and what needs to be implemented in future. So we think that if we can incorporate like sidewalk gap program, pedestrian lighting program, Trail Crossing Treatment Program, Mid-Brock Crossing Program, then that would really help us to identify some new projects, look at the benefits of the projects that have already been implemented and see what else can be done in future. And here are some funding programs that are available out there. We have federal funding options. We have state funding options. We do have options to go after grants from regional as well as local funding programs. So we have listed all of those and we can go after these grant applications and see if we can get funds to implement some of the proposed improvements that we have proposed. And with that, I would like to open it up for Q&A.

Yes, thank you for your presentation. What I'd like to do first, please, I'd like to open the public hearing on this item. And then as well, that will incorporate any of the public's comments, perhaps with councils. So with that, I will open the public hearing comments related to the public hearing are limited to three minutes per speaker or otherwise extended by council and for those attending remotely, you may press nine on your phone or raise your hand in the webinar. This is for the active transportation plan and adoption. Is there anyone in chambers who'd like to speak on this? Mr. Scheinman, welcome to come up. Good evening and welcome.

Thank you, Mayor and Councilman. Mr. Mondale, I just had a couple of questions with the stats. I didn't see them there. On the collisions and accidents, Were there statistics on how many of the victims were maybe impaired under the influence? What were their ages? Do any of these involve children that were unsupervised? Or did we take into account maybe these were seniors that needed supervision that were out and shouldn't be out? That's all. Thank you.

And with that... if you have that question logged. And then when we come out of the public hearing, I'll let you address that question. Anyone else in chambers have questions on this item? In fact, do we have anyone on phone or webinar? Okay.

All right.

I will close the public hearing. And I think first off is I'll give you the chance if you'd like to address the public's question, and then I'll open it up to council.

Yes, we did have all those attributes and that was looked at. So we exactly know the age as well as if the attribute for that particular collision is present, then that was accounted for in our collision analysis. So all the aspects that he said, we have looked into that.

Does the report note that? Yes.

Yeah. The detail of collision analysis does bring that out.

It would be within an appendices to the report. I think it would be found within an appendices to the report.

Can we get those appendices from staff?

Yes. It may not have been distributed. On the website, it just wasn't distributed.

OK. All right. But Mr. Scheinman, as I said, that information is in the report. And then we have your information. We can get that information to you if you'd like.

Thank you very much.

Council members, do we have any additional questions? Comments? Councilman Seagal?

Thank you for the presentation. A couple years ago, I brought an item to the city council to try to restripe and paint green, like other cities, some bicycle lanes in my district. particularly off of West and off of Tulare Avenue. I was told a year and a half ago to wait for this study to take its course. I'm glad it's done. But I was a little disappointed not to see West or other streets in the final proposed projects. And I did see Barsley, but not West. I guess the questions I have are more on Exhibit F. that lays out, apparently, I think in the staff report, if I'm wrong, it said that some of the potential costs of some of these projects would be listed in, but I didn't find any money associated with any of these projects. I'm trying to recall where they are in the CIP, and that maybe some other staff could answer that. But I think for me, what I'm interested in is what kind of recommendations are there to get this thing going? In other words, you know, for me, I've been waiting two years just to add a stripe on West between Tulare Avenue and Cross that seems to be missing the bike lane stripe and wanting to paint some green greenery. I think I even got as far as getting some money in the budget. I think at one point the mayor helped me with $50,000. You know, I brought this up for the West side and everybody else had chimed in and say, Hey, what about our district? Hey, so now that we're finally here 2 years later. I'm trying to figure out, like, I don't want this to kind of sit on the shelf. But I'd like to see what kind of ideas are there for some implementation. Of some of these recommendations, I mean, I don't want to wait another 2 years to get. West striped. which all it takes is some paint to go out there and stripe it. So that's kind of my big question to you is in the study, what kind of implementation? I learned a lot. It's a great study. I encourage the public to read it, look at it. I learned the difference between the class one, safe bicycle lane, and then you put your hands, you put your life in the line on the class three, right? Because you're sharing the street. But, um, so that's my big question, you know, under the city manager and the other staff is okay. We got this study. What are some ideas? I mean, I would love to have a study session on this if possible. But again, I've been waiting for 2 years to get a stripe on West for a bicycle lane.

So, um, I'll, I'll sort of say it this way. You know. You have to get the ATP plan completed and adopted 1st, right? Because the ATP plan is going to be the thing that's going to. House all of the potential proposed projects and have the data and the analysis behind them supporting them. Right? So it's not a. Nilly willy political decision, let's just go out and stick something here, stick something there. There's a methodology and a process. that's behind it and the justification. Because as soon as we go out and start striping stuff and somebody gets hurt, then we also get served with a lawsuit and the attorney's going to say, where is the justification for these lines you painted on the ground? We're going to point now to the ATP. So step one is get the ATP done. Step two, I would say is, assuming you guys adopt it, Then staff will go through the process of start incorporating the ATP proposed improvements into projects. Right? So we have projects that might be a street project somewhere. That now currently is just the resurfacing and do some water sewer lines. But now, if you adopt the plan, we say, oh, but that plan also included doing some bike lanes and striping. So we go back and say, hey, can we incorporate that into the project? It might increase the cost of the project. And that would have to be something that we would come back to council with in the future. As we go through budget workshops in the future and or the strategic planning session, or if we schedule a special meeting to sit down and say, now that the ATP has been adopted. What are councils additional priorities if they differ from the ATP or. Does it want us to go out now and do this project that's already adopted? It's kind of the same thing like we did a downtown master plan. We adopted a downtown master plan that identifies projects, and then over time, we start working to implement those projects through the budget process. Unless staff has any other input, that would be my thought process.

Yeah, I couldn't find Wes. Is Wes Street in the proposal?

Yes, it is, but it does have existing class too right now.

It does have it, yeah.

Yes, but we are not proposing that that class to be converted because if there are right-of-way issues, there has to be a few more other studies needed before we can even stripe that because we would think that it is only two additional feet of buffer or striping. It's not... that you have to have some trade-offs in that, and then we have to look into whether we want to take that trade-off from, I don't exactly remember if West has parking or not, but say parking, or if there is a travel lane that is 12 foot, then the trade-off would be taking away a couple of foot from there and seeing whether that would work for us or not. So but there are sorry, just to also answer your other questions other than best, all the proposed improvements are on page number 77 that anything that is in dashed. Sorry, I forgot to say that in my presentation. Those are the proposed improvements that we are proposing over anything that is in solid, which is existing.

No, I saw that. And I think for me, it's just that I've I have just. been trying to understand why there is a bike route that runs from Barsley. I mean, there is bike lanes that run from Barsley on West all the way up to Prosperity. But that little section between Tulare and Cross does not have the striped bike lane. And it looks just like the other streets. So that's the reason. I mean, that was the genesis of my bringing this item two years ago, just to try to see why can't it be restriped. And then we got to wait for the ATP that took a year and a half. And yet, Wes is not being addressed. So I'm trying to figure out what can happen for that to be looked at. So I mean, I'm not expecting that to be done tonight. That's just a little frustration on my end is like, so what's going on there?

I think we can jump to that. And I've Doris, the recommendation is we come back and get an update to everything we've had presented on the West Tolarian Cross so we can get additional information.

And while staff is looking in depth again, the selection of projects, there's various factors and so. It's it's the priority 1st is filling in gaps where we don't have. Any bike lane, so I understand there's a small gap there. That's also by the trail. That very well could be why it's left that way, but that's something we can certainly look at. And if a lot of times where we left out corridors. The first priority is on the high injury network. In other words, do we have a lot of accidents at those locations? And then if we do, okay, how can we address it? What are the possible solutions? Then we have to look at the lane geometry, as Ruta mentioned. We work with our engineering department as well in looking at those to see what are some of the trade-offs to be able to squeeze in a bike lane here. So all that was considered. um and then obviously that's something that uh if for whatever reason it's it's feasible and was just left out and it's as simple as just striping that is something that could be included like mark mentioned as part of a cip project if i can just jump in with a segue and i think a combination of what's

Councilman Segala is asking the city managers report and what you're saying is as we come back through a review of our CIP, I think that's great that then this plan can be presented with that. Hey, here's a CIP project and here's how it overlays with the active transportation plan. And I mean, I also, I know all of us council members, things will come up that says, hey, at times, what about this street? But having this plan and having the CIP, I think Councilman Segala keeps it all on our mind now of when we do that, it allows an opportunity to touch on these projects, get updates on these projects or address gaps. Hey, the CIP is going to address Bardsley. What about this? Or if we're going to do the maintenance, I think to the city manager said of West Bardsley Avenue, we can, we're going to also put in this active transportation plan. I also heard, I think, a combination which we can get updates, and this kind of sets the stage for that, is funding. So I think the city manager said, and you talked about, so when we go to CIP projects, we have grand opportunities or others.

Can I interject?

Yeah, go ahead.

Unless I misunderstand, it's just Tulare to cross. And one of two things happened here. either it was inadvertently left out or it was intentionally left out. Can't we make a determination as to which of those two it was?

Yeah. There's an existing strike bike lane there. Some part of it is missing because of the driveways and stuff. So we can definitely look into it and get back to you. But there is an existing strike bike lane between Cross and Prosperity that you're saying.

Yeah.

There's just a little bit of gap because of the driveways and the side streets coming in.

So we will in the weekly report, give you a report out that specific issue and what we think can be done on that issue. And then if it's something we can take care of, we'll let you know, we'll take care of it. If it's something there's not, we can't take care of, we need to talk more about it, then we can bring it back for discussion.

And then the last question I had on this item, is there anything in the report that precludes us from moving forward and greening? I don't know what the proper term is, but, you know, painting green or whatever color existing bike lanes. Is there anything that precludes? I know the city manager brought up a good point about, you know, when we put in stop signs, we have to have a study. So there's no liability. But is there anything today that's precluding the city from saying, okay, we're going to paint the bike lanes between J Street and West on Tulare Avenue green. So there's nothing today other than the funding, of course, but there's nothing prohibiting us from doing that now after this ATP study is done.

Councilmember Segal, that's some sorry. So the cross avenue that you saw a couple of weeks ago, that one will actually have components, some of which will be green in the mixing zones and other places. So the adopting the ATP does not preclude that we already have some of those things in the works as we go through it kind of balancing the where's best to do those.

Right. And I guess I don't know we're in the CIP. I've been looking at the CIP because I have some questions when we get to the budget, but I couldn't find anything specific. And I believe the $50,000 that was allocated a couple of years ago in the budget for this exact issue to restribe and paint green bicycle lanes has probably been exhausted and it's not in the current budget. Right. So we would have to allocate more. if we wanted to accomplish that this year or coming fiscal year. Is that correct?

That'd be correct.

Okay.

So even though then nothing precludes it, I would like to say that once you stripe it green, we have to make sure, city has to make sure that they keep on maintaining that because bicyclists get used to having the green paint and it wears out also. So we really need to plan striping green very well before we start striping them because you have to continuously maintain them and keep it up to dated.

Okay. If there's no more questions, Council, do you have an action?

I'll make a motion to approve a resolution adopting the City of Tulare 2026 Active Transportation Plan.

I'll second. We have a motion and second for approve the resolution adopting the City of Tulare 2026 Active Transportation Plan. All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Approved. Thank you. That concludes our public hearing and information. Thank you. Moving forward, general business, 10.1, actions related to the 2026 municipal general election.

Our city clerk is going to respond.

Good evening, council. This item includes several actions related to the upcoming election in November of 2026. As required by our charter and the elections code, the city must conduct its regular election in even-numbered years, consolidated with a statewide election. This year, District 2 and District 4 council seats will be on the ballot. In addition to calling and consolidating the election with Tulare County, the item also asks that council consider placing a general one cent transactions and use tax measure on the November ballot. This measure would increase the city's existing sales tax rate from one half cent to one and one half cents and is projected to generate approximately $16 million annually in unrestricted and unrestricted general fund revenue. These funds would support essential city services, including emergency response, crime and gang activity prevention, which investment in youth activities are included by definition in efforts to prevent crime and gang activity per the discussion initiated by Council Member Sagala. Also includes public safety staffing, road repairs, clean and safe public areas, homelessness response, and protection of local drinking water sources. As a general tax, it requires approval by a simple majority of voters. The item also includes an optional resolution of intention, which would allow the council to state its non-binding priorities for how this new revenue would be used, providing additional transparency to the community. Staff recommends approval of the resolutions and introduction of the ordinance as presented. Staff also requests the city attorney assist in guiding the discussion regarding the optional resolution of intention where council can formally acknowledge its funding priorities for revenue generated from the sales tax measure. And I'm here to answer any questions you may have.

And council, if I'll just add really quick, as you look at your documents that are attached, right, you have your first resolution, which has to do with for the ease of discussion, the council positions. You have the second resolution, which is the ballot measure language. You have the required ordinance. And then the last document is the one that Melissa was just referring to, the last two pages, which is a proposed resolution of intent. And you'll notice that what staff did was we just left the line blank under Section 1. And that's what Melissa was referring to is that if council decides it wants to pass a resolution of intent, that's where we would fill in If there's any specific things that you want to say, we're primarily focused on, you'll recall that in our prior prior presentations, I have tried to stress in my opinion. The importance of using funds for road maintenance, public safety, and to address homelessness. That doesn't mean that's all we would use the mud funds for. Obviously, there's a whole list of other things and many of those things that are identified in the staff report and are consistent with the polling that was done. Um. But, you know, council doesn't have to do resolution of a 10 and it could choose to put other things in there. Um, we just, we left it blank because we, that's a, that's a council decision. The 1 thing I will say. The 1 additional thing I will say is I do encourage you if you are going to pass a resolution of intent. To add some language, it was inadvertently left off. It was my fault. I was out of town. I didn't get a chance to review this document, but you'll recall my. May 15th staff report, based on the ballot language that you see in front of you, some language that just says that investment in youth activities are included by definition in the efforts to prevent crime and gang activity, which was per a previous discussion at a previous council meeting. That's all.

Anything else from staff on that? All right. TODD BANDUCCI- Mayor, can I add something?

Yes. TODD BANDUCCI- Just on the resolution of intent, it's not required that you do that tonight. So that's an option for you to come back and think about that. The key thing from my perspective on the resolution of intent is we don't wanna use language that's gonna turn this into a special tax, which requires a higher threshold. So the language that you select, I would recommend needs to be, it can hit particular topics, but you certainly don't wanna get into, we're going to spend X amount on this particular thing, right? You wanna keep it broad. What are the council's priorities? But you don't wanna get into the weeds of, percentages of what you're going to spend or dollar amounts of what you're going to spend on certain things. You want to keep those high-level goals there and use that language.

Okay. Councilman Medeiros, do you have any comments or questions?

No, I'm satisfied with the recommendation as indicated as far as the ballot language and what's set forth in the resolution itself.

Council members. Vice mayor. Council members to go.

Yes, I just for the record. I don't know if it'll just be for the record that I say it or for the record that we take an action on it. But in regards to the tax, I understand what the city attorney has mentioned in terms of no specifics. They have percentage of this a percentage of that. or a set amount, but I do want it to bring up three things that I have consistently talked to the city manager about in regards to the tax measure. And then, you know, obviously my support for it. At this point, you know, I feel comfortable moving it forward to the voters, but, you know, another question, whether I asked my district to vote for it, is down the road, decision I make. But one of the things that I had asked that we consider as youth, and I appreciate the fact that we kind of went around a back way instead of investing in youth, we're going to try to suppress gang activity, which could be the other side of a coin in terms of trying to help kids stay on the right path. So I appreciate that that's in the language itself. But I also know that there's language regarding parks, operation and maintenance. I think one of the priorities that I hope that this council, future council considers is working hard to try to replenish the parks fund that was used to help build the amphitheater. The amphitheater is a great jewel in our city, but there were diff funds that were used to construct the park. Then I'm hoping that over the years and hopefully decades that the sales tax measure is available to us that there is a dedication of some type of funding to put back into our parks fund so that we can provide the operations and maintenance that our community would like to see in our parks. Make sure they're clean, the bathrooms are clean, parks are clean, and so forth. So that's one sort of intent, at least in my mind, that I think could be used by this tax. And then the other one, there is money, there is language in the tax measure regarding supporting businesses. I would love to be able to see some attention put on the west side of the city, like we have invested in downtown and other communities that there is some consideration and conversation about some economic development dollars. That could be invested on the West side to help grow businesses to help businesses continue to to operate and perhaps encourage new businesses to open up on the West side. You know, I am going to heat to the city attorney's recommendation to not put a money figure out there, but I would like to know that that's my intent. if I get to serve on this council when we start deciding how to spend the money. Yes, I know it's important to spend money on our streets. Definitely have no doubt that it's important to support our public safety departments, fire and police. You know, should all of it go to the homeless? No, I mean, but we definitely have a, the rest of it, we definitely have a commitment to help that community and I definitely continue to be supportive, but I think we also have to mix it up. And so for me, youth, parks, and economic development on the west side are my intention if the voters of Tulare pass this tax to come back and be a strong advocate for those things. Thank you.

Okay. I'd add to what Mr. Sagala indicated, my support, but in addition to the items he indicated, Public safety is extremely important and that's what I'm gonna be indicating to the community that is one of the primary purposes of this additional one cent tax. More specifically, what this tax does is put us on par with our neighbor to the east, Porterville. Porterville's tax is at nine and a quarter. Ours is at eight and a quarter. The people, Porterville obviously made the commitment to their community that it was worthwhile to have public safety and the other items that they support. We're a community of 10,000, somewhere in the vicinity of 7,500 to 10,000 citizens more than Porterville, and yet Porterville has a dozen more police officers than we do, and they have, I believe more fire personnel than we do. And there's no excuse for that. We as a community should commit that we value safety every bit as much as our neighbor to the east. We're the lowest sales tax incorporated city in the county at eight and a quarter. And I would call on our citizens, while I still can advocate, I guess. I think I can. Well, that's why I'm doing it now. I think it's time for us to recognize, when I first got on this city council, my predecessor sitting in my seat indicated that we had to find other sources of revenue in this community to take care of some of the problems that we have. This is one of the primary ways to do that. And I've indicated to our police chiefs and I'll indicate to fire chief and fire personnel that I'm in support of getting us to the level that we need to be, not only for the departments themselves, but for the public safety of our citizens that we represent. So in that regard, that's the primary purpose of this resolution as far as I'm concerned.

And I'd just like to echo the same concern. Without this measure and the support of our entire community, we pass up $16 million. So I think it's really important that we look at this in every citizen into Larry will benefit from passing this tax resolution this tax measure so i i wholeheartedly encourage every citizen in every district to consider the advantage of 16 million dollars coming into our community for those areas indicated which includes all of our districts and all of our desires both for youth safety and repairing our roads so i just want to encourage everyone to support it

Just one of the things that was said earlier, we said about advocate. If I'm correct, we can advocate because we're the public, the government, the city council can't advocate. You can just inform.

Yeah, typically on your own time, you can do whatever you like as a citizen. Basically, the bottom line is the city dollars can't be spent to advocate for the measure. And that includes staff time, for example, spending money on things as well. But individuals as citizens in their own right and on their own time can share whatever message they want.

Awesome. I think the sentiment as well is, and I know you'd said previous predecessors, which was cover the fundamentals. And we absolutely want to support our public safety and get our public safety at the support that our department leadership wants it to be. What does the community need? Absolutely. Funding our cops, our fire department, public safety number one with me as well. And I think the consensus of a lot of what we talked about as well. And I think for the public listening, it's, it's potholes. I think from public safety, traffic enforcement, we talked about transportation plan, but also is Mark. I appreciate city manager gave some statistics of what we've done and pothole maintenance over five years. And I share that with folks out in the community and I, People want the truck, the asphalt, the shovel, they want to see that happening of filling the potholes. Road maintenance is absolutely right there. And amongst everything that was mentioned too, and as myself, and I've shared with the city managers, we get this park enhancement. is important. It's a role that we can play in park enhancement because we can take care of what we got. We have a place for youth baseball that's private park, support that. We have youth softball, we have soccer, we have football. I mean, everything from the pickleball court to everything, it doesn't, in my opinion, is... We have an opportunity to better enhance and support what we already have and to make it better and that I think the parks and all the groups and all the people the public from senior citizens to our toddlers to use our parks. And I think the last topic, which I will just share on, which I shared with the city manager too, and I think as the public, it's accountability. And as we work towards implementing this, as was talked about, when this is in front of the voters, we get the trust of the voters and the voters approve this. And we take these measures as was talked about council members here then as I'm also I think that discussion of stronger accountability kind of like measure I has an oversight committee. What does that look like perhaps of what we can do for what we're spending on public safety and how how they said it can't be a special tax. I mean, it can't be a special designation, but I want the public to have confidence of, hey, we're voting for these key areas and accountability that it's going to be spent. And that's reflected in us passing the measures and putting that in writing up here. And that's what I look forward to us doing. So I think we all come to the table in consensus about making Tulare better, brighter, safer moving forward. And let's get together and make that happen and

and implement it can i uh i left one thing out i apologize um oftentimes we forget that sales tax dollars don't just come from our city yeah paid by the visitor they pay by they paid by everybody who comes into our community and spends the dollars so those from the outside that come in based on what we can provide in economic development hotel tax all of that goes towards enhancing our sales tax dollars that we receive. I mentioned Porterville, but Visalia is twice as big citizens wise than the city of Tulare. But if I'm not mistaken, their sales tax dollars are four times what the city of Tulare receives. So that's an anomaly. Why? Why are they four times bigger than us as far as sales tax dollars? And that's because People from outside go into Visalia. People from Tularego spend their dollars there. Dinuba, Exeter, they're drawing from all over. We have to take steps in this community to have sales occur here so that we get the sales tax. And our citizens have to recognize what happens when you drive over to Visalia and spend those dollars. That's what makes our community better. And before you go to public hearing, I mean, public comment on this, I'm ready to support what's been ended. I apologize for the second bite of the apple.

With that, I want to open this to public comment. Is there anyone in chambers who'd like to make comments on? This is the discussion of language and our approval of moving forward with the election to have the sales tax on the ballot measure.

Okay.

All right. With that, I think there's some maybe just decisions of specific items.

Well, I didn't know, was there anyone online?

Oh, I apologize. Thank you, clerk. Do we have anyone on the line? Thank you, Mark. Catching me all night.

Yeah, I think, council, we want to take these individually, you think? Yeah.

So the first item that we have, and I look to council and the clerk to help me with this, we have one is adopt a resolution calling for the general municipal election. requesting and consenting to consolidation with the statewide general election on November 3rd, 2026, and requesting election services from the Tulare County Register of Voters. I'll make the motion as read. OK, we have a motion by Councilman Medeiros and second by Councilmember Segala for calling the general municipal election. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? OK. Carried 5-0.

Read number 2, and then I'll make the motion.

Yeah. Adopt a resolution calling an election and submitting to voters an additional $0.01 transactions and use tax measure for general purposes. I make the motion.

Second.

We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item three, introduce and authorize the submission to voters of an ordinance amending Tulare Municipal Code Chapter 5.78 to increase the transactions and use tax by one cent contingent upon majority voter approval. So moved. Second. We have a motion and we have a second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item four, adopt a resolution of intention conveying the council's intended use of revenue from the additional one cent general sales tax measure.

We need to discuss this one.

Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think we added anything to it.

We haven't added any language. I took some notes from the things you said. So I have a suggestion if you're wanting me to read it, but please do so. So what I had heard general consensus was using the, and this would be going into section one where there's that, you know, that blank line that counts council would be using those dollars to support public. I'm generalizing these to support public safety. roads, homelessness, parks, and economic development, recognizing that investment in youth is also helped to prevent crime and gang activity.

I'd make the motion utilizing the exact blank, which is indicated.

I don't second that. We have a motion and a second for the laying... Can I do this in two or is we can Dennis? Sorry his motion is about the resolution. We don't have to vote separately on the wording. It's the resolution with the wording, right?

It's a resolution with the warning. Got a motion and a second.

We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item four is approved. All right.

Thank you, council.

Moving forward to 10.2, adoption of City of Tulare fiscal year 2027 operating budget.

It was coming up. We're pleased to let you know that we have a balanced budget for you this evening in our general fund. Jacob will walk you through that. We have a slight surplus. And then we are proposing to use about $1.9 million in fund balance to address our CAP projects.

Are you going to explain how we went from where we were as a deficit to where we are now?

Yes, we are.

Good. Thank you, Mr. Mondale, and thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council Members. It's a pleasure to be here this evening to present the City's fiscal year 2027 proposed budget. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our budget manager, Jacob Del Cid, for his work in putting together the information before you. Total fiscal year 2027 revenues are projected to be $200.6 million. Proposed operating appropriations are $205.5 million. And as you may recall from the last meeting, the city has many funds and that difference is not a deficit that's made up by one fund or another, it's just the accumulated net of expenditures over revenues, and the funds that have deficits or uses of fund balance do have adequate fund balance to cover those excesses of expenditures over revenues. Fiscal year 2027 projected revenues are $77.7 million, which is $4.4 million than the current year's revenues, adopted revenues of $73.3 million. Adding the small transfers in, which are unchanged year to year, the total revenues and transfers in, otherwise known as financing sources, Uh, for the current year, or for the upcoming year are 77.7Million dollars again, a 4.4Million dollar increase over the current year of 73.3Million dollars.

And we've made 3 significant changes on the revenue projections since the last meeting that we brought this to the council and I'll go over those briefly now, because I will touch on them again in a couple of slides. So the largest increase revenue projections was to our utilities users tax. We increased this projection by roughly $1.25 million. That 1.25 includes the 800,000 anticipated streaming revenue that we anticipate to collect on this upcoming fiscal year. 350,000 anticipated retroactive revenue from back collection of streaming services for the past two years. And that's been very conservative. We know we can possibly potentially retroactively collect about up to 1.6 million, but we're being very conservative in that collection. And just the base projection for the UT revenue, we just increased that by 100,000 based on current actuals and where we ended up at the same time last year. Secondly, we've increased our investment interest income by about $500,000 thanks to significant anticipated investment returns over the next fiscal year. And we just received updated sales and use tax revenue last week from our sales tax consultants, and they're projecting a slight increase of about $200,000 from their initial projections. And this proposed budget incorporates those new estimates.

Proposed fiscal year 2027 general fund expenditures are $74.8 million, a $5 million increase over the current year, adding in transfers in of $4.9 million, which is a slight decrease over the current year. Expenditures and transfers out, otherwise known as financing uses,

is 79.7 million dollars a 4.9 million dollar increase over the current year's adopted 74.8 million dollars so as mr roberts touched on salary and benefits are projected to be about 45.7 million dollars which is a 2.1 million dollar increase year over year and that's changed significantly since the last time i presented this at the last council meeting that's because i inadvertently realized that I did not move over temporary part-time wages. I'm still working in Excel workbooks, so when I'm moving things over, I forgot to move that over. Temporary part-time wages roughly account for about $1.3 million, and primarily that's for the best program. It's about $1 million just for the best program, so that accounts for most of those temporary part-time wages.

You inadvertently forgot $1.3 million? Is that what you're talking about?

I did, but I caught it. So I forgot to move it, but I did catch it. So that's, I'm glad I caught it.

There's nothing else you inadvertently forgot.

No. Yeah. No, I'm just glad I caught it. Yeah. Remember where he's working in two systems at the same time.

I was going to say, I think he's being a little overly critical of himself. We are working in a new system with a new module for this. So it does take some getting used to, but he had a lot of sleepless nights and I told him he didn't sleep so that I could.

So, but isn't best reimbursed? Yeah, but it still counts as an expenditure to the general fund. Right, so it doesn't, I mean, it neutralizes. We account for the revenue in the general fund, but also that wages come out of the general fund too. They're accounted for. So, also there have been several vacancies that have been filled from the last presentation. So those are also accounted for, roughly accounts for about $300,000. So that accounts for the 2.1 for salary and benefits. M&O expenditures are projected to be $16.3 million, which is, like I said, $2.8 million increase year over year. Internal service charges haven't changed very much. They're still projected to be $11.5 million, which is a slight increase of $77,000 year over year. Capital outlay hasn't changed. We're roughly projecting the $708,000 in fiscal year 27, which is actually a decrease year over year. Debt service also hasn't changed, and we're seeing a slight increase of about $45,000, and that's just based on our amortization schedule for that energy debt. Proposed general fund transfers out total roughly $4.9 million, which is a slight decrease year over year, but that's 4.9 does include the CIP that we're proposing tonight, use of fund balance for the general fund. Total expenditures and transfers out total about $77.9 million, which is a $4.9 million increase year over year.

So we've prepared this slide so the council may see what the city manager indicated at the opening or prior to the presentation. And that is that we have a slight operating surplus in the general fund where financing sources slightly exceed financing uses. And we are dedicating $1.9 million in transfers for CIP projects.

I touched on these briefly in a couple of slides previous, and I'll touch on them again. The significant changes for revenue include a UUT revenue increase of about 1.25. Again, that incorporates the $800,000 in streaming revenue, $350,000 in the retroactive collection of that revenue as well, and $100,000 in the base projection as a whole. Again, investment interest revenue increase of about $500,000, thanks to significant anticipated

Um, returns of this upcoming fiscal year and again, so remember. It wasn't until about last year we brought on a new invest. Well, we didn't have an investment firm, frankly. And we brought in a new firm that's starting to invest our funds for us. And so we're starting to see dividends as a result of that.

Yes, and on that subject, I should note that when the portion of the city's investment portfolio was in the inactively managed portfolio, the overall rate of return was about 80 basis points, or 0.8 of 1%. For the upcoming year, the investment manager is projecting nearly 4%. So that's a pretty significant factor. We've done some other things where we've moved some money to higher interest-bearing accounts. And we had discovered that the city had never had what's called a sweep account for its checking account. And all that is is overnight investments that the bank sends out and brings back. but you have to actually set that up. And that is also earning nearly 4% currently. So we're seeing a significant increase in the investment rate of return, in some cases from zero to nearly 4%, and in other cases by a factor of four or five from what was an inactively managed portfolio to an active portfolio. And we've also moved more money to the state's local agency investment fund, or what is commonly known as LAIF, managed by the state treasurers.

Do you have figures on what, based on the previous investment strategy, what was brought in on an annual basis compared to what is taking place?

We could certainly provide that for you.

It'd be interesting to know what the difference was between where the city was at and where it is today.

Well, for the city for the current year, I believe we were at, wasn't it 500? It's about 900 now, or close to a million. And we went up from about 600,000. But don't be too excited and think, oh, wow, we're doubling everything. Everything is great. Part of it is about how it's allocated, and that can change from year to year. We've used fund balance for a couple of years, so the amount that the general fund is getting less and more goes to other funds. So it kind of balances out. Some are increasing more than others.

And so the significant changes that we'll go over for expenditures, again, I touched on salary and benefits. A big part of it was the temporary part-time wages. We did include the Measure I annual streets transfer out this year. We done it last year too, but it hadn't been incorporated as of yet. Now it is incorporated. That's an annual amount of 200,000. That goes to help fund the streets projects. Working with General Services Department, they let me know that they anticipate being able to save about $362,000 in homeless shelter operations. And we did suspend the surface water management transfer out for a second year in a row. That accounts for about $272,000. Okay.

Okay, so as we've done before, this is simply the department by department detail, which shows you the personnel and non-personnel expenses for each department. As I had stated at the preliminary budget presentations, or pointed out, public safety represents the largest share of the expense, which is common for full-service cities, with the police budget being approximately $27.9 million, followed by fire at $12.6 million. And then after that, you've got general services and going back community services as the third and fourth in reverse order, actually.

again the overall budget for the general fund is 74.8 million dollars council member appropriations have not changed throughout this entire budget process so each each council member has a travel and expense about five thousand dollars also community improvements for five thousand dollars and just as a whole in the city council department division community arts is for fifty thousand dollars that they're able to allocate they see fit Proposed personnel reclassifications have also remained unchanged throughout this entire budget process and we are proposing reclassifications totaling right under $100,000 and those reclassifications are on the screen for your information once again. We also showed you this list of general use of fund balance projects, and they haven't changed since the last time they were shown to you. So we do have the projects here for your information with the total amounts. And on the second slide, you'll see that they totaled the 1.95 use of fund balance that's shown on your staff report as well. I know Michael's not here, but I'm sure there's some engineering staff that may be able to answer some CIP questions if you have any.

And then once again, we showed you this slide before, but again, this city has a slight operating surplus of about $23,000. And we are committing approximately $1.9 million, actually just under $2 million for CIP from the general fund, resulting in a total use of fund balance for proposed use of fund balance for fiscal year 2027 of $1.9 million. Okay. And we the Board of Public Utilities adopted the municipal utilities budget for fiscal year 27 at its fiscal year 2027 at its last meeting. The adopted budget, the total adopted budget for the solid waste and street sweeping fund is $14.6 million. The wastewater fund $29.6 million and the water fund $13.8 million.

Taking estimated revenues, expenditures, and transfers out, the solid waste and street tubing fund is expected to see an estimated surplus of roughly $709,000. For the wastewater fund, taking estimated revenues, expenditures, and transfers out, the wastewater fund is estimating a surplus of about $2.4 million. And water revenues, expenditures, and transfers out, we are estimating a use of fund balance of $1.3 million. This concludes our presentation and staff is recommending that the Council adopt the budget as presented and staff is ready to answer any questions that you may have regarding the fiscal year 27 proposed budget.

What I'd like to do real quick. Thank you for that presentation walkthrough is bringing in any public comment questions for our budget. Like to open this up for public comment regarding the 2026 2027 city. fiscal year proposed budget is there anyone in chambers who'd like to speak on this. And Clark do we have anyone on the phone. All right. And then, with that is, I will open up of Council members, we have questions Council member madaris. Council.

You said the two words that I wanted to hear, balanced budget, and a great presentation. Thank you.

Councilman Seagal? Well, I think I can help really balance it by considering that the $22,755 that are surplus just be added to a proposed budget for the cooling centers. if there is a need to have it. I mean, if we don't spend it, we don't spend it, but that way there's no... The city manager doesn't have to figure out where to get the money, but it's in the budget.

Just to make it clear, I think we've been down that road. I'm not in support of that. I would be in support of what you indicated previously, which is to add it to the park fund, I think you said, that was depleted.

Instead of spending that money and not seeing it anymore...

Why don't we add it just like you indicated to the, it was park fund. I think that he indicated.

Yeah, well, the parts when I'm looking for part of the problem. So here's part of the problem. I would have to, and I don't know if we can do this on the fly, but we'd have to have a conversation with the city attorney about. You know, those park fund dollars are originated from developer impact fees and those dollars are typically intended for. Capital projects, capacity building, not maintenance projects. I don't know. I don't think that we can't take general fund dollars and stick them in that impact fee. But I don't know that we, I don't know that it's illegal to do that, but I've never done that before. So, rather than on the fly, just see if we can wing it.

I'd rather want to, I don't want to confuse it that that Mr wants to make that motion. That's not what I'm attending. I'm intending that this would be to help alleviate any cost if there is any during the summer to address homelessness at the library or the cooling center.

I do, but the easiest way to do that if it's okay with you comes from is just add that to what's the line item budget for the city manager? Um. Yeah, it would be to add it to the city manager provision for a contingency. So it's sitting there for that intended.

That would be what I would recommend. The parks thing is a whole other future thing. And so there's two other things that I just want to bring up. I'm sorry I missed the last meeting where CIP was discussed. And I know it's not going to change anything tonight, but if I can get some answers from staff as to the Tesori project. From the math that I put together, that thing's like $6.8 million now. I know Mike's not here, but just trying to get some answers as to how, you know, that thing has really ballooned from when I remember it was almost 2.9 million. And then I think the other question I had is that from what I read, that this will exhaust our measure, our funds for a couple of years, the 3.4 million that's going into this project. Will exhaust measure our funds for a few years. Because if you look at the spreadsheet, where all the revenue that comes in gas tax measure, our general fund, all that, if you look at the subsequent years measure is gone. It doesn't appear again until 2030.

Part of that's also because we have to preserve funds for the International Agri-Center Drive project if those developers don't pay.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out like...

So we can put together an expression.

Yeah, because that's kind of popped out to me. It's like, okay, we're using Measure R funds, but they're not going to be available for a couple of years. So I just wanted to get some information because obviously, you know, it's already in there. We've already passed the... the time where we can do anything about it. But I'm just curious to see why that's ballooned to so much money, 6.8 million. And from, and believe it or not, I watched the council meeting. I even heard that it may even go up more. So I want to get a sense of whether that's the case, that that's going to go up more. Because I was sitting at my daughter's house all day, my grandkids, watching YouTube just to kind of stay in the loop. And that really caught my attention that this $6.8 billion may not be all the money that we use for Tesori. So I'm just curious on that. But other than that, those were some of the questions I had. And I appreciate the support from Council.

to roll in the surplus into the city manager's account for the cooling centers so i think one of the things clarification we're rolling it in into his account not for the cooling centers but for him to have the discretion to use if it's needed for the calling those are two different things okay

I'm going to break that out and address that right now. Is there a consensus with council, which is to take 22,000 and add it to the contingency funnel?

Yes.

Okay. We have consensus for that. The second item that I've heard as a request is the Tesori project breakdown. And I know that's been discussed. I just want to piggyback on that is as well, the city manager has broken that down, those costs. I know in our meetings, you have broken that down. And the part that I don't necessarily have all, I didn't bring my entire notebook that I have, but did walk through that. And what I understood at the end of the day, when it gets into the fundings of that is we're looking at of a net of about 1.9 million is what I was looking.

Yes.

So the other part is we're not, we're not there writing a check yet, but going through that project. And I, I just wanted to say, I appreciate is we as council has had questions and I've had questions. Mark has presented those funding sources with that and that project of the enormity, yes, of what it's taken, that it has my support with it because really when we've got the settlement and we're going to get this project done and we're looking at for possibly a net out-of-pocket of $1.9 million, great. And I think as we get into that, we'll see that. But I also, I just want to say the information has been provided and endorsed as well as the Tesori project breakdown be shared. And perhaps maybe that could be revisited in our Friday memo. um my just touching on this tonight but last meeting we did have various questions um i just had some clarification of items in the budget there was probably about 10 items that i i sent to staff i just want to understand you know line items the contingency fund was one of those questions too and uh appreciate the information we've had various uh Public input. This has been on our agenda for quite a bit. It's been in our meetings and council. I look to you. Are we ready to adopt this budget? I will do that. It's not usually the chair's position to do that, but I will make the motion for the adoption of the city of Tulare fiscal year 2027 operating budget.

And the surplus is to go. I think that ought to be pardoned.

And also point for clarification, can he do that in one or do we need to take each of those four separately? Or can we just do one that captures all four? The budget can be adopted with one motion as long as the City Attorney is good with that. So we'll do one motion as it's read in the title, essentially, but we'll incorporate the amended 22,000.

And I can read that off so we're all on the same page. And motion reads, adopt a resolution approving and adopting the City of Tulare fiscal year 2027 proposed budget totaling $205,503,980 and including the general fund operating budget. As the recommended action notes, adopt a resolution establishing the appropriations limit for fiscal year 2027, adopt a resolution establishing the position authorization resolution for fiscal year 2027, and adopt a resolution approving amendment to the city's master salary schedule. And with council approved changes of $22,000 from the, Are we doing it all? 22, 755. Okay. From the general fund operating, but to be placed an expense under the contingency fund. The city manager's contingency.

That's the motion?

That is.

I'll let the vice mayor second the motion if he's comfortable.

Second. Yeah, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? All in favor. Aye.

Aye.

Do I need to pull the council on resolution? Okay. All right. All in. Ayes. Any opposed? Motion carries for the adoption 5-0. Oh, don't get off the script yet. Thank you for being here and addressing our questions. Yeah, after going through all the budget, you kind of want a free round of waters, you know? Future agenda items, none submitted. Staff updates? Mr. Beck, how are you, sir?

Good, thank you. Nothing to report.

Nothing to report.

Nothing to report.

Nothing to report for the good of the business of the city. But although she's not here, I would like to acknowledge my wife, Jennifer, to whom I have been married for 25 wonderful years. Actually, technically, since we were married on the East Coast, it's 25 years in one day now.

But what day was it that you were married?

June 2nd.

Of what year?

2001. 2001.

Today is my 47th anniversary, June 2nd, 1979.

We're gaining on you.

Yeah.

There was a time when you were married for twice as long as we were, but we're closing the gap.

So congratulations to my wife for putting up with me.

I would say the same thing.

I'm sure Mr. Sagala would agree.

Nothing to report.

Just quickly, I just wanted to say, appreciate Thomas and I attended the Building Industry Association, mixed with elected officials. So it's great to be there with Thomas and just kind of hear about building industry issues and mingle with the community.

It was good to attend with him.

Yes.

But me being there, you ignore me.

i i thomas mentioned it sorry other council members were there as well as dennis was there too bring us home nothing to report

Just briefly wanted to let you know that I was not here at the last council meeting because I was attending the ICSC Las Vegas convention and glass attended as well and thought it went pretty well. So we have several retailers that we'll be following up with.

Nothing to report.

Just to let you know, today in the morning, our department did a cleanup in the Tulare Irrigation District. We got like 20,000 pounds out of trash. They're going to open the water tomorrow. So my employees did a great job, the facilities and everybody involved. So the streets even let us borrow some equipment to make sure that we were able to do that. That's all I have.

Manny, did you say 20,000 pounds?

Yes. You'll be surprised. I can show you pictures.

No, thank you.

Okay.

And Manny, isn't there one other thing? What about the old library?

By June 19th, it will be gone. We started today. Today, we started the whole process, but by the 19th, or somebody else will be sitting in this chair right now. So...

nothing nothing to report nothing to report nothing a nightmare mr monday just just thank you to staff and thank you to council two big lists tonight with the sales tax measure and the budget a lot of hard work a lot of hard work ahead of us but uh good night to get those those things done thank you

One thing that was left out was I attended the Leadership Tulare graduation. And the speech given that night was inspiring by the individual that did that. And I want to congratulate Council Member Sarah for what a fantastic job she did.

Thank you.

I'm right. We are going to recess to close session to discuss the following conference with rural property negotiations per government code 54956.8. And with that, we will recess to close session. We've got three. Go. We've got three. All right. No, I'm not. I can't hear you.