se. Agendas are a tough thing to schedule. First thing I wanna say is to our city manager, there's a song that was sung by Tina Turner called Simply the Best, Better Than All the Rest. That's you, my friend. Now, I thank you for what you're doing. I think, you know, we presented a different solution but whatever gets my people whole, I'm behind. As Eddie would say, you gotta do the right thing. Right, Eddie? Now, I'm gonna need you to do more, really. And a lot of it happens in Councilman Alvarez's district. If you've read the papers about what's going on in Carriage Court and look up harmony communities, you'll read horror stories. Please direct the city attorney's office to put in overlay zoning for senior housing on every senior 55 plus park in the city. We need that protection, please. The other thing you're gonna hear more about today is the in-place transfer, 10%. You know what in-place transfer is? It's another word for rent increase and seniors can't hack it. We can't do a 10% every time somebody sells a unit. Look at Petaluma's new ordinance. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Gary, followed by Dwayne. One thing that concerns me is the rent control mediation fund money that we were expected to pay four times a year. And I don't know how much money's in that fund now. Megan, do you know how much money's in that fund? It's over 800,000. I wish it to be frozen until a time when that money has a use. It's a nuisance and you're allowing it to be, to continue for us to be charged that money quarterly and the owners. And with really no plan and no outcome and it's not being used. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Dwayne, followed by Roger. I don't see Dwayne in the council chamber. Roger. Down here. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Roger McConnell, I do live in the country. I hope the council reads and understands what this proposal is. I've read it several times. I still don't know where this 8% comes from.  I don't know. It just run around in circles. It took us six months from the time the mistake was made to get to here. It doesn't make any sense, people. It just doesn't make sense. I hope you're more aware of when you were back in November when they presented that 10% in place transfer fee. It's a huge increase. There's no cap on it. The people we were trying to help the most was those on Social Security only, so they could maintain it. They can't even qualify to get in the parks. At $800 a month, you gotta have three times the income. Social Security is not there. Most of these people on Social Security are somewhere between $18 and $2,100. We forced them out of the parks. This wasn't what we were trying to do. We were trying to save it for these people, and that's not what happens at all. We asked staff, way back when we negotiated with the park owners or whatever they called that silly fiasco, we need our mobile home commission back in process. It was discontinued in 2008 or nine by Mayor Susan Goren. We all know what the economy was in 2008, nine and 10. We need that back. We need a place for these people to come and express their anger at some of the way they're treated in those parks. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Joanne, followed by Barbara Gee. Joanne, are you approaching the podium? Good afternoon. My name is Joanne Jones, and I am the vice president of the Santa Rosa Manufactured Homeowners Association. And I would first like to say thank you for giving us a bathroom break. We definitely needed that. Also, I would like to thank the city council, Mayor Natalie Rogers, city manager, Mayor Keisha Smith, housing and community development manager, director, Megan Basinger, for your ongoing support and work for us. We've come a long way with an ordinance revision in the 11 parks. I was left out of that for this year as well as the other four parks, but we are still grateful that we have the ordinance revision. And I didn't, yeah, I'm like Roger, I didn't understand completely the legal language of what was read to us. I know that what we proposed was when figuring out our increase for 2024, it would only be increased as if 2023 rent had increased to 3.99% from 2022. So if we get anywhere close to that, I'll be happy. So with that said, we just implore you to do it in your power to correct the rent disparity before the CPI comes out for next year. Manufactured homes have been the last means to affordable housing. However, if space rents continue to surge and sometimes they double, that will no longer be the case. Seniors will be displaced and left without a home and we were the, I mean, the last place to go. There is no place other than the senior manufactured home parks. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Barbara G, followed by Linda. My name is Barbara Goodman and I'm a new resident of a mobile home park that got left out. Last year when we were here until nine o'clock in the evening, I don't think that'll happen again today, but we were last again on the agenda. So maybe hopefully there's not a next time. But anyways, last year, I also am one of the people that did not, one of the parks, the country park that did not get included. I'm going to ask you today to just do what is right and what is fair. For some reason, whether it's the date or I don't know what the loophole was, but someone was going to fix it and they didn't. 11 parks got the discount to 3.99%, five parks did not. Those five parks already paid more than the others. There's no reason for the next two years to be able to have to pay more. We already have a loan plus rent and the rent wouldn't be so bad if something happened for it, but it's just really money out of our pockets. There isn't a lot of integrity, how to use it. There isn't a follow through and I'm going to ask you to follow through to finish what was started last year and to make it right for the rest of us. 11 parks got it, five parks did not include the five parks with a 3.99%. That's all. We already paid extra. It's simple. I don't know where this other formula came out of or why it did, but it's not right. Thank you. Oh. Thank you. And I didn't mention the 10%. I thought that was part. Here's a park that did have new people come in and they had to pay 10% extra. Why? I thought this was all one piece, but it's not. The next public comment will be from Linda followed by Diane and then Barbara Sue. Hello, my name is Barbara Sue Wilson. I live at the country. I've been before you folks a few times and I've told you all my sad stories and I don't plan to do that again. I'm here for not just myself, but these other five parks. This rent increase has just really hurt us really bad and we need to have it fixed and we need to have it fixed now. We hope that you will pass this new ordinance and get us back down to where the other parks are. This is like Barbara said, it is not fair. And we have had seven months now. You might as well call July because it's too late now to do anything.  I saw that chart. My rent went up $44. That really hurt bad. And I'm sure others in here probably even had more. It's just according to how long you lived in the park. So I ask you please tonight give us seniors some relief. Take this awful increase away. I ask you please, please do this. I vote for it tonight. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Bonnie, followed by Diane. Hi, my name is Bonnie Petty. I live in one of the senior mobile home parks in Rankin Valley. So I am one of the lucky people. I got the rent, I qualify under the program. I'm here in support of my fellow brothers and sisters who are gonna be experiencing severe rent increases. And I'm also against the 10% transfer fee. But I'd like to make my comments. I've given each of you a copy of an article that I got from Forbes Business Magazine. And the article says, the title is, five reasons why mobile home park investing is recession and inflation resistant. Concerns of an upcoming recession sparked a renewed interest in commercial real estate investing as a viable alternative to uncertainties of the stock market and other traditional investment vehicles. However, all real estate investments are not created equal. In fact, mobile home parks have historically delivered outsized returns, even in the worst of economic times. Here are five reasons why investing in mobile home parks is recession and inflation resistant. Number one, mobile home parks generally perform well in both strong and weak economic environments. Between 2004 and 2018, operating income from mobile home parks rose by 87%. This income never declined even during the great recession of 2008. Item number two, the demand for affordable housing is unprecedented. I don't think I have to talk about that any further. Mobile home park residents tend to stay put longer. Item number three, and reason number four, mobile home parks can operate with higher profit margins. As rent, because mobile home parks typically operate on high margins, expense ratios around 30 to 40%, there is more room to recover in the event of an economic downturn. Just saying. Thank you, Bonnie. The next public comment will be from Diane, followed by Margaret. Hi, my name is Diane Monroe, and I live in Sequoia Gardens Mobile Home Park. Oops, did I jump the, okay. My name's still Diane Monroe, and I live in Sequoia Gardens Mobile Home Park. Thank you for hearing me this evening. I want to express appreciation for the amendment that's being made. It's one way to try to redress the problem of the mobile homes that got left out. What I want to speak with is my concern about carriage court and it changing itself to all ages as perhaps a way to get around the rent increases. There was an April 10th article in the Press Democrat in which the new manager from Harmony Communities, the new owner, the new regional manager, is quoted as saying, this ordinance has prevented carriage court from reasonably earning a fair return, and further states that if they can't earn more money, they'll just shut the whole part down. That is unconscionable. Again, April 10th Press Democrat article. So what is this fair return? First, some facts. Older adults are the fastest growing age group of homeless population, and the main reason for this is the high cost of rent and the lack of affordable housing. This from justiceinaging.org. According to a New York Times heavily researched article in what was it, October of 2020, the number of elderly homeless is projected to triple by 2030. Older people are getting pushed out into the streets due to the high cost of living, and mobile homes is one of the last resorts. Okay. Second, mobile home parks are very profitable for investors. Thanks for the previous speaker for bringing that article. A quick, oops, sorry. Thank you very much for hearing my concerns. Bye. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Margaret, and I have been told we also have two additional public commenters prepared to speak as well. Margaret's a Madio housing policy attorney for Legal Aid of Sonoma County. First I wanna thank you for your steadfast support of Legal Aid. It allows us to support the many seniors sitting here and beyond. We have been hearing from a lot of residents experiencing retaliatory conduct by park owners since you all passed the necessary reduction last year. There is a severe power imbalance between park owners and residents that only you really have the ability to correct. So we wanna thank you for your consideration tonight of solutions for correcting that imbalance. I know it's been a challenge making this equitable for the parks that were left out. So again, thank you for trying to make this right. I do agree that it is a little bit confusing, but if the math works out that we would support the amendment as drafted. We support the many seniors who've shown up and shown courage time and time again in this room at late hours during dinner time, over and over again to speak up in the face of a power imbalance. And I just wanna make sure you know that just last night Petaluma passed their mobile home ordinance with urgency effective immediately, capping rent at 4% or 70% of the CPI change, whichever is less. They're returning in July to make further substantive amendments, making the protections even stronger for Petaluma residents. And in doing so, there's no plan to invade their vacancy control. There's no plan to pass an in place transfer fee. And we would encourage you to consider that it's never too late to return to improve a law that's aimed at protecting precariously housed and vulnerable seniors. Thank you so much. The next public commenter, please come to the podium to provide comment. And please identify yourself for the public record if you choose to do so. When I reside at the Orchard hometown America in Santa Rosa. And I just wanna kind of give you a little more education about the cost, like 20 years ago, mobile homes were 80 to $130,000. At where I live, we had lost, I think, 83 homes due to the fire in 2017. And some of the new homes, of course, cost of materials has gone up sky high. But we have new homes in our park that are in the range of $380 to $469. And that's not your old grandma's mobile home anymore. It's their pricing way up high because of the cost of living and materials. And so that 10% when someone moves out, it's kind of a joke. It's supposed to help increase the rent because we're trying to reduce our rents. But the parks are taking advantage of people who've, we've paid our dues, we've worked our lives, we've gotten where we are, not by accident. But I just wanted to give you a little information about the cost of mobile park homes these days. So thank you so much. Thank you, can I see? Hi, I'm Carol Reinke from the Orchard, the mobile home park. And I just have two things to say. One is that 100% or the 10% in place transfer is going to really cause a problem. The new homes are going for 1,000 rent, 980 rent, and you increase it when they sell it by 10%. It's gonna put those people, they won't be able to sell their homes. The other thing is, I think it's really unfair that you make us wait till the end of your council meeting to have this when all these people are senior citizens and they need to get home. And penalizing us with two minutes for comments is unfair. Thank you. Thank you. I wanna confirm Dwayne has not entered council chamber before turning it over to the Zoom host. Thank you. I see two hands being raised via Zoom. I will let Rhonda facilitate public comments via Zoom. Thank you. We'll start with Salo and up next will be Keita. And I apologize if I've mispronounced the names. Salo, I'm asking you to unmute. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you, council members. My name is Salo Longdano and I'm with WMA, the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association. Despite the existence of a strict rent control ordinance, owners and managers of mobile home communities in Santa Rosa have worked diligently for 30 years to find ways to successfully maintain their communities. Despite the city's rent control ordinance, severely limiting their ability to do so, they have been able to maintain a high quality standard of living that presidents appreciate and expect. Unfortunately, the city of Santa Rosa has recently jeopardized a sensitive balance with several measures to further limit an owner's ability to maintain their community. Going as far as restricting their ability to even keep up with the rate of inflation. We understand the uncertainty of current economic conditions and we attempted to negotiate with the city in good faith, offering concessions and rental assistance programs for those in need, unfortunately to no avail. We're here again today as the city looks to further restrict and control local rents, even beyond the actions it has recently taken. Instead of further entrenching an adversarial relationship between the local business owners and the city council, we respectfully urge the city of Santa Rosa to take a step back so we can work together for the benefit of our local community. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Up next is Keda, followed by Trey. Keda, I've asked you to unmute, please go ahead. Hi, my name is Keda Hodgson and I live in the country. I do want to comment that I moved here from West Hollywood and I noticed that it's just a common thing for city council agendas to be hours and hours and hours long. We are not the last item on your agenda and I can see that. So I want to endorse two things. One is that you demand that there be a freeze on this insane fund that we are paying into for litigation fund or I don't know what the fund is, but anyway, we keep paying into it. It keeps building up. I hope it's getting interest and I don't know who's getting the interest, but that needs to stop until somebody can figure out what the fund is about and how to best use it. The second thing is the transfer fee is just insane. I mean, if it was a flat fee to cover for paperwork and filing and all that kind of stuff, that would be understandable, but a 10% transfer fee is just insane, especially for housing that is predominantly used by seniors. So I thank you very much for your time. I wish I could thank you for the service, but it's just really completely unconscionable. It's really biased that five of us, five of the park, excuse me, were not included in the original ordinance. I don't know why, I don't know how. It just, the fact that there was no flexibility on that just really unfair. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Trey. I'm asking you to unmute. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Yes, go ahead. All right. Thank you, members of council and mayor. My name is Trey Pinner. I wasn't originally planning to speak tonight, but after I heard the original comment from the council about that this was a mistake that were there and sort of how unconscionable it was, I felt the need to speak up. Unfortunately, as you know, there was a timing issue with regards to this ordinance and it fell with requirements to the 30 day notice which brought us to January 6th. But I feel the unfairness was the fact that all parks are required to give a 90 day notice to their residents per California law and all the parks had given a 90 day notice and that was considerably ignored by the council when doing so. So the reality is many of these ordinance or these increases should have been allowed through till March, but I understand that you're at this point now trying to, as you quote rectify or think it's unfair that we were at this point, but again, as I mentioned, I think it was unfair how it was handled in the first place. Second, as I pointed out last time this matter came before you, I need to keep reminding that the preamble of the rent control ordinance for the city of Santa Rosa has a specific statement that says it is not the intention of the ordinance to protect affordable housing. That is not the legal ability for this ordinance to do so. And that's the comment comes up about affordability and that's not the intention of this ordinance. It's only to deal with the fact that inability to move a mobile home from one park to the other causes a need for creating some ability to regulate rents. And lastly, I would also mention with regards of affordability, people keep continuing saying it's unaffordable, but I don't know if there's ever been a suggestion that the residents of the park who sell their home consider a restriction on the price that they can sell their home, as opposed to always the park owners having a restriction on their rents. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have no additional public comment on Zoom and no pre, quote, we have one additional comment. Dean, you're being asked to unmute. Go ahead when you're ready. Unmute, you can hear me now. Yes, we can hear you. My name is Dean Moser. My name is Dean Moser, I represent Rencon Valley and I would like to speak to- Mr. Moser, can you please speak closer into your microphone? We cannot hear you here in council chamber. Okay, can you hear me now? No, sir. Can you hear me now? Slightly better. Okay, well, I'm basically yelling, but the 10% increase on turnover is something that a new resident can afford to look at to decide whether or not they would like to live in the facility. And you heard earlier that the prices in one of the parks went from 80,000 to 380,000 and that has a lot to do with the fact that they have low, low rents. So the lower the rents, the higher the sale price on the home. So it's a little selfish of the residents to say that the 10% increase is too much. So that's kind of my comment at this point in time and I appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Do we have any additional colors on Zoom who wish to speak on this item? Seeing none, and we have no prerecorded messages. Thank you, I'm just gonna check once more to make sure there's no more public comment in chambers. All right, we'll go ahead and close public hearing and I'll bring it back to council for final thoughts and direction. Okay, Megan, could you do me a favor just so that I'm clear on the math? If it was an 8% cap over the next two years meaning 4% and 4% and one of the parks was charged 5.7% in this year, would that mean that next year they'd only be able to be charged 2.3% under this ordinance? That is correct. So the intention is to equalize the rate increases in 23 and 24. So as noted in 2023 under the amended ordinance the allowed rate increase was 3.99%. So we rounded up by 100% to 4% and then using that as the maximum cap. I just wanna make sure for the public that there is an understanding because it was confusing to me as well when I read the presentation that it was shoring up those that did get charged extra this year and we understand I think from a council's perspective that this was not equitable, that it was something that was missed on our part as far as five of the parks not getting to get that cap in and so this is our way to fix this issue that has happened but in the meantime it doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt our community members who had a bigger bump this year but hopefully by next year you'll see that your bump will be lower than what everyone else can get to shore it up. So I wanna apologize for not catching that as it came forward to council. We were not aware that that was something that was going to be missed. So from my perspective this is a good fix. I know it's not perfect but I don't want the perfect to get in the way of the good and that's that we can fix it within the next two years. So with that, if there's no more, oh council member Rogers, go ahead. I appreciate that vice mayor. I don't wanna, I'm not trying to quabble with my colleague but I wanna make it really clear that this didn't happen because the city council missed something. We couldn't make the findings for an urgency ordinance that night. This happened because the park owner had an increase ready to go and sent out notices the next morning to make it really clear to people that they were not going to abide by the decision that was made. Some did, some parts did, some park owners did not. And that's my frustration as a council member that we find ourselves here tonight trying to find equity that we could have not needed to do if all of the mobile home park owners had actually operated in good faith with the city. So I'm not trying to quabble. We should have figured out- That sounds a little like a quabble. I just wanna make it clear. This council is trying to protect people and we're making up for a couple of park owners who are bad operators. So thank you. Thank you council member Rogers and I appreciate the quabble with you. May I go to Mayor Rogers and then I'll go to council member Fleming. Thank you. So I just wanted to ask that we make it very clear what the 8% is and maybe have a calculator or something so that there are no mistakes next year or at the end of this year when park owners and residents try to find out what is indeed within our ordinance. I think that is going to be the difficult part because I did some math and I'm pretty good at math and I don't understand anything that we put on there. So I think we need to make it a little bit easier for people to put in their specific rent amounts and increase from this year to see what they can get increased for next year. Thank you. Council member Fleming. Thank you. Thank you to staff, Ms. Bassenger, city manager, Mr. Dunstan for bringing this forward as well as the patients on the part of the folks who were discriminated upon during this unfair imposition of this really high rate increase. I know that with inflation and all it's just too much. So we did know that night and I am really sorry that we couldn't get it fixed before now but you will see a lower rent increase than your peers who did get the lower increase and you all will be even pretty soon. Couple of points I wanted to make. One is many of you brought up the 10% in place transfer.  I for one would be very interested in looking at that. Another thing, there's one other additional point that's alluding me at the time but there are a couple more pieces of this that I think we should continue to work on and meet to adjust because this is certainly not a perfect policy, it's a good policy but it's not done so let's keep going. Council Member Alvarez.  I hope that when I'm looking for a mobile home for me that there's one of you amongst my age group amongst my generation. Thank you for what you do brother. I appreciate all the applause tonight. I really do, it makes it much more exciting to be up here tonight with that. Megan, I do have one more question that was brought up around the burn rate of the money that we charge to mobile home, the money that they pay in where part of it is by the mobile home, park owners and some of it's by those that are in each of the slots. I'm probably not saying this well. The applause took me off guard, I apologize. So I think it's $4.70 was the amount. Could you give me an idea of where we're at on that burn rate for this year and where we would be if we were able to maybe put a pause on that in the next year as we go into budget discussions and just for the record we do have another big item after you tonight so you weren't the last. So I just wanna make sure everyone in the audience knows we still have another item that we're discussing but Megan could you give me a little bit more on that? Yes, so that fee is as I noted collected based on the spaces that are subject to rent control. So 50% in general is paid by the residents, 50% by the parks. The fund balance is approximately $900,000 currently and there are a couple reasons for that. One, we've had staffing vacancies over the past few years and this is funds that are used for staff to administer the ordinance. So the absence of staff has eliminated our ability to expend the funds. We also need to maintain a fund balance in the event we need mediation services and those can have varying rates and so there needs to be a resource available to pay for that expense. With the adoption of the new ordinance in 2022 with the implementation in the beginning of this year we've had an increase in staffing costs associated with administering the ordinance. As I mentioned we verified the in place transfers so there's a lot more staff work that is done to administer the ordinance and I anticipate that continuing with the rents in 2024. So we are expending a little over 100,000 this current fiscal year and unfortunately at the top of my head I can't tell you the budget for 2324 for mobile home rent control but it is increasing because of the additional staff costs associated with ordinance administration. I believe it's in the budget document tonight and I wanna say that it was closer to $300,000 if my memory serves but you can't count on that right now but I just wanna make sure that that's something we're looking at and I know that as we discuss the budget and our next item that could be potentially something we look at but I appreciate the clarification on that. So with that I'll go ahead and have Council Member Ocrubke. Madam Vice Mayor looks like the mayor's hand up. I apologize. Sorry. One more time I know I have my hurt. Oh, I'm so sorry Mayor Rogers please go ahead. Okay. I was just gonna say I really honestly wanna thank staff. This came up and it was very difficult to even look at and know what we were gonna do and how we were gonna do it and although I don't completely understand it I think this is very creative. A very creative way to go about doing this and I just hope that it works out and I agree with Council Member Fleming that we're not done, that we do have a lot more to do and I think that you have commitment from many members on the council if not all the members on the council to continue to look at this and other things that are going on within the city to make them right. So thank you. Okay, now we'll get ready to have our motion on the floor. Council Member O'Crapke. I'll take that one. Council Member Stapp, I'm so sorry. I'll make a motion to approve this ordinance of the council of the city of Santa Rosa. I'm ending title six of the Santa Rosa city code chapter six dash six six rent control. Mobile homes to set a cumulative limit on rent increases for combined for the combined calendar years 2023 and 2024. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any more discussion? Madam Vice Mayor, may I also just clarify that the motion was to introduce the ordinance and it'll be brought back for final adoption at our next meeting. Thank you. And I also heard way for the reading of the text. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. So we need, we're going for roll call vote now though. Thank you. Madam City Clerk. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. I am. Council Member Rogers. I. Council Member O'Crapke. I. Council Member Fleming. I. Council Member Alvarez. I. Vice Mayor McDonald. I. Mayor Rogers. I. Let the record show that passes unanimously. Council will be taking a 30 minute break and then we will come back for our budget adoption and public hearing. Thank you everyone for your patience. We're going to go ahead and get started on item 15.2, but I'm going to have Madam City Clerk facilitate a roll call though. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Here. Council Member O'Crapke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers. Present. Let the record show all council members are present. Item 15.2 is a public hearing. Public hearing on adoption of the City of Santa Rosa fiscal year 2023-2024 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement budget. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Vice Mayor McDonald and members of the council. I wanted to take a couple minutes, one minute before we start our presentation to acknowledge the team that has put this budget together. It's a large and complex budget with a lot of challenges. Veronica and her team in budget, Mike and Tricia and Jose and now Andrew worked very hard on this and they worked with the rest of the city team throughout every department. We had department heads and budget liaisons and ASOs come together to work on this. The budget has turned into a, it's not quite a full year process, but it's getting close and it does take a lot of effort to get it from the very beginnings to the finish line where we are today. I think it would also be remiss of me to not mention the fact that through our review process we have a very interested and an attentive city manager staff of the city manager and the two ACMs that help us guide this budget through. So I just wanted to recognize that it doesn't get set often and with the work that's there I thought that I would take this time now. That was almost a little bit more than a minute. So with that I will kick it over to Veronica who will walk us through the presentation. Are you keeping the clapping going? Okay, just every time you finish we're gonna clap. Council Member Fleming prefers jazz hands. Thank you, Allen. Good evening, Mayor, Council Members, Vice Mayor. We are back here today for the budget adoption public hearing. And just to give you a quick recap of what we've been through this last budget season you saw us on January 10th where we had a public hearing on budget priorities. March 9th and 10th council have their goal setting sessions when we attended and took into consideration council goals in this annual budget. In late March, the city manager sat down with each department and did a detailed review of each department's budget requests and additional needs requests. And then you saw us for two days on May 9th and 10th and we did a deep dive of all department budgets and the overall city-wide budget. And now we're back here today for the final step to adopt our annual budget for next fiscal year. So when we saw you back in May we have made a few changes to the budget and I'm gonna go over the details with you now and point them out in the coming slides. Not in the general fund. So outside of the general fund in the housing authority both revenues and expenditures have been increased by about $106,000. And this is just due to updated revenue estimates from the housing department of housing and urban development allocations. We've also appropriated an additional $1.6 million in the ARPA fund. This is due to the fact that the remaining reserves in the ARPA fund were set aside for homeless services not for this upcoming fiscal year but the fiscal year beyond that. So fiscal year 24-25. And we were realizing it's most prudent to appropriate everything up front. We don't wanna have reserves sitting in that fund that are not spoken for, that are not assigned. So we have gone ahead and appropriated them against the homeless services contracts. They won't all be expended in the coming fiscal year 23-24. Some will be expended in 24-25 but that is an increase in appropriations that you'll see in this fiscal year. And then continuing on in the water department we presented to you three staffing changes back in May that the department decided to not go ahead with. They've been working with our human resources department and will continue to find the right staffing fit for some of these items. Utility system supervisor was proposed to be added. Instead they'll be adding a water quality supervisor and the department was going to delete a vacant skilled maintenance worker and in its place add a wastewater operation supervisor. They decided to not do that at this time. So these minor staffing changes have resulted in a decrease of about $28,000 to those enterprise funds. And then finally the final change that you will see in these coming slides is in the general fund in the police department we have appropriated an additional $557,000 for improvements to the public safety building. This is not coming from general fund dollars. This is offset by a transfer in from our state asset forfeiture fund. And I do wanna mention that the funds coming from the state asset forfeiture fund were actually determined by the DA's office to not be asset forfeiture but actually lost property. So the city went through the necessary steps to try to reunite this property with the rightful owner could not be found. So it became the city took ownership of these funds and we'll be using them to do a improvement project. I believe a security gate at the public safety building. So you'll see this increase in appropriations but it has an offset. So there is a net zero impact to the existing general fund deficit. So in those previous slides I went over the changes that we have included in the budget and these next couple slides I'm sorry just this one slide. We're gonna be bringing forth some proposed changes. We have not included these. We are asking council to consider these changes and vote on them at this adoption hearing. So one is to eliminate 1.0 FTE vacant assistant city attorney. We had proposed adding this position initially but after some thought knowing that we are unfortunately losing our chief attorney to retirement in the coming months. We thought that best practice would be to let a new city attorney come in, assess the staffing levels and then possibly request an assistant city attorney next fiscal year. So at this time we are proposing that we do not add this position. Second one down we are requesting to add 1.0 FTE employee relations manager. This will cost the general fund about $190,000. And the purpose of this position would be to assist in the upcoming labor negotiations and there is a whole long list of benefits that this position would also be able to accomplish but we know that with a year of labor negotiations ahead of us it's kind of critical timing. And then finally we discussed back in May, there's the reorg that occurred where we moved community engagement from the Reckon parks department over to the communications and intergovernmental relations office. There's two vacant positions that were moved. One is a vacant community engagement coordinator. We are requesting to downgrade that to as admin secretary and I apologize. This slide says senior admin assistant. The position is actually an admin secretary because we want that position to be able to assist with boards and commissions in that department. There is also a vacant deputy director of community engagement that the department is interested in downgrading to a manager. We cannot bring that to council at this time because that's gonna require a classification study through HR. So that will be something you may see in the upcoming fiscal year. But all told with these three changes of council chooses to move forward with them this will reduce the general fund deficit by about $61,000. And with that we're gonna move into some of these slides that you saw back in May. We're not going over all of them again but I will take you through the changes that we just saw and point out in some areas where they've changed. So this is our city wide revenues by fund. This is all in all entities, all funds. Revenues total about 499.2 million. The only change on this slide from when we saw it back in May is in the enterprise funds line item that increased by about 106,000 as I mentioned from updated HUD allocations. I'm not gonna go into the big changes and variances here because we discussed those in detail back in May but that is the one change that we see. And city wide expenditures by fund type. So this is the expenditure side. And again, this is city wide all funds, all entities. And here we do have a few different changes. So the first one would be up in the general fund 200.9 million that's increased by 550,000 as I mentioned for the public safety building project with state asset forfeiture funds. The enterprise operating line right beneath that has been reduced by 28,000 due to those staffing changes we mentioned. And the special revenue line item at 25.6 million has increased by 1.6 million from when we last looked at this back in May due to the ARPA appropriations. And then finally the housing authority line item has also increased by 106,000 due to HUD allocations. So all in our proposed O&M budget, operations and maintenance budget is 461 million, 461.3 million, excuse me. And then our capital improvement program has not changed since back in May at 74.9 million. And this is just a visual of that previous slide showing all funds within the city. The general fund is the largest at 38%. And that's what we'll be taking a look at next. So back in May, we showed you this slide with an overall deficit in the general fund of 2.5 million and we are proposing to use fiscal stability funds to offset that deficit. This number hasn't changed. What has changed is you'll see our expenditure line item increased by 550,000, again, for the state asset forfeiture funds, but that's offset by the transfers in line item, which has also increased. So no change to the general fund. And here is just a visual of our general fund revenues. These have not changed since we last met in May. We are still at 201.9 million in the general fund, which is what we project our resources to be that we can expend for the upcoming fiscal year. And then finally, our general fund expenditures. This visual shows us that salaries and benefits are our largest expenditure in the general fund. And again, none of these have changed since May with the exception of the very bottom line, O&M project, that's our operations and maintenance projects. And that's where we put that expenditure amount for the public safety building security project for their security gate. And all in general fund expenditures are expected to be 200.9 million. So the five year forecast that we showed back in May also has not changed with that deficit in fiscal year 2324, still staying at 2.5 million. This means that our outgoing numbers still have not changed. And as a reminder, this forecast still does not include anything that is unknown at this point, including labor negotiations, including the expiration of ARPA funds for things like in response or safe parking. So while it's not a great picture that we'd like to see for our forecast, it's also somewhat on the conservative side. So staffing citywide, excuse me, as I mentioned, we did retract some of the changes in the water department, but overall our proposed staffing changes have not changed. So we are asking council to consider not adding the assistant city attorney, so that top line that says CAO with 1.0 FTE change, we are asking and proposing that that one be retracted. And down on the very bottom line where water shows 2.0 FTEs being changed, this has not, they're being added to the department, excuse me, this has not changed since May, although there was some staffing changes that we went back and forth on, it didn't affect the overall number. So total FTEs at this time, we're proposing to add 7.0 FTEs, which would bring us to 1,285 and a half FTEs. If council goes forward with those proposed changes, including adding an employee relations manager and removing the assistant city attorney, that's also gonna be one addition, one subtraction. So those total FTE count of 1,285.5 would stay the same. So in conclusion, the city manager and the finance department recommend that the council approve by resolution, eight resolutions that will adopt the O&M and the CIP budgets. And then we have a separate resolution to amend the measure O, transaction and use tax implementation plan to adjust the fiscal year 2324 budget for all programs. We're happy to take any questions. Thank you. Looking to council to see if they have any questions. Do we wanna take it in segments or the budget as a whole? We're just gonna take it as a budget as a whole and they'll have to answer questions as we go through. Council member Rogers will let you start. Yeah, so just a quick question following up on some of my comments in our last study session. One of the things that I was looking for and I appreciate the slide on the staffing changes. I really thought that those were good moves from us. But the other component of it was around the, I think it was half a million that we were originally budgeting for labor negotiations. And I apologize if I can't find it spelled out by itself in the budget document. All I can find in here is the increase of 744,000 for professional services and legal consultation and labor negotiations. So rather than kind of being able to see, did we reduce that initial number? It instead got kind of conglomerated with other things. Yeah, sorry that wasn't very clear. The $500,000 for labor negotiations is still included in the budget. That 744,000 includes the 500,000 and then there's an additional amount on top of that for other things in the human resources department. So after some discussion with the department, with the city manager, it was determined that that 500,000 is a realistic expenditure for this year, especially considering that we will be losing in our chief attorney. We will, we have our HR director is kind of in flux that position. And if we are hoping to add an employee relations manager, there will be some time needed to recruit and train and bring someone on board. So that expenditure for $500,000 for professional services as actually a pretty realistic figure and the whole thing would be needed. Okay, my opinion still isn't gonna change on it. And I'll ask my colleagues to do this as well to make this change. If we need to exceed 250,000, coming back and having a conversation with council about why we're spending more than a quarter of a million dollars on labor negotiations, I think it's prudent. And I hear you that we're losing staff and it's potentially gonna cost that much. But I think given the contentious nature of some of our previous negotiations where there was concern that outside council was driving up the cost, I wanna make sure that we have some pretty clear oversight over what's happening with that. And just for context, we did go back and look at previous years to see how much was expended in labor negotiations and it has typically exceeded $500,000. So it's been a very high expenditure. So that was the reason and thinking, we'll leave that in now. It's possible it won't all be expended. It is a not to exceed total amount. It's not a guarantee it will all be spent. But for the placeholder, it's just a prudent way of moving forward. But yes, thank you for your comments. Council Member Fleming. I'll second Council Member Rogers' suggestion. I think that it builds trust with our employees to have an employee negotiating with employees rather than to have outside lawyers. I don't know about you, but when outside lawyers are negotiating between me and someone else, it usually is a sign that things are rough. So at any rate, we love our employees and we want them to know that. I do have some questions around our reserves. Our reserve policy, correct me if I'm wrong. I've got the numbers from the city manager. So these questions are mostly intended to help bring the public along, not in order to put you on the spot. But it's my understanding that we have a prudent reserve that's 15% of 17, excuse me, 17% of our overall budget. Correct. And can you tell me how much money we have in our reserves at this point in time? Sure, so as a point in time, we would have, we have $49 million in our unassigned reserves, which is about 15, or 25%, and which is about $15.6 million over the 17% mandated policy. So, and that money is unallocated. The 15, I have nine here, about $15.6 million of unallocated reserves above the 17%. Correct, it's unassigned. Okay, when we get, would you prefer to take programming, additional programming requests after public comment or would you like them to be taken? Now I think this might speak to council member O'Crepkey's concern about segmentation. But you are the presiding officer. How would you like to do this? I think we should ask all of our questions now for clarification and then go to public comment. There's commentary laid in questions in here. Then save the comments for the end, but ask clarifying questions now. Yes, ma'am, I will rest my case in a moment. Thank you, thank you for asking for clarification. With that council member O'Crepkey, do you have a question? Yeah, now the prudent time to ask questions about specific departments, about their needs. Okay, chief, police chief, sorry, I saw you too, Scott. So I don't know about my colleagues, but I got more communication about policing than I have about pretty much any subjects that we've tackled so far this year combined. So a couple of questions for you. Can you give me a little bit of context of our staffing levels now versus historical staffing levels? Yes, we discussed some of it at the budget hearings that we've seen in a rollercoaster of staffing in the city of Santa Rosa with the police department. And the one that we've been discussing that's been coming to light is in 2006, we were at our highest level with sworn. We had 190 sworn and 90 civilian employees. Since then, we've seen a growth in the city of approximately 20,000 with annexation of Roseland and as the city has continued to expand, currently that sworn number has gone from 190 to 181. So it's gone down by nine sworn officers and the civilian employees have gone from 90 to 78. So more substantial in the civilian employees have taken a hit over there. So that's where we've seen. Now, some of the things that we've done is we've seen the in response introduced, which is gonna help us with some of the calls for service, but obviously as the city has grown, our continued calls for service have increased along the way. Thank you. Can you give me a little bit of context with the current call volume and the amount of time spent on calls by our officers on average these days versus historical averages? Yeah, and I think we've seen that COVID greatly affected the number of calls that we saw as a substantial dip in COVID. Those numbers are coming back strong. Last year, we had over 250,000 911 calls that came into the 911 dispatch center for help. And we dispatched officers to just over 108,000 calls. One thing that's really important to understand though is like even in my 24 years in the career, how much like each call for service has changed. And right now we're seeing a lot more with the introduction of body worn cameras and how that adds to the time on the calls. But also we've seen a lot about we're doing more in our calls. And some of the things is we have a much higher expectation for community engagement. And that's something that I've really enforced with our department about getting out there and being involved in the community. And we've seen things administratively with RIPA, which is the Racial Identity Profiling Act, that any proactive contact that an officer goes so they go through a questionnaire of answering those. So each one of these calls for service takes more and more. We had a federal law that changed with, did not get too far in the details, but the uniform crime report of how we report out on crimes. And now we've gone to Nibers for this national incident based reporting system. So now it takes, or many of these calls, you have to break them into multiple reports. So if you arrest a car load and they have an aged kid has drugs on or whatever, we used to write one report with one narrative. Now they have to take a separate arrest report for every single person. So it adds literally hours to the process for the officers. We've seen a lot of the things, even with what, like one of our things that we really focus on two words at the police department are time and distance. We slow down things. And so we're able to use less force doing that. And we put distance between us and the suspects, but each one of those things is causing us where we see some of these cases where we'll send officers, we'll spend an hour or two of really like negotiating, calming things down in an effort to not use force, but it has a lot of staff that gets tied up on these calls. So in the long story, what I'm saying is many of the calls for service are now taking longer than they did years ago. And we're seeing some of the impacts on the streets of Santa Rosa. Thank you. And then, can you tell me a little bit, well, there's the obvious difference of a civilian FTE versus a sworn officer, but in terms of workload, what they do, how they interact with each other, how they help each other, can you give me a little information on that? It's a key partnership. And for us, we have civilian employees serving as like police technicians that are handling calls in the lobby, going out and doing citation sign-offs. They handle a lot of online reporting and assist with even if someone comes in for a complaint, they can take those. They help even with our 290 registrants and do a lot of that. Our dispatchers are handling over those 250,000 calls. And a critical role is we have as these field evidence technicians that go out and they process all of our crime scenes, so all 12 homicides and 421 shootings in 2022. The field evidence technicians process those crime scenes. And they also handle or assist with our officers by going out and taking collision reports, burglary reports, and literally dozens of other reports that they're able to take. And while they're taking those reports, our police officers are able to respond to 911 calls across the city and help focus on reducing our priority one responses and assisting to those who are in need and focusing on some of the community engagement that we've greatly prioritized. So would I be accurate in saying that I keep, I said FTEs could, we're talking about full-time equivalencies, but FETs, that FETs could actually help reduce response time if used appropriately or if staffed appropriately, is that possible? Absolutely. And I've been really working on using data to better allocate their existing resources. We have to do that. But the additional full-time employee positions, whether it be in the civilian or the sworn, there is a synergy between the two. And I think that you will see not only a better service delivered to our community, but a reduction in our response times throughout the city. Thank you, Council Member Alvarez. Thank you, Madam Mayor. My question is in regards to page 137, contracts. My question is, seeing how the cost of labor force has gone up over the years, are there any of these services that can be returned to in-house opposed to having a contract out? Specifically parks. So we do look at that on a case-by-case basis, actually part of the budget process involved this year, involved looking at a number of different operations in either parks or public works that could potentially be brought in-house. What we tend to find is this, while in the immediate term, it may be less expensive for in-house staff to hire the staff, hire the equipment, do all of that. Given where our salaries and benefits are gonna go in the, let's say, in the next five years, it goes in the wrong direction. So it actually becomes more expensive in that way. Again, not knowing exactly what our salary and benefits are, but we can guess where they could end up being, and so that would cause pause. The other thing that I would say is that, given what we're projecting in terms of a deficit now, and what we would have potentially after we go through our next round of labor negotiations, it would make sense to me to have the flexibility of continuing contract work, as opposed to bringing staff in where you lose that flexibility. You gain a long-term permanent cost to your budget with really no flexibility. So especially in cases where we once did the service in-house, and then through, say, the recession, we decided to, we analyzed it and ended up outsourcing that to then go and bring that operation back in-house would not make sense to me at this time, given what we are about to head into in the next year or so. So specifically, if I heard you correctly, one of your main concerns is the liability, the long-term liability, especially bringing the department or the service back in-house. Yes. Thank you. I have a couple of questions here, and then I'll go to you, Council Member Rogers. I noticed on our bonds that some of them were AA rated, AA plus, but there were a couple that were AA minus. Is there any thought about going back out and refinancing now that we've appropriated money to offset some of our liabilities to see if we could get a higher rating to save taxpayers' money, or is there any way to do that under these specific types of bonds? For the record, Scott Wagner, Deputy Director of Finance. So our bonds do have different ratings when you look across our debt portfolio of the city, and that's really based on what type of debt instrument it is versus going out and basically refunding it to get it into a better rate. The credit agencies are doing continual evaluations of our city as part of our ongoing disclosure process through the SEC, so we wouldn't gain any rating benefit per se by refunding any of our bonds at this point. They stay and get updated by the agencies. If you see a difference in how they're rated, one may be a revenue bond versus a general obligation bond. That would be really what's causing the difference in ratings. Thank you. I just realized that bonds are going down as far as interest rates, and so I just thought I'd ask the question to see if we could actually capture some of that as savings in our own funds. Absolutely, and your point's well taken, and what I would bring up is that we certainly are always looking for opportunities to gain arbitrage within our debt portfolio to save us money. I can't imagine us getting to that environment with rates as they are for honestly a very long time. We did a lot of refunding through lower to interest rates. I don't see us getting there, but you can rest assured that staff's gonna be constantly looking at that. I appreciate that. On page 107 under the risk management budget, I see that there was a pretty large increase. Could you just tell me a little bit about that? It looked like it had gone from maybe a couple million dollars to a pretty big bump this year. And just to clarify, since I don't have it in front of me, is that in the general fund or the risk management or is it overall? Let me get back in the budget so I can see what that is on page 107. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly which fund it is, but across all lines of coverage, the interest, well not the interest rates, but the overall experience modifiers have gone up within the experience, within the pool. So we're seeing rate increases along all lines of coverage. And so based off of our funding, we double up the SARs and our SAR has moved from $500,000 to a million dollars in the liability program. So that increases it to $2 million just right off the bat. And then whatever the premium is. Thank you. I wasn't sure if it was fire related or if this was workers' compensation related. I'm not sure. So again, like I said, it's kind of going across all lines and I'm not sure exactly which line item it speaks to. But if we're talking about workers' comp, as salaries go up, our premium will go up because that's based off of salaries. And then if we're talking about property insurance, which includes the fire, that has also increased due to urban wildfires and the exclusions and just all losses across the state. And so I think most property programs are seeing increase of like 40 to 50%. And even our SAR on that, I think when we have the Tubs fire, our SAR was only like $25,000 or a deductible and now we're up to 250 and they're looking to move it to 500,000. So it's increasing across the board on all lines. Thank you so much. And then my last question is on our reserves or our portfolio. So you stated in our reserve portfolio, we have about $49 million. Do we have an additional investment portfolio and how is that money actually invested back the interest that we get from that? Where does that go? So we do have a separate investment portfolio. It is, I'm trying to think of what the last reporting of it was, I don't know, $600 million, something like that. So those are all the funds that aren't currently being used are invested. So they are a mixture of water funds, general fund, whatever any, if you think about it this way, when we pass the budget, the budget year about to pass, come July one, we don't spend every dollar of that on July one, right? So we spend, so as we spend the budget, those funds are then used at that time. When they're not used, we invest them. We earn interest, that interest goes back either to the general fund or to whatever fund that's tied to that, the source. So that's completely separate from our unassigned reserves. Although those unassigned reserves are also invested. Thank you for that clarification. I wasn't sure if they were just going back into another reserve or into an investment or if we actually take that money that we're capturing from the investments and putting it back into general fund. So I appreciate that clarification. So as we close our books every year and we're about to go into that process, we take the interest dollars and then they go back to those funding sources. Thank you, Council Member Rogers. Thanks Vice Mayor. I have a few more questions for the police chief, Kreegan, if you're still available. So one of the things that I know you've highlighted in this budget is the six over. Can you explain sort of what that is and what the significance of that is in terms of morale, overtime, standards of coverage, all of those sorts of things? Why is it so important for the city? So we worked and we've had strong support from our city manager of understanding and the police staffing, we started last July with 21 sworn police vacancies out of 181. So it was overwhelming and our recruitment team has done an incredible job and also our officers around the Bay Area are seeing the support they get here from our community and from our city council. So as of right now, we're actually gonna be entering into July and be able to over hire. So the over hire though is important to understand that it's not gonna allow us to be able to go that we have six operating officers more than that, but it's allowing like while they're in the, while they go through a 20 week academy and a 23 week in house training. So it allows us to start hiring and training the officers in anticipation for known retirements. But that's incredible for our armor row because now we don't see these huge upticks and then the law, the big valleys when we're waiting for almost a year for someone to get out of the training program. And it's gonna help us to be able to deliver a better service to our community with more officers out in the streets. So we're gonna go from, I think you said 20 vacancies last year to being able to over hire this year. Correct. And now to be quite honest, we have over 20 that are in training right now. So it's gonna take a while to get them with them in training, but the momentum's going we've been our patrol staffing has been critically low. So we're gonna be able to start building up that patrol staffing and then we're gonna work toward some of the specialty positions that have been vacant for years in our like our domestic violence, sexual assault or property crime or narcotic team. And then I'm also gonna use some of those resources to bring back our gang crimes team without asking for additional bodies. We're gonna use those bodies we're filing hiring to bring back our gang crimes team, which is eliminated in 2019 due to some of these low staffing numbers. We've heard from a number of folks in public and I'm sure we'll hear more when we go to public comment. If you had additional officers, where would you put them? What do you see is the most critical need? The most critical need is our downtown enforcement team. Right now that we see so many of the issues, not only they deal with a lot of the homeless impacts but they deal with a lot of the safety downtown. And right now we're seeing some safety concerns at the transit mall, not only for our staff, but our community at Simon Plaza's on the downtown area. So that's our greatest need right now. I think another area that we're trying to focus more is on our traffic safety in our accidents. We saw eight fatal collisions last year. So that's another area that we're focused. And then our overriding goal for this year is to reduce violent crime and to reduce our priority one response times. And we're seeing that right now taking seven minutes and seven seconds as our average to respond to a priority 911 call. And that's too long. And so we got to get better. And so we're focused on putting resources to reduce the violent crime, the priority one response times and fatal collisions in the city of Santa Rosa and improve the overall safety throughout our whole city. But especially where we're seeing some of the upticks is in our downtown core. And that's so important to the vibrancy of our city. And then my last question, you mentioned non-sworn civilian members of the department as well. Are there ways that those folks can be additive to address some of the backlog, if you will, or some of the areas that need a little bit of additional attention, background investigations or things that don't require the immediate presence of an officer? Is that a way that we can try to help mitigate and relieve some of the pressure or some of the stress? Absolutely. One of the ways we're looking at is with the filled evidence technician spot and they can fill a lot of roles, being able to not only processing the crime scenes, handling the reports, but assisting our investigative teams with things with investigations and going out. And so we've been finding ways to utilize them with our investigation resources on major investigations where an FBT can be assigned to them to assist with that investigation and hopefully reduce some of the overtime that is being paid to a detective and that we could pay really at a more cost effective means to a civilian employee and then utilize their enhanced expertise in crime scene collection and processing. And for our officers that what I've heard from a lot of them is they don't mind overtime so much, they hate the forced overtime. And is there with this staffing model that you're presenting, does that allow you to free up some of the additional time for officers and make sure that we get real coverage? It'll certainly assist. And unfortunately, some of our overtime is unpredictable, such as the homicide we had just this Friday evening and other emergencies that may come up. But as staffing improves, we're certainly gonna be able to start seeing reduction in some of our overtime and certainly not some of the forced overtime that we've seen happen with a lot of just our high vacancy numbers. And we have minimum staffing to provide a safe level of coverage throughout our city. So we will frequently mandate officers to fill the meet our minimum staffing guidelines. All right, I apologize. I lied because I have one more question for you also. You and I have talked before about the downtown enforcement team, how during the week we seem to make progress. And then we backslide when we don't have officers on for DTE. What would it take to get coverage all throughout the week and the weekend to make sure that we really have downtown as a shining example of a safe place for people to be? Certainly. So right now we have six buzzard positions in the downtown enforcement team. What we're trying to do is get to at least eight on that team and then be able to have two teams of four. So one team working Monday through Thursday and one team of four working Wednesday through Saturday so that we have the full week coverage there when we have city resources here. And they work as a partner and then their overlap day is Wednesday where they really focus on some of the larger issues in the city, larger encampments and some of the issues downtown and coordinate their resources. So that's what my short-term goal is to be able to get them to eight and have two teams of four working six days a week and really being able to have that covered throughout the city. And that includes the focus on shifting folks to reconstitute the gang task force? Correct. I'm gonna use the existing resources that we've made by making the grounds and recruitment this year to be able to put four detectives that we're gonna move back and then one sergeant that's being funded by measure H is gonna be the crime scene sergeants and we lost that position. And then our goal is this fall, no later than January of 2024 to have that gang crimes team up and running. Great. I appreciate that. And I'm sure we'll discuss it further after public comment when we hear from folks. My one major concern is that we aren't pulling between the two and putting resources into downtown that get pulled away constantly or putting resources into the gang task force that then also get pulled into other priorities from the city. I'd like to see how we do both. Thank you. Absolutely. Council Member Staff. Council Member Rogers very helpfully asked both of my questions. So no more for me. Thank you. Seeing no further questions from council we'll go ahead and open up the public comment 845. Thank you. We are now taking public comment on 15.2. I'm sorry, my computer is frozen. I think I'd have this down by now. If you are in council chamber who would like to comment but have not provided a speaker card or your name please make your way to the podium. If you are participating via Zoom please raise your hand or dial star nine. You will have three minutes and a countdown timer will alert at the end of that period. The first public comment will be provided by Dwayne followed by Hugh. I don't see Dwayne in the room. Hugh if you can please make your way to the podium followed by Stephen. We are allowing two minutes for public comment on this public hearing. Good evening members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity. I'll be brisk Hugh Futrell for the record. Here is chair of the downtown action organization which does encourage the council to add the two additional people to the DET team as the council is aware. Although there are six currently frequently to a great degree they have to be pulled out of the downtown. This will help assist a more permanent presence in the downtown. The issues of public safety and perception are exceptionally important. I want to add another aspect though from a budget standpoint. The downtown is the economic engine and to the degree public safety gets in the way of tax revenues then in fact you have a budget deficit that can be increased. These two positions people often say gosh if you'll just do this position or do this program it pays for itself and most of the time that's just not true. That's just propaganda but in this case it very well probably is true. For example, you have about 10 million dollars coming into the budget from the two different sources you have for hotel taxes. 60 to 70% of those dollars come from downtown hotels. These two positions that we're talking about right now equal about 6% of those dollars. So it's an insurance policy, perceptions get bad, hotel occupancies fall, you lose $400,000 like that. Similarly, if you have a vibrant downtown you're not only your hotel tax but your sales tax increase. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know but it's important to emphasize that sometimes decisions to invest in personnel are very, very prudent. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be Steven followed by Nicole. Please go ahead Steven. My name is Steven Stankovich. I'm with San Rosa Plaza and Simon Property Group. I'm also a member of the DAO board. The reason I am here today is to speak on behalf of adding to downtown enforcement team members to SRPD. There are a lot of tenants that frankly feel unsafe at the mall when they arrive in the morning or when they're leaving at night. We also get a lot of comments from the public with this sense too. We have increased our security staffing levels dramatically. We've also tried to hire off-duty PD to help out with the perception issue with the downtown. Unfortunately PDs suffering with staffing issues as well. So having these two extra members would dramatically help us. We've also over the years kind of to go along with what he was saying. We have lost six permanent tenants. That would have been national tenants that would have come to downtown Santa Rosa due to a safety and perception issue. They literally, they walked the center with us. They loved it. They came back another time by themselves and they felt scared or threatened due to issues of homelessness or due to other safety concerns that they were experiencing. Finally, as many of you know, Catholic Charities Open the Caritas Center which is a dramatic increase in public and homeless items downtown right next to the mall. As part of that, I think that it's very strong for the city council to increase policing if they're going to be putting such amenities downtown. We are also going to be having public housing downtown or not public housing, low income housing but also a homeless portion as well that will have persistent and severe mental health issues are going to be half of the people living down there. So we really do need this increase in public safety to provide a safe community for all especially for our retailers, our shoppers and our employees, thank you. Thank you, the next public comment will be from Nicole followed by Joe. Good evening council, my name is Nicole Gaddis. I'm in California luggage right at the heart of downtown Santa Rosa. I am also here to advocate for amendment to the budget to add the two additional downtown enforcement officers. Right now they are doing their best and they're doing a great job but they're often pulled away to other parts of the city. So having two officers designated, two more officers and officers that are designated in the downtown core will not only increase the perception of safety but will in reality create a safe for downtown which I have watched many businesses leave our downtown for other locations like Montgomery village or Healdsburg places that don't struggle with the same unhoused population that we do downtown. And so I'm nervous up here, can you tell? So yes, I ask for myself and for our community that we add these officers, thank you. Thank you, the next public comment will be from Joe followed by Terry. Mayor Rogers and council, my name is Joe Deetson and I urge council to support an amendment to the city budget to include two additional officers for the SRPD's downtown enforcement team. Now my background is that my wife and I have lived in downtown Santa Rosa in the St. Rose district since the 80s. At the same time I've worked downtown literally across the street in that same period of time. Currently I serve on the downtown action committee as the treasurer, but I believe because of my time and working downtown that I have a unique perspective. And I wanna tell you, my family and I love downtown but we want it to be better, we want it to succeed. I think the addition of the DET officers focused on the downtown will help in restoring a safe environment. And I think as it's been mentioned, I think there've been some negative impacts caused by unfortunately caused by some unhoused individuals in downtown. And I think this has had an impact on residents. I've seen it have an impact on tenants downtown moving out because they felt unsafe for staff. That's been unfortunate and certainly we've seen the impact on merchants. So why make the investment? Well, if reality or perceptions change, the word will get around. Hotels, occupancy increases, TOT tax increases, merchants come back in, sales increase, sales tax increase. It's a payback to the city. Recently we've seen a number of players start residential building in the downtown. And that's a tremendous, it's tremendous. 4th Street, Mendocino, Morgan and Fifth, out by the railroad square. That's a tremendous investment and we should welcome that. The city should also make an investment in the DET team. Thank you. Thank you. Terry, do you mind raising up the microphone in the podium so that we can hear you better for public comments? Thank you. I will max it out. And it's still too short. Thank you, council. I'd like to also echo some of the sentiments of previous speakers and urge the council to amend the budget to include the two additional downtown enforcement officers. And I understand that, I think we all understand that the budget is predicting a deficit, but the officers will have a positive impact on the general fund by creating a more visibly safe downtown area with more people likely to visit shop and thus increasing TOT overnight hotel stays and sales tax dollars. In addition, it's in line with the council goals and priorities with one, helping to reduce homelessness and its impact on our downtown businesses. And I always say that our downtown businesses, they're us. They're people trying to make a living, sending their kids to the same schools that we all send our kids to. So we don't wanna make that more difficult for them. And also promoting economic and community vibrancy in the city's economic center. So you know that I'm on the Wednesday night market and it's just, I know this is anecdotal and anecdotal is not evidence, but we've lost two young women employees because when it gets dark outside, they don't feel safe walking back to their car and they're volunteering their time to participate in an event that they don't get paid for to make our community a vibrant place, to make our downtown a place that people feel comfortable going to. And they don't feel safe walking home, walking to their car. Please, please amend the budget and please include these two officers. It's vital for our downtown. It's vital for vibrancy in Santa Rosa. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else in council chamber wishing to provide public comment on item 15.2? See no one rise to the podiums. I'm gonna turn it over to our Zoom host or we have three hands raised at this point. Thank you. We'll start with Tom followed by Leanna. Tom, you're being asked to unmute. Go ahead when you're ready. I'm ready. It's just Tom Robertson. Our community has been involved in downtown Santa Rosa since the early 1990s and we've had the building at 625 Fifth Street rented to the county of Sonoma. And I want to tell you a very specific issue which is arisen because of the lack of sufficient policing in the downtown. The police are doing a very good job with resources they have. But the issue is garage, the garage on Fifth Street, very explicitly the leaders of the Department of Health Services, which is our tenant, have told me they're going to leave the downtown because their employees do not feel safe parking in that garage and in particular their cars are frequently broken into. And then, you know, to pay the deductible and it's just not right. I urge you to add these two positions back into the budget. You're going to lose the county. We're going to build, we own an acre of ground. We're pursuing two projects which would bring 230 units of market rate housing or even more into the downtown. Some of the people who are going to live there are going to need to park in that garage. How can we explain to developer that there's a problem with the parking from a security standpoint in that garage? So we need your help to turn the perception around and the reality so that we know that we can tell people they can park there and that their cars and they will be safe. Thank you very much. I must commend the staff. Terrific presentation, but we need your help if we're going to get this, these projects going. The property taxes alone will be a substantial addition to your budget. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. Liana will be followed by Marianne. Liana, please go ahead when you're ready. Yes, hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Greetings, council members. My name is Liana Kane and my family has owned Osiello's the street grill downtown for over 23 years now. I'm also a member of the downtown action organization known as the DAO. I'm here to echo the need for two additional officers for the DET downtown enforcement team in effort to achieve a seven day a week presence of enforcement downtown. The short-sighted view is that we are asking for an amendment to the budget, which would increase spending, but the long-term goal here is to create a more visibly safe downtown, which would result in more people shopping, more tourists and more sales tax benefiting in the general fund. The key word here is visibility. Having officers present downtown would help in reducing the unwanted behaviors of the unhoused population. Their presence would promote economic and community vibrancy. Others have mentioned downtown's reputation through the eyes of consumers and tourists, but I would like to relay a unique perspective of operating in a business seven days a week into the wee hours of the morning. Safety is one of my biggest concerns for my employees. They refuse to use the parking garages because they won't walk a couple blocks away that late at night, and they strongly feel they need to be closer to work when they get off of their shift after midnight, and I don't blame them. It's not news to anyone that our downtown's reputation is struggling, but we are at a pivotal point in time where we believe our downtown is at full capacity for potential. We can only go up from here. We ask that you help us achieve this goal of increasing visible security. Thank you. Mary Ann will be next, and if anyone else on Zoom is wishing to speak, please raise your hand. Go ahead, Mary Ann, when you're ready. Yes, this is Mary Ann Neufeld. I am a property owner in Rebels Square, and I've been in business there for 15 years. I think the downtown area, I'm also on the board of the Rebels Square Benefit District. The downtown area is the most vibrant as I have seen it in 35 years have been a property owner. It's important we're hearing from the different hotels that are concerned with the conditions that some have to put up with. The two additional officers will help. I'm not sure it's enough. I would like to see more, but at least we will have two. So please amend your budget to hire those extra two people. Thank you for the opportunity to make my comment. Thank you. They know additional hands on Zoom. We do have a few prerecorded messages I will play. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald, and members of council. This is Kayton Pinkle-Allinson, the executive director of the San Jose downtown district. I'm sorry I can't be there with you today, but I'm calling in to request that you consider amending the budget to include the addition of two new members of the downtown enforcement team. I've had the opportunity to work closely with the DET under three different sergeants, and I'm consistently impressed with their dedication to all members of the community. Their knowledge about complex subjects and their ability to compassionately address quality of life issues in the downtown core. I understand that there are many competing requests for limited budget dollars, as that these positions have the unique potential to generate further revenue for the general fund by making downtown feel like a safe place to shop, dine, and visit. And encouraging people to spend money and increasing overnight visits. We know from many of our business owners that customers have started to perceive downtown as an unsafe place, and it is critical that we address this now. The addition of these positions is also very much in line with two of council's goals, helping to reduce homelessness and its impacts and promoting economic and community vibrancy in the heart of the city. The DAO's three team has expanded our hours and team members to help mitigate the impacts of added trash, bulk objects, human waste, cleanup, and other impacts that business and property owners are feeling as a result of the unsheltered population residing in the downtown. But being able to expand the DET's presence to seven days a week will make an incredible difference. It'll be critical to ensuring that members of the public feel safe when spending their money in the downtown core that our unsheltered population has consistent points of contact and care. And it will begin to reduce the impacts of homelessness and help downtown reach its potential as we continue to grow and develop in the area. I hope you'll consider amending the budget to include these two positions. Thank you so much for your time. This is Dan Tamasi calling regarding item 15.2. I'm the city of San Lorenzo, resident of principal TLC, the architecture in downtown. I'm calling to urge council support amending the budget to include two additional officers from the downtown enforcement team. Adding downtown enforcement team and visual replacement back in general plan that will help reduce impacts of homelessness in downtown and will help promote economic vitality in the core downtown core. As a downtown business owner and many other businesses that have moved out of downtown were expected not to locate here primarily because of employee safety concerns. Adding these two officers will make a substantial change in addressing these concerns. Thank you. Caitlin Karasek commenting on item 15.2. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor McDonald and members of council. My name is Caitlin Karasek. I am the owner of LaRosa's Keillery and Grill downtown Santa Rosa, as well as the board member on the downtown action organization. I'm calling today to request you consider amending the budget to add two more DET members. I know budget dollars are limited but I feel that the addition of these two positions will prove their value and generate revenue for the general fund. As a restaurant owner, I have had multiple conversations with multiple people from various demographics and a very common theme is the perception that downtown is not a safe place to be. I strongly believe that the additional police presence would appease some of these concerns and help bring people back downtown, shopping, dining and bringing money to all businesses, promoting economic and community vibrancy. Expanding the DET coverage to seven days a week is critical to improving the perception of downtown. More often than not, the issues we experience at the restaurant occur outside the current coverage schedule. Having those off days covered would be a massive win for all of us downtown. I hope you will consider amending the budget to include these two positions as the impact will be exponential. Thank you for your time and your consideration. This is Chris Wilson. I'm the executive director for the Historic Railroad Square Association and I'm calling to voice support of the item number 15.2 to strongly request the council amending the budget to include two additional downtown enforcement officers. As executive director, I hear from our businesses, our merchants, our restaurants and their issues and concerns are valid. My role here is to help support business in our district. And by adding additional officers will have a positive impact on the general fund by creating a more visibly safe downtown area where more people are likely to visit and shop which would increase the TOT overnight hotel stays and sales tax dollars. We want to help reduce the homelessness as it impacts the downtown core and promote our economic and community vibrancy to the city's economic center. This is, we don't get a second chance to make a first impression. It's lasting and we must expand our team in order to provide really the needed safety and security for residents and our visitors. Please, I strongly advocate to amend the budget and add two additional and very essential officers to the downtown enforcement team. Thank you. Thank you. The next public comment will be from Zach. Zach, I've enabled your speaking permissions. If you can please unmute yourself. Thank you. Sorry. My name is Zach Berkowitz. Sorry, I couldn't be there in person. I wanted to thank you all for what seems to be going in the right direction. I'm a longtime property owner and developer and landlord to the downtown police department when they were on the square. Our downtown has gotten away from us and we need more police presence to serve as a deterrent for the graffiti, reducing the homelessness, helping the homeless people out and making people feel safer when they are downtown. Downtown's the heartbeat of the city and we need your help in bringing back both the economic and community vitality. Please amend the budget and add two police officers to the downtown area. Thank you. Next, we have Nica. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. Well, thank you again for hosting this. This is Nisha Weyland, an executive at a large main box retail store that is located in downtown Santa Rosa. I'm asking the council to increase the budget to include two additional DET officers to support safety of not only my employees but our core customer. Our shoppers are cautious to spend time at our location as they don't feel safe due to the flex of professional shoplifters, homelessness, and including those who are struggling with addiction. My employees have experienced physical and verbal assault weekly. Customers have been robbed or threatened. It is not an environment we should expect. Investing in the DET will provide further presence and visibility to everyone to feel safe to bring additional assistance and foster faster response time to our downtown business owners. So I do believe that it will make a positive impact to our beloved city. Thank you. Thank you. And we have no additional public comment. I'm sorry for clarification. Was that the end of our public comments? That includes the public comments. I apologize. I didn't hear you. Okay. Seeing no more public comments, I'm going to go ahead and close the public hearing and we will bring it back to council for final questions and comments. Council Member Fleming. Thank you to everybody who took the time to call in. I know that there's a lot of issues in our town and the downtown certainly gets a lot of attention because it is in my mind, the economic generator should be the economic generator, even though I was reminded earlier today that it is not the economic generator that the council would like it to be. And it's a shared and long-term priority of this council. I just want to take a moment to talk about the stream and the cycle of how things work as far as I see them, which is that there's a cause and effect and there are reasons why there are folks in the downtown that are causing trouble and making people feel fearful and causing us to need what I agree are two more dedicated officers and probably, not probably in my mind, two more field evidence technicians. And the reason why I feel this way is because we need to get ourselves in a good financial place and in a good appearance place in the downtown. But that is one end of the stream. To my mind, there is the upstream and there is the downstream. We cannot ignore any place along the stream. And that's why as we go forward with our negotiations, I want to encourage the council to have some ideas. I'm just going to put out a frame here for us to think about it, but there are ways that we can help people before they get to the place of loitering, harassing or doing drugs or making unsightly appearances in our downtown. There are lots of things and interventions that we can do most notably in our recreation programming for younger children, allowing families to work and be more self-sufficient. There are things we can do for people like reinstituting our gang tattoo removal program. Fairly low-cost things that we can do to make sure that people who want to get out of the cycle of poverty, trauma and general antisocial behavior can do so prior to them landing in our downtown. So I'll be as supportive of what I hear from the community and what I believe is a really good short-term solution and I'd like to see it paired with upstream investments as well. And I'd like us to have a balanced approach to both prevention and addressing challenges as we see them in our community. Mayor Rogers. Thank you. So I could not agree more with council member women. I think just speaking to my fellow council members like this is a time to show our residents, civilian officers, sworn officers, bicyclists, pedestrians, everyone in our community that we support them. I'm so big on upstream investments, but when we don't make the upstream investments that we need to make, then we have to make investments downstream. In a lot of this, we are definitely downstream. So I will be supporting having two additional DET officers and two field evidence technicians. One of the things that I asked when we were going over the budget was, you know, why do I see so much? And when we see violent crimes, we see that, but we also see people running red lights. We see, and we want people to get out on their bicycles. We want people to walk, but then they're not really safe, are they? So there's just so much going on in our city. And I can't see Allen's face and I can't see city manager's face very well, but I do know that both of you deal with challenges head on and you're very innovative. And I'm sorry to spring this on you because that's not me. I don't like to spring things on anyone, but I do think that this is needed. Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Before I go to the discussion topic on officers, I did want to ask a couple of specific questions about economic development. And I brought this up in the last study session. Do we have adequate funds earmarked in this budget to both fulfill the work that we're doing around enhanced infrastructure finance districts, which I know is a big priority. And then also on the tail end of our discussion at our last economic development committee meeting about developing a comprehensive economic development strategy. And again, I'm asking the questions because as we talk about deficits, as we talk about long-term fiscal stability of the organization, we typically have two options. Focus on economic development and grow the pie or ask the public for more money through tax measures. And I found us $250,000 earlier, so I figured. And that's appreciated. Do you mind? I'm sorry, I don't think I caught the first part of your question relative to the EIFD. Yeah, I want to make sure, given that we've put so much work into developing the EIFD, that we are adequately budgeting for staff time to be able to get it where it needs to be to be fully functional by the end of the year, right? So we've got our folks who have been appointed, the county is appointing their folks. There is some additional work that'll need to be done at a minimum staffing the meetings between the joint entity, but probably more so working with consultants and making sure that all of our teas are crossed and eyes are dotted before it comes online. I just want to make sure that we don't drop the ball at the 11th hour by not budgeting adequately for that. So I believe that we are, and I would look at it this way, is that between the resources that are in the economic development department and planning and economic development, the resources that are in the finance department, meaning myself and Scott and other admin staff that we can, we understand the priority and I would much rather pledge those resources rather than adding new. And that's going to be the theme that you'll may or may not hear from me as we go through this, is that for me at this stage of where we are, given our budgetary constraints, is that for as much as possible in instances like that, is that we are looking internally to figure out how we can use our existing resources to be able to make those things happen. That's got to be our first question. And then if we can't, then obviously we have to augment. So I think that probably answers that one. And then I'm sorry, I lost your second one. Yeah, no, and I really appreciate that. What I'm trying to make sure I avoid is that three months from now, we check it and we say, why didn't something happen? And the answer is we had no staff capacity for it. So I could appreciate the desire and the need to look internally first, but I wanna make sure that we're also not blind to the actual impact of the organization if we don't have adequate resources. Right, and I'm probably gonna get daggers in my back from the other departments that I'm speaking from for, but I do know that where we are at this point, our tasks are out of what we need to do in order to get that to the finish line. It's a priority for our team to make that happen. So, and honestly, if something slips, we can always come back and ask for it then. But at this point, I think doing it inside and making sure that happens, I know that we do need to augment our consultant budget. And I'm not sure that that's in this or that is probably a separate item that will come to you, but from staff resources inside, I think our plan is to have that as a high priority and move forward with that. Right, so that was item one out of three for the economic development priorities. We also had a comprehensive economic development strategy that was being developed. I wanna make sure that that won't fall by the wayside. And then the third was the potential for annexation in South Santa Rosa, and I wanna make sure that that also doesn't disappear if we don't have adequate resources. And I, again, maybe I missed that it's a long document, but I didn't see any of those three things called out in the proposed budget. Right, so the economic development strategy is moving forward. I'm getting nods behind me. And do you have adequate resources? Okay, so there's that. I can't speak to the South Santa Rosa annexation. I honestly, I forget where we left that. I'm not sure if... We do not have any budget allocation for the annexation at this time. That was not a direction we were given, so that's not included in the next fiscal year budget. If that's something council wanted to move forward with at a later time, it would be brought back to council and appropriated then. So through the Vice Mayor, Councilman Rogers, I believe the last direction that we've received on that was we were waiting on the grant. So we applied for the grant and we also submitted municipal services letter to LAFCO, and LAFCO is actually working on the duck. So at this time, I believe that's all we have been required to do at this time. So unless there's other direction that I'm not aware of, I believe we're moving forward on South Santa Rosa. Now, that sounds great. And I know that there's also a discussion about if there was additional work that needed to happen that the applicant might be interested in offering resources for a dedicated planner. And so I know we'd have to make an adjustment to the budget at that time if they actually did that. But I just want to make sure that we are not the barrier to them being able to move forward expeditiously. And I'm hearing that the answers know that we're fine on that end. Great. All right, thank you. Now to the police. So I am definitely supportive in concept, but want to hear some specifics because I keep hearing two police officers plus two field texts thrown out. What is the actual budget impact if we were to put those positions in? So two police officers, they each run about $231,000, all in with salaries and benefits. So two of those you're looking at 460,000. Field and evidence texts, salaries and benefits together is about 160,000. So if we were to add two police officers and two field and evidence texts, just the staffing costs alone brings us up to about $782,000. In addition to that, there would be support costs required for training, equipment, that nature, that things of that nature. Those run usually about $10,000 per FTE. And for the downtown, we'd have to double check to see what types of vehicles would be needed for the officers. It would be a motorcycle, police car, et cetera. So from there, there would be ongoing costs associated with maintenance and repair and gasoline as well. So about 850,000. That's, I think, a fair estimate, yeah. Okay, what does that do to our measure O baseline formula? So that would bring, so police and fire are well above baseline. That's not a concern. It's violence prevention that's running a little close. We would probably have to add additional general fund budget to the violence prevention neighborhood services programs, but it wouldn't be much. I believe it's 0.04% of our general fund expenditures. It breaks out to be about, what was it, it's $40 for every 100,000 we add, something like that. Wouldn't push us over the edge significantly. All right, so we're just to be clear in what we've sort of heard conceptually for adding, we'd need to find almost a million additional dollars. For, yeah, for two officers, for two field and evidence texts, additional support costs and baseline, I'd say 150, $900,000 about there. Okay, and Alan, remind us, how much are we over the council policy for our current reserves and understanding we're doing contract negotiations and these are ongoing costs and understanding all of that? We are, yeah, 15.6 million. Okay, and that's over the 17%, yes. All right, great, thank you so much. Council Member Flinney. I'm just curious to know what the, given sort of what Council Member Rodgers set up, if the council has an appetite at this time to hear about some specific programming ideas that were brought forth that we could add on both neighborhood resources and recreation, if there's any interest in balancing that out with addition to our law enforcement side. And before I get down into the weeds, I just wanna see if there's even support for the idea of doing all points along the stream. So I guess I'm looking for a straw poll before I begin to waste anyone's time at 9.30 at night. Love to hear my ideas. I wish I could say they were all mine. But one thing is that during the great recession we lost drop-in sites in our city parks. There had previously been six park sites that during the spring and summer had drop-ins for families and children where you could go between, for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening. That program, which provides childcare, opportunities for parents to work and children to recreate without necessarily having to plan in advance if we were to be stood up during the spring and carried through to the end of the summer. It's aimed at elementary school age children and allows for middle school children to have a more leadership role in it is about $375,000. A neighborhood revitalization program which would take kids to the snow, to Safari West, to the ocean and so forth. That program costs about $50,000. Scholarships for children to attend regular city programs which I think is a great idea because I hate the idea of us separating out low-income kids from regular kids because at the end of the day kids are kids is about $25,000. Most of these programs would be started next summer, next spring, we're not talking about right now. The purchase STEM curriculum is about $25,000. And then one that is particularly close to my heart is the, not that I've ever had a tattoo, but is the tattoo removal program. I think anybody should be able to leave a troubled past behind. We can get nurses and doctors to donate their time, but to oversee the program and the equipment, we need about $100,000. And then there had been some thoughts around reopening Finley as an after-school site, not all after-school. So for example, at my child's center as a city school program, previous to her getting a lot of kids weighed on these weight lists and they use other services. And at her school, prior to her getting on site, care at her public school, the bus from the Boys and Girls Club would come to her school. But at my friend whose kid goes to school half mile away, in the middle of the day at two o'clock, she'd have to get in her car and luckily she could work from home, but she had to go pick her child up and drive him to the same site that my child was getting cared for because there was no service. So one idea would be instead of standing up a fairly expensive program at Finley, which we could consider doing, but we could also work with the city schools to add additional transport or Boys and Girls Club or any of these sites to help bridge the gap so that parents and mostly moms in this case can work a full workday. Anyway, if we were to take all these programs, the Finley one I adjusted a bit, but in my talking to you guys, but if we were to take all these programs without amending them, we're looking at minus administrative fees, which I'm guessing would not be unsubstantial, it's about $725,000. What I would propose is that the council allocate a dollar amount to recreation and to tattoo removal, since I'm guessing recreation doesn't administer tattoo removal, that would probably be a different department, I'd have to ask someone here, but that we allocate a specific amount to match the investment in our police department. And the reason why I would suggest that is because, not just because of the streams and the upstream downstream stream approach, but also because of our reserves. I understand the city manager and our CFO's position that we do have a lot of headwinds coming. At the same time, we are constantly asking our public for a handout in the form of taxes and fees and all sorts of things. And I do believe that at some point, we have a responsibility to distribute the funds in ways that generate additional dollars without generating additional asks. And I think that if we were to allocate, between these two programs would be a little shy or these two suites of programs would be a little shy of $2 million, which is by my estimation, about 15% of the overage on our reserve. And I think that that's a prudent, reasonable reinvestment of the community's dollars. So I'm gonna put that on the table for discussion and see what you guys think. Council Member Alvarez. I love the idea. I love the, when we speak of equity and equality, I think you spoke about exactly that right now. Thank you. Yes, well, I appreciate the sentiments around some of them. Some of them I would be cautious around. I'm not sure around investments in STEM education or curriculum, where we would be at and how that would coincide with education. Same with wraparound services, working with Four Seas, some of our other partners around the Findlay Center idea that you had. I would be curious to talk first with the City of Santa Rosa Schools to see how we would transport them. I understand that we're in the middle of a budget process. The one that kind of speaks out to me the most is the $375,000 program that you spoke of early on that was a before and after school program. So just so I'm clear, would you be asking for that so that it would start in the fall when kids would go back to school or is that something in the summertime specific? So that's actually not an after school program. The Findlay program I'm less wedded to. I mean, I'm actually, besides the tattoo removal program, I'm not actually suggesting a specific program. What I wanted to do was suggest a number of different ideas and then the notion that we allocate a general amount to recreation for them to come forward to us and let's say a month or six weeks with a suite of programs for us to choose from or they can give us a presentation rather than me as not a staff member and not a recreation specialist trying to present to you my limited understanding of these programs. So I don't think that we need to necessarily dive super deep in the weeds today. If we're comfortable with just saying that we want to make an investment upstream and then staff will come back and we can choose from it on a menu. Thanks for that clarification. That wasn't clear to me. I apologize. Council Member Staff, then Council Member O'Crepkey. I'd like to add my support for making investments, particularly in public safety and I'm certainly not adverse to making upstream investments also. I would like to come back to the budget headwinds though because when we're talking about these investments, we're talking about making multi-year investments. So once we're putting say a total of $2 million in this year, we're really hoping to fund that for three years, five years at a minimum and in reality potentially in the perpetuity. So the $15 million budget, or the $15 million overage with respect to the surplus. I mean, in point of fact, most of that's probably gone with the upcoming budget negotiations. So the $2 million plus a year that we're talking about, which is really $6 million over three years, $10 million over five years, whatever the number is, that's gonna have to come out of somewhere. And I'm a little bit nervous about that point. All right, respond to that. I'm gonna let every Council Member at first make their comments and then I'll come back to you, Mayor Rogers. Oh, pardon me, I'm sorry, Mayor Rogers. I went to Council Member O'Crapkey first, then to you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm kind of leaning towards where Council Member Stapp is at. The comments about making downtown more hospitable, about reducing response time are things that we can do directly without having to fund them for years down the line, but I actually see a result immediately. I do believe that the downtown enforcement team, the DET officers would pay for themselves over time, and that's why I'm a little bit more comfortable with it. I'd also like to say with not that I'm averse at all to upstream investment, the budget head wins, yes, being what they are, but I also want to, you know, to Council Member Rogers' point, we have a work plan, and while it's not set in stone and it can shift, I don't want to task our staff with more stuff to kind of decide if we maybe kind of sort of want to do something now to come back in a month or two months to pick it off of a menu when we could have had those discussions during the goal setting process, and we can have those discussions during the goal setting process next year. But for me, if we're looking at our work plan and our workflow for our staff and our departments, if we're putting something like that on there, then we've got to be prepared to point out something that we want to take off, because we only have a finite amount of bandwidth for our staff without stressing them out too much. So with those two things, I guess three things, the budget headwinds, the staff, limited amount of bandwidth, and as well as the ability to see returns with the public safety investment, I'm a little more wary of doing the upstream investments right now. Bear Rogers. I think upstream investments are definitely great, and I think that I would definitely like to hear what parts and wrecks would do with additional funding, maybe not as much as we're giving to public safety at this time. I think that we see an immediate need, an immediate need that's going on, and we're trying to, I think someone else said it, like put a bandaid on it or do something right now, even though we know that this is not a permanent fix for some of the challenges that we're facing. And I really do like the integration of the programs. That's something that I've been trying to say that we need for a while. So I am not opposed to hearing maybe not in six weeks, but maybe mid-year or something, what it is if we gave additional funds to parts and wrecks, what they can do with it. Council Member Fleming. Yeah, just a couple of responses to some of the comments from my esteemed council members. One is the notion that the suggestions that I'm making would be multi-year programs. I would put that back to y'all around the police investments. It's not as though next year we're gonna turn around and say, wow, that was a resounding success. Let's, we're done with that. We're gonna keep on making that investment, that million-dollar investment as long as we can afford to. We're not gonna turn it around if it works, and we're probably not gonna turn it around if it doesn't work. And the upstream investments have been shown to reduce need over time. And so the notion of saying we're not gonna do it now, let's look at it next year is probably not gonna be really as helpful to us. If you're gonna make an investment, the best time is now. So while we may not choose to make an investment of the same size, I think that the investments that we make now are more likely to be profitable for us. I hate to talk about children in that way, but they're much more likely to pay off the sooner we make them. So I just encourage you to perhaps step outside of your comfort zone. If the programs that I'm suggesting don't work, I hope that we don't continue to fund them for many years. I think that we should be nimble, be willing to make a mistake. If something doesn't work, we can turn it around. Offering children, services, recreation is a pretty low-risk proposition. Worst case, some kids have fun and we can't pay for it again next year. Council Member Alvarez. Thank you. I do support that EIFD. I support adding police to downtown corridor. I understand how important that is to the city of Santa Rosa. But I do understand that this is what Councilman, Councilwoman Fleming stated, was a long-term investment with long-term solutions. For myself, when I think of removing the blight that transients are to downtown corridor, where are we going to send these folks to? Where have we sent these folks to? District one. When we're talking about creating a unit to arrest folks, who are we arresting? What's the long-term solution? Repetitive in and out of jail? Historically, that's proven already. So for me, it is an additional investment. It could be a great investment. And as Council Member Fleming stated, kids had a lot of fun. Maybe they learned a lifelong lesson. But it has to be a long-term solution. So for me, it's the solution, not the investment. So I just want to say, as far as upstream investments and looking at that, there's a lot of data behind what Council Member Fleming is saying around investing in our youth in after-school programs in particular, in recreation programs in the summertime that keep them out of trouble and off the streets, which we can correlate with the need for law enforcement and interventions as well. What my concern is on tonight's implementation is we're not giving staff enough time to even take a look at what programs they would want to have. And I think when we look at goal-setting and work development plans, that's our opportunity to say, these are the six programs that we feel we need to bring forward so that we can really target our youth in these specific areas. I feel like this is a bit last minute going into this. And in a few months, we're gonna be back at work plan and goal-setting. So nobody has probably worked harder to make sure that these programs are in place. Well, I don't want to say nobody, but I've worked really hard to make sure programs are in place for kids in our community. But I want to make sure that we're doing it in a way that it's thoughtful with our budget as well and that we're not just throwing money at something. And then in five, six months, we actually don't have anything in place because we don't have the staff to put it in place and we don't have a program that we've really made sure that we are able to stand up. So I would be more comfortable having this discussion as we go into goal-setting so that next budget year we can actually look at, we want to invest even maybe a million dollars in these upstream programs. I just think it's a bit more last minute going in tonight. That said, I'd be comfortable allocating probably a smaller amount, not the $700,000, but maybe a smaller amount that maybe staff feels that they could work with. So I'm not sure if that would be an agreeable thought process on that. Perhaps if you and the city manager, we might be able to hear from recreation about whether or not these suite of programs would be feasible within their current staffing. That would be, that was one of my main concerns that you point out, Council Member Fleming is, do we even have the current staffing to add additional programs to recreations at this point in time right now? So by adding programs that to me means staff time as well as maybe stepping back from some of the current programs we have in place. Director Tibbets is here. So could you speak to that and Assistant City Manager Nutt? So good afternoon, Assistant City Manager Jason Nutt, Director of Recreation and Parks Acting, and Jeff is here as well as the Deputy Director of Recreation. I think the challenge we'll have is trying to make sure that we take the information vetted in a way that we can provide you with feedback and data and a complete roster of what it will take for us to implement certain programs because it will likely involve increased staffing as well as increased resources. So it's not an unduable product. It's a function of we know that there are other aspects that are gonna have to be put in play in order for us to be able to create that program that you may be looking for. Jeff, do you have additional information about kind of? Yeah, good evening, Jeff Tibbets, Deputy Director for the Recreation Division. First, I wanna start off just as Deputy Director of the Recreation Division. I wanna say thank you to Council Member Fleming for bringing this forward and to the Council for having this discussion. Before we talk about the resource that is being discussed, I just wanna say what it means to me as someone who's been in the department for over 20 years and what I know it means for my team who works incredibly hard. It's not just a discussion of resource. Regardless what the decision is on the resource, it means a tremendous amount to myself and to my team because it is a discussion of trust. It is a discussion of validation for the work, for the continued stepping up that the team has done incredible work through fires, through pandemics and the value of just kids having fun, right, I mean, as worst case scenario. So I wanna start off with that and just say how much that means to me that this is a conversation that is seen as a conversation to have at this setting and tonight. So thank you for that. Looking bigger picture and as far as the city is concerned, right now there are some resources that we are blessed to have. We've been supported by this Council. We've been supported by our community. So we have Measure M, the County Measure M Parks for All. That is giving us a unique resource that we are really just grasping, coming out of the pandemic and everything on the implementation of programming side. We're just grasping some programs that will start to, the community will start to see the benefits of this upcoming fiscal year. In addition to a funding source through Measure H, we have a general fund baseline contribution on the violence prevention partnership side. As we become more intertwined again with this restructuring and reorganization, that is a resource that we are looking to, to Council Member Alvarez's point earlier, the opening of the meeting tonight around, you know, really trying to rally with the community and get more services back out there. We have 400, about $425,000 in that fund, an additional 190-ish thousand being allocated to it. The 425,000 that's are rolling over, it's in a project account. We are equipped right now with some unique tools that are gonna allow us to expand and do more this upcoming fiscal year. Obviously, the more tools you put in the toolbox, the more that we can do. But also, what we're presenting to you tonight is an opportunity to, again, invest and show value in recreation and parks, not just recreation, but recreation and parks as a department again, to invest a director in our department, to work on a business plan with that new director, and to really give us that guidance of what is our direction, where are we headed, pulling the violence prevention partnership in with Neighborhood Services, that they've always worked together, but to pull that all under the same umbrella again, I'm very excited about where we already are for this upcoming year. Again, you put more tools in the toolbox. I know my team is gonna find some way to use them. They're too passionate not to, but we have a lot of tools in our toolbox for this year. We're talking about reserve funds, we're talking about projections of deficits, those types of things. I think we have a lot of tools to use this year. And if, you know, certainly, I don't think anyone's projecting that the reserve funds are gonna be gone by next year. Thank you again for having this conversation. Thank you again for, I can't stress how much it means to recreation and parks as an apartment to have those conversations and to give that validation. But yes, with more tools, we'll do more, but we have plenty of opportunity this year with what we have right now. Council Member Alvarez. You spoke of tools. So I wanna thank my colleagues for collectively taking one from the Carpenters, which is measure twice cut once. Thank you. Council Member Fleming. Yeah, so to your point about that you have a lot, I'm glad to hear that you have a lot and I know you have a lot to balance too. And I understand the delicacy of trying to get it all done in a way that meets all your constituencies. That said, some of the programs that I was talking about, for example, the drop in summer program, that wouldn't be done, that wouldn't be this summer, that would be summer of 2024. Is that something that you would have the resources to stand up without additional allocations? So yeah, the program you're referencing was called the Playgrounds Program before. Near and dear to my heart, it's actually a program I started as a temp staff in. So there's a lot of strategic conversation that's taking place right now and allocating those funds that we do have between Measure M, Parks for All. We are already working on a Camp Wattot's program, which would serve as schools start serving younger youth, trying to catch up with that gap of our services. So that's something that we're already putting in place. That is not gonna use the fall allocation of our Measure M Parks for All, not to mention we also have reserves building up in that from not having pulled that during the recovery from COVID. But a program like that to stand up the infrastructure, all of that, we could run some form of it, the full form that would be several hundred thousand dollars of a spring Saturday Playgrounds Program, which actually we knew we didn't offer that in the past, but the idea with that would be if we bring it back at some point to have to try the Saturday programming and then run through the summer to run a full program like that. Do I think we have the resources with some of the other goals that we have? No, I don't think so. Okay, that's helpful to know. I'm hearing just a general support but more caution from my council members than a full matching of what we're going to from when I hear allocate to the police department. I wanna suggest that we consider this program because if we wait till goal setting, then it will be stood and we decide we wanna do this drop-in summer program, then it won't be set up till 2025. It would be a $375,000 allocation. I recommend we do that and that we also look for ways to bridge the lunchtime before and after gap so that if a parent needs to work a full day that they're able to do that. So that's something that maybe need to be a little creative with if we only allocate $375,000. If I'm gonna make a paired back proposal, I would suggest that and I'd suggest the tattoo removal program and then strongly encourage you around the tots because my goal for this was to walk away with something for tiny children, for mid-aged children, and for older children slash young adults. And I think that the combination of that while not being on par with the same level of expenditure would leave us with a win for a little bit of something for everybody, including working parents. Council Member O'Crepkey. Thank you. Just to get the question out of the way, where would the tattoo removal program be placed? What department, would that be REC? Would that be VPP? Through the Vice Mayor. So in the past, Valence Prevention actually managed the program and they just worked with a local provider. Okay. So we'll keep that separate, but in regards to this department, Jeff, I really appreciate your candor. The one thing that you brought up that I wasn't even thinking about is that I'm hesitant to put more on REC's table than they already have considering that should we pass this budget as we think we will tonight, God willing. That we hope to have a new director for the Inevitable Parks and REC department in three to four months. In three to four months. So I don't want to, if we say like, hey, can we stress our resources here and do this and do that and then bring someone into a situation where they have no latitude to do the job they wanna do until we free something else up. Like I heard you say basically, if you give us a task, we'll find a way for most things. Wow, that's great. I'd prefer to have you focused on what you're trying to focus on right now and do that well instead of trying to do multiple things pretty good because we give you more. And I think because we're waiting on an Inevitable new director, I wanna give he or she that ability to have some latitude within their department. Any further comments? Okay, seeing none from my colleagues, we're gonna go ahead and start on the votes of the resolution. So we're gonna start with the first two are going to be full-time equivalent staffing for parks and recreation changes as well as the resolution for parks and recreation department budget. Those two will be put on the floor. I will be passing the gavel to council member Rogers to facilitate those two and be stepping away from the dais as I have a conflict of interest from a personal relationship. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right, council member O'Crepia, I believe you have the motion. I do. There's two resolutions. It's okay if we take them both at the same time. Is that correct? All right. So first I'll move a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa recommending the city salary plan and schedule for parks and recreation and authorizing the city manager to implement these changes included in the fiscal year 2023-24 budget and a resolution of the council of the city of Santa Rosa approving the parks and recreation budget within the fiscal year 2023-24 operations and maintenance budget. I'll second. All right, we have a motion and we have a second. Do we have any additional discussion? I have a question. Would this be the appropriate place to suggest additional funding for recreation? Okay, I'm gonna move that we allocate $375,000 to stand up the, I can't remember the name of the program, Playgrounds Program, the Playgrounds Program as a one-year pilot and see if kids have fun and if they don't, we will remove it. So that's a substitute motion from council member Fleming. I'd like it to be a friendly amendment. See if we can get it going that way. Okay, well, substitute a motion then that we take the language as written and add in that additional funding as I set forth. Thank you. All right, we have a substitute motion and a second. Is there any discussion on the substitute motion? All right, we'll take a vote on that first. Madam City Clerk, if you could please call the vote. Thank you, council member Stapp. This one's a tough one for me because I'm conceptually supportive.  But I am concerned with the budget headwinds, right? And I'm also concerned about how this motion, how this idea is coming up at the very last minute. I too would pref