Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Yeah, yeah. Oh no, you're not there. Yeah, she's maybe working.

Yeah.

all the meeting for tonight for tuesday june 23rd planning commission for the city of tillery to order first item of business on our agenda is the pledge of allegiance and please join commissioner cantu in the salute to our flag

Justice Patricia Guerrero, of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Justice Patricia Guerrero, I don't know who sits in this chair, but. Justice Patricia Guerrero, it's like moving a rock okay. The next item on our agenda is public comment. Members of the public wishing to comment on any item not appearing on the agenda may address the Planning Commission at this time. State law prevents the Commission 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 on the consent calendar be pulled for discussion purposes. Comments related to the public hearing and general business items will be heard at that time the items are discussed. In fairness to all who wish to speak, public comment is limited to total of 15 minutes with each speaker allowed three minutes unless otherwise extended by the Commission. Please begin your comments by stating your name and proving providing your city of residence. Next item in our agenda is Commissioner reports and items of interest. Is there anything that you would like to speak? I'm sorry. chair did we take public comment thank you public comment is now open is there anyone who would like to address the commission okay commissioners anything you would like to discuss at this point no um just a small update um we the historic preservation committee met

a week ago, two weeks ago, it all blends together. And I'm excited to share that we had an owner initiated application for residents, which is new. And so I think staff is working on the complete application and we anticipate it being brought before the commission pretty soon.

Great. How exciting. Yeah. Anything else? All right. Next on our agenda is a consent calendar. All matters listed under the consent calendar are considered by the Commission to be routine and will be enacted in one motion without discussion. I will entertain a motion to approve the consent calendar as presented. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded that we accept the consent calendar as presented. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? No. Okay. The motion is carried. Moving on to public hearing. Comments related to public hearing items are limited to three minutes per speaker. for a maximum of 30 minutes per item unless otherwise extended by the Commission. The first item on our agenda is to consider a request by Chris Jaluni to develop a 39,000 square foot commercial building that will operate as a business park with multiple tenants and approve conditional use permit number 2026 based on the findings and subject to the recommendations. I will now open the public hearing. Jonathan, this is you.

Thank you. The item before user request by Chris Angelini to develop a 39,000 square foot commercial building. The subject property is located on the East side of North boulevard and north of East to Larry Avenue. The proposed site is zoned C4 service commercial and general plan designation is service commercial. The development of a larger business park requires approval of a conditional use permit. The development will be a ground-up service commercial project that will be approximately 39,000 square feet with 25 individual tenant spaces. Potential uses include but not limited to are automotive service, equipment repair, contractor and trade services, and specialty retail operations. The project will result in an on-site stormwater basin, paved drive aisles, 145 parking stalls, loading areas, and new raised median on Mooney. landscaping and on-site improvements such as curb gutter and sidewalk the project will operate seven days per week with the following hours 7 a.m to 9 p.m the project is examined pursuant to section 15332 infill and development of the california environmental quality act Inclusion staff recommends approval of conditions permit application number 2026-10 subject to the recommended conditions approval provided in your staff report. Basis for recommendation include consistency with the general plan, consistency with the zoning ordinance existing from CEQA. This concludes my presentation. Staff is available to answer any further questions.

Thank you, Jonathan. Since the public hearing is open, we will now hold public comment. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak in favor of this project? Please come forward. Okay. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak in opposition to this project? Please come forward. All right, I'm going to close the public hearing commissioners. What do you think?

Just for clarification, it's only coming before us because it's considered a large business park.

That's correct.

Thank you.

Well, I have a couple of questions. Can someone please explain exactly what the retail is going, where it's going to go, what it's going to look like and how that's going to affect egress and ingress into the project?

Yes, thank you, Chair Miller. That's an excellent question. So there's some renderings you can see that show typically what the elevations would look like for this type of development. It's kind of considered like a light warehouse for service commercial use. In terms of retail uses, so some of them are mentioned in the staff report, some of them are more automotive. When it comes to true kind of retail, what we tend to see in these locations are things like gyms. I think we have a martial arts studio in one of them, different things of that sort. And the ingress and egress will be off of Mooney as shown on the site plan. with a large parking lot there to serve the various tenants. And keep in mind, because of the mix of tenants, staff believes that this shared parking will work sufficiently, as some uses, like auto tint, et cetera, do not have a lot of vehicle trips on a daily basis. Others may, like a gym, and even those are only during classes and select hours. So we have a number of these developments around town, notably on Bardsley. Yon Bardsley there next to the old Saputo plant and then we have some along Blackstone south of Bardsley as well. There's a pretty high demand for these in our community for mostly for small local businesses.

Okay, will there be any, for the like of word, amenities into each one of these spaces, electricity, water, that kind of thing?

Yes, it would have a full city services. Electricity would be provided as well for the tenant spaces. So this would be a brand new ground up development meeting all current code standards per building code.

Okay, and according to the rendering that we're looking at here on the screen, is the ponding basin there in the far right of the rendering, is that going to be the ponding basin?

That's correct, yeah, beyond the parking lot. And so that's going to provide a little bit of screening too from the uses. The uses, it's designed in a way so any noise that's produced at the location is kind of in the middle of the site, so furthest away from the properties. But yeah, the ponding basin is tucked there in the back.

And then the big square there on the left, is that going to be the retail space?

I'll let the applicants kind of address that if they'd like. But yes, that is a future retail space. At this point, it's speculative. So, you know, foreseeably, most of the development consists of those roll-up doors you see there. But that would be more of a true retail space, taking advantage of the Mooney frontage as it does.

There's also a required front yard setback up against Mooney where landscaping will be required that isn't completely depicted on the site plan.

okay and so as the plan sits right now the egress and ingress is that narrow um driveway up at the top that's correct it does meet the city's uh driveway standards for for the width and such and it's been reviewed by our fire department and solid waste as well for access okay and the fire department um has approved that radius there that turn yes okay

Does the, as far as the road is concerned, if the road is, there's going to be a lot of traffic here, are there future plans of widening, and would there be ability to do that?

So while Mooney State right-of-way, this was routed to Caltrans for their input. They don't have any plans in the near future to widen the road at this location. There is a proposed, in fact, it's actively going through design right now between city consultants and Caltrans for potential intersection control there at Seminole and Mooney, which is just to the north of this. But at this location, there's no specific widening proposed.

The applicant will be required to meet any requirements to dedicate any right-of-way needed to meet Caltrans' ultimate right-of-way as provided and in conditions of approval. So Caltrans is the oversight for, as Mario noted, and they have their plans for how wide this right-of-way will be in the future and the ultimate site, this site plan will be required to meet their ultimate right-of-way. It'll match the right-of-way provided to the north.

And another thing is I was just thinking about this, the way those buildings are pointed, at least the openings, that If there's work being done on a car or what have you, that noise is going to be pretty much heard by the people who live on that right next to the fence there, right? Because the sound's going to be projecting out from there.

There is a condition of approval to provide a seven-foot-tall block wall along that northern property line that should provide a fair amount of sound attenuation to the property owners to the north. look like it was notice and no comments were received we haven't received no comments and so far nobody's spoken during public comment thank you okay is there any further discussion okay i will entertain a motion on this project

I will move that we approve conditional use permit number 2026-10 subject based on the findings and subject to the conditions and resolution number 5557. And I will second.

It has been moved and seconded that we approve the project as presented. Maria, will you please hold the commission?

Vice Chair, Lemas. Aye. Commissioner Cantu.

Aye.

Chair Miller.

Aye.

Commissioner McGill.

Okay. The project passed. Congratulations to the developer. The next item on our agenda is a presentation by City Manager Mark Mondale regarding the proposed sales tax measure to be put on the ballot.

Thank you. Good evening. It's always great to see you guys before I begin the presentation. Let me just take a moment to thank you for your service. Most people don't realize you volunteer your time to do this and it's a very important role. The planning commission for all cities. So you're really doing the work of the citizens and the organization. So, thank you for that. Do I have the ability to advance?

You have it, I think we have it over here.

So I'm going to all the boards and many organizations in the community and talking about the proposed sales tax measure. I'll work us into the discussion about the measure itself. We'll talk a little bit about the budget and why we're considering the measure. So this is just our budget cycle overview. I think most of you know this information. There may be some folks in the community that do not. But our fiscal year at the city level runs July 1 to June 30th every year. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" And every year there's a very big process of working on our budget really kind of goes on throughout the entire year. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" Where we're looking at revenues and expenditures and projections and whatnot and then ultimately city council approves the budget each June and we just approved the budget for fiscal year 27 recently. And so, you know, our most important part of the budget, I would argue, is our operating budget. So you'll see in these slides, we'll talk about what our total budget is. But our general fund budget is about $73 million or so. And this explains a little bit about where the money comes from, right? So the largest chunk of the general fund comes from sales tax and property tax. And then there's other pieces of the general fund like utility taxes, TOT tax and franchise taxes. Many people don't realize that our budget's a little over $200 million. And most people would assume that I pay property taxes, that covers the whole budget. And as you can tell, it doesn't even come close to that, right? Only about $73 million out of the $200 million comes from the general fund. And only 24% of the general fund comes from property tax. Actually, sales tax is a bigger... portion of our general fund. And general fund is very important because it has the most flexibility. So all the funds we have have restrictions on them, right? Somebody might look at our budget and they say, oh my gosh, you have X million dollars in, let's say, gas tax. You should use that to go hire more police officers. Well, it's a restricted fund. You can't use gas tax money to hire police officers, for example, right? And so all of our funds have restrictions on them, except for general fund. The general fund is the fund that gives us the most opportunity for use. And you'll see a little bit about how those general fund dollars are spent. Here it is right here. So this talks a little bit about what we spend general fund dollars on. It's very common in most communities that the largest portion of general fund dollars are spent on public safety. And then there's all the different things that follow underneath that. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" You know engineering public works, I would say, public works actually is is a much bigger piece of our overall budget, but out of the general fund only about 8% is funded in public works, the balance of public works comes from utility revenue right water sewer utilities etc. And as I mentioned, public safety represents about 55% of the general fund. So you can see in this slide sort of how those costs have increased over the years. And so in our most recent budget, about $38 million in change for both police and the fire department, in total making up public safety. I would say people will say, well, how much, for example, what does it cost to be able to hire a police officer? And what I'll tell them is an entry level police offers about $200,000. That's not all their salary and benefits. Their salary and benefits are about $134,000, but you have to add the car and the gun and the vest and all the other tools and equipment that they need to do their job. So it's about $200,000 per officer. That's an entry level. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the projects. We've done a ton of projects. I've been here about four and a half years and I've been really grateful for council and staff and community. We put a lot of money into a lot of different projects. And there's a lot more that is to come and a lot more needs that we have. But we've been pretty successful in the projects we have been implementing. We've won probably five state awards and one federal award for the different projects that we have. And I could spend all day talking about these projects, but that's not really the primary purpose of the presentation. If you have questions, I'd be happy to get into those if you're interested. And here's sort of some of the upcoming challenges. So we spent about $45 million in the last five years on road projects. We're in the process of updating what's called our pavement management study. You're supposed to do it every five years. I don't think we've done it in 10 years. um that's going to be a big chunk of money to fix our roads i think it doesn't take much to drive around town and realize we have a lot of deferred maintenance it didn't happen overnight didn't happen in the last four and a half years this has happened over decades right and so we've got a lot of work to do on our roads and you can see our transportation projects just in the next four years this is 26 through 2030 we're estimating about another almost 18 million dollars But you can see, you know, about $255 million or so for all the projects in the next four years or so. But we've got some really big projects that we're going to take on. If you look at, for example, the wastewater projects, $120 million, it's actually probably more than that because we need to build an expansion of our wastewater treatment plant. We're really fortunate that we have two plants, a domestic and industrial. and we're fortunate because what happens is when you get about 80 percent capacity on your domestic plant the state requires you start getting into the planning stages to expand that plant we're about getting close to 80 percent but we have the ability to flow load back and forth between the plants so we have more capacity in our industrial plant so that buys us more time We've already done the engineering analysis for the expansion of the plant. We're getting ready to, we have to do a little bit more work and examine some of the energy consumption side of it and if there's some savings opportunities we can create. But we will go into design later this year or early sometime next year, likely. And that plant is anywhere going to be from about $120 to $160 million. So we've got a lot of different improvements coming. As I mentioned, we've got street projects. We have to do a lot of accessibility improvements to city facilities. We continue to work on our parks. We have to modernize our facilities. We have to invest a lot more in public safety. We've been investing in public safety right as we've gone in the last four and a half years. I'd say probably more that we've invested in public safety than any other time I can think of in the city's history, probably, that I'm aware of. But we have more to do. If the sales tax measure were to pass, my recommendation to council is we hire at least 12 new police officers. You need to ideally hire them in threes because of the shifts. But I think we need probably at least 12 more. For example, if we were to hire 12 more, we would match what Porterville has in terms of the number of police officers. And we're a bigger city than Porterville. So what are the challenges in doing all that? Maintaining a balanced general fund budget is a challenge. We have some falling revenues. Our sales tax revenue is starting to decline a little bit, and that's for a variety of reasons. One is online sales continues to be very popular. So this is an issue that affects everyone in the country, frankly. But I would say there's other challenges. Some of the revenue sharing on how sales tax is calculated at the state level is going to be changing, which means the state wants to keep more of the money, which isn't a surprise. And we have a lot of folks that shop in Visalia. Visalia builds a lot of their retail on the south end. not keeping up you know that's not something we could turn the switch on immediately overnight we are working on that you may have heard us talking about it building an entertainment district a lot of that is about trying to build a center so we can keep our retail dollars here and attract dollars from other places like visalia but it's it's challenging and it takes a little time to put that together and visalia has been way ahead of us they've been doing it for a long time and we've been a little maybe asleep at the wheel of course we have rising costs right public safety costs inflation everything that affects you affects the city organization pensions homelessness is a i would say in the last 10 years is a growing phenomenon i think we're doing a good job on how we manage it once that shelter opens which will be mid-july you'll see an even bigger impact and greater clearing cleaning up of the streets and clearing up some of the homeless encampments around town to me the biggest issue is the deferred maintenance I mentioned to you, we spent about $64 million in the last five years. And if I were to ask you, do you see the difference? You'd probably say no, right? We have a lot more money we need to spend on our streets. And going forward in the future, you'll see us coming with a plan of how we will address long-term street maintenance for new projects. I think we've got that figured out. We'll be creating a CFD mechanism where um the the areas in which those are benefiting from those streets will be paying more for those streets it's kind of like we have in del lago we have a lighting landscape district it's the same thing except we call it a cfd you're a lot you can't use dollars in a lighting a landscape district for street repair but you can with a cfd So new developments going forward, I think we'll be able to manage it. It's the stuff we have right now that is the big problem that we've got to figure out how to take care of. So my recommendation to council, if the sales tax measure were to pass, is we need to obligate and earmark a good portion of that money to fix our streets. Without that, it's a real challenge. This is part of the problem. As I mentioned, our sales tax revenue, we see a decline. Now, we'll see some of this change over time, especially if we build the entertainment district, if we're successful with that. But for right now, it's representing a pattern and a challenge for us going forward. So what does that mean? That means we either identify the opportunity to generate new revenue or we start making reductions in city services. And this isn't hitting us immediately right now. Right now we have a balanced budget. We have plenty of dollars in reserve. We meet our reserve fund policies. We have a little extra money. We've got about $8 million on top of our general fund reserve that we're required to have. And people say, that's great. That's $8 million. And I say to them, $8 million would allow us to replace all the streets in one neighborhood. So who gets to be the lucky neighborhood that we spend that money on, right? And how far does that go and what does it do for us? Not much. It makes one neighbor's happy, right? So we've got to hold on to those dollars and use them very wisely and invest them in something that'll get us a return. And I don't mean like invest it in a mutual fund. I mean, invest it in future development opportunity, economic development. So this is kind of what we're looking at, right? If a sales tax measure were to pass, we would be able to add more police officers. We'd be able to protect our public safety. We'd be able to repair our roads. And we would do so ensuring fiscal accountability, we have a separate annual audit that's done by a third party qualified firm and all of our audits are posted on our website, we have a site now for the sales tax measure, you can go to. If we're not able if we're not successful in this effort, then we will over time start looking at the possibility of cutting services. I can tell you some communities and I'm not a fan of this, but like, if you look at the city of Los Angeles, for example, when you, when you build, when you do a new, let's say you're going to redo a whole street, right? The cost is not only very expensive to do the street, but what makes it even more expensive is you're required by law to address all the ADA issues, which I agree with. That's an important thing, right? But many of our streets don't have, they haven't addressed all the ADA issues. So now you're getting into land acquisition, right? And doing all the ADA improvements is expensive. So cities like Los Angeles, they don't typically do big road resurfacing projects anymore. I call it modified pothole repair. They do just as far as they can go before it triggers the requirement to do everything else. And I'm really hoping we don't find ourselves in that position. We're not there today. We could be in the future. We do have deteriorating infrastructure, and we would have to look at the possibility of cutting back, scaling back, lowering levels of service. I'm not saying what that would be or how long or how much, but those are things we would have to look at. So we've done two surveys, actually. We polled the citizens. I think we had about 400 folks that answered the survey, both English and Spanish, last year in March. And that survey came back saying there was about a 70% support rate from our voting citizens for the sales tax measure. We did it again. April to May timeframe, and it was about the same results, which is encouraging. Normally, you don't see that high of polling results. You really need to have at least 51% to consider going out, but the measure at 70% is pretty high, which is, again, encouraging. So it was a statistically valid survey, and we asked the citizens to sort of rank and look at all the different needs out there, and they did that. And so the conclusions of that is it was a favorable review, about two-thirds support that there is a need for additional funds. I think there's good support for the city organization. I think the citizens see that the city council, city management, staff are making things happen, moving projects forward. Around 6 out of 10 initially support the simple majority, so about 60%. But after education, after they understand the needs like I'm giving you tonight, then that jumps up closer to about 70%. These were sort of the key priorities, maintain our 911 dispatch. We're in the process actually of upgrading our dispatch system. Right now we dispatch police out of our police department and fire gets sent to TCAD. We're gonna bring fire back in house and dispatch out of one center, which based on the study we did, we estimate we'll maybe cut upwards of about 40 seconds out of each call. And we received a federal earmark of about $700,000 to help cover some of those capital costs. Our citizens wanna make sure that we're protecting local drinking water sources, preventing crime, keeping the community safe. And as you can see, some other issues that they wanna make sure we address. This is actually when we polled and tested each of these subjects. And these were just, we tested a lot more than this. But these were the ones that had at least 51% support or higher. So you can see sort of the top two highest were maintaining the emergency services and protecting local water, preventing crime follows along with keeping the community safe. So a lot of public safety things. And then you can sort of see repairing the roads is down about 85%. so on and so forth. So you can look for yourself here at all the different things that the citizens say they want us to address with the dollars. All pretty high support there. We actually polled the hospital district tower project. As you know, the tower project has been a challenge for many years. I'm grateful that we have Adventist Health here and they're expending a ton of money in our community. trying to upgrade our services. But that tower project remains a challenge. And I know the hospital district, Tulare Hospital District is working very closely with the Venice to try to figure out how to get that done. And we've had conversations with them and they've said there's sort of a gap there. How do we fill that gap to get the project done? So we asked the question, would you support using any of these dollars towards the hospital tower project? And there was about 51% support there. Now, this would be a general tax measure, not a specific tax measure. So that means, ultimately, if it was approved, counsel from year to year could decide how to use that money. My hope is they would use sort of this analysis to help them decide how to use it. Our council, when they voted to move this item onto the November ballot, they passed a resolution of intent that said, in general, we believe we should use these dollars for public safety, for roads, for homelessness, to try to continue to manage that issue, parks, economic development. But that was very general terms. Every year in the budget process is how that would be decided. This is the actual ballot language that you'll see coming out in November. And so it'll be a one cent sales tax. So right now we are at eight and a quarter percent. That's what you pay in sales tax when you buy goods in the city of Tulare. We are the lowest sales tax of any city in Tulare County currently. The highest is Porterville there at nine and a quarter. if the one cent sales tax or one percent sales tax were to pass then we would go from eight and a quarter to nine and a quarter and that would generate about 16 million dollars a year that the city could use for all those different things i've discussed and here's you know here's the language that was you that you're going to see on the ballot measure in november This is just showing you what all the existing sales taxes are for each of the cities. I can tell you all the cities, just about all of them are talking about increasing and doing a sales tax measure. It may not be this year, but they're having, I meet with all the city managers and they're having these discussions now. I would say over the next three years, you'll see several others likely move forward with a sales tax measure. So this is kind of what the impact would be. On the left hand side, it says that eight and a quarter, that's what each per capita resident pays and what per household pays. And if the sales tax measure were to go through, this is what the increase would be per capita and per household. So from 277 to 466, from 916 to 1500. The good news is one of the things I like about a sales tax, I'm not a fan of taxation. I don't know if any of us are. But one of the things I do like about a sales tax measure, especially for a community like ours that has Highway 99 running right through the middle of it, about 20% of our sales tax measures paid by visitors to our community. So we pick up 80%, they pick up 20%. Okay, that ends the presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions you or if you want to invite public comment. I'm happy to answer any questions. Whatever you'd like. I'm happy to answer any questions. Sure. Yep.

I'd like to ask a question about this presentation. So please come forward now.

Michael lemus to Larry with the you've mentioned the wastewater being at 80% once it gets about that you have to go further if this doesn't pass and the state forces you to do it how this, how do you go about that sure.

We are not currently counting on sales tax revenue to pay for the treatment plant. Most of the treatment plant, so we've known that this is coming, you know, it's inevitable it'll come. So the city has been saving for that project. And so between our savings and between our current rate structure, and we are going through a rate structure increase, you know, you're supposed to do rate, you're supposed to do rating, not supposed to, there's no law, but ideally from the best practices perspective, you would do rate increases, or at least the study, at least every five years. because otherwise what happens if you go too long like 10 years then there's a huge increase right so we've been okay with the timing of our studies I think the last was 19 if I remember 2019. so um between the money we have saved the current rate structure and we're working on a new rate structure I think that'll probably will probably show that sometime later this year or next year we're working on that and we're talking about doing some refinancing of our debt between all those things we think we have enough money to cover those expenses

yeah i have a question um doesn't does the uh measure include any investment and sit for city youth um currently we again council council cannot

at this point in time be specific on what they want to spend the money on because the more specific you are like we want to spend 10 million dollars a year on youth now it becomes a specific tax measure and it requires a whole different voting structure to it council has talked about investing dollars in youth in fact at the last meeting when they adopted it they wanted to make sure it was clear, even though that, remember that slide I showed you where it didn't talk about youth on that slide? That wasn't something that polled very high for the voters. Council did make it clear in their recommendation that trying to eliminate and reduce gang activity includes further investment in youth. That will have to be able, you know, in terms of what does that mean ultimately, if the measure passes, that will get sorted out as we go through the budget process. now i will tell you just so you know we spend annually about a little over a million dollars on direct youth related activities and events and programming every year currently um we've had some conversations about what's missing what other youth activities should we consider but we haven't really gotten into the weeds on that yet because you know when i was growing up we had recreation

That was always right after school or about four o'clock in the summertime. So I don't know if the high school or city does anything like that or if they're planning on doing things like that.

Yeah, we do. That's a huge part of our recreation program. We have what's called the best. There's a couple of different ones, but the biggest one is the best program. And we do that in conjunction with the school system. I don't remember, I could get this to you if you like, but it's not at every school site, but it's at many of the school sites. So it's aftercare, afterschool programming for the kids. That's a big chunk of the youth programming. Okay, thank you.

I think we used to go over to Mulcahy when I was a kid and do all those things. The sales tax said there's been a decrease. Has there been an increase in seepage to Visalia or are they down as well?

Yeah. No, Visalia is doing very well with sales tax. They're over four times in sales tax generation than what we are. Now, I don't look at them specifically in terms of year over year for them. Do they see a leakage? I mean, most cities, you know, as online sales has increased, you know, online sales, you can probably consume to be 20%, something like that, 20, 25% of sales tax revenue. I'm sure they took a hit like all the jurisdictions have. But when we compare us to them in terms of their overall revenue, they're crushing it. and and it's a shame that we're so far behind because i mean i'll give you a real good example um they have they will soon have two costcos and one sam's club at least one of those should have been in our community period each costco probably generates about two million dollars a year in sales tax revenue on its own for the city the sam's club will probably do maybe just under a million dollars a year alone those five pro those three projects can generate almost five million dollars a year just from those three projects and we don't have either of them all our dollars go to them by our people shopping there and i'm not criticizing people for shopping there i shop at costco But it'd be sure nice to have one of those here. And we're working on trying to bring a project like that here. It's a challenge because we're not going to be able to bring Costco. They already built two, one in the north, one in the south. But in a perfect world, I wouldn't come to you or counsel and say, we need to look at a sales tax measure because we do it all through economic development. The problem with doing it through economic development is it's not guaranteed. Like it's slow. We can work on five projects and none of them materialize. We can work on five projects and one materializes and it can happen in three years from now, right? So it's not dependable and we have real expenses year after year right now. I'll share one other comment with you that I think is very important. My original recommendation to council was we do a half cent sales tax. Actually, we pulled both half cent and full cent. Full cent pulled better than half cent, oddly enough. I don't know why. But my original recommendation was to do a half cent. And the reason why is I don't like the idea of capping us out at nine and a quarter. Now, there's a process you can go through if you wanted to. If the city had problems in the future, it could go through a legislative process with the state legislature where it could ask to have that increase that cap. There's a lot of cities around the state. I don't remember. I think areas in Los Angeles are 11 and a quarter or more. but you would have to ask that permission versus having the right to do it. So originally my recommendation was do a half cent, which would be about 8 million a year. But what changed my mind was two things. One, the polling, the strength of the polling and the, the voters said that one cent pulled better than a half cent. But the bigger thing for me was, and this is something important to understand. Um, I have to be careful how I talk about this. Let's say, well, We got word that late last year, a hospital district outside our community was looking at passing a countywide sales tax measure. If that would have happened and been successful, right now, Porterville wouldn't pay anything towards it, because they're already capped at nine and a quarter. We're the lowest. So we would have paid the majority of the money in that sales tax measure, and that money would have flowed from our community to another community to benefit that hospital. I don't think that's a good decision for our community. And so I think when you leave money on the table like that, there's other parties that are gonna wanna come and take that money. And so my recommendation changed from half cent to one cent once I got wind that that was happening. That's still under discussion, but it's been delayed, I think for at least a year. I don't think we should leave money on the table.

Okay, I have several questions. Yes. I was not aware that we were able to cap sales activity Talk a little bit about that to 9.25%.

Sure. So we're not capping it. The state caps it, right? So there's a minimum sales tax levy at 7.25%. That's the state's money. And then local jurisdictions can add to that. But they can only add up to 9.25% statutorily without going to the legislature to ask them to increase that cap beyond 9.25%. so we would if we do the one cent sales tax we would now hit the state level cap at nine and a quarter and if the city ever wanted to do something again just like porterville right now you'd have to go to the legislature to ask their permission okay so of the of the sales tax that is collected in the city of chile how what percentage of that do we keep here

Um, so we don't keep the whole.

No, we don't. No, no, no, no, no. Seven and a quarter goes right to the state right now. We only get, we only get one, one cent currently, one, one percentage point, one cent currently. And that's, you know, the $16 million or whatever. Um, did that answer your question? I think I just did. Yeah. Okay.

So I'm talking about streets and, uh, I've heard something about a chip and seal program. So is that the type of program we're thinking about doing or something different that's more pertinent?

Yeah. Yeah. So when you, you know, I'm not a road expert. So if the city, if the city engineer was sitting here, you'd probably be embarrassed, but embarrassed for me, I think. But this is my understanding. So when you build a, let's say you build a road today under modern standards. know you can depending on the nature of the road because not all roads are the same right a neighborhood street is different than an arterial road right different compaction different base all that but you know somewhere in those road designs you should be able to get somewhere between 30 to 50 years out of a road if you properly maintain it and proper maintenance requires a lot of work annual maintenance on that road right chip sealing and you know all that stuff that you do um Unfortunately, we're in a position and I don't mean to criticize anyone. The city made the decisions, the best decisions it could at the time with the dollars it had at the time in terms of how it spent money on maintenance. Unfortunately, we have a lot of roads that have not been properly maintained. And so I suspect what the pavement management study that we're doing right now, you may have seen there was a vehicle driving around. It's actually testing all the roads. It's not ours. It's a consultant's vehicle. We just paid them to do the work. But I suspect when we get done with that, it would be wonderful if that study comes back and they say, guess what? you're not gonna have to replace all the roads you can just chip seal you can just whatever the repair work is i don't think that's what it's going to say i think it's going to come back and say many of our roads in worse shape than you think you can see the surface but you don't see what's under it you know there's cracks and water getting in you have bigger problems i think our study is going to say we have hundreds of millions of dollars of work to do not tens of millions i'm not certain of that because we won't have the study until september um but i suspect that's what it's going to say now These dollars, if they were to pass, we could use these dollars now to be aggressive at going after the roads that we could still save. We'll go and do those. And that'd be the hard thing for the citizens that understand they'll see some roads and be like, why aren't you replacing this one? You're fixing this one. It's like, because that one, we can get another 10 years out of it. We do this work right now, but then some of the roads, you know, you're going to see a lot of road reconstruction, like tearing out all the asphalt, repairing and replacing the base, putting a new road down. um i would just again now i'm getting into really into the city engineer business i would just say you know like most things over time modern materials modern methods of construction you learn lessons over time right and so um over time you make decisions about, you know, it may have been in the past that you can use less foundation for the road with less compaction. And now over time, they're like, you know, really, if you add more foundation with more compaction, you get a road that's gonna last you a lot longer, right? The asphalt mixes, what's in the asphalt mix itself really makes a huge difference on the longevity of the road. So our standards have gotten better over time. You know, I think in the old days, think about anything, right? In the old days, we used to be able to do handshake deals with business. don't do handshake deals anymore you have to have a contract right it's sort of the same thing when it comes to roads they've got more complex more legal uh more requirements i mean all the ada requirements that i just mentioned a few minutes ago now come to play where they didn't in the past right those things drive up costs yeah yep Yeah. Great question.

Thank you for bringing it up. I am remiss in not mentioning that.

about a year and a half ago we hired 12 new firefighters in the firefighter world there's something called a safer grant and that is a federal grant and if you're successful in getting that grant that grant will pay for your firefighters for three years salary benefits the whole kit and caboodle not all the equipment and supplies but the personnel we were successful in getting a grant to pay for 12 new firefighters for three years that was a year and a half ago My hope and goal is that we'll be like, we're in a good place right now in the fire department in terms of staffing level. My hope and goal here is that we can keep those 12 firefighters. If we don't have the revenue to keep them, we won't keep them. But we're going to do everything we can to try to find a way to keep them. The sales tax measure is a piece of that. If the sales tax measure passes, in my recommendation to council in terms of, I didn't show you that, in terms of maybe how to spend the money, that'll come at a later date. I've allowed, I've accounted for all those firefighters being kept in addition to the new 12 police officers. The other thing is you're right about the fire station. We are going to probably go into the design on that fire station. If the sales tax measure passes, we'll go into design later this year or the first, it'll probably be the first part of next year because we won't know until December how it does. But we've got the property. We need to design that facility. We've already gotten some rough cost estimates of it. We'll have to not only staff it, we've got to put all the equipment in there. We're probably looking at potentially buying four new fire engines if this measure passes. Those are... million to a million and a half a piece. And it take four years after you order them to receive them. So it's like, we've dialed, like I've given my staff direction. If the sales tax measure passes the next morning, I want to advertise for the 12 police officers and I want to order the four fire trucks, but we're just having to wait. Yeah. Um, we were, when I first got here, um, We have real problems across the entire organization. We had 12 positions throughout the organization we couldn't fill. Like we just historically couldn't fill them. because I didn't know all the answers, but my gut feeling was is we were, our salaries were very low comparatively. So we have done a ton of work in the last four and a half years. What we did is we went out and did salary surveys and we compared ourselves to the eight sort of cities that surround us, including Fresno and Bakersfield. They're bigger ones, but that's who we compete with, Visalia, right? And our salaries compared to those, and we put smaller jurisdictions, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake. our salaries across the organization were low in every category um some of them like 25 low comparatively all we did is bring the salaries up to hit the average so we weren't you know we weren't trying to be the highest and we didn't want to be the lowest if you're the lowest that's the worst place to be in um so we brought them up to the average we're we're almost done with that lift and now we we have better benefits than some of the organizations we have had when i first got here we had a hard time getting applications for positions and i had heard word there were a number of police officers and firefighters that were interviewing and looking to leave now i would say we are one of the choice organizations to be a member of we every time we advertise any position we get a ton of any position we get a lot of applications This is the first time our police department's been fully staffed in 20 years for our staffing level. Now, I still think we need to increase it, but for where we are, we're fully staffed. We've got a ton of laterals. I feel bad for Exeter. I think we've taken every one of Exeter's police officers just about. You know, it happens in smaller cities, right? But when we advertise a firefighter position, it is a heavy competition now. So I don't think we're 100% where we should be, but we're 90% where we should be. Yeah, thank you.

I have a question. I know that the mayor of Hamford did an op-ed, and the state has been looking at rating the treasury, basically, of different cities that are along the high-speed rail. We're outside of that realm?

Yes. Okay. Yeah, well, right now, as far as yeah, none of them have contacted us. We don't have, you know, a stop in our community, right? So yeah, I've read some of those articles. We're aware that that's going on. No one has contacted us about it. I don't know if at some point they brought in their scope of who they're looking at. Obviously, we'd be seriously opposed to any of those kinds of efforts. um you know we have real needs at home that we need to take care of and it's time uh for us to fully take care of our needs right so thank you thank you so much

Yes, thank you again, the city manager. Just glad we have the majority of our commission here to hear this important presentation. And we sounds like we may have another application coming through for the next planning commission meeting. As soon as we know, we'll send out either the confirmation that we're having the meeting on the 14th or 17th, second, second Tuesday in July. And if not, we'll send out the cancellation because you know, summer travel plans just to be considerate of all your your schedules.

This Friday night at Sunwell Park. The Beach Boys, if you're interested. And Saturday night is something about the 90s. I forget what it's called. Vanilla Ice.

Do you remember who's on that one?

Color Me Bad. Color Me Bad, Vanilla Ice, and one other group. Who is it? Black Sheep. I know who Vanilla Ice is. I don't know the other ones.