Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

I'm ready. Good evening and welcome to the City of Tulare's September 16th community meeting regarding the proposed Measure A sales tax measure. This evening we're going to walk you through a series of slides. and kind of explain to you our budget process, our city's financials, why we're pursuing Measure A, what the funds would be used for, providing information for everyone so they can better understand what's being considered. So first we're going to talk a little bit about the city's budget cycle. And our cycle is really a year long cycle, to be quite frank. Our budget runs from July 1st to June 30th every year. But the reality is, is we're constantly working on the budget. We're always looking for ways to save money, to make sure we're meeting our expenses and to raise additional revenue through various means, especially in terms of attracting new private sector investment and job creation. And so once the budget's adopted in July and October, the city manager will report to council on our fiscal condition in february we'll do a mid-year budget review to see where we're at and then we start developing the budget after that and in may we start having public hearings we'll have a number of public hearings to go over different aspects of the budget the city has a over 200 million dollar budget in total but what we're going to focus on tonight is a portion of that budget which is the general fund And then in June, city council will adopt a budget and it'll take effect again, July 1st. So first we're gonna talk a little bit about our operating budget. So as I mentioned, the general fund is a portion of the city's total budget. And those revenues right now are around $73 million. And so many times people will say, well, I pay my property taxes and that should cover the entire cost of all the operations of the city. And that's not true. As I mentioned, our budget's over $200 million in total, of which 73 million is the general fund. And of the general fund, about 24% of that is made up of property taxes. The balance of that general fund is made up of sales tax, utility taxes, transient occupancy tax, franchise taxes, and some other miscellaneous taxes. And so you can see by this slide, how important, for example, sales tax is to the city that it is the largest component of the general fund currently. And then our next slide talks about our expenditures. So currently we're looking at about $70 million in expenses. And you can see from this slide, sort of how those expenses are broken down by department. You can see about 38% of our expenses are attributed to the police department and 17% to fire department, right? So public safety is obviously a very big priority for us. We have a number of other departments, community development, engineering, general services, administration, et cetera, One of the things you don't see in here, you see a small piece of it under engineering and public works, which is about 8%. Actually, public works is a much bigger portion of our budget, but that's under the utility portion of our budget. It's not really under our general fund operating budget. So a small piece of public works is general fund, and the majority of it is under our enterprise funds and our utility. Now we're going to spend a little time talking about public safety. As I mentioned, it is really the largest component of our budget when you combine police and fire together. So about 55% of our total general fund is funded for public safety. And as you can see in this slide, our city council continues to invest in public safety. We've increased our spending from about 32 million back in 23 to 38 million or so in 2026. And that is because council not only has provided more police officer positions and firefighter positions, but of course the costs of all those positions go up every time we hire a police officer for example we typically hire three because there's three per day or there's three shifts then you have to provide vehicles and bulletproof vests and firearms etc in fact to hire one police officer today at an entry level that cost runs about two hundred thousand dollars per officer. That's not their salary. Salary and benefits is around $134,000, but the balance of that expense is for all those other things that I had mentioned just a minute ago. And now we're going to talk a little bit about some of our key completed projects that the city's been working on over the past few years. Here's just a few different projects that we've been working on. These are some of the projects that I think you've seen that we've showcased. Some of those are downtown, for example, our Zumwalt Park project, which is an award-winning project. We won the best park in the state award from CPRS. Our T-Biz, which was the former vacant courthouse building that's been converted into a business incubator. and a maker space. We have built our homeless shelter. You'll recall going back five years ago, we had a number of encampments throughout the city, most of which were along the railroad. In fact, one time I think we had almost up to 400 homeless individuals and encampments on the railroad. We have since cleaned all that up. And it was funny, the other day I had a citizen talk to me and they were concerned about seeing a single homeless person in the downtown area. And I thought to myself, I remember when the call came in or the calls would come in and say, we have seven encampments in the downtown made up of multiple homeless people. And now we're talking about a single homeless person. So, uh, you know, we've made a lot of progress there. Our shelter just opened a few weeks ago. Uh, we built an encampment of course, for the past couple of years where we moved those individuals off the railroad tracks. But we're very proud of our efforts. We've had a lot of success. We've actually put about 140 homeless individuals into permanent supportive housing, put them back into society. also have our canine bane dog park which is the city's first dog park and we have a a series of a downtown master plan that was adopted which is also an award-winning document and we've done a lot of downtown building rehabilitation projects so we have a downtown that's starting to be very thriving now i want to talk a little bit about our capital improvement projects and some of our upcoming challenges In this slide, you're going to see that over the next five years or so, we've got about $255 million in projects programmed to be completed throughout the city. We look at everything from, you know, when you look at this slide, you can see that the biggest one is our wastewater projects at about $120 million. But we have all kinds of other things listed. Our transportation road projects at $17 million, water projects at $68 million. And so these are all funded through a variety of means. There's usually general fund dollars in a lot of these projects. When you talk about wastewater and water projects, those are typically funded with development impact fees and or utility user rates. But you can see that's a pretty big expenditure. We have spent, for example, in the last five years alone, about $64 million on road projects. And so when you look at our roads, for example, many of our roads are in very difficult conditions. They're not in great shape. And so we spent $64 million in five years, and it's hard to see the difference there, right? Road projects are very expensive. I tell people all the time. you know, to do a single subdivision to completely reconstruct the roads in a subdivision. Nowadays, let's say it's about a 200 home subdivision. That's like six to $8 million, right? So it's very expensive and that's the cost everywhere. That's not just in the city of Tulare. We have some upcoming improvements that we're working on. We're really focused on our streets. We need additional revenue for the streets. In fact, that's one of the primary David McGoldrick, M.D. : intended uses of the sales tax dollars if it were to pass, we have a lot of work to do we just are in the process of completing a pavement management study. David McGoldrick, M.D. : Those are studies that typically you want to get done about every five years or so I think the city hasn't done it in over 10 years so we're just updating it now. Unfortunately, as I think we expected, that's come back to say that we have almost $2 billion in road work to be done. Now, the reality is we're not going to be able to do all of those roads. And every city is in that condition because there is not a statewide funding mechanism that will help adequately pay for all the road work that needs to be done in the state. But we do have some local dollars. We obviously have gas tax dollars and measure our dollars that can be used, but they're not enough. Having a dedicated source of dollars like sales tax dollars, through Measure A would really go a long ways to help us fix our roads and get them into better conditions. We have a lot of needs for improving accessibility in our facilities. We have a lot of public spaces and parks that we want to improve. We have parking areas and a lot of our city's facilities need a lot of work, a lot of re-roofs, a lot of energy upgrades. and we were trying to do many other things like create a vibrant arts cultural program throughout the city so there's a ton of needs out there so what are our core challenges well i would say maintaining a balanced general fund budget long term we're doing fine now we're able to pay all of our bills we have adequate funds in reserves for all of our reserve accounts in fact just last night at city council we had our 2025 audit prepared and presented and It was a, an unqualified clean audit. And they were the auditor who's an independent firm that comes in and evaluates all our books. That's like a six month process every year, uh, indicated that we have, um, adequate reserves in all accounts, which is great. However, the challenge is going forward. We also have five master plans that were recently adopted of which those call for about 1.5 billion in improvements. We've got the roads, which is separate at about 2 billion. We have a lot of needs, a lot of expenses, and all the costs given inflation keep going up. And on top of that, unfortunately, we have falling revenues. As the state pushes forward with electrification, we are going to have less and less gas tax revenue coming in. And there hasn't been a replacement revenue stream identified yet by the state for that. And we have falling sales tax revenue. And I'm gonna explain that a little bit more in detail in our next slide. And of course, as I mentioned, we have rising costs, not only related to inflation, but we need to fund more monies into public safety. Homelessness is an issue that we have to continue to deal with. We have a ton of deferred maintenance. I think the most obvious is our streets. But as I mentioned earlier, a lot of our facilities, our roofs, Our buildings are old and need to be rehabilitated. And so we have a ton of deferred maintenance throughout the city. This slide talks specifically about sales tax revenue. So our current sales tax revenue is projected about $22 million, which is a 3.5% decrease compared to last year. Some people have asked me, why is that? And I would say there's probably, you know, the city's growing. We're one of the 10 fastest cities in terms of growth in the state, one of the 10 most affordable cities in the state. But, and so we do have growth, which is great. We're doing maybe 400 to 600 homes a year. The problem is, a couple of problems. One is the way sales tax is calculated at the state level is going through some changes. There's a big debate about online sales, right? So not only has online sales taken about 25% of the revenue we would normally receive from our storefront retailers, but who gets that money is the big question. Is the community where the person in their home placed the order, do they get that money? Or is it where the distribution center is located that fulfilled the order? Does that community get the money? And even though right now there is a process by which that's determined, that's in litigation. And so we expect there to be some changes there. consultants are advising us that that's probably going to continue to trend to go down for several years and then it'll flatten out and perhaps come back up over time and there's a big debate it's not only the communities debating between each other but the state also feels like it should get a larger portion of the sales tax revenue I think one of the other challenges is, and to be quite frank in Tulare, is we have a lot of folks that shop outside of the city of Tulare. And I'm not criticizing our citizens for that. I do that as well at time. Part of that's because we don't have all the retailers here that we want. And part of that's because Visalia has been very aggressive in building retailers, especially on their southern border. And I'm not criticizing them for that either. but um a lot of our folks shop in visalia and how do we know that we know that for a few ways one we've done some studies that show we've got about a 300 million dollar leakage or so in dollars that are leaving our community going annually to visalia that means if we had those retailers here the money would stay here two visalia is about twice our population but they're over three and a half times our sales tax revenue generation. That doesn't mean that Visalians are super consumers. That means that people are coming into their community to buy goods, right? And so that's one of the big challenges that we have going forward. So what does that mean in terms of a constraint? That means going forward, we either need to look at generating new revenue sources new revenue streams or make significant reductions to city services. And again, I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow. I'm saying that over the next five years, that's exactly what we're going to have to decide to do. If we're successful passing a sales tax measure, we'll be able to maintain and improve our level of service and we won't have to make cuts to services, city services. But if we do not, then we will be looking at having to make cuts. And I don't know what that answer is yet. I'm not saying know we're going to eliminate the police department but an example might be that right now we go out on all kinds of calls there could be certain types of calls let's say they're just property damage calls that we might not go out on right so that's the way you have to start thinking about things is is what kind of cuts do you have to make and unfortunately in some cases you have to lower level of service So here's this slide kind of lays it out for you. It's like, these are the choices, right? We could adopt a local sales tax measure and continue to protect public safety and repair our local roads. And we could do so by ensuring accountability. Again, we have an independent auditor that comes in every year. There's very strict requirements for all of that. So they make sure that we're spending the funds properly. Or we can talk about cutting services. What would the impacts be to public safety? Do we allow our roads to continue to deteriorate? In fact, I can tell you there's a lot of cities that actually are doing just that. When you do a major road reconstruction project now, you're required to bring the entire road, both sides of the street, up to all the ADA standards. So you have to go back in there. Many times there's no sidewalks on one side of the street, or they're not wide enough, or they don't meet the cross slope requirements. They don't have the curb cuts and pavement. dimensional requirements, grading requirements. That could be very expensive, especially if you have to acquire right of way to do all that kind of work. So there are some cities that have decided they're just not gonna do any road reconstruction anymore. They're gonna do what I call an advanced pothole program. So when you fill a pothole, you don't have to upgrade the entire road. And so if you cut out a section of the roadway, let's say it's a 50 by 100 swath of asphalt, that doesn't necessarily trigger you to have to upgrade all the ADA requirements. So there's a number of cities, city of Los Angeles has made this decision that they're not going to do any new road reconstruction. They're just going to do what I call an advanced pothole maintenance program. And, you know, so those are the kinds of things we'd have to talk about as well as, you know, potential community services. And I don't know what those all are right now. But we'd have to look at every one of them very closely. So right now I'm gonna talk a little bit about our budget priorities and some survey results that we have in terms of the ballot measure. We hired a firm, a firm that specializes in polling last year. to do a survey when we were first considering this possibility of floating a sales tax measure. And we were really surprised by the results to be quite frank. They came back very positive. About 70% of the voters, I think out of the 20,000 some odd voters, they pulled, I think four or 500. So it was a statistically accurate sample. And about 70% of those voters said they would support a sales tax measure. And we tested it several ways. We asked, would you support a quarter cent, a half cent, a three quarter cent or a full cent? And actually the full cent passed at the highest rate. And we asked them kind of what things would they be thinking we would use those dollars for? And I'm going to review that slide with you in a few minutes. And we asked questions like, how do you feel about the city? Do you feel like the city is doing a good job? And it came back resoundingly very positive. They felt like this current city council and management team are getting things done, that the city is moving forward with things that have been due for many years. And they feel positive that the city is moving in the right direction. And then we also did the survey this year. Um, and it was, I think, April to May timeframe this year, and the results came back very, very similar. And they think that the city, you know, the citizens have a favorable favorable view of the city. They perceive that there is a need for the additional funds. Initially about 6 out of 10 supportive, which is a simple majority. That's about 60%. But after education, like what we're doing tonight, we're trying to help folks understand about this measure, right? We're giving them information that that jumps up to about 70%. So what are some of the key community priorities that came out of that survey? Well, maintaining 911 emergency fire and police response, our dispatch service, Protecting local drinking waters, preventing crime and gang activity and keeping our community safe. That's all basically, I would argue, public safety stuff. Right now, we're actually in the process of upgrading our 911 system. We have a police dispatch out of our police department and a separate fire dispatch out of a third party vendor. And we're in the process of bringing those together under one roof with an upgraded system. We did an independent study that determined that they believe that once we have that system in place, we should be able to carve out almost up to about 40 seconds per call in terms of our response time. So 40 seconds is significant and that could save additional lives. We are working on protecting local drinking waters. The city's been doing a really good job over the past 10 years or so in terms of And our citizens have been doing a great job in terms of water conservation, in terms of building above ground water storage tanks with new development. And so we've been sort of curving where we were before, where we were sort of really depleting our groundwater resources. We're doing a good job of working to replenish them. We still have more work to do because we have about 32 wells in the city. sort of this cone of depression under the city that we need to keep dumping water into and so we've been working with uh several of our partners on a long-term urban water strategy document we presented it to council a month or so ago the preliminary findings we've come up with three or four strategies of how we can continue to ensure that we'll have good clean potable drinking water for years to come but it's all going to cost money to implement and then i think some of the other priorities were providing fire paramedics and equipment to improve medical response time and ensuring fiscal accountability. I'll talk about fire for a minute. About a year and a half ago, the city council approved us hiring 12 new firefighters, which has really been great. But we were able to do that through what's called a safer grant. So the safer grant pays for salary and benefits, 100% of salary and benefits for three years. And we're a year and a half into that grant. If the sales tax measure passes, we'll be able to keep all of the 12 firefighters. If it does not, I don't know the answer to that question. We'll do everything in our power to do that, which might mean we have to cut in other areas. I don't know that answer yet. I'm hoping we aren't faced with that decision, but that's the kind of decisions that we'll be facing if we're not successful in the sales tax measure. This next slide I think is very helpful This was from the poll that was done just this year, very similar to the one that was done last year. And so what we capture here is the different topics that people felt strongly in support of, that the dollars would be used for these purposes. So anything that was 51% or higher is what we're reflecting here. So you can see right at the top of the list is protecting 911 dispatch and water, preventing crimes and gang activity. I have recommended to our city council our city council members have been extremely supportive and vocal about if the measure passes we will immediately turn out turn around and hire 12 additional police officers the city of porterville currently which is smaller than the city of tulare i think we're almost 75 000 think they're closer to 68 000 they have 12 additional police officers to what we have and why is that it's because they passed a sales tax measure to fund those positions so we're looking to do the same thing here excuse me and you can see a number of different things you know fixing roads and potholes keeping our parks clean and safe um addressing homelessness so there's a lot of needs out there we actually also pulled The question about should we help Adventist Health and the Tulare Hospital District complete the hospital tower project? You know, that's been that's a really important project for this community was sort of an eyesore and a sort of a. A wound on the on the community for for for some time. We've gotten past those days. We're very fortunate now to have a Venice health. And they're working really hard with the hospital district to see if they can fund the tower project. But they've got a little bit of a gap there in terms of trying to hit those numbers. And so we asked the public. How do you feel about us using maybe some of these dollars to help them and. Just over 51% said they think that's something they'd be willing to consider. So that hasn't been decided yet. That would come at a later date. And again, this is a general sales tax measure, which means it could be used for any general government purposes. Council has passed the resolution that says if this measure does get approved, they would focus on public safety, streets, and a few other things. Homelessness, economic development, parks. If it was a specific sales tax measure, it would have a higher voter threshold and we would have to identify exactly how much money would go to each thing and that's not the route we're pursuing. This is the ballot language you'll see on November 3rd. If you go out to vote or you turn in your mail-in ballot, and it identifies very specifically. Priscilla Chalda measure, funding City of Tulare General Services. such as maintaining 911 emergency fire paramedic police response, preventing crime and gang activity, recruiting retaining police, firefighters, paramedics, keeping public areas, parks clean, safe, repairing roads, potholes, addressing homelessness, protecting local drinking water sources, retaining attracting local businesses by increasing the existing sales tax by one cent providing approximately $16 million annually until ended by voters, requiring independent audits, public spending disclosure, all funds used locally be adopted. That's very important. If this measure passes, it will be one cent on a dollar. So every dollar you spend, one cent would go towards this measure. And these are the things we would have to use it on. These are the things we've committed to using it on. And so that generated about $16 million a year, go a long way to helping us address many of these problems. This is an important slide. This shows you where every city currently is in Tulare County in terms of sales tax. And what you'll notice by this slide is that we are currently the lowest sales tax rate of any city in the county. We're currently at 8.25%. Dinuba is currently 8.5%. They have a sales tax measure ballot on November 3rd to go to nine and a quarter. Nine and a quarter is the highest level you can go to before you go to the legislature to ask for it to be increased higher. There are many cities in this state, especially coastal communities, especially around the Los Angeles area, where they have a sales tax rate of over 11%. We're not looking to do that. We're looking to just go to the nine and a quarter, which would be a 1% increase, which is the equivalent of one cent. Visalia is at eight and a half. They looked at the possibility of increasing it late last December, and that measure didn't have success. So I know, I meet with all the city managers once a month and we talk about this and all of them are talking about the need to eventually go to nine and a quarter. Um, and of course, you know, Porterville is currently at nine and a quarter. So it's important to understand. I had a, I had someone recently say to me, you know, I, I, uh, if, if I knew I just spent a bunch of money reinventing my home, uh, let's say it's about $20,000. And if I knew that Tulare was going to go from 8.25 to 9.25, I would have gone to Visalia. And again, Visalia is at 8.5%. And my comment on that is I get that sentiment. I really do. Nobody wants to raise taxes, right? But understand that a 1 cent or 1% increase on $20,000 would be $200. So you'd be talking about... Going back and forth, however many times you have to buy all those materials to save $200, I would tell you that you would spend more than that in your gas. Actually, it's not really saving $200 because Visalia is $8.5 and we're $8.25, so cut that almost in half. Just to give you context and an understanding of that means and this slide does a little bit of better job on that um this tells you kind of in a comparison perspective currently at eight and a quarter percent the estimated per capita cost of residence and right now is about 277 dollars a year uh if it was to go to nine and a quarter percent that would increase to about 466 dollars a year and the per household cost currently is a 916 dollars a year that would go up to about 1500 a year but i would tell you this is no one likes taxes and i'm this is really not the city manager's tax what my job is to tell you the reality of the situation here's here's where all the costs are here's where all the needs are here's what the projections look like it's ultimately up to the voters to decide what's hilarious they want to have right and so it's the citizens tax measure do you want to maintain level of service or improve level of service then I would suggest you consider voting for the measure. If you're comfortable with the way things are and you're okay with them declining, or you're willing to look at the possibility of cutting level of service, then I would say you don't need the sales tax measure, right? But I would also say this, Couple other things. One is, one of the things that's good about a sales tax measure, it's a consumption tax, right? It's not like property tax where only property owners pay it and you don't have any choice. If you own a piece of property, you have to pay the increase. Sales tax, you have a choice in terms of what you consume, right? So sales tax isn't charged on a lot of things like many of your grocery items. It's obviously charged on luxury items. You could decide to curb what items you're going to purchase or you could delay those purchases for another year. That's a way you can handle that. The other thing I would say to you is very important is sales tax is paid by everybody. So it's not just the property owners, it's also the renters. And it's not just our citizens, it's everybody that comes into our city. So if you come into our city and you go to a restaurant or you go to the outlet mall and you buy goods, we have 65,000 cars a day going through Highway 99 and a lot of folks going to the outlets. They're paying, that's about 20% of our sales tax is paid by visitors. So keep that in mind that, you know, a lot of this is going to be paid by those that are visiting us. I'll share one other quick comment before I take some questions, which is, you know, when I first was considering this as an option for the city, my original recommendation to council was to not go to nine and a quarter, but to go from eight and a quarter to maybe eight and three quarters, maybe a five. half cent sales tax measure and the reason for that is i you know i am conservative in terms of you know being fiscally conservative and i want to i like the idea of leaving capacity for future managers and counsel to consider but what changed my mind was a couple things one we polled the citizens twice And both times the citizens had more support for the one cent measure than a half cent measure. And what that told me is the citizens opinion is it's time to keep getting things done. We're tired of living in a community where we haven't gotten things done for years. We see that things are getting done now. It's time now to continue that progress. And the second thing is this, this is important. understand that if there was an entity that wanted to promote a countywide sales tax measure so let's say somebody decided it doesn't matter who it is let's say it's an entity that's not in the city of Tulare let's say it's another city that wants to promote a countywide sales tax measure if that measure were to pass Um, the city of Porterville wouldn't pay a dime because they're already capped at the nine and a quarter percent. We're the lowest at eight and a quarter percent. We would pay the most. And if that measure passed, those dollars would leave our community and go outside to another community. And, and there actually has been discussions about that occurring and that completely changed my opinion. We have, sorry, I have a little bit of a call, obviously. we have a ton of needs as i've already described and we need all the local dollars to stay local as possible we don't need our dollars being spent outside of the city of tulare city limits and so i think we need to capitalize uh my recommendation to council is to capitalize now on the one cent so we don't find ourselves in a position where our dollars are going to leave our community and go to some other entity so that concludes my presentation

with that i'm going to open it up to see if we have any questions so jason yep mark uh i have a question here so here's one that came in uh why is there a significant portion of the general fund being allocated to homeless

Well, I would say, I guess I would say first thing I would say is significant is all relative, right? So I would argue significant would be like our public safety where 55% of our general fund is obligated to homelessness. I would say a much smaller amount of our general fund is obligated to homelessness right now. You know, so for example, when we were talking about public safety, I think that number was 38 million. Right now, we're spending about $3 million a year on homelessness in terms of the operation of the shelter. Keep in mind that we're also seeking grants all the time, right? So even though it's costing us about $3 million a year to run the shelter, we received $500,000 from the county. We got another $500,000 from another grant. We're talking about using some CDBG funds. So we're going to offset some of those costs with other grants. other people's money other state dollars and federal dollars um and then i would say this too you know there is no easy solution you you you're not going to cure or eliminate homelessness right it's a part of the human condition any one of us could be in a state of homelessness at any time right we could lose our jobs we could suffer significant trauma we could suffer mental illness some people find themselves suffering from they've made some decisions but some people suffer from drug addiction right um so you can only try your best to manage it and you try to manage the the issues around it right and our goal has always been to um respect the taxpayers and clean up our streets and eliminate the issues that they have right it's hard to to sell your property or to seek additional investment in your community when you know your neighborhood's not cleaned up because there's there's encampments and you know all the things that come with homelessness so we've done a really good job of cleaning that up but all that comes at a cost right and so the the constituents have told our city council hey we want you to clean up we wanted you to clean up homelessness but we have to do it in a way that's also humane these are human beings they could be any one of us they could be our family members so we've tried to take a very measured approach at how do we handle that issue. We've built a homeless shelter that I think right now it's operating at the lowest cost per bed of any homeless shelter I have found in the state. Like I said before, put about 140 into permanent supportive housing. And so I think we have a very good, we've already achieved some really early success with it. um long term you know we're going to continue to try to seek other dollars but the sales tax measure would help us right it would help offset some of the current costs that we have uh and we're not necessarily looking to put a bunch more money into the homeless shelter but we are looking to make sure that it's stabilized and that you know we're spending as limited dollars as we have to but we have the dollars we need to get the job done hopefully that answers that question all right okay i've got two more questions one um is how will the city ensure that the funds are spent properly well i think that's a great question i think there's a few ways first of all council's already passed a resolution of intent so that gives everybody a general sense of their priorities and how they intend to spend the funds which coincidentally aligns perfectly with what the voters said in the polling, right? I think our thinking of what needs to be done and the voters thinking of what needs to be done is exactly the same. So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say to you is it's true. It's a general sales tax measure. So council could change it at any time during a year, but they can only do that through the budget process. And so, Every year. That's one of the things I love about local government. You know, it's really hard at the state or federal level for your voice to be heard, for you to go to congressional hearing and tell them what you want them to do. We have a representative form of government, right? So one representative may be representing thousands and thousands of people. It's very different in the city of Tulare. We might have 75,000 citizens, and we have five council members that are elected by district, but Any month on the first or third Tuesday of the month, you come to city council and share your viewpoints. You can call the city manager on the phone tomorrow or step into my office and you have the opportunity to tell me your thoughts, right? So as I mentioned before in our budget process, we have many multiple budget meetings throughout the year. And anyone can come at that time and say, hey, this is what we want to have happen. This is what we expect to do. I think the other component that I would share with just the auditing, right, we have an independent auditing firm that compares what our policies say, what we have to do with the funds compared to what we actually did. And when there's a conflict, they identify that conflict and they bring that to council's attention. We just had it presented last night. They identified, I think, four issues where there wasn't necessarily a conflict. We were doing everything in accord with the policies, but some of our processes needed to be tweaked. They're like, Hey, you need to put a little more energy into this process to make sure there's a better check and balance system. There was no fraud. There were no issues like that. It was just like, this process is inefficient. This process could be done better. And we already knew that. And so we're putting all those measures into place to fix that. So hopefully that answers that question.

Okay. All right. And the last question I have is what happens if measure a does not pass?

Great question. Well, I'm not a doom and gloom guy. I'm more of a glass half full guy. The reality is if measure eight doesn't pass, we will continue to operate the government. We'll do everything in our power to maintain level of service. But like I said, in the very beginning of the presentation, we're a little bit at a crossroads as far as the community goes. The question I think the community has to decide is, do we like what we've seen being done over the last five years? Do we like the progress and where we're headed? Do we want more of that? Is it time to address our deferred maintenance? Is it time to continue to invest and get more police officers on the street and keep the firefighters that we have? If the answer is yes, then I would suggest you probably vote yes for the sales tax measure. If the answer is no and the measure doesn't pass, then we're going to be looking at cutting levels of service, I will probably bring forward to council other ways that we can try to generate revenue. I could tell you right now that nobody's going to like those ways of generating revenue. But that is the reality is we'll have to look because as I said, as sales tax continues to decline over time and we'll keep focusing on economic development, try to bring in new businesses. But that's a very slow process. I mean, if we, let's say we negotiated with a company today and they're going to create a thousand jobs and invest a hundred million dollars in the city. If we got that deal done today, which by the way, usually takes six months to a year minimum to get a deal like that done, if you're lucky. take them a minimum of a year to go through the design process then it would take them probably two years to start construction and it wouldn't be until year four that we'd actually collect revenue i mean i'll give you a really great example of that in visalia they have two costcos and one sam's club one costco typically generates about two million dollars a year in sales tax revenue for the local government and the sam's club does about a million dollars that's five million dollars from three buildings in bycelia we should have had one of those here but we don't and by the way we're not going to get one they're already built in by said they're not going to notice where they put them on the south border of the city so that our citizens will go there right so We should have been doing more of those things for you. It's not intended to be a criticism. It's just that wasn't the focus of the community at the time. We're trying to do more of that now. We're working on a lot of important projects. We're talking about entertainment district project to generate revenue, but those are slow in coming. And so we really can't count on those being the things, if the measure doesn't pass, I can't tell you that those are going to be able to replace and generate the revenue because we might not even get those projects to go forward, right? So the reality is we will seriously be having to look at cutting service level and looking at other revenue generation means, which, you know, no one's going to love for me to talk about. I'm not going to talk about them tonight.

All right. That's all I have. Okay. Anybody else have any questions?

well thank you all for your time uh melissa are we going to post this on the city's website somewhere some people okay we have a measure measure a dedicated web page off the city's website so they can go look at that you can reach out to us at any time to ask any questions really appreciate your time it's a very important issue for the city i hope you take it seriously and please if you have questions please let us know um We're not here to tell you you should vote yes or no. We're not advocating for how you should vote. We're advocating for the facts and the truth. And we hope you will strongly consider those and you will vote in line with your conscience. Thank you so much. Good night.