Good evening, everyone, and welcome to our special meeting for the City of Capitola. Let's go ahead and begin with our clerk, Chloe, who has a few words. Welcome to the special City Council meeting this evening. In accordance with the California Governor's executive order N2920, this meeting is not physically open to the public. Council and staff are meeting via Zoom and there are several ways for the public to watch and participate. Information on how to join the meeting using Zoom or a landline mobile phone, along with how to submit public comment during the meeting tonight, is available on our website cityofcapitola.org and on the published meeting agenda. The public can also live stream the meeting on the city's website. As always, this meeting is co-cast live on Charter Communications Cable TV Channel 8 and is being recorded to be rebroadcast on the following Wednesday at 8 a.m. and on Saturday following the first rebroadcast at 1 p.m. on Charter Channel 71 and Comcast Channel 25. Our technician this evening is Kingston Rivera. Thank you, Kingston, and thank you, Mayor Brooks. We'll just go ahead and move on to item one for roll call, please. I'm here. Here. Council Member Peterson. Here. Vice Mayor Story. Here. Mayor Brooks. Here. Welcome, Council Members. So nice to see all of you. If you can please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, and with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. Now moving to item two, additional most materials. Do we have any this evening? Mayor Brooks, we did not receive any additional materials for this meeting. Thank you. And moving on to item three, additions and deletions to the agenda. That's no changes. Okay. Next, we're going to be moving on to item four for public comments. So we'll now open public comment for this item. We'd like to make a comment on about something not on this evening's agenda. Send an email now to publiccomment at ci.capitola.ca.us or to speak, please raise your hand now by clicking on reactions and clicking raise or then this will raise your hand or you can dial star nine on your landline phone. Our moderator will unmute you. You will have three minutes to speak. So we'll start with the audience. Is anyone's hand is raised? Mayor Brooks, I do not see anybody asking to speak on public comment. And I do not see any emails on this item. Okay. We'll just give it one more minute for anyone interested in submitting a public comment via email. And then we'll move on in just a moment as I get a bit more organized. I'll use this time. Okay. Larry, anything new? I do not see anyone asking to speak on this item. Great. Okay. So we're going to move on to item five. This is city council or staff comments. We'll begin with staff. Hopefully we have the comments this evening. Any comments from council? Vice Mayor Story? Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to report out that for our next budget session, which is May the 20th, I had volunteered to represent Capitola at a Santa Cruz housing event, which starts at about the same time that our budget session starts. So I just wanted to report that I probably will not be able to attend the next special budget session on May the 20th. That's it. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Story. Any other comments from council this evening? Council Member Bertrand. Yeah, I understand there was a meeting with the residents of Depot Hill and the artists for the stair project. Is there any report that can be brought out on that? I heard from Mary Beth Cahalan that a lot of questions were answered and possibly since the riser is being painted, that in a sense makes it much more safe. So I was just wondering if there's any report back from staff on that, if anyone attended from staff. Thank you. I do see a hand from Vice Mayor Story. I just want to see if this is, if Vice Mayor Story wanted to respond or if staff would rather. Or did you just put your hand down, Vice Mayor? I did. Oh, he's mad at me.  Did you want to add? Yes, Mayor Brooks, we held a, the artists held a kind of a question and answer session with anyone that was interested in the project. We've received an email from the, the, some folks down the villas that said they couldn't attend. But we also received three participants from, I believe they're all from the Depot Hill area had some questions and answered. And Mr. Kirby, the, the artist answered them. There was no definitive thing, but it was more of just an open question and answer session. Lasted about 35 minutes. So that's all I have to report. Was there any response from the BIA? I've heard they're very enthusiastic. Did they send in any emails or participate in that meeting on any website? I received an email from the BIA, but they said they weren't the person who sent it was not allowed. Was it able to participate? I did inform them that the project would be discussed at the May 27th City Council meeting. Thank you. Any other council comments? Seeing none, we're going to move to item six for consent calendar. Do I have a motion to approve consent? Council Member Peterson. Council Member Peterson. I will second that. Great. We have a first from Council Member Bertrand and a second may have a roll call, please. Council Member Bertrand. Aye. Council Member Peterson. Aye. Council Member Kaiser out of order. Sorry, everyone. Aye. Vice Mayor Story. Aye. Mayor Brooks. Aye. That item passes unanimously. So we're now going to move on to item seven. This is our general government item A, which is presentation of the proposed 2021-2022 fiscal year budget for the City of Capitola's General Fund and the Capitola Successor Agency. I'll now turn this over to staff. Thank you, Mayor. Before our finance director, Jim Malvern, kicks this off. I just wanted to do a little bit of an introduction here. The first is obviously an important time of year when we adopt our budget, which is really the city's blueprint for its operations for the next calendar year, fiscal year, excuse me. This is the first in a series of four scheduled budget hearings. Usually the latter budget hearings are occasionally canceled if Council's questions and answers and we can reach consensus on a budget before then. We do have another budget hearing coming up on May 20th, as Vice Mayor Story alluded to during his comments. So you don't need to make any final direction tonight. There are a couple of issue areas that we're going to highlight and if the Council is ready to give feedback on them, we're happy to receive it. But we can also continue the conversation out to May 20th. The other really important thing to do tonight is if there's specific questions or issue areas that you'd like staff to dive into more deeply at a future budget hearing, we're always happy to hear that. We're always happy to provide that information. So as you listen tonight, don't feel pressured. You don't have to get it done tonight. And if there's specific issue areas that you'd like us to focus on for the future, that can be helpful to call those out. Without that, I'll turn it over to Finance Director Maubard. I also do want to congratulate him on the great work preparing the budget. It's always a huge lift to put that in place and he's been working really diligently with all the department heads to help prepare the budget for this year. So with that, Jim. Thanks, Jamie. Good evening Mayor Brooks and City Council and happy Cinco de Mayo. Let me take a moment to share my screen. Can you all say that okay? Okay, I'm going to start with just kind of a summary of where we, how we got to where we are right now, getting through this last year with the pandemic going on and then just kind of go through some high-level stuff before I turn it over to the City Manager to kind of get into those key discussion points that he was mentioning during his comments. So as far as from a summary, our local economy is starting to show signs of recovery from a pandemic and we're realizing that the fiscal impacts that we originally anticipated were not quite as severe, we're not nearly as severe as we thought. We had originally anticipated about a four million dollar revenue shortfall from our prior estimates for fiscal year 2021, which resulted in about a four and a half million dollar budget gap that we were trying to close a year ago at this time. Our actual, well, our revenue reductions actuals for last year in comparing to fiscal year 1819 were down 1.1 million. And if you recall, that's just the first three and a half months of the pandemic when the shelter and place orders were first issued. So that was what we were seeing at this time last year is kind of how we developed some of that four million dollar revenue shortfall. As you're all well aware, the restrictions began to lift right after the fourth of July holiday, which also coincides with the beginning of our fiscal year. So we're estimating that revenues will only be down about 1.3 million rather than the four million that we had originally thought. On the expenditure side, again, comparing to fiscal year 1819, our expenditures actually increased in 1920 by a million dollars, but they were, however, $633,000 below budget. So a lot of our expenditures had already taken place when the shelter and place order was issued, but we were able to come in at $633,000 below by really tightening the belt that last quarter of last fiscal year. Our estimated decrease in expenditures for fiscal year 2021 is just under $2 million. That's an estimated number of that. We feel pretty comfortable with that number at this point. Our proposed general fund budget is structurally balanced, and I've made some changes from the FAC meeting last night that we'll get into in a little bit showing that. The estimated fund balance for June 30th of 2022, also the same as 2021 is about $1.4 million. In addition, we have $600,000 set aside in the general fund as a COVID stabilization account. So there is the potential as we go through this hearing and future hearings to utilize some of the fund balance for one-time uses. Our ongoing purse costs remain our major threat to city resources. Right now, we're estimating that our purse contingency reserve is going to be at about 987,000 June 30th of this year. However, our unfunded actual actuarial liability from Calcurs is sitting at about $26 million. We're hoping that doesn't grow this year since when they did that, the economy was still kind of in rebound mode. So they should have captured all of this kind of growth in this year. So we're hoping that number doesn't change a whole lot or if anything goes down. But we'll find out around August-September timeline. Again, we have a heavy reliance on both sales and transit occupancy tax, and there is some anticipated changes to online sales tax revenue distributions that may have a negative impact to our sales tax revenues. The staff will be watching that closely and report back to council as we get some clarity on what those changes, if there are changes, it sounds like there will be, but what those changes are going to be and what the impacts will be. As far as our reserves, both our contingency and our emergency reserve remain at target balances with contingency slightly over $2 million in our emergency reserve at a little bit under $1.5 million. This is a graph just showing how we built the reserves up. So as you remember, we went through the grape recession and the housing market crash in the early 2000s followed by the storm pipe failure in lower PAC Cove. And at that point, our revenues were utilized down to the point of about $1.5 million. At this point, we've built them up to just under $4 million and anticipate to get a little over $4.5 million over these next two years. So this is a summary with major categories, both revenues and expenditures, showing that the budget is balanced with revenues exceeding expenditures by a little over $4,500, leaving $1.97 million of fund balance. But again, there is $600,000 of that designated as the COVID stabilization account, leaving a budgetary fund balance of about $1.4 million. As far as a revenue summary, these are our major revenue categories, and you can see in the proposed column that revenues are returning a little bit better in most categories than our pre-COVID revenues from fiscal year 18-19. Taxes are up a little bit, licenses and permits are down, and intergovernmental revenues, charges for services are coming back, which is a really good sign, fines and forfeitures pretty flat, and the other two categories kind of move around there. Sometimes grants come in in the middle of the year that can impact those, but as of right now, that's where those are sitting. As far as our revenue forecast, we get our property tax estimate directly from the county assessor's office, and we're anticipating a almost $110,000 of growth in property tax revenue. Our Bradley Burns sales tax, we're anticipating a little over $392,000, and that estimate is coming from our sales tax consultant, HDL, which what's kind of interesting is we did our own estimates in-house with staff, and then met with HDL, and we were almost identical with their estimates, so it makes us feel a little bit better when everybody's kind of seeing the same thing and projecting the same thing. As far as our district taxes measures, F and O are each thing that we're anticipating grow about $60,000, or a total of $120,000 in total for those. TOT, we're expecting growth of $450,000, and that will match, that will be really close to what we actually received in fiscal year 18-19, so that's a good sign that the vacation rental market and industry is recovering and doing well. Our cannabis tax, we're expecting a $162,500 of additional revenue on top of this year. This revenue started out really slow when the first shop opened, and it's slowly been building up over time. These last four months have been really encouraging, and these revenues are kind of working back towards our original projections before we issued those licenses, so that's a good sign there. Parking and parking citations, expecting to grow a little over $225,000 and $50,000 respectively, those are back to kind of our historic averages. And my one note on the parking revenues is we're saying historic average, but we've backed out about $30,000 of revenue to account for the outdoor dining through the end of August, so that outdoor dining in the village has been taking into consideration in that parking revenue forecast. As far as revenue notes, our general fund revenues were expecting to increase $1.4 million from last year, which is about $84,000, and the grand scheme of things relatively equal to our fiscal year 18-19 actual numbers. Our sales tax and TOT together represent about 57% of our general fund revenues. Our top 25 sales tax generators represent 70%, and the part that makes us nervous is our top five generators represent 41% of that total, so we're very dependent on a limited number of businesses from the sales tax front. On the kind of the more promising comment would be our optimistic comment, our March 2021 TOT revenues were actually equal to our March 2019 TOT revenues, actually a couple hundred dollars higher. So again, that short-term rental, vacation rental market looks to be coming back back to pre-COVID levels. Property tax, we didn't anticipate any negative impacts last year, and there were not. Properties continue to go up in value, good or bad, depending on your perspective, I guess. But we have no negative impacts and that revenue source continues to grow. And then again, that cannabis retail business tax has been increasing over the last four months and is looking promising that it's working its way towards our original projections from a few years ago. So graphically, I mean, this is a graph of our sales tax show on Bradley Burns measure up and measures F and measure O. And as you can see, they're kind of returning back to that 18, 19 pre-COVID level. I think the districts are a little bit lower, but the Bradley Burns is pretty close. And then continuing to grow a little bit into next year. Property tax, this one's been pretty consistent over the last four or five years with about 4% growth annually. And we see that trend continuing on trends at occupancy tax. This is the general fund portion. So I believe we were at about 1,980 pre-COVID and that's what our estimate is this year. And all signs from the last few months, that's a realistic revenue expectation as that market is rebounded pretty well. For the restricted TOT portion, which goes to local business groups and another portion to the early childhood and youth programming, same type of a graph where it's basically showing that it's returning back to the fiscal year 18, 19 levels. On the expenditure side, our major categories here, you can see a relatively flat with the exception of personnel and that's just kind of inflation and the way that works when I have another chart coming up later that shows what percentage of our budget goes to personnel costs. It's easily our largest cost that we have. And that's the one that is really growing in this forecast. Let's see, contract services are relatively flat a little bit lower than pre-COVID. The other's training's up a little bit. We have new staff, we've had some retirements and new staff, new police officers. So we have a little bit more in training budget this year. Supplies is still a little bit below pre-COVID level, but there's plenty of budget there to get through the year. On the grants and subsidies, 125,000, there's also our typical amount is somewhere in the 225 to 250 as we develop the early, the restricted TOT for the local business groups and youth programming, early childhood education programming. There's an additional, I want to say it's right around $100,000 that we anticipate being able to fund into the community grant programs out of our community development block grant. The stuff that community development department's been working on, there's three rounds of that. We expect some of the funding to come in relatively soon. And then some of that money can go in. I believe a lot of that money's going to go into our community grant program. So all that looks low here. The program itself, as far as proposed in the budget, is remaining pretty much intact with how it was prior to the pandemic. Internal service funds, again, we didn't really fund those last year. The majority of last year was our insurance premiums and a little bit into the IT fund as employees transitioned during the shelter-in-place order into working remotely. We're returning those, so we have equipment going back in there and then compensated absences, but I'll get into a little bit later. And then our other financing uses is really just a CIP funding coming back into the budget. We didn't fund any new projects last year outside of our restricted-willed revenue projects. Personnel, again, growing almost $792,000. And that is growth, which still includes 7.25 positions that remain frozen at this point. The contract services, training the memberships and supplies are all kind of growing a little bit. Some pre-pandemic levels, training memberships a little bit higher. Again, community, the grants and subsidies they talked about as well as the internal service funds and the other financing uses. So the compensated absences, some of that growth there, if you recall, we put a moratorium on the mandatory and voluntary cashouts of our crew time, anticipating that that moratorium will be lifted in the next fiscal year. So we've put a little bit more than we normally would put into that fund to kind of account for those cashouts as people have gone over the maximums and will be cashed out next May. CIPs I talked about. So again, those 7.25 frozen positions represent a savings of about a little over $600,000. Another big increase in personnel is from the CalPERS UAL. It was growing closer to $200,000 last year. It grew to $280,000. We're hoping that number is much smaller this year or maybe zero. It would be nice, but we'll see how that plays out. As far as non-personal expenditures, those are returning close to pre-pandemic levels and we're putting some things back in, such as sidewalk cleaning in the village, hope services, and the temporary seasonal staff that we use in public works to help keep the village clean and nice and neat for our visitors in the summer. And then we're returning a portion of the agricultural event budget. I believe it's about half a season as we anticipate some of those things being able to happen later on in this calendar year, kind of the beginning of the fiscal year. I have that backwards, I'm sorry, later in the fiscal year early in the next calendar year, but we'll see how that goes. That could go earlier, hopefully. One note I want to draw your attention to is the Community Action Board has historically received a little under $1,500 from the City's Community Grant Program. This funding has recruited Council Member Story from being able to participate in decisions regarding the allocation of community grants. If I'm going to jump in, I'm sorry. No worries. I think we might want to give Council Member Story the opportunity to recuse from this slide so that the Council can can so you don't have to participate in this piece of the decision-making tonight. I laughed already. Okay. Sorry, Jim. We need to carry on. No, I was going to do that at the end of that slide. At a recent Council meeting, Mayor Brooks suggested that funding for CAB could be moved out of the Community Grant Program, which would allow Vice Mayor Story to participate in those conversations about allocating the community grants. So our draft budget does include $1,500 for CAB, but it is now in the City Council Department, and staff is recommending that Council weigh in on this change right now while Council Member Story has recused himself. I will pause right there. Okay, so just for clarification, you just want to receive kind of consensus on whether we agree to move the funding to the City Council Department. Is that what I'm hearing? That is correct. Okay, and do we need it in a motion, or do we need it just as consensus this evening? Also, consensus is fine on this matter. It's just that because Mayor Story has this conflict, if you guys have already given us feedback, we don't need to bring it up again, and it will be included in the final the final Council budget. But as long as we get the direction here, will Council Member Story is recused? Okay. I see Council Member Peterson-Henry. Thank you. I just want to confirm it's putting, I'm kind of trying to determine if there's any implications for moving that funding to the City Council Department. Does this preclude them from applying next year or in other years for additional funding or for to increase that funding? I know with the community grant program, people could apply every year and ask for different amounts. So does this mean they won't be allowed to do that anymore? So Council Member Peterson, frankly, it doesn't preclude them technically from applying. This would offset the historical amount that we've given them to the community grant program. Because we open up our community grant program and anyone can apply technically they could still apply, we would make it clear to them what the intent of the City is. I think the disadvantage ostensibly could be that in theory if they're participating in the community grant program, CAB could ask for more and this would then just be sort of giving them a light item. And then in addition, the advantage for CAB is that they're no longer potentially competing with other non-profits as they do get a carve out in the budget. For by way of example, this is similar to how the City historically treated the Bagonia Festival where there was a Bagonia Festival $5,000 contract light item amount in the Council's budget when we did that festival and it wasn't through the overall community grant program. Okay, so am I correct in understanding them that if CAB at any point wanted to request an increase in that, it wouldn't necessarily be through the community grant application program. They would just need to come to the Council and ask for an increase. Correct. Okay, cool. I'm good with that. Thank you. Council Member Bertrand. You know, I'm good with it too. I brought this up before. I thought it was particularly unfair to Sam not have his voice in the decision-making process on community grants because it can. And, you know, I think we do want to fund them. That's not the issue. To me, the issue was not allowing Sam to have a voice in the discussion. So I'm definitely for this. I've brought it up multiple times before. So definitely with it. Okay, apart from two Council Members, Council Member Kaiser. I'm all for it. Thanks. Okay. So it seems like everyone's in consensus here with some nod shakes. Okay. I think you have what you need, Jim. Thank you, Mayor and Council. And then do we want to let the Vice Mayor know he can rejoin us? Welcome back, Vice Mayor Storys. Thank you. It's good to be back. This chart right here is showing what our staffing levels historically have been. Actual staffing levels. And then what I'm just kind of drawing attention to here is that we still have 67 and three-quarter positions authorized by the City Council. However, this budget is only budgeting for 60.5 of those positions. So that's where our seven and a quarter vacancies are coming as you kind of scroll through that chart there. As far as our expenditure summary, again, our personnel costs are 68.5%. By far our largest. And then contract services, the second largest. You know, there's kind of filling the gaps. Both of these have, we have limited ability to make reductions there, which is why I like to draw attention to this just so you know where the money is going and... And I see Council Member Bertrand's hand raised. I just want to make a point. We're going to treat this like a regular action item and take questions at the end, Council Member Bertrand. But I do recognize your hand at this moment. We'll circle back with you in just a minute. Okay, Jim. Okay. Thank you. As far as expenditures by department, you can see police and public works are our largest departments, which is why they have the most staffing, which is why they have the largest shares of the expenditure budget. So this is our multi-year projection. And this is where for the mayor and vice mayor, this is different from what you saw last night. What we did today was last night you saw deficit, basically deficit spending going out into the future. So today what we're presenting is a balanced budget using measure F, a portion of measure F into the operations. And so on that, you have the percentages of what our projections are in the different revenue categories. And so the measure F to operations represents the amount of measure of money that would remain in the general fund for ongoing operations. And then the measure of balance is what's available to be programmed into CIT or whatever the council's desire is with that funding. I mean, then that shows the net impact on the fund balance that the budget is balanced out for this year, as well as the five-year forecast. I have another slide. So there's the net impact is right there. As far as budget principles, we have kind of three overarching principles, fiscal policy, public service, and public improvements. These remain unchanged from prior years. As far as fiscal policy, it's maintained a balanced budget that ensures ongoing operations can be met with ongoing revenues, use of one-time revenues for one-time expenditures, ensure the budget plans for future cost increases, and a table revenue estimate. On public service, it's maintained and approved upon the transparency of city operations and accessibility to government, recognize the high priority to community places on public safety, on the public safety, analyze future service level increases with the long-term financial impacts to ensure financial stability. Public improvements maintain the city's infrastructure by providing maximum funding for the statement management system, maintain and improve capital as natural resources and sustainable green programs, and ensure maintenance and cleanliness of city facilities by walks and streets. So this is also a change from last night to the mayor and vice-mayor. I had these listed as bullet points, which was really busy last night and kind of hard to see. But as far as our key projects and programs, we have these broken into some categories. So I'll start with fiscal transition from COVID-19 response back to normal operations, but continuing to monitor the impacts from COVID-19 quickly. And these are, just as a reminder, these are the key projects and programs that the city council identified at our February 25th meeting. So this is where we are kind of organized into this format here. Explore grant opportunities for public safety, CIT and environmental and outreach programs. Create a three-year fiscal plan for mold redevelopment impacts in-house. We actually kind of have that in place. We're just waiting for the mall project to kick off again, and then we'll update that. But we do have a fiscal plan for mold redevelopment pretty far along. As far as land use support creation and expansion of hotels and appropriate locations, review village hotel parking permits and village parking program, review parklets in the village, which is the outdoor dining. And this is both, well, for right now, as far as related to our COVID-19 response, we've got it programmed in through the end of August, but this is talking about whether we continue this program and what that would look like going forward, following Labor Day or at whatever point. And then staff to develop a list of projects associated with mold redevelopment and prioritize affordable housing and building community relationships. Our next category is public works. Evaluate traffic flow at cliff and wharf and a possible roundabout. Sidewalks on Kennedy and McGregor. Crispin Park project that clears complete street project. Seek a grant with school district regarding soccer fields, picnic tables at Monterey Park, and make available free feminine hygiene projects for all public restrooms. That one's already well underway and actually could potentially be done before the end of this fiscal year. But if not, it's going to remain on there as a key project for next fiscal year. For administration, go above and beyond, keeping residents informed, ensure all members made aware of projects that affect them, implicit bias training, and we'll have, I believe, we'll be back with some proposals that are relatively soon council meeting. Administrative policy updates, develop a community grant strategic plan. We get off that slide, Jim. I just do want to interject about the administrative policy updates. We have quite an ambitious workload plan for this next year, and so that's one that I think has a potential for taking up a lot of city council and staff time. I think we have 99 policies at our last count. Each one, not each one of them, but a significant number of them require council hearings for amendments. So it's still on there, but I just want everyone to be aware that, you know, the way the workload has gone over the last three months, I'm just not sure whether we're going to be able to totally get to that one. So I just want everyone to make sure that their expectations aren't over. We don't miss that people's expectations on that, or if council says this is the number one thing, we talk about something else that we would potentially not focus on in the near term. As far as public safety is expand emergency response planning and pursue grants for a city hall generator, and for recreation established plans for children's fund considering parks and recreation strategic plan and needs for scholarships, and also to work with the school district to allow alcohol at the community center, or that's related to special events. And at this point, I'm going to turn it over to city manager Goldstein as we kind of focus in a little bit and get some of the some of the areas where we're looking for council feedback. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. So the key areas we're going to be looking for feedback are five areas. We're going to talk about the frozen vacant positions and what what we would like to try to do around that the ECYP funding general fund balance that Jim alluded to the 1.4 million in general fund balance that we have the $600,000 the council set aside for the COVID stabilization account last year, and then our federal stimulus funding and the measure F consider putting that towards the war project. So the first discussion point that I wanted to dive into is there's currently seven and a quarter positions in the city that are frozen and vacant. That's a budget savings of about $600,000. So you can imagine what that that would do our budget if we had all those positions filled at this time. We don't think that we can fill all those positions without a major structural reorganization of our budget. And so in the near term, my suggestion is the following is is that number one, I'd like to take a look at this again in January, February is this coming year. There's a lot of talk about a potential real vertical recovery in the economy. I'll be honest, my city manager career, I've never seen that before, but I know it's happened in the past. So it would be a welcome change, but you know, I certainly in my career, I've never seen the situation where you have seven percent year over year city general fund growth. But I know that in the 80s it happens to cities. So for the time being, we didn't budget with that assumption, but I would like to sort of see what the recovery looks like and reevaluate in January, February. In the near term, we're trying to evaluate opportunities to fill some of these gaps that have been created in sort of the biggest service issues that we're seeing in the city with a limited investment of city resources. And we're suggesting $100,000, I think potentially we could get it done for a little bit less. And it would be to fill kind of three key gaps in the cities that these frozen positions create. Number one is in finance. Finance is down a position. We're also down, so we only have one person that does payroll. Doing payroll is a very, very important function for a city. Obviously, if you can't pay your employees, it's difficult to keep employees. So we would like a limited allocation of budget so that we can bump some hours for an existing employee and get them cross-trained in doing payroll, as well as assisting in other functions within the finance department. Number two is the building department has historically always been two people. And we are now down to one and a half people partially due to this, the shared service model, which has been going well with the city of Scotts Valley. But the idea was that we would have administrative support dedicated to building. And that hasn't happened, which results in our inspector having to do a lot of administrative work and therefore the lead time for the permits and the public's experience has definitely been affected. And then the last is in the police department, they lost their administrative analyst position, and they don't have some of the administrative support for doing budget analysis, grant work, and some other functions as well. So what we're asking for is a limited allocation of $100,000 and to try to put that towards filling some of these holes. One of the thoughts we've had is we can allocate maybe two years worth of funding from the fund balance for this effort. And then we would consider it maybe a pilot program, and then we would have to reevaluate when the two-year cycle was up. So that was the first sort of key discussion point. The next one is about the ECYP funding. That's the early childhood and youth funding that comes out of a carve out of the TOT. It's restricted revenue, restricted by the voters. It can't go to anything else. We estimate that we're going to get it out $49,000 this next year. And in the budget, well, we also believe we're going to have about $14,000 of fund balance that is carry over from this last year because sales about hotel taxes have been stronger than we were initially anticipating. So the draft budget allocates $30,000 for community grants as the ECYP. So that would be grants to nonprofits that provide services primarily to youth. And that leaves $19,000 of new revenue plus $14,000 of ECYP fund balance. And our proposal to use that would be $15,000 towards scholarships for our various youth programs. We're also suggesting $15,000 for youth enrichment. And really what that is, is really transportation. Because transportation, which we don't have mechanism by which to move kids around, lets us do more things away from our facility where we're putting something on. So for example, field trips to a museum, things like that, we become able to do. Obviously $15,000 is not by a passenger van. So this would be a bit of an amortized cost that we would buy a passenger van. And this would be a portion of the cost that we would spread out over multiple years. Or we could look at some sort of shorter term lease option as well. And then $3,000 towards staff training for our staff that are primarily working with kids. Next one is the fund balance. As Jim mentioned earlier, we have $1.4 million in estimated fund balance. Historically the city, this is the difference between how much money we spent in prior years and how much we've received. We've usually tried to keep that number around $500,000. When it gets higher, we would usually come to the council as we're doing here and look at how to best allocate it. Given the uncertainty with COVID and the pandemic and recovery, we're thinking that maybe a $750,000 target is more reasonable at this point. In general, we would usually recommend a split between using the fund balance for different types of things. Some kind of long term investments like debt reduction or investing in the PERS trust that is sort of trying to reduce a long term liability. And then some near term things like some of the council goals or some of the CIP projects that we wanted to get done. So the fact supported at their meeting last night, they supported the funding targets that staff proposed. And then they're going to be talking a little bit more about the split if council is on board with allocating around $650,000 of fund balance, how best to split that between projects and debt reduction at their next meeting. The COVID stabilization account, council will recall that was $600,000 we set aside this last year. We had suggested considering reducing that down by 50% and using $300,000 now and then evaluating the remainder of the balance at the mid-year budget review this winter. The fact suggested delaying that and holding off until the mid-year to look at the COVID stabilization account. And then the last discussion point we have is that we anticipate receiving between $1.8 and $1.9 million in stimulus funding from the federal government. The reason why we don't have a firm figure is we suspect that the state may take a cut out of it. If they don't take a cut, it's $1.88 million. If they do take a cut, it obviously would be reduced. We also have $960,000 of new measure F revenue coming in this year. And staff is recommending putting those towards the war resiliency project. When we have a little bit more information about that project here coming up in the next slide. And the fact supported allocating both of those funding sources towards the war. So, oh, we'll get to that in the next slide after this one. We'll talk a little bit more about the war for a second. So this just puts these ideas down on kind of one chart. And you can see the American Rescue Plan funding is recommended by the staff and the fact going towards the war, as well as the measure F revenue. And then $600,000 of fund balance going towards this point just saying it's a bucket for CIP debt reduction, council goals. And then we can get feedback on that. And then they get the facts input at their next meeting. And then I did want to remind people that that isn't the only money for CIP projects. We also have about $600,000 of restricted road funding that we'll be talking about next meeting when we're talking about the CIP projects.  And the war slide, the only reason I'm putting it up here is I think it helps to understand the context. So the previous cost estimates you've seen suggested it was between a five and a seven and a half million dollar project. We put in about $1.2 million of previous measure F funding. We spent about $325,000, at least just about $900,000 available. We got this funding from the state of $1.9 million. The American Rescue Plan of just under $1.9 million also allocate to the project plus the 960 of measure F would bring our funding total to about $6 million, which gets us in the ballpark to be able to bid this project this fall potentially. I'm not sure that we're going to be able to build this bid the project this fall, but otherwise we'd have to be talking about some sort of debt financing instrument to get us to the balances that we need so that we wouldn't have to so we could actually fund construction. So with that, bring it back to kind of the sort of overall the questions for tonight and then the feedback we're looking for is number one is identify budget questions and we'll do our best to answer tonight. Otherwise we can come back with more information at the next meeting. And then there's those five topic areas where any feedback the council wants to offer at this stage would be welcome or they can be continued out to the May 20th. And with that, staff is available for questions. Okay, so council member Batrand, you've been waiting. And for questions, I'll turn it over to you. Yeah, I just have a simple question for Jim. And I think our main discussion should be the recommendations that Jamie wants some guidance on. So I'll be brief. Shouldn't the city planning this excuse me the the council did deal to the city planning issues be considered staff also they're on stipends just like a city council. So I'm just wondering about that. They're part of purrs. They get a stipend. So you sort of briefly mentioned staff and I didn't see anything about our city planning group. I mean, they're city planning councils, excuse me. Are you referring to the planning commission? Yeah, sorry. So I think you're cracked at that. Okay, technical answers is that the planning commissions are not actually employees. But I understand exactly what you're talking about council member Batrand and that they do receive a stipend and they can enroll and they are rolled in purse. But the legal answers is that they're not technically employees. Okay, but only employees would get purrs I thought so. Yeah, the council had we so we were now elected officials are out of purrs. But before the rule was that elected officials the planning commission it was sort of a separate plan off to the side. So I don't I don't honestly I'm not 100% clear on that. That's something we could answer for fully at a different meeting. I've had this discussion with the city attorney in the past and she's pretty adamant in her position that the planning commissioners are not employees. Okay, the city council's in purrs. City council existing council members are new council members I believe are no longer. Is that correct? Mr. Laurent or Robert? That is correct. Okay, so I'm in purrs but the new one sorry that's weird. Okay. And that was a change that the council made I think maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago. Okay, thank you. Vice mayor story. Yes, thank you mayor. Jamie, I guess I wanted to start and ask you about the last presentation about the war thing you said going out to bed with about 5.7 million. I don't know. Yeah, 5.94. I was I wasn't could you clarify you're saying we would with 5.94 we would go out to bed on the work project. I'm just and I'm looking up there that the project cost or somewhere between 5 million and 7.5 million. So there's a couple things to think about. Number one is is the work project is a bit of a I don't know what the right analogy is a bit of a tinker toy project if that's a good analogy. There's a lot of different components to it and they are they're not they don't all have to happen. You know so we had an original project design that we liked at one point I think we came the engineers came back and said it was 20 million and so we said well we can't afford that and we scaled it back and so the 5 to 7 million kind of represents the estimated project range but there's like you may remember that right now the design has restrooms at the at the both ends of the work. So that's potentially if we ended up with a project that was more than we felt we could afford that's something we could look at. There's a number of different components that you guys are pulled out or added in. In addition when Jim showed the multi-year fiscal position there's Measure F coming in for five more years down the road so potentially what we could do if we decided we wanted to target the 7 million dollar project hypothetically this fall we could look at how we would get another million dollars of Measure F money in sooner rather than later whether we internally financed it whether we went and talked to a local bank those kinds of options. Well for our next planning session I was wondering could you you and Jim maybe bring back if we were to kind of aggregate the difference in the Measure F how much that would make available for the work project and just so that we can see how that's going to play out with the Measure F funding. We can do that. Okay thank you and if I had one other question and this is going back to your you know staff additional staffing request which is about a hundred thousand dollars and and also just to emphasize that the fact last night recommended that the council prioritize that request so you know I I certainly want to look at ways that we can maybe accommodate it and you know stay true to our I think our fiscal policy. So what I mean the plan here is just using fund balance kind of fun personnel hours that seems a little precarious and and against our policy of using ongoing expenditures for or ongoing revenue for ongoing expenditures but I wanted what I wanted to maybe throw out there for consideration and I know this is a bit of presentation but sometimes that makes all the difference in the world is if we could use the fund balance for certain general fund expenditures going to the inner fund accounts such as the equipment reserve there's like 270 that we're transferring into the equipment reserve account and whether we could and since that equipment is a one-time expenditure whether we could utilize the fund balance for that that frees up general fund ongoing revenue that could be applied to personnel and that was just an example I don't know if there may be other examples of inner fund transfers that we could use the fund balance for which would free up future revenues for ongoing personnel expenses and to me you know it's just the difference of maybe making those additional hours that seems so precarious after two years you know maybe the transfer of the equipment reserve becomes precarious so I just I wanted to maybe also put that request out there to maybe consider that and look at that for the next time that we come back and I think those are my comments and questions at this point thank you. Council Member Batran, do you have another question? You know I have another question Mayor thank you very much. Jamie you I wrote some notes down and I didn't capture enough to remind me of what you were talking about 100k over two years what was that about does that ring the bell? Yeah so this is this point the Vice Mayor's story is talking about and it's this the issue here is is that we have these key positions that are frozen and we have certain staffing impacts needs that are definitely affecting the public and affecting sort of the city's overall kind of resiliency so I was suggesting that if we had about $100,000 a year the staff could develop a stopping plan to sort of strategically fill a plug a few of these holes and I was suggesting that we had could take an allocation of fund balance which would fund this for for a couple years I think Vice Mayor's story suggestion is a good one we can definitely look at other you know to some degree it's maybe semantics but I also understand we have our fund our fund balance policy that we need to be very cognizant of and look at other ways to get this done to achieve the same goal. Okay yeah I wrote that down I thought it was very good some of the positions that needed filling I think were critical especially in the police department for instance and they need some analytics I'd like to understand a little bit more what spending money in those areas would be and how it benefits our particular departments so thanks for bringing that up the other one is I'd like to see more from the fact talking about putting more money in the PERS reserve and you know I'd like to better understand that if they could address that and give us some more guidance. I guess the transportation issue for the children's programs I'm a little hesitant to have us get into transportation because of the liability issues so I like to understand a little bit more about how that would be developed for us so those are some of the concerns your your comments brought to my mind thank you. So Council Member Tran I know that our police chief and community development director are both on the call and they're both prepared as well as our finance director both all prepared to talk a little about the service impacts and kind of our thoughts about the staffing is that information that would be helpful now. Yeah I agree I I definitely want to have a better understanding of what these proposals are they seem reasonable but I want a little bit more understanding thank you. Sure so what I will tell you is that at this point we don't really have a proposal if I can get the budget allocation then we can figure out exactly strategically how we get it done but I know that the finance director community development director and police chief are all prepared to talk about kind of what the whole that needs to be filled is. So Jim if you want to kick it off. Thank you so excuse me in the finance department pre-covid I had two full time and one three quarter time positions at the onset of the pandemic one of the full-time employees resigned and left basically over a third of our hours our staff hours were gone. Our senior accountant has been able to do and that position also did the payroll as well as accounts payable. Our senior accountant has been able to handle the payroll as well as accounts payable during this time we also had a retirement in September so we have new staff that came on board and replaced the retiree as our account clerk who as she started at the end of December she's now doing very well and we'd like to get her trained to do backup and payroll as well as accounts payable. I've been nervous I'm the last 14 months I've been one positive COVID test away from not being able to get payroll out which has made me very nervous. Also that's a wine too much but our senior accountant is getting prepared to move for the second time during this pandemic and also got married and I don't think he's taken more than a day and a half consecutively since the pandemic hit because we just don't have any backup for all the things that he does. So the what I was my thought was to our account clerk who started in December as a 30 hour a week employee has moved that position to 40 hours to create that redundancy and backup is what I was looking for I think that cost is probably in the $20,000 range. I think that seems very reasonable. Does that answer your question Council Member Bertrand? Oh yes it does Mayor thank you. Okay Council Member Kaiser. Thank you. So this is the way I'm looking at it and Jamie maybe you can re-explain it to me so that that savings amount of the $603,000 that is something that we've technically banked over cutting certain positions and over COVID or is that what could potentially be saved within the next fiscal year? So what this is is that the onset of COVID we had a number of vacancies and then we had a couple people resigned and that we've subsequently had a couple people retire and so we froze those positions and we didn't fill them. So those are said so the savings we've been accruing for the last 12 months approximately. Next so the 603 that you see there on the screen that's the savings by keeping those positions vacant next year how much we would gain is what that is. So in other words if you just said hey Jamie go ahead hire all six and a quarter positions our budget would now go upside down by $600,000. Right okay well I just want to say I think that looking at this as a smaller amount like that $100,000 cap or whatever would be super beneficial to our city staff and I know what it's like to be overworked during a time of uncertainty and and just Jim didn't have backup for payroll that's super important to our city and our staff and everything. I want to advocate for that so however the algorithm works I think it would be super important to people that we already have on staff but train them whether it's a few more hours per week that they're adding on these extra responsibilities in order to sort of moving through our like kind of reopening and business phase of COVID and the building permits and things like that I think that's going to be important as people start to flood more money into the town and things like that. So I would definitely like to see I don't know if we need more clarification for the rest of council or anything to see where exactly that money's going to go but I definitely want to push in that direction of allocating not the whole 500 but a portion of that to get get our staff more up to speed and more supported and and less of like that struggle you know. I think that was my main point going through this so thank you. Okay any other questions? Councilmember Peterson? Can you just go back I thought there was a slide that had the FAC recommendation on it am I mistaken? So we ended up actually building the FAC recommendation to each one of the discussion points. Oh okay that's okay. So here yeah so you and I actually talked before the meeting about potentially using the COVID fund for this idea of kind of setting aside a chunk and saying hey this is good for two years worth of funding for this after the FAC last night reviewed it and said hold on to the COVID fund we switched over to fund balance to try to make that work but that would certainly be an option as well. Okay I mean I guess for the sake of of discussion and based on what the FAC recommended I mean I do think we should be using some funding for this 200,000 for up to two years whether it's from from the COVID fund or from the fund balance you know if the FAC isn't recommending we use the COVID fund that's fine I'd rather that I'm okay with using the fund balance I've I've never I think the COVID fund is more of a one-time revenue so to speak more than the fund balances so I mean I definitely think that 200,000 would be important to at least cover those two years and then like it says reevaluate at that time um yeah that's my thought on that item sorry I thought I thought I had seen a slide that had like an overall FAC recommendation so my apologies. We did have do you want to jump to the table Jim? So this was kind of the putting it all on paper in one place it shows you know the stimulus funding going to the WARF measure F going to the WARF using the 650 getting more feedback the 650 of fund balance and that's the difference between the 1.4 million in fund balance and then holding 750 aside and then getting more feedback from the FAC about balancing that between projects and debt reduction in the long term. I think this encapsulates oh the other piece of the FAC recommendation and I think Vice Mayor Story may have said it better than I'm going to say it was I think they also said that there should be a priority on fine plugging those service needs in the city so a priority to find that funding for the staffing needs and please correct me someone who's on the FAC if I got that wrong. I think that's what Vice Mayor Story said that was the FAC recommendation. I'm going to just jump in here to kind of go over the several pots of money this is how I kind of see it so I'm going to start with the fund balance of 1.4 million this is a carryover we have from last year to this year 1.4 million and what I'm hearing you say is that you would so this is what I'm thinking that 200 thousand from the 1.4 will go to salaries right is that correct and then the rest will go to other things and and the 750,000 so whatever is 1.4 minus 200k minus 750 whatever is left over is what's going to go into CIP projects and other council priorities is that correct? Sounds right to me. Okay so what I would say and what I'd like to see to come back in terms of that is whatever that's left over is after the 200k and the 750 set aside whatever's left I'd like to see what the CIP projects are at cost so we can determine which ones we would like to finish first if that makes sense so if you can bring back those CIP projects and their costs then moving on to the 600,000 for the COVID stabilization I would agree with the fat committee I'm on it so I'm going to agree with them to maintain it the 600k so so whatever they said the mid-year to reevaluate where we are at the city level the the what is it called the American I'm gonna the ARP well let me actually start with the ECYP thing so with that I heard you make a recommendation of where to move some of those dollars after looking at the community grant applicants for that that would actually fall into the early childhood youth program I'm anticipating that there will be some more some newer applicants applying for the funding so I think what I'd like to look at is possibly moving that 3,000 so I think it's 33,000 that's left over there we can move three of that thousand into the community grant so that bumps it up it is what I would like to see because I'm anticipating more community grant applicants in this area we would need more money to cover and I think the rest to person rest would be great what I would like staff to come back on this one is that there's some mention of the transportation and we have 1.8 million dollars coming in from the ARP funding and we talk about this is what vice mayor often talks about it's one time funding for one time things and you know when this came out the American recovery funding they mentioned about they talked about supporting youth programming and having cities use some of those dollars if needed to support community programming so I think so perhaps that could look at maybe utilizing some of that 1.8 to like 50,000 dollars of it to actually look into purchasing our a van for the parks and rec department and using the 1.8 of the ARP money instead of pulling it out little bit by little bit directly from the early childhood youth program funds I don't know if it's a possibility so staff to come back with if that's even something we can use it for or if I totally made that all up and we can't use it then that would you know make the conversation different at that time and then for the the I have no questions about the work funding I think that's fine to bring it to use the rest for the rest of the war I think that's what I have for now that's all of the funding all the pots of money correct that I went over yeah and then I heard you're going to come back about the road funds at the next yeah we'll be coming back to talk about the road funds and then all those CIP projects you mentioned with the cost estimates what level of funding we have as you're thinking about allocating the road funds and then the remaining fund balance at our next meeting and can we just make sure that we keep it separated right so the 600,000 for road funds and the whatever's left you know just so when we're looking at it and we're trying to have those conversations because it's not one pot of money there's I think the road funds is dedicated so that we could see them separately and how we could allocate the dollars in that way so that's what I'd like to see to come back okay council member Bertrand yeah um I know we're going to talk about CIP later but I remember in the earlier presentation um I mentioned I'm doing a roundabout at Cliff and Wharf um what's happened with the proposed roundabout um Capitola Road in Bay is that still not under consideration or is that so far in the future that we don't even want to consider it now so that actually will be a conversation you'll have at the next meeting I believe that the under grounding project we can hear from our public works director but I believe the under grounding project that was a predicate to being able to do our roundabout project I think it's happening shortly so we would be at a stage where we could start talking about moving that project forward it'll just come down to council's priorities for where you want to put we want to put our money next year yeah I just uh I had my ear bent at um Grady's you know someone was talking about how we need a roundabout it was talking about all the accidents and all the issues at that particular intersection and I agree it's been a problem for so many years so just want to make sure it wasn't being dropped and I do know that PGD is gradually getting more money for that under grounding so it's nice to hear we're close and to council member Chan council member Pearson yeah I just want to make sure I'm understanding and I'm not I'm not missing something the slide here says the facts recommended strategies to have 300 000 in the COVID reserve oh I'm sorry I uh that is um a goldstein version of a line out I was trying to cross it off oh okay okay probably doesn't make my sense yeah what happened was we developed the slide the fact went a different direction I felt like it was worth saying hey staff had suggested this the fact is going a slightly different direction I don't think there's a big philosophical disagreement with the fact or anything but I was just trying to show us kind of getting on the same page okay I thought it was just a spacing issue that there was something was supposed to be above and something okay my apology that was that was supposed to be a crossed off okay okay okay thank you I just wanted to make sure I wasn't confused between the the recommendation I do want to make you know a comment and I think it's up to the the council you know overall as a group our discretion but you know my understanding with the COVID reserve was that we have it for COVID related issues clearly um and that staffing was something that we had to deal with in the last year because of the impacts of COVID so I don't necessarily think that it's a terrible idea to use the COVID reserve to replace some of our staffing funds so I just want to put that out there for discussion and consideration because I understand that it's you know mid-year we might find some other things that we also need to send these funds on but I do think that staffing was something that we had to cut back on due to COVID and so I don't think it would be inappropriate for us to use the COVID reserve to replace that so I just want to put that on the table for discussion amongst the council thank you council member so I'm going to take a pause here and let us brew a little bit and thank you a little bit more about our and go to public comments at this time let me find my language okay so now I'm going to open this up to public comment for this item if you'd like to make a comment send an email now to public comment at ci.capitola.ca.us or just please raise your hand now by clicking on reaction and clicking raise hand in your zoom application or by dialing star nine on your landline our moderator will unmute you then you will have up to three minutes to speak we have any participants or attendees with their hand raised Mayor Brooks I do not see any attendees asking to speak and I do not see any emails on the final okay so we'll just give it a second and just to let council know we'll just be bringing this back just for further discussion and questions as mr. Goldstein said no decisions have to be made this evening okay we'll give it I do not see any one with their hands raised at this time okay and any emails and no emails on this item okay so I'm just going to bring this back to council I just want to make sure everyone was heard with any other additional questions nice Mayor sir I can't recall did you have an opportunity for any questions or feedback yeah I did okay earlier yeah thanks okay council member Batran in terms of transportation we're going to have to have special people to deal with kids I think wouldn't that be an issue Jamie it's not just buying a van I think a recreation supervisor is on this call and if Nicky wants to jump in right now she has experience in supervising programs that move kids around and I think rather than me taking a stab at it because I don't have experience in this field she might be able to share some details we've got an elevates the issue of liability you know with the kids and I know I've had friends that have been drivers for kids and vans and buses and they have to have special training so that's my concern right thank you city manager I'm happy thank you city manager I'm happy to answer that question counts good evening Mayor council members please let me know if I start to slow down as I'm competing with Netflix in the next room so as far as having vehicles for youth programming I think one of the things that you might be remembering is that when a vehicle is with a certain passenger or length it becomes a bus and I agree that we would want to avoid the purchase or rental of any vehicle that would put us in a bus category because it does require a specific bus license and that is very burdensome for to maintain hourly staff members who are the individuals that would work with the youth in after school programming or camp programming and have them appropriately trained as with a bus license now you can buy the vans that fit with that do not classify as a bus and that would be where I would recommend we go because then it is your basic driver's license and then the city would do its own in-house training to ensure that the staff member is familiar with the vehicle familiar with the size familiar with what it is like backing up that particular vehicle and actually do some checklist in those skills to ensure that they will be safe and staff member that we hire on in our hourly positions they're already getting a DMV check upon hire so a lot of the necessary checks that we would have for having staff driving youth that a lot of that already exists so really to me the key is just making sure that we don't get into a situation where we're considered driving a bus thank you mickey is there a special liability insurance that we'd have to take out needs to meet kids are a little bit special and we have to deal with them in that regard well in the past we have transported kids we have usually done this by chartering a bus and buses now are very very expensive to drive a group of students from the community center to simpkins round trip is about a thousand dollars so it's it's it's a prohibitive expense to provide enrichment to you and and so that is the only other real option that we would have I do think that I've had you know having these conversations in regards to the liability we can definitely double check on that I don't have the answer at the tip of my fingers right at the moment but it is something that many recreation agencies in our county are regularly doing so I feel like it is something that we could achieve and I can share that it is a covered we are covered for that we are not covered if we want to operate municipal buses I know that that's excluded from our coverage but youth transportation is covered okay any other questions all right so seeing that there's no further questions I believe council has or excuse me staff has received some some feedback from council this evening and has what they need to that staff made any clear any clarification on the request from council this evening let's just summarize I think what I heard the biggest thing it sounds like everybody is primarily on board with the need for the staffing and it sounds like there's just a couple of different suggestions on how to deal with it we heard from vice mayor story suggesting maybe we look in the budget we look at maybe reorganizing some of the expenditures council member Peterson suggested potentially looking again at that COVID fund and mayor Brooks I know you suggested probably going with the route that we we suggested the fact suggested of using the fund balance so we'll bring back some more information and that'll be one of the key discussion points it sounds like there's general consensus about the $750,000 fund uh balance target and uh there's some good food for thought that mayor Brooks put on the table for the ECYP funding am I missing anything else there's other questions I didn't touch on I'm thinking in terms of the council direction did I hear you say CIP project oh yeah well that's definitely the plan for the next meeting is you can see it there at the bottom line is that we're going to be reviewing the CIP for next year at the next meeting and we'll be bringing back the cost the funding status and then looking at what resources we can bring to get those projects done yeah I just wanted to um add to that list I had asked for a kind of a projection on the work funding coming out of measure F in a few two years that's right I've got that as well okay and also there was there was a request to have the fact weigh in about maybe the PERS reserve uh for that debt reduction um from member Kaiser yeah thanks that was just a follow-up on the wharf um I think so Jamie you were saying um that we would need to get a hold of that five and a half million or um in order to ask for a bid or you're like if we could bid what would mean that we could or couldn't ask for a bid on the wharf sure so when a public agency goes to bid basically what it means is we put out a package and we say contractors give us a price uh to do this project and before you go to bid you really want to have a very clear fund plan about how you're going to fund that project when you do get the contractor's response so what I was trying to suggest and I may not have explained it very clearly is that before we go to bid and best case scenario is maybe we're bidding in the fall we would really want to say okay we're targeting a six million or five million or seven million dollar project and here's how we're going to have that buy say you know when we think the project is going to need that much money okay so that's what I was trying to suggest is that before we go out and say hey we got a project is we know where the money's coming from totally okay thank you there are some jurisdictions which have requirements that you have the money in the bank before you start and that can be quite an expensive way to go about financing projects so that's not something I recommend we just have to better have a clear plan that we know we can execute okay I'm assuming we don't need a motion at this time so we're just going to move forward if everyone's been heard okay so that brings us to item eight which is adjournment thank you council members thank you staff we will see you on May 20th for our follow-up meeting to review the rest of the budget so thank you everyone have a great evening see you all soon goodbye


Remote sensing technology has been used to estimate leaf area index, LA, of mangroves, but this technique has been limited due to the difficulty of capturing the entire canopy. This study used Sentinel-2, S2, imagery, airborne hyperspectral imagery, HSI, and airborne LiDAR data to estimate LAI of a multi-layered mangrove stand in Maipa, Hong Kong, China. The LiDAR data was used to stratify the overstory and understory layers, while vegetation indices as VIS and LiDAR metrics were generated as predictors to build regression models against the overstory and understory layers. The overstory layer was more accurately estimated using HSI data, while the understory layer was more accurately estimated using S2 data. Additionally, the use of LiDAR metrics and S2 VIS together produced the best results for the understory layer. This article was authored by Chao Sili, Frankie Kwan, Kit Wong, Tung Sung, and others.


I've done an undergraduate at Bonn University in economics. I came here as a visiting student. I liked it so much that I asked him whether I could stay and luckily for me that was granted. After the Masters I went straight for the PhD program from which I graduated this year. Toulouse has been at the forefront of contract theory for decades. If I may attempt a definition I would say that a researcher from Toulouse is someone who takes the details of games, contractual terms very very seriously because there's a conviction that those terms ultimately shape economic outcomes. Think about how asymmetric information transpires ultimately into prices or think about the munition of competition policy. One advice I would give is choose the program where you find people that you admire intellectually first and foremost.  I was very lucky in this regard and I don't think it's something you can fully control but with this mindset good things sometimes just happen. So there are two things I would like to mention. First I felt very free in my academic pursuits. Over the years I've been varyingly pursuing an unorthodox I would say applied theory project dedicated my time full time to mathematics and embarked on a months long existence proof and never did people come and say stop what you're doing here this is risky this is not what you know will play out well in the market. So I felt very free and the second thing I would say is that Toulouse is an international city but the community is very international and perhaps owing to the fact that we come from so many backgrounds people are very close to one another. I think it's a wonderful place to live in we have made many good friends. It's a beautiful city to begin with with stunning churches, great historical houses dating back to the Renaissance then there's a river bank there's fantastic weather early on in the year and then of course there's French cuisine so it's a wonderful place to study and to live in. The academic job market is an annual event held in winter with preparations beginning as early as late spring. Graduating PhDs interview for positions in both Europe and the US in my case that went really well I'll be joining the LSE as an assistant professor before I get to do a postdoc in Princeton. What undoubtedly stressful I think I'm really happy we've got the academic job market I've met so many interesting people exchange ideas discuss and ultimately show my research and I think that is what we as economists as researchers aspire to think very carefully about the problem solve it and share that knowledge.


So far we've got the basic pieces in place, so that if you want to jump into your very first Python program, you can. We have the command line, we have a text editor, we have Python installed. Now we're going to step through a couple of other tools that you may find very helpful. The first of these is called PIP. It's the Python package installer. It comes automatically with Python. You already have it on your machine. The way that you use it is you go to the command line and you type python-m pip install-U and then the name of the package that you'd like to install. In this case, NumPy. PIP here is the package installer that we're running, but we run it using python-m. What that does is it goes to the version of Python that that command is linked to. You might have more than one version on your machine, depending on its history, and this way we make sure to get the pip that is tied to your command line Python command. So python.m pip install. The name of the package is NumPy. The dash capital U says install it just for me, just for my username, instead of trying to install it for all of the users that might use this machine. That's optional.  You'll just be asked to provide a password. But the dash U keeps it as simple and straightforward as possible. When you run it, what your computer does, pip goes out to the internet, pulls down a copy of this package, NumPy, downloads it, unzips it, installs it. Also there are other packages that NumPy uses called dependencies. And if it doesn't have any of those, if it's missing any of those, it goes out, pulls those down and unzips and installs those as well. This is like if you've ever watched Matrix, Neo is able to lay back, get jacked into the computer and download Kung Fu. And then he knows Kung Fu. He's got all of those tools at his disposal. This is the same way after pip installing NumPy, our Python installation like knows the Python version of Kung Fu, which is NumPy, how to work with arrays and numbers and do all kinds of crazy math things. If you want to see all of the packages that you have installed, you can type python-m pip list. And sure enough, we can see NumPy in the list right there. That's very good. If ever we wanted to upgrade a package that we already have installed, we can do exactly what we did to install it, but just add dash dash upgrade. And then if there is a newer version, it'll go pull that down as well. If we want to uninstall it, we can modify that same command and say python-m pip uninstall and the package name. And it'll wipe it. It'll take it out. All of these packages live at pypy.org. This is a website where people all over the world write packages. They write code in Python. They upload it and carefully structure it so that anytime someone sits at their computer and says pip install NumPy, it can download it to their computer. Anyone can write packages. Anyone can upload them and share them with anyone else through pypy.org. It's free. It's not owned by any company. And there are no restrictions on how much code you can upload and how broadly you can share it. It is an amazing open coding resource. At PyPy, you can look up, for instance, information on NumPy. You can get some more information about the project, the description. Here we see it's good for working with n-dimensional arrays. So one or two or three or four-dimensional arrays as high as we want to go. It's good at doing math, linear algebra, random numbers. A thing that we'll find very useful in future projects. So it's a great example here to practice pip installing things. And with that, you now have the capability to download kung fu, jujitsu, linear algebra, and whatever else your Python program needs to do what you want it to do.


Processors and personal computers and at this time I'd like to introduce to you Ken Olson the president of digital and it is my personal honor and my privilege to introduce to you the president of the United States the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth thank you very much thank you all very much and I understand that you even have time in here to do a little artwork up there well I'm I'm very proud and pleased to be here and when when you said about the most powerful nation on earth I think we're standing in the midst of part of the reason why it is what a typically American story this is Mr. Olson and two associates 25 years ago started with an idea that now is this company I can't remember it was only a few employees that you started with and it's now 65,000 in all in all of the various plants of this of this company I know that today and you probably were too busy last night to look at television but I was talking a little bit on it and I was talking about the unemployed that besets our country but this this is the future and you're part of it this is where we're going but now they've told me and they've warned me in advance that I only have a couple of minutes and then I have to move on to some other things that I'm doing while I'm here but I just thought and I probably can't take more than one or two that there must have been times when you said if I had a chance I'd like to ask that guy meaning me well if there's if you did think about it and you've got one fire away and I'll try to answer it yes what what is the I wish you'd asked an easier question what is the possibility of making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday I believe that it is a day that should be nationally recognized but technically when you say national holiday you were then speaking of a day that closes down industry and the government closes down and so forth and the only one we've really ever done that for nationally of our own country was George Washington even Lincoln's birthday some states recognize it more especially than others but it is not that other and I know what has caused the problems in the Congress and in legislation with regard to that is what could be done that would not at the same time necessitate that being the kind of holiday where as I say that is only recognized in one other man George Washington and then you would have to ask well now wait a minute great as the service he performed have we opened the door to to many other people Thomas Jefferson for example or George Washington Carver and the great contribution he made but I would like to I'd like to sit down with people that are trying and are doing this drive to find if we can't have a kind of national recognition day that will be an annual observance of the birthday of this man because just a few days ago on his birthday I was talking about him and I made the statement then that Lincoln freed the black man Martin Luther King freed the white man and we didn't know until he did that how heavy the burden of racism was that we had been bearing for all those years and thank God for what he has done and he should be remembered I'm we're all having trouble I've got the mic and you haven't got a mic oh when I said earlier that we were standing in the middle of what has made America great that's part of it we came from every corner of the world came here because our ancestors some of us came directly and then some of us by way of our ancestors but the one common characteristic we have and we've proven to all the world with all their prejudices and their jealousies and their bickering that go on between ethnic groups and between racial and religious groups here in this country yes we've got our faults and our problems but we've made it work better than it has ever worked any place in the world and we're I think the common heritage of all of us is that somebody in our family or ourselves if we're the first to come here had a little ounce of courage and a love of freedom that made us tear up the roots in the homeland and come here to this place where we can truly be free he says he says says I can only take one more question and I don't into meeting us on that I proposed last November or a year ago November I proposed to begin with the Soviet Union has more than what about 340 intermediate range nuclear missiles aimed in Europe that's why they're called intermediate range and they're targeted on all of Europe and there is nothing there as a deterrent that could fire back in other words to keep them from firing in the first place and the NATO countries asked us some time ago if we would provide Pershing and cruise missiles in enough number to be based in Western Europe as a deterrent to those weapons and I proposed a year ago last November that we sit down with the Russians and see if we couldn't negotiate a zero option that they give up all of theirs and we won't put any in in Western Europe and free that whole area of the world from that threat that is hanging over it now so far they've only they've only met us halfway they're willing for us to have zero they want to keep on having missiles we're going to keep on negotiating but in addition to that we have a team in Geneva now that is negotiating also a reduction of the great intercontinental ballistic missiles that the Soviets have aimed at us and that we have aimed at them and we've asked them to join us in cutting way back to below the level we now have which is much less than they have and having us have an equal number and have it be verifiable so that we'll know whether each other is cheating or not and we're continuing with that but at the same time we have a third team that is negotiating with them to see if they won't join us in reducing what are called conventional arms just artillery tanks things of that kind now we're going to keep on doing that for just as long as we can keep them at a table because the goal has to be peace and yet the only answer to the threat they pose is a deterrent that in other words we have to be strong enough that until they will join us in disarming they've got to know that if they decided to lose those weapons on us they'd suffer enough damage themselves that wouldn't be worthwhile that's the only protection we have against that kind of weapon and as I say we are the ones who've made those proposals I think they came to the negotiating table because of our present military buildup the fact that we showed them or told them unless they did join us in disarming then they were going to have to face the fact that we were going to build our armaments up to the point that we could protect the freedom and the people of this country and of the free world and once we made that plane they were willing to come and sit down at the negotiating table and I hope they'll meet us in good faith and join us because this would be a contribution that this generation of Americans could make to the world that would be remembered for all time to come if the great nations would begin turning their swords into plowshares so just keep a prayer in your heart for us we're going to try to do it they tell me I got a quick thank you mr. president we feel proud to have you here today we have a deck made computer which we feel is the most sophisticated standalone word processor which we'd like to if we can figure out how give to the White House for the use of Jim Brady and we will be careful to be sure that it has the keyboard that was assembled by the president of the United States so it will be the most famous word processor in the world we feel proud to have you here today in addition he has been a driving force within so splendidly in massachusetts president ladies and gentlemen like private sector initiative free enterprise and the money has to be required to capitalize on the biological this country taxes and education let me first turn the job for a year we created sixty one thousand seven hundred jobs in these difficult times we could go to the second chart it shows that the total tax burden has dropped very significantly when we look at the yellow back and you're dropping the property time Alaska was higher and we have dropped the 12th massachusetts today most unemployment rate of our 17 industrial state for the last 38 second of months we have that we established the social the past five years we've had a major effort of education to ensure that we can grow resources approximately 150 we have written curriculum guides for universities in the technological field one year ago and we call it the 2% solution we're again through our own initiative we flashed that we would contribute 2% of our research and the volume of expenditures to universities essentially use funds equipment as well as support sponsored research our estimate was that this program was contributed fifteen million dollars the massachusetts university thanks in part to the equipment donation tax deduction 81 recovery act put forth by your administration we are now believing that our estimate is close to forty million dollars in just twelve months going to higher education from modern very tough to use the high technology the same is true of some of the other rates were increased with the capital gains tax and how the open market with a very few years a couple of years at the new higher rates and that wouldn't be a great lack of understanding how it functions that people study you brought up there second to it was education which was increasing in cost in 1982 it was somewhere in excess of what was an eighty-nine percent the same thing there that the governor of the states to our state and we expect our C. Martin TV studios they even had a revolving stage finally set to the man in charge was so proud of you that any of your graduates ever make it big and show business these were the things but we are children in the forty-five and a half pages help what it is that how many of those ads just after planting they were they started together we face some awesome problems that we've also made real progress and bring down the quickly interest rates in place in the tax rates that there's nothing to grow our crusade goes forward we will take new steps to rebuild our country we're still the technological leaders in the world and we must not only keep that we must increase so I intend to open a national dialogue in our private sector and export more goods and create more jobs at home and abroad the strength in our firms can be more effectively we need to better mobilize resources science and technology so let me tell you today we will still create a non-parts of commission on the industrial unless the commission makes the city policy recommendations to meet and asking all of you to let us yours to point out that in our tax structure the corporate tax is very hard to justify its existence that why isn't the so-called corporate tax simply passed on to the stockholders in which they