That's taking us to a use of reserves, which is zero, which is great. And a lot of that is doing credit to our finance team with advanced planning, with Touchstone and having that advanced meeting with council last year to have that discussion. Slide. And so looking at this year, one of our key highlights this year is, of course, the agreement that Assistant City Manager mentioned. It's a different type of agreement than the one we've had in the past. This one is a system where the city earns and receives all of the revenues. And we also pay all the expenditures and we pay a fee to Touchstone. Whereas in previous agreements, it was shared revenue and shared O&M expenditures, which leads to a lot of gray areas on how to move forward. So this is a really fantastic, easy to manage agreement and we are thrilled to be working with Touchstone. It's a very professional organization. We also are in the process of buying two hybrid greens mowers. We're really excited to have these. The equipment you might remember from last year is very aged at the golf course. So we are looking at slowly integrating new equipment. We have a lot of back order with equipment, as you may hear through the capital and other budget presentations, materials and supplies are difficult for those, but we are moving forward with it and we're looking forward to those greens mowers this year. We opened our restaurant and event center on October 1st of last year. To much fanfare was very, very well received. We changed the name of the event center to the iron and vine and is exceeding expectations as we thought it would. So it's doing very well. And if you haven't been, it's a great place to check it out. Our rounds of golf from this time last year compared to this year are around the same. They're shallowing just a bit with our latest financial updates. But if you look back in time at a time when we had the fires and we had flooding, it's a very similar type of golf rounds where we're lower in golf rounds just a tiny bit. The restaurant and event center have far exceeded expectations. So it's a good budget. They've done very well this year. We are looking at the irrigation water storage system coming back to this council in June of this year. To talk about that, we've started the design process that you may recall the irrigation system is over 50 years old. And this design is the step one in getting us to a brand new irrigation system in the next few years. We needed a water storage system first to bring in a new irrigation system. And then last but not least, we've increased golf fees in January of this year to make up for a five-year lack of increasing golf fees altogether. We also reduced the amount of golf type of fees from 180 to about 30, which is a significant change from one organization, one management operator to the next. And so that is, I would say overall though, just want to say the golf course is doing really well. Again, shallowing and a little bit of the golf because we had Epic Reigns this year for months, but overall balancing that out with their other performance of the driving range and that event and restaurant center. And I'll turn it back over to Assistant City Manager. Thank you, Deputy Director Santos. And with that, that concludes Recreation and Parks Department budget and we're happy to answer questions. Council Member Fleming. Thank you guys. I'm so excited to hear how many people are back using our services. I hope there's lots of pent up demand that is going to be continuing to reach out across the city. So it's really exciting. I do have a question about the aesthetic improvements. As we've heard, it's not all doom and gloom, but it certainly is in a rosy picture across the city in terms of revenues. And I'm just wondering where the money is going to be coming from for these aesthetic improvements. Yes, thank you, Council Member Fleming. So we have secured one-time funds to add the landscape maintenance component of a contract back in. This current budget actually continues and perpetuates the funds that have been necessary to sustain the mowing portion of the operation. And so we have one-time funds that, as you heard from Director Hartman for the Graffiti Program, we've also received funds to do the landscape maintenance component through that same resource. Our intent is to work with the Finance Department in next year's budget to incorporate the ongoing ask and need from Council. At that point, we will know exactly what the annual contribution for the contract will be and we'll be able to make the necessary adjustments moving forward. But it is our intent to bring that contract service back, which we feel strongly will make a substantial impact in the aesthetics of our community. And the one-time funds, are they general fund? They're coming from the landfill settlement contingency program and they'll be distributed into the city's general fund and then pushed through a separate Council action later this fiscal year for Council's consideration. Okay, thank you. Council Member O'Crapke. Oh, thank you very much Madam Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. Also a great job on the forecasting of the realignment. I know we always say put people before parks, but thanks to NBC and Amy Poehler and Chris Pratt, Parks and Rec is in the American lexicon and we can't help that. So even if we wanted to call it, you know, Rec and Parks, people aren't going to call it that no matter how hard we try. But to my question, Northwest Community Park has a interesting ownership and responsibility situation and I know there has been very, very preliminary informal talks about making it more logical, I guess would be the proper term. Is that in the work plan and if so, is that going to require any sort of budgetary requirements? Thank you Council Member O'Crapke. The Northwest Community Park is an interesting quilt of ownership responsibilities between the city and the school district. We actually have had now two conversations with both the school itself, as well as the district representatives on how we might proceed. One proceeding in the short term by creating an agreement between the two agencies is to basically code of conduct for city participants and permittees. And so far the feedback has been positive that our adjustments that I explained earlier about managing the permits better has really made a positive impact on some of the conditions that we saw over the last couple of years with that particular site. Moving forward, it is our intent to work with the district to try to clean up the ownership out there if we can, if we can come to a resolution and agreement. What that'll do is give us more of the long-term reliance on those facilities, how we can utilize them and what our relationship with the district is. As far as the last question, which is really the kicker is, is there gonna be a budgetary expense to it? And right now I actually can't offer anything. There is gonna likely be some level of negotiation in this. And I don't know exactly where that will land, but more than likely in that negotiation, we will try to make it one of labor and service as opposed to financial. But it'll be really a function of what ultimately we have to accomplish with the district to make the lines and use of that facility cleaner. Thank you. And then unfortunately, the Parks Foundation ceased operations in the middle of this last budgetary term in December. While not a part of our organization, it's a separate organization, but it has an affiliation financially, do you foresee any negative effects other than the obvious to that and what we can do as a city financially? Yeah, thank you again for that. Losing the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation this last year was a good hit to our organization. We really do wanna see the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation come back into operation. We do have one nonprofit entity that's expressed interest in taking on the leadership role with that and we're actively negotiating there. But my hope is that other organizations across the city will express interest in wanting to be a part of it. It is not just a single directive operation. We do need lots of partnership to make that function. Historically, the Santa Rosa Parks Foundation was singular in focus. Their focus was predominantly aimed at the train at Howard Park and some of the amusement style improvements out there as immediately following the Tubbs Fire as we were looking to recover from that, the Parks Foundation became invested in the restoration of Coffee Park in particular and we had started a conversation about wanting them to take on a bigger, broader role city-wide moving forward. Unfortunately, a number of the participants who were involved in the Parks Foundation chose to no longer proceed and therefore we actually worked with the last remaining operation and entity to close out the accounts in December. So we did retain the name and it's our intent to proceed in the future with a new Parks Foundation that has a broad city-wide focus to help us fund a lot of the improvements and that we're talking about today. So in summation, if we were to live in a county that has more nonprofits per capita than any other place in the nation and there were some people that were parks and open space minded, there's an opportunity to help re-establish this organization to help fund our parks and recreation purposes. Is that correct? That is correct. Thank you, Council Member Statte. Thank you, Mayor. So much excitement coming out of Parks and Rec on every front with the internal reorg to make it a more focused group. That's fantastic. The plans that are underway, I'm particularly partial to the Family Aquatic Center and also the work at the Benebelli Golf Course in Galvin Park, but I'm hearing a lot about MLK as well. So a lot of great buzz out there. The question that I had, well actually before I get to my question, thanks again for shining a spotlight on the grants management issue. That's something that we've heard across departments and it's interesting to note what a pain point that is for the organization. So thanks for bringing that to light. My question is one that you're already expecting and that you'll be getting many times over the next months because of the spotlight that's being shown on the Southeast Greenway. Obviously there's a lot of excitement about the city's impending or the city taking, not imminently taking control of that piece of land. In the budget this year, is there gonna be, do we have the budget? Do we have the resources to start taking the next steps in terms of the planning for that piece of land over the next 12 months or so? So I'll do the initial answer and if Deputy Director Santos has some additional components or a rebuttal to my statement, she's welcome to chime in. So the Southeast Greenway is active. It's an active project on our list. We are working today with the Sonoma County Ag and Open Space District to try to identify, prepare and draft the conservation easement that will be placed over the top of the property should and when the city acquires the property. And so that is a critical component for us. Immediately following will be the implementation and community discussion around a master plan of that property. The master planning process is not a small or this will be a large sizable program and it will take quite some time to complete. But it's critical for us to go through that effort to try to understand what services programs and facilities are intended to be located there. And we wanna hear from the community at large as to what their expectations and interests. And then that'll help us once finalized that'll help us develop an infrastructure investment strategy on moving forward. So to answer your question more simply, yes. We have that on our program. It is something that we don't need additional funds at the moment. However, if we get into more of the environmental aspect, we may be returning to council with a request to appropriate some park funds to proceed with consultant services for environmental or master plan support. Excellent. Thank you. That's a member Alvarez. Thank you Madam Mayor. First and foremost, thank you for making district one looks so beautiful. We have $12.5 million coming into Kiwanis MLK Park. We'll be done with the Colgan Park with the restoration Colgan Creek. And we've actually sat here and spoke about Davis Park and the upgrades to that park as well. So before anything, thank you very much for the efforts to make that happen. Considering that we've had a very wet start to the year and we're moving into the drier months, how prepared are we for weed abatement or addressing the tall grass in our city? Are we staffed? Do we have, are we prepared? So the fire department has an active program utilizing our supervised adult crew with the county and they are actively working through our wildland urban interface priority areas alongside our parks maintenance teams. Those are the primary direction, that's the primary area that we need to focus in on today. The grass is still growing. There's still green out there. So cutting today will result in additional cuts through the course of the summer and fall. But it's growing and it's growing at a much more rapid pace and much taller than we've seen over the last several years because we're now out of the drought. So in order for us to manage the vegetation as well as prepare ourselves for the upcoming fire season, that is the key focus. From the standpoint of the rest of the community, more of the vegetation management side and less the weed abatement side, we are having to shift staff around both from parks maintenance, street maintenance and actually facilities maintenance to try to address the rapid and uncontrolled growth at the moment that's occurring everywhere around town. We are aware and again, once we come and cut it, it's likely to grow again. We'll likely be out there in a couple of months. The focus that we have, which is usually part of our landscape maintenance contract is redirecting staff off of other activities. And so we are slowing down some services in order to respond to the current vegetation management issues. But we do have a plan that over the next four to six weeks we should be able to gain control of a majority, if not all of the city landscape areas and have them cut down at least for this first round. So we are making adjustments in an effort to try to address the current and emerging issue, which is the vegetation growth. Well, when you state a contract for assisting us in making that happen, do you mean with the county or is there another entity that we are entering in a contract with? Yeah, Council Member, it's the landscape contract that we don't currently have relating to landscape maintenance. And so as we look to award that contract this summer fall, that contractor will take on the direct responsibility for managing the vegetation component, not necessarily the Wildland Urban Interface areas, but really focused in on our medians side on landscapes, our parks and our facilities. And so once we award that contract, they will take on that responsibility and we can restore all of our crew services back to their original programs. And please help me understand why we as a city would not do this in-house. I fell to see the reason for that, if you could explain that. So historically, I'll just start there, historically through the recession, it was a shift. At that point in time, contract service were substantially cheaper than in-house staff. And we saw that by the elimination of nearly 30 FTE for a single contract. That's been shifting and ebbing over the course of time and we've been actively evaluating the difference and cost variance between in-house staff, bringing them in and their long-term permanent costs versus a contract services cost. Right now, we still find that contract services have a value in the operation, mostly for that long-term investment need in having full-time FTEs. And therefore, that's our approach moving forward, is to continue to look at having that in-house, that contract service provide us the ability to be able to address issues in the vegetation and landscape maintenance front. So we've been looking, we've been working with finance and right now we believe that contract services is still the cost-effective way for us to proceed. Would I be correct in making the assumption that the driving force is at seasonal compared to a year-round need? We have seasonal issues that pop up, but it is a year-round issue. In the wintertime when the growing season is shorter, that's when we focus in on other safety-oriented issues or capital modifications to a park site because now we're moving maintenance staff into more of the capital side. And so seasonal has an impact but maintenance activities operate to be flexible through the seasons, right? You've got summertime activities, you've got wintertime activities and that's how you keep your FTEs fully staffed, fully operational and invested through the course of the year. So even though there are seasonal activities that may be greater in some years like this year is with vegetation management on a normal year given the resources that we need, which would be the additional contract service, that is what will help us keep a sustainable program and be able to bring our parks back into good condition and sustain that way. Thank you. One of the questions that I get asked a lot is for example, Southwest Park or Southwest Community Park. Amongst many other parks in the city of San Jose, and I'm sure you probably get the question as well, as well as my colleagues, is are there any additional resources that we could use to renovate, introduce new parks such as developmental fees? Do those exist, are those within our reach? So Southwest Community Park is one of those that's located in a park development impact fee zone and actually it's an extremely active zone. We're collecting more, we've collected more this year than we have in prior years, which is an exciting thing which allows us then to turn around and invest it into those needs. The other tool that we have is the Measure M program, the Parks for All piece, and Southwest Community Park has been identified as a recipient of both funds over the course of the next several years with interest in looking at how we can rebuild the pergola that's out there, how we can invest in changing and improving the fields, potentially even shifting one of the soccer fields to an all weather turf field. So there are products and projects that are currently in place utilizing exactly those financial resources. We will always be looking to supplement those with outside grant funds or other financial pots of money because as I said, costs are continuing to escalate and we're trying to keep up.  Later on, I won't know what to present up in all the parks, look beautiful, including the Rosalind Creek Park, which I know is coming up here pretty soon as well. Thank you for your efforts. Absolutely. Council Member Rogers. Thank you, Mayor. So Jason, what happened with the scuba divers? The scuba divers were unfortunately not able to acquire an ABC permit for that location given the facilities that were available to them and with the sale of alcoholic beverages that is part of the way they balance their budget and without that availability, they chose to take a year off while we work on a permanent solution collaboratively. So if there's an intention then in a year to bring this back, do we have any dollars in this budget to actually address the issues at Doyle Community Park that led to them taking a year off? We don't at this point in time, partly because we're not exactly sure yet what ABC is gonna require for permanent or semi-permanent installation that would allow for them to provide vending out of. Negotiations with ABC over the last several months looked at a number of different options and they weren't pleased with those. So until we understand a little bit more what the need is, we may be able to accommodate it within our current budget but if there's more of a permanent building that has to be built, then no, it would be outside of our current budget but if it's something more akin to a tough shed or they actually proposed at one point the purchase and utilization of a container, ABC wasn't happy with that, at least not in the timeframe that they were given to review the request. So it's not a clear answer for you, it's partly gonna be dependent upon what ABC requires of the scuba divers and the city. All right, my request would be that when we know more that we bring it back if we need to allocate some resources or find some resources just because the feedback that I got from the community is that they really liked it and thought that it was interesting and it was something different to do in the community. I'd love to support that. Unfortunately, Council Member, it really came as a surprise to all of us, including I think the scuba diver program. I think this was a last minute shift. I wanna say they made the public announcement two days after announcing to the city. Okay, thank you. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to touch on you have an after school program that you spoke about. Can you maybe tell us a little bit more about that and how that's funded or where those activities take place? So Vice Mayor, I'm gonna do my best, but I may on this one have to phone a friend with Deputy Director Tibbets being online if there's a way for him to be promoted, please. Our after school programs in this particular instance are neighborhood services programs that are measure-of-funded and we utilize an MOU or an agreement with Burbank Housing at their locations and their sites to service community members that reside in their properties. And we've been shifting, we've had to make some shifts, especially through the pandemic because some sites didn't have enough participation. We had to see some participants be driven in to a particular site. Coming out of the pandemic, however, we not only feel like we've seen those, that participation resume, but we also have had interest from Burbank Housing and expanding to two other sites. So Deputy Director Tibbets, if you are available, if you can add additional information. That really did answer my question. I think I appreciate it, Director Tibbets. I just wanted to find out where those funds actually came from and where the sites were being utilized more than anything. And then, but if you'd like to expand on anything else, go ahead, since you're corroded now. I think Jason covered it well. And yeah, I think the one thing I would just highlight on is that this is a model that is really what started neighborhood services even before we had Measure-O, Apple Valley where we have a trailer out there was as a program that's been in existence for over 20 years doing this type of programming. And so that partnership just over the years has looked different over the different years. But it's really a unique way to provide after-school programming. There is a lot of money that goes through our schools, through ACES funds and different things to provide after-school programming. Unfortunately, there's still kids who slip through the cracks. And this is a unique way for us to go into the communities where we know that kids need that support after school and catch those kids who slip through the cracks. So it's not the traditional model of being at a school and serving 120 kids at one school. But it's a really important need in the community to make sure that we're providing the service to as many of the youth as we can. The reason this is so important to me, I think, is because we can also have a direct correlation between what we're investing in, you know, law enforcement and after-school quality programs. So I just wanna make sure that we, I do feel like this is a good investment specifically for youth, you know, in sixth to eighth grade. If we can capture them specifically, I think would be really beneficial to the community. And vice mayor, you bring a great point. And I think that's gonna be one of the benefits and perks of seeing us reformulate the Recreation and Parks Department where violence prevention and neighborhood services are now going back under one roof and able to work together. The programs at neighborhood services really are that upstream investment. And that is they need to be able to coordinate hand-in-hand with our violence prevention partners and the programming that that team is doing. So I think your point is very well taken and this new reorganization, I think, will help us make that happen more succinctly moving forward. I appreciate the efforts. And then I just have a couple more questions. I saw that on the Touchstone contract that we are transferring in, I believe you said $208,000 from General Fund. Is that consistent with what we do in enterprise funds? We take money from our General Fund to backfill? So I'm gonna let Deputy Director Santos answer. Thank you. And historically we take money from the reserves in order to backfill, but when we had this conversation last year when we were bringing on Touchstone, we recognized a budget deficit going into the first year. So we transferred funds from the, had the ability to transfer funds at that time and make those accommodations at that time. So it's not entirely unheard of. We have in 2013 and 14 transferred general funds over to the Bennett Valley Golf Course in order to prop up the enterprise fund. And Vice Mayor, on the more general front, the golf course has been the predominant recipient of general fund transfers to help it balance its budget. The other enterprises have generally not seen that transfer, but that would be the source should it be needed if they had to prop up their operation. The curve that we've seen from a budgetary perspective shows that that general fund transfer is only needed this year, potentially next year before we see that operation begin to be fully self-suffunding. Thank you for that. And then I just have one more question. I noticed that you talked about the irrigation needs out at Bennett Valley Golf Course and that it's in a design phase right now. Do we have money budgeted to address those needs in this current budget so that we can start work on it immediately? So again, I'll start. I'll let Deputy Director Santos chime in. The current program and design is being done through our contract with Touchstone. And so they are the primary implementer of that program. Deputy Director Santos will be bringing a separate item to program funds directly for the ongoing construction of that site. And that should be coming here within the next two to three meetings. So it's not in the new CIP budget? It is not specifically programmed in this budget. It will come as a separate item. Okay, would it be helpful, I guess, if we actually are budgeting in this current budget for the needs that are at Bennett Valley Golf Course for irrigation? Director Alton, good afternoon and thank you for your question. I think considering the, as we came to the final amount of what the dollars would be, it made sense that we, since we were gonna be pulling from reserves in order to pay for that work out of the general fund, that we would take it at a separate item as opposed to putting it as part of our ongoing budget here. We were gonna take money from reserves, which is different from what we're doing to solve our deficit. So that was the main reason why we would take it separately. So more of a one-time? Absolutely, it's a one-time thing. Okay, thank you for that clarification. Council Member Fleming. Thank you. One thing that got triggered by something Council Member Alvarez asked about was around budget management and weed abatement and the contract that's coming forward for beautification. Would that contract then eliminate the need for what you mentioned we're using supervised adult crews? It wouldn't reduce the need, it would reduce the stress on our need. Right now we have the supervised adult crews fully engaged and we are asking for any additional teams that they have available to send our way because of the demand. The demand really is the area that our contractor would be doing. We're hoping to try to bring in that service to try to supplement some of those needs. So it wouldn't eliminate it completely, it would reduce the stress and they would then focus on the larger property areas in the wild and urban interface. Okay, well I really struggle with the ethics of using supervised adult crews as I've expressed before and without ladders to careers and I suspect that I may not be alone in that. So my request would be that while it might be potentially really expensive that at least the council have the option of what it would cost to pay people who are not incarcerated and underpaid to do this service or a proposal for a program which would indeed give these folks an opportunity to a career or an explanation of what opportunities are being provided in them when we hear the full budget. Thanks a bunch. Thank you. Any additional questions from council? All right, seeing none, I will dive into mine and I only have a couple. So I did want to ask a question about when we make improvements to parks, even neighborhood parks, are there places to park bikes because we're encouraging people to ride bikes? I just wanted to know, are there places to park them? Yes, no, and yes, right? So yes, there are some parks that have adequate and incorporated bike parking. No, not every park currently has those facilities. And yes, it's our intent as we look to modernize, update and upgrade parks and build new that they will all incorporate bike parking. So when we, the current parks that we have that are have money slated, we're going to make sure that we have parking for not only vehicles, but for bikes. Yes, as we're looking at doing renovations in specific parks, that is one of the facilities we're looking to add into those parks. Okay, and because when I look at Jason, I think of everything, parks, recreation, roads. Hearn is having some improvements. Is there money in, or is it plan to make a four-way crosswalk that goes from Southwest into the park? Is that... Mayor, are you speaking of the Hearn Community Hub project? I'm talking about Southwest Community Park and then I'm speaking of the street Hearn. So when we look at, we're going to make improvements on the streets. Are we looking also at the accessibility of the parks when we make those improvements? And would that come from parks? Or would we have to connect, and you would be the connecting factor, would we have to connect with? And yes, the intersection of Hearn and Burbank is actively on our radar. We are working to install a full traffic signal at that location for the benefit of pedestrian movement and bike movement, but also traffic flow. It is, the other part of your question is one that it's sort of in the, it depends, right? So for example, Roseland Creek Community Park, there's a crosswalk that connects the park and the school. That is a function of the park design, and it's incorporated with the environmental. And so it's the park's program that will be funding that with support from the gas tax funds on the other end. Other locations where it's a street improvement, for example, at Juilliard Park. Juilliard Park improvements are being funded specifically by transportation-oriented financial elements. And so it depends upon the specific location as to which fund is paying for the improvement, but both the recreation and parks department and the transportation and public works department are always looking at how to improve access in and out of those high use areas, especially for bicycles and pedestrians. Perfect. And then I had a question about the fee-based programs. You may have already said this, but what percentage of those programs are youth-based? All right, I'm gonna have to phone a friend again. So if we could promote Jason Parrish, I believe he's also online. It's funny, it's like that show when you get a lifeline. I'm not seeing Jason on the line. If not, Deputy Director Tibbets, do you have an answer to the mayor's question? Yeah, I wouldn't know the exact breakdown of that percentage programs. The key areas that we have obviously are aquatics that serve all ages and then youth programming, adult programming and senior programming, but the exact. Would you be looking for that percentage in terms of offerings or in terms of participation? I'll tell you why I'm looking for the percentage, so maybe that will help. I'm looking for the percentage because previously we had had a discussion and I spoke about separate but equal programming. And I want to know if that is being addressed and how it's being addressed, looking that the fee-based recreation has increased or we're getting closer to where we were pre-pandemic. So that's a concern of mine. Mayor, thank you. And so I'm gonna take the first stab and again, Deputy Director Tibbets can chime in to correct. We did hear your request and the Deputy Director and his team have been actively working on trying to create a way to merge the programs and provide more universal offerings. And so this winter was our first time doing that and it was extremely successful and Deputy Director Tibbets, I might get this wrong, it was the fairytale dance, which was the first time that we had measure O and non-supported or general population together with both programs functioning. So we're working on making that happen. And how long was the fairytale dance? I was assuming it was a day and night. So yeah, we kind of started previous conversations, we talked about it's really a plan for each different program and the different components of that program. So that's a special event where we did the fairytale ball and we had a sweetheart dance there, something exactly what's called, but essentially two very similar family events. So we merged those together, merging the staffing and resources together with that event as kind of our first pilot program. We're looking at doing a larger community event through our Spring Fest, which has been funded through measure O and measure H. And we're looking at making that a much larger community event through the entire department. And then right now one of the programs we just brought back is flag football. And as far as an ongoing program, that's the first one that we're looking right now is because it's not tied to our agreements with the school districts and those types of things, but it's really just kind of a program that we can run outside in our parks and find our own space to run the programming. So we're looking at how to grow that program and expand that program and merge the resources from that program as well. So those are a few of the areas that we're looking right now to continue to kind of expand that process. Thank you. And I see Mr. Parrish on the line. Did you have anything you wanted to add? Actually, Mayor, I was hoping you might repeat the question briefly. I was just wondering, because I had made a comment prior to about kind of separate but equal when we have programming. And I know that there were some obstacles at integrating programming when you have fee-based and non-fee-based. But I wanted to know that we're still working towards it. And if not, do we need like money to work towards it? Or like, what can we do so we don't have, I probably a lack of better term separate but equal because that's essentially what it is. You pay, you have one program and you don't pay and you are in a different program. That is a system integration issue. Or I shouldn't say it's an issue. It's something we're actually all doing right now with the neighborhood services programming, integrating with some of the other existing classes within our enterprise software. And I know there's going, Jeff has been working with his team to actually develop that even more in the coming year. And so now that we're out of COVID and we're resuming what might be considered traditional recreation program that should be taking place. And Mayor Rogers, if I could just add one more thing. I think historical context of this is important. Having been involved when measure O first passed, I think a lot of what got developed was under a microscope of concern for supplanting the general fund and I am, I hope you can trust when I say that I'm very excited that this is the conversation that we're having. It's a conversation of, I agree 100% it's the direction that we need to go with these programming. It's just finding the right way to work back from 20 years of we have to keep everything separated to show that we're not supplanting anything from the general fund and that really being the microscope to I am much happier running programming looking at how do we serve youth, the best we can get everyone together and do these programming. So I think it's a sign that we're in a much better place with this measure, especially as it passes again as measure H and we have another 20 years. But that's a little historical context as to some of the complication of unwinding some of that. Okay, and initially, and I'll say it again, the reason why this was an issue for me is because I had to drive across town to take my son for a summer program because I live in Southwest, Santa Rosa and I did not financially, I was disqualified from him participating in a program that was right around the corner from my house. So this is what actually brought my attention to it, but the problem is still the same. We should not have separated programming. Absolutely agree and one more thing to highlight again, there's not gonna be a one answer to everything. It's the steps that we're taking, but one of the slides of our accomplishments mentioned the increase in membership based off of adding the residency. And so in the particular example that you gave, that is something that has now been avoided. And again, it doesn't solve every aspect of that problem, but again, it's the continued steps that we take to look at it from all different angles and make sure that we correct that over time. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions regarding that. So with that being said, I'm assuming you don't need any money for that, that you guys are working on that and trying to find a way to work around some of the rules for the grant funded or other programming that we have. Any questions from council before council member Alvarez? Could you describe, thank you. Could you describe the Rosen lighting district please? I'm sorry, the Rosalind. The Rosen lighting district. General fund proposed CIP projects and it's on page 61. So the Rosalind lighting district was, it's a function of the annexation process. There is a standalone assessment that was placed for a particular area of Rosalind. That was managed and operated by the county. With the annexation, the city did take over those street lights and that district. It has taken some time to get all of the data and information together and transferred from the county to the city. And so that's why you're starting to see that today as opposed to five years ago when we initially took on Rosalind as a part of the community. So it is specific to those lights that are assigned to that assessment district. And I believe this was through the LAFCO agreement. Correct. I don't have to report that we have a council member who sits on that board. Thank you sir. So thank you, thank you, thank you for everything that you do. Like parks definitely is a place that everyone can go to regardless of their income, income level and recreations is something that we want everyone to have the ability to experience. So thank your department and thank you for the presentation. Thank you, mayor. And I'll just say it's a phenomenal team and they are very excited to all be back together again. The challenge for you though is you don't get to lose me, I get to stay up here. Our next department is gonna be Transportation and Public Works. Again, I am Jason Nut, the assistant city manager and acting transportation and public works director. With me is deputy director Rachel Ead. I will cover the general aspect of the department and Rachel will help discuss the city bus budget. Again, as I mentioned with the recreation and parks side of the house, the numbers on here seemingly are all over the board and it specifically relates to the transfer of budgetary items from transportation and public works to recreation and parks. That is the 31 employees, the Benetville Golf Course, the Capital Improvement Program and all the associated budget line items. And so it's very difficult, like with some of the other departments to go line by line and explain to you what's happening. If we go to the next slide, which is looking at programs, in general what we have operating is a flat operation. We have increases because of MOU changes, increases in costs relating to fleet replacement, increases in costs relating to electricity and gas. Those were actually significant increases in costs this year for both. And we're starting to see increased cost in resource and services. One of the additions up here relates to the 60, almost 67% increase in the zero waste operations. We are adding funding into this year's budget specifically to begin addressing SB 1383 while implementation date was two years ago, there's been a lag in enforcement. It is now time for CalRecycle to start stepping up their enforcement activities. And in response to that, we need to make sure that we are prepping our organization, our community to respond. And so our zero waste coordinator is going to be incorporating some additional activities that are showing up in this budget. As I mentioned, really the major change here and the general fund is this shift of staff and operations from relating to park maintenance and park planning. So we'll just go straight into accomplishments. We have a number of different divisions that are doing a ton of great things and trying to pare down all of the activities and all of the accomplishments was difficult, but I did my best to give you a summary. The local road safety plans is really our opportunity to begin taking those high incident corridors for bike and pet incidents and really study them to a level of detail that we believe we can actually implement improvements in a way that starts to have direct impact in reducing the severity and number of collisions with bicyclists and pedestrians. There are three primary corridors that we looked at this year with the fourth corridor having been studied the year prior. That fourth corridor was Stony Point Road. The three that we studied this last year were four streets, Montgomery Drive and North Dutton. Those particular programs are really critical. We held a number of public meetings and we now have a program to implement to the benefit of roadway safety. We are using that term, which is a local road safety plan to actively go after grant funding. That is now a tool and a requirement for certain grants such as the Highway Safety Improvement Program. And having these in place will actually give us additional points and qualify us for certain grants where we wouldn't otherwise. So huge effort and I applaud the staff for getting that. I will also say is if you've been around this community as much as we don't like to be the bleeding edge of things in some ways we are in others. And you heard from other departments, places that we've gone and taken the lead nationally. Historically from a traffic perspective, we were the first to implement pedestrian activated flashing beacons, especially the in-ground ones. So we were ground zero for that. Now we are working with SMART and the California Public Utility Commission to implement a rectangular rapid flashing beacon protocol for multi-use path crossings at railroad crossings. It's a lot of words there. But the idea being is not every intersection of a railroad crossing mandates requires a traffic signal. One, people just won't obey that because they won't wait for the indicator for them to cross. But two, it just doesn't make sense if the volume of the road or the safety indicators on that road are low enough to allow bicyclists and pedestrians to cross that roadway with that enhanced safety beacon. And so Sebastopol Road is our primary location. We're having a great success with that. The Public Utility Commission is very pleased with the level of work that's going on there. And this not only means a substantial win for the city of Santa Rosa as we look to incorporate these safety elements that are at a reasonable cost, but for SMART in general, as they look to expand this throughout their corridor at many of these uncontrolled crossings. So that was a huge win for us. As council approved back in December of 22, we are now fully funded moving forward with the Herne Avenue Improvement Phase Three. That's the interchange project. Great project. I'm finally seeing it come to fruition. And I've only been here for 13 years. So folks who've been here longer have a lot more excitement about seeing this come and move forward. We expect to hear about the LPP competitive grant in early June. And that is the last piece for us to get this out on the street to bid as council's action. We do have the alternative that doesn't slow the project down. We just hope the grant is successful. So more things to come there and our partnership with SCTA is working beautifully. We did go through and develop and implement the first battery electric buses in the city. We've got four out on the street. We have five more that we're actively working on bringing into our community. Rachel will be happy to tell you all that good news when she gives the transit update. We started the project for the outreach for the Herm community hub project. That's a new fire station eight. That's the Southwest area library branch. And it's a new multicultural community center. So that particular project is now getting too full swing. You've awarded two key contracts for us in the earlier part of this year. So preliminary design is on its way. And we now have a permanent project manager who will be leading this effort as we move into our community meetings this summer. Realistically, just want to give you a high level thought of what's going on. In 2022, we invested $49 million into public infrastructure projects. 26 million of that was in the non-enterprise side and 23 million in the enterprise side. It's pretty hefty considering our staffing challenges that we're having and we'll discuss that more when I get to that slide. On the real estate front, I got to say that team has really been pushing it into high gear. They went through and completed the acquisition of the three properties for the Herm community hub. That is now complete and final. And the project can now move forward without any hesitation. Not on this, but they also were able to complete the acquisition of the Bell property. Bell property is the part of and the key piece of the Laura Colgan Creek phase three. And that is super exciting, especially with the grant funds coming in. They were instrumental in setting up the Surplus Lands Act sale of properties in the downtown. We have great proposals that we're currently reviewing right now and we're very excited to see how that could reinvest in our downtown community and get those properties activated. And we're looking at finalizing the map for Fire Station Five. Fire Station Five, thank you for awarding that contract. We're excited to see that start to break ground. And we'll have an announcement on the groundbreaking ceremony coming public here very soon. And so great opportunity, but they also helped us get all of the legal boundary issues and the easements that cross that property organized so that we can start construction. For street maintenance, the data that you see here actually is a little bit old because this is data that was provided for you prior to goal setting. So as of February, we had done almost 4,200 cubic yards of roadside and encampment debris in 22, almost 9,400 graffiti tags in the 5,100 potholes. Now, just in April, that team has removed 542 tags. 204 potholes were filled and they removed 213 cubic yards of material. In every case, they've exceeded the target response times when those responses come into our department with graffiti being within 23 hours, potholes within 56 hours and roadside debris within 42 hours. Our target is 72. The team is really working hard to make those primary aspects of our service for this community. Moving into fleet maintenance, the Telematics program was huge. And thank you to council for giving us the funding and the authorization to proceed with that. All vehicles have had Telematics incorporated that's giving us specific and real data on the travel patterns of our staff, our equipment and it's really helping us to organize our replacement program making it more efficient and effective moving forward. So really appreciate that. And obviously that team was really a critical component in helping fire move their assets into the replacement fund. On the solid waste front, we've been working actively with Recology to make that service agreement sustain into the future. We've been making amendments along the way and really setting up so that they can assist us with the SB1383 implementation. We did get a grant from CalRecycle to help us with that SB133 implementation and we are working with them with our zero waste team as the lead to implement the Clean Santa Rosa initiative where we're going out into communities and cleaning up roadside debris and really trying to make our neighborhoods and community areas look better all the way around. From a city bus, we did talk about the battery electric buses, they secured funds to bring in six additional buses as well as the second phase of infrastructure charging. We can currently charge, or we will very soon be able to charge 10 buses. We're hoping to expand that to 20 with an additional 10 chargers through this grant program. And they're working really hard with our partners through a number of different initiatives. In particular through our TIES study, this is the Transit Integration and Efficiency Study that the city kicked off. It was our initiative several years ago. All other agencies are starting to come on board and through the efforts that Deputy Director Ead has along with Executive Director Smith at SCTA, we're starting to see substantial changes with the most exciting coming is the Free Fair for Youth program. And I think Rachel may touch on that here shortly. So some of the very cool things that are happening within the department and we're super pleased with the efforts of our team. Now, what are some of the challenges? As I mentioned early on, electricity and natural gas are really going through the roof. Our contract services are also starting to increase substantially, whether it's the janitorial, the alarm, or the pest. Staffing has been our biggest issue. So you heard HR report that we have 124 vacancies in the city, 49 of those are in public works. I have approximately a 50% vacancy rate in our capital projects engineering team, 20% in street maintenance and 20% in our city bus. So we are experiencing high levels of turnover. Folks are either moving out into retirement, they're moving on to other careers that have a different pay and benefit package to them. Or they're finding other opportunities that have different salary and benefit options, such as fully remote work opportunities. So that's some of the struggles that we're having in the department. It is really starting to hand tie us in certain areas. I will say we are ebbing and flowing in every division to try to keep up, catch up, and continue to look forward in a positive way. And I'm really proud of the team for what they've been able to do with that. On the fleet front, our challenges, the availability of equipment just doesn't exist. We are now in our third year of trying to replace vehicles that were supposed to be replaced three years ago. The equipment just isn't out there. We're seeing 24 to 36 month build times on certain types of equipment. So once we get them ordered, there is a lag in the delivery. There's a big push to bring in electric equipment. Electric fleets aren't out right now. And we think part of our challenge with our gas and diesel equipment delivery challenges and ordering challenges are that manufacturers are trying to figure out how to shift their production from fossil fuel to electric or sustainable operations. And that is creating a huge lag on both fronts. And so while it may seem like both from the department perspective and from the community and council perspective that we are slow at integrating, I can tell you we are working extremely hard to try to bring equipment in. It's just the availability is not there at the moment. And as soon as we start to see those order windows open, we're gonna be all over it. I promise you. Some of our vacancies have arisen from, we've been without a director for a year. And we've been without a deputy director of engineering services for three and a half years. We've been filling in and substituting staff over the course of that time. I've been filling in from my role in that position. I will say, thankfully to our human resource department, I can announce that we at least have a conditional job offer for an employee for our deputy director of engineering services. Can't tell you how thrilled and elated our staff is. That is a huge hole to fill. And I will, I am very excited about the candidate and we'll give you an opportunity to meet that person when they come on board. And I think you'll be very pleased with the selection. We are still working with the city manager's office to determine and identify a staffing response for the climate action goal. And so that's something that the department will be working with both myself, the assistant city manager Dunstan and city manager Smith to try to understand how we can roll that and moving forward so that we can meet and achieve the goals that you've put on the table for the city this upcoming year. With that, I'd like to turn it over to deputy director Ede to go over the transit enterprise budget. Thanks, Jason. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor and members of council. I'm pleased to be here to present the proposed budget for the transit enterprise. And just to provide an overview, the transit enterprise fund funds both Santa Rosa City and Santa Rosa Paratransit, the ONM, as well as the capital program, as well as the other activities of the transit division. So in fiscal 2324, we are proposing a budget just under 16.6 million. That does represent a 9% increase over the current year to give it a little bit of a COVID recovery context. However, that is also a 9% increase over our fiscal 1920 budget. So really, that just demonstrates how we're starting to get back in our recovery to a point where we were right before the pandemic with that 9% increase. And I'll talk on the next slide about some of the factors driving that increase. The transfer in is a general fund transfer of $30,000 to support our free fair program for veterans. That's a transfer the council has made over the past several years to backfill the lost revenue for that program. And as you all know, the fair free programs that we have in place have shown the strongest ridership recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic. So we're grateful to continue to be able to offer that program. And the veterans community certainly is grateful to be able to take advantage of that free access to city bus. We are not proposing any use of reserves this year. We do have sufficient revenues to cover this proposed budget. I do wanna note however that we anticipate we will have some significant savings against this budget as we are still carrying 14 vacant bus operator positions. As you all know, that's really been hampering our ability to further restore service. So I don't anticipate even with our efforts and my anticipation that over the next few months we will make some inroads on that number of vacancies. I do anticipate we will have some savings in this coming year. So in terms of some of the highlights and the factors driving increase this year, one of the major ones is fuel and this is a very conservative estimate we've made for fuel this year. One because we're still hoping to restore service. We'd like to have about four more buses out on the road this year in service getting additional frequency back on the routes that are still operating at half their pre-pandemic frequency. So in addition to leaving the diesel budget flat anticipating that while we have brought four new battery electric buses into our fleet, we're gonna hopefully get four more of our older buses back on the road. We are incorporating electricity as a fuel source for the first time and because we only have a few months of experience with fueling our electric buses and it's a very complicated rate structure that has to do with the fueling as well as the charging and the timing of it. We don't have a really solid baseline at this point in time and we're also seeing PG&E's proposals for the significant rate increases as you know in the coming year. So this estimate or this proposal for our fuel budget is conservative taking to account all those factors as we understand this transition from an all diesel fleet to a mixed fleet of diesel and battery electric buses. Hopefully at mid-year we'll be able to come in with a downward adjustment but we wanna just make sure we cover our bases on fueling giving all of the uncertainty and volatility. We also have a 165,000 anticipated increase in our purchase transportation cost and that is for our MV transportation contract for Santa Rosa paratransit. Of that increase, the majority of it is associated with an increase in the contract cost itself and the majority of that increase is related to higher wages for the paratransit drivers per the CBA that MV has with its labor group. We also anticipate we'll have a little bit of additional service demand in the paratransit service in the coming year. We are seeing demand continue to recover not quite back to pre-pandemic levels yet but it is occurring. So we've incorporated that as well. We've added $63,000 in professional services to include some staff augmentation for delivery of capital projects. Good news is we've been very fortunate with getting a lot of competitive grants for everything from vehicles to facility improvements to passenger amenities over the past few years but we need to have some additional capacity to bring on as needed to work with our CPE team and TPW to assist with delivery of those projects so we can get them done and delivered within the grant required time frames. So that would be something we would just bring on in it as an added basis to augment our staff. And finally, we are also adding funding for private security at the transit mall. Actually, we have already put private security in place given some of the issues we've been having recently through the contingency line of the city's contract but we will be looking to come forward to council with an amendment to the city's contract to amend in funds for ongoing private security at the transit mall as we reset that environment to a more safe and secure space. And the last note I just wanna leave you with is that we are using the last of our ARPA funds, our emergency relief funds for transit in this year's budget.  Using those funds this year does allow us to bank some of our Transportation Development Act funds to ease that transition next year. But as we move forward and continue to restore service, we will be really keeping a close eye. Things are gonna get tighter, costs are rising in all categories as Director Nutt indicated. And so we will be, you know, keeping a close watch on those expenses and what our revenues look like as we look forward to the fiscal 24-25 budget. And with that, I'll turn it back to Director Nutt or Assistant City Manager Nutt. He's both. Thank you, Deputy Director Eid. And with that, Mayor and Council, that concludes the public works budget. We're happy to answer questions. Looking at Council Member Rogers. So first of all, I wanna point out for folks who don't know what in accomplishment it is that you're able to deliver a transit budget right now without dipping into the reserves.  And I think, you know, our brethren at the Golden Gate Bridge District, they're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a week because of the transit patterns and presenting us a balanced budget without having to use reserves. Really just wanted to call that out how incredible that is given the times that we're at. Assistant City Manager, I wanted to ask you, first and foremost, about first last mile options, give us an update on what's happening with BIRD, our operator, and what the future of first last mile within the context of this budget looks like over the next year. Yeah, thank you, Council Member Rogers. First last mile is definitely a target for us. And there are a number of initiatives that are currently underway, whether being housed by the city or other entities within Sonoma County. BIRD is our current contracted operator of scooters, which started out in a robust way and really looked solid. We had great ridership. We had an exciting robust launch and we started to see significant, what we thought was gonna be a significant boom for our first and last mile. Over the course of time, we did start to see ridership wane. Now the question is, and part of the conversations that I've had with Council Member Rogers is, is ridership waning because ridership is waning or because there's less and less equipment out on the street. What we did find is that our operator is having some struggles in particular in our area. They've had national trouble as well as local management issues. And we are still working with the corporation to rectify our local issues. We've been told that the local issue is unrelated to their national corporate issue. But we have not seen the type of recovery that we had hoped. We are going to be engaging with them more assertively over the course of the next few weeks. We are gonna be seeing a new transportation planner start in transportation and public works who will fill Nancy Adams' position who retired earlier this year. And that individual will help shepherd because that will be part of their goal and directive to shepherd that conversation with Bird to make sure that we start to understand what their intent is long-term. And if we feel that it's not compatible with our goal that we'll shift and move on. Other initiatives, I'll have to get back to you on some. There is a bike share program that is being rolled out between SCTA and TAM with Nancy's absence. I don't have an update today on that, but I can get back to you and share that information with you in the future. There have been conversations from SMART and the downtown business community about incorporating a first and last mile in the downtown. I think that conversation is still underway. And once that formulates into a plan that they're planning to implement, we'll come back and describe that for you in more detail. I'll just look to Deputy Director, she may have, is there anything else? No, I would say in terms of that downtown circulator concept, we're providing assistance in terms of, given our past experience with running a circulator, but I believe it is still in formulation and more to come on that. Great, thank you. We have a building conditions index similar to parks that you talked about that we've completed. How are we, I'm looking at this through public works, but we can talk about it elsewhere if you'd like to, but how are we addressing not just the deferred maintenance on our streets, but also the deferred maintenance for our buildings? That's a great question. Council Member Rogers and a very difficult one to answer. It's difficult because our investment strategy is far short of what the need is. Back in fiscal year 2018, 2019, we came forward to council with the results of the condition assessment and requested a $3 million annual investment to try to bring our facilities up into the good condition. And we were unable to continue that allotment even though council incorporated into that year budget, it got pulled back as we went into the pandemic. It was felt that the need for those resources would extend beyond facility investment. We have not come back to council with any further requests given the state of the current budget. There are programmatic and prioritized investment strategies that we've put forward, that we've been talking with the city manager's office about. And if there's opportunity moving forward for additional or programmatic funding that could go toward facilities, there is a plan in place and the city manager's office is open to that dialogue given other needs of our community and our city operation. So it's unfortunately right now we are utilizing our current facilities budget to sustain to the best of our ability, the operations that are existing with limited upgrades and limited improvements. But we're doing our best to keep our facilities operational and in the best possible condition we can for our staff, our community and the public. All right, that'd be encouraging if there was a further conversation about how we direct more of those resources. Again, just looking at it from a long term expected yield or return on investment, particularly with our streets, we've seen the degradation curve and we know how much more expensive it goes or it is once we let it go. And then do you wanna talk about bike lanes now or should I wait until capital improvement projects? Let's, your pleasure, we can do it now and I can respond later if it's more appropriate. So please feel free. Sure, we'll do it now so we can take two bites at the apple then. Obviously we have a very robust bicycle pedestrian master plan. We hear consistent public comment as we did yesterday at our council meeting about expanding on that and accelerating the adoption of that. Is there anything in the budget this year geared towards either the full implementation or even just picking a critical corridor like College Avenue and figuring out how to better protect the bike lanes that exist there to increase ridership? Yes, there is and given that question, I will expand on those particular areas when we go through the capital improvement program budget but we are through the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board and through our regional partners working very closely to try to incorporate more and enhanced bicycle and pedestrian facilities throughout town. You'll see things, well, we talked already about programs that were implemented through the local road safety plan, things that we've done community-based, community-oriented with substantial feedback to create a plan and a design for a particular corridor. Financially, it's a matter of getting those funded. Because of our current capital improvement program investment strategy, a majority of the funds that we use are either gas tax, measure M streets or grant funding. And so local road safety plan projects in particular, the reason we do that is so that we can qualify and be highly thought of for grant funding so that we can utilize those other forms to match. And so we are doing our best to incorporate where we can but we do look to grant funding for a lot of those enhancements. Now, when we look at a resurfacing project, we look at other pavement restoration, we are always looking at ways that we can improve the conditions and utilizing the current funding for that project to make a betterment. And we've been successful in most cases of making betterments along the way. I appreciate that. And I know you and I talk about this all the time that smooth roads are important for bikes too. And investments in better bike lanes help bring up the PCIA pavement condition index as well across the city. So I'd like to see those improvements. I also like to propose that there's a low hanging fruit program that we could adopt or implement out there. Very similar to what you talked about with parks about adopting a green space. Why not a program adopting a bike lane where folks can help working with the city to make improvements to make the bike lanes that exist safer. We've talked about this quite a bit. I loved when I was in Canada, the protected bike lanes that they had that they used flower pots to protect the bike lane which added to the aesthetic made it look like a welcoming community. And then also obviously protected the bikes. Why not start a program like that where people can adopt existing bike lanes, put in something like a planner box or something to help delineate it and take some ownership over the streets. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I appreciate those thoughts. Council Member Stapp. My question is really just an add-on to Council Member Rogers. First, thanks to the Traffic Department for how responsive they've been to some of the traffic issues. Across the city, but especially in District 2, it's been a rough year in District 2. You brought it up in your remarks where you talked about some of the areas of focus specifically on pedestrians, which again is an add-on to our bike traffic. There are obviously other corridors, in addition to the ones that you mentioned on the slides. Is this an increased area of emphasis for the Traffic Department and for TPW? Are we gonna be able to do more with some of the higher risk pedestrian crossings in the city? So the team has been working, I mean, our traffic team, as I mentioned, has kind of been out in front in many ways. Like I said, as the initiator of the in-ground pavement flashing beacons, we've done our best to try to be in front and we have a really talented team in traffic engineering. What they're looking to do at this point is to utilize a combination of new implementation in an existing facility to provide enhancements. For example, one of the projects we're gonna be bringing forward is the utilization of TDA funds to go out and incorporate rectangular rapid flashing beacons, pedestrian activated at a number of crossings through town. We currently have seven identified. We think we're gonna have funding to be able to implement nine. That's a positive influence and we're utilizing data that we collect and we are data organization engineers. We have a tendency to be very programmatic that way but we are data heavy in that sense to try to determine where the highest priorities are for those implementations. One of the other tools that they've already started to talk about is are there ways that we can utilize existing infrastructure and enhance it further? We went forward and implemented a hawk over in front of the junior college in Santa Rosa High School, which is a modified or hybrid traffic signal that allows pedestrians a safe stop oriented crossing but should that pedestrian move through in advance of the dedicated time, vehicles have the opportunity to proceed after stopping. And so it's an innovative approach. While we weren't the first, we were definitely looking at places that we could implement those. And so one of the thoughts is how do we take what were our historic innovative approach of those overhead flashing yellow lights and turning those into a hawk oriented type of program? And we believe that there are already equipment on the street that we can start to implement a program and other locations where some of that equipment exists, it's a much lower investment cost to convert those to that type of facility. So they are actively looking at how they can make some of those adjustments and changes to the benefit of our bicycle and pedestrian communities safety moving forward in the near term. Council Member O'Crapke. Thank you, Mayor. So first I just want to say real real quick, anecdotally, there was this football player in the 90s named Cordell Stewart, whose nickname was Slash because he played quarterback slash running back slash wide receiver. And I say that because this is your second of three presentations today. You're an assistant city manager slash interim deputy director of engineering slash interim slash interim slash interim. So that's been going on for over a year now. So I just want to say thank you, Jason, for right now for going above and beyond which I think you even expected to do. So thank you for all of that. My question that I wanted to ask was when I was on planning commission, one of the things that frustrated me the most is we had to play pretend. And this is a, this may be a planning slash public works question, but I think some of my council, fellow council members have had to do this too where a specific project comes forward. And oh yes, this will be approved because this street's going to be there. And the question, but the street's not there, but we have to pretend like it is. And there's streets that have been talked about since the 60s that were codified in the general plan 20 years ago that still don't exist. And my question after saying all that is, are there projects out there that have been on the books for years that we can work to get off the books in some way shape or form so that we can allocate time, energy, money and staff to other pursuits? Thanks council member. So this is what you and the city manager are doing when you're talking the same language right now, which is how do we really look at our project lists? Cause we do, we've got projects. I mean, whether it's North Point Parkway or Farmer's Lane Extension or the widening of West College or I mean, I can go on and on about projects that exist that have zero funding assigned to them. But yet because of our general plan, we continue to require certain things to occur. That's why for example, you drive down Dutton on the south part, south of Sebastopol. You've got some that are four lanes wide and some that are two lanes wide because the general plan has shifted over the course of time to try to respond to what we're visioning as the future travel and traffic patterns in our community. So yes, there are absolutely projects we have to reconsider. There are absolutely pain points in reconsidering those projects. In part of the response to your question is the response to council member Rogers question. There is a resource limitation financially for many of those projects. Great idea, look good on paper. Actually in order to make certain things work are required but will we ever be able to truly fund them? And so through this general planning process, we're having to ask some of those questions. Can we sustain without it? What if we don't do that? And so we're actively working on those questions right now. I don't have answers for you partly because the traffic engineer in me and the public works guy says I want them all because I think they're vital and critical to the long-term viability of our community from a circulation standpoint. I mean, we all hear about traffic woes in our community and in certain parts of town. Those certain parts of town are where this critical infrastructure isn't yet constructed. And the question is, will we, should we and how are we going to? And so those are the questions that we're gonna have to ask moving forward in the next year or two. Thank you, I appreciate that. I just wanna point out that this is not something that would be the fault of staff or anything like that. I mean, of mice and men, right? The best laid plans. But I think that it's important to understand that no matter what we're talking about, what a lot of policy comes down to and a lot of our ability to do is a city comes down to staffing and funding. And so if we can be more efficient in ways like you're talking about, we're addressing these projects to see if they're realistic or needed or both. I think it's important. Thank you. Vice Mayor McDonnell. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions for you. As far as the ridership on the last mile, I don't know if they're called the birds or whatever we're using. Do you think that statewide it's been a problem because it's been such a wet winter that maybe that's why ridership has gone off or is it simply just equipment and we're having problems with? You know, I wish we had enough consistency with our current operator to be able to answer that question. And so I'd like to believe that it's a weather issue and that that's the real reason why ridership has dropped off. I have us, I suspect that it's broader than that and more relating to the amount, number and deployment of the equipment. And that is a contractual issue that we're having to deal directly with the operator. Some cities and communities, this is a phenomenal first and last mile resource. And that's what we wanted to hop on the bandwagon. They haven't been successful in every community like some, but I believe we've got the right community and I think that really is one of the most, one of the most viable first last mile options that we're gonna have, especially in our downtown area. I think it's a great resource and we need to make efforts to shore up that contract and make sure that we can have that operation work effectively. I agree with you. And you know, specifically as we continue to develop the downtown area, I think it's gonna be even more important to have those types of options. And going along that line, and I know council member staff had asked a question around specifically crosswalks. And this is something that I think is high on our mind as we look at bike paths and walkability in the city. And I'm getting requests in my district for specific areas that have been a long time problem. Could you tell me how those are prioritized in a budget so that there's more of an equitable approach around the city in the district so that we can look at specifically areas where children maybe walk and ride to school. And so we're promoting that kind of walking school bus and those types of programs, safe routes to school. Just because I know that sometimes we focus on the high traffic areas, but there are other areas in the city that maybe impact 100 community members, but the safety of that. So that's still not clear. And maybe that goes back to the need for prioritizing by district and coordinating what's being done in our CIP budget. And that's something I think I'll probably touch on again. I know I've asked in the past, but specifically around crosswalks, how do we actually effectively make sure that these are being done in each of our districts as our community members request us to do? Yeah, thank you, Vice Mayor. You know that we are actively working to transition all of our operations to a districted format. One of those is we've had historical lists of locations where community members have requested street crossing improvements for safety or for accessibility or for convenience. And those lists have been prioritized over the course of time, some of which go higher depending upon, like I said, engineers. So we're linear in the statistical front of things. Ones that meets the statistics and conditions more robustly tend to be higher on the list than those that are at less. And so as we transition to those lists to districted format, we are creating that specific program within each of the seven districts. That's why this year's rectangular rapid flashing beacon program includes one for each district and not necessarily the highest priority seven in town. And so that's the direction that we are moving with all of our, I wanna say, capital investments relating to maintenance and response for safety. Those tend to not have larger capital planning processes. They are more relating specifically to community input and requests as well as safety concerns that arise. So that's how we've come up with the current program. And that's how those have made their way to the top of the list for this upcoming funding cycle. Thank you, that's helpful. Council member Fleming. A couple of things. One is just I wanted to split a couple other council members have said around bike and pedestrian safety, being a top concern and wanting to make sure that our bike lanes are as operational as possible. I love council member Roger's idea that he brought back from Canada around the planters. I can see that from a bureaucratic perspective that might just be lots of, I could see lots of reasons why there would be no, but I urge you to try to figure out a way to help us say yes. I think people would love to tend to those and take care of them. And our pavement conditions, both benefit bikers and cars alike. So I'd like to see a real emphasis on safe biking conditions and just know that you have my full support to implement that and to be bold and to try things. And if they don't work, that's okay. I just heard you say something that really concerned me, which was that instead of picking the seven most dangerous places to put a flasher, you're picking one in each district. It's really important to me that they go to the seven most dangerous places, even if my district doesn't get one, because the lives of Santa Rosans, you know, I'm here to represent district four, but the lives of all Santa Rosans, like I just couldn't sleep at night if we got one, just for political reasons, when someone else with a more dangerous intersection didn't get one. Thank you, council member for that feedback. I appreciate it. And I will say on the, you know, in response to the comment on council member Roger's point, some of the activities that we as a city have done in other departments, such as planning an economic development, looking at the Parklet program, that is giving us a new vision on how we can implement other technologies and techniques on roadways shoulders. But I certainly appreciate the feedback on the list for enhancements. Council member Rogers. Yeah, I appreciate it. And that's actually why I raised my hand as well, was to reiterate that point that I know that we're in districts now, and I know I'm the last of the dinosaurs that have been elected citywide, but I don't care when we talk about safety about keeping everything equitable for the sake of fitting it into the molds of all of us representing districts. I want a methodology behind it around safety, around when we're gonna get the best bang for our buck. I don't want us to break into sort of parochialism as it pertains to city infrastructure. I want us to look where the need is and make sure we're investing dollars that way. So I wanted to support that. Thank you. I do have to go back to Vice Mayor, but I wanted to piggyback off of that one to say that to me it is important that we look at districts because historically things have not been equitably distributed. And in a particular district, you may get some people that will speak up more about something being non-safe. And so they may be the loudest, but it doesn't mean that the safety concerns are not within another district, but we definitely go to those intersections and to those places to look because we hear them. So when we get the emails, we get the phone calls, we respond, we see, we hear and we try to respond. So I would like it if you stayed doing the districts, but maybe Mayor, we have one in your district that is due, but we know that it is not on the safety list, but this one really is, and this is a priority. As a council member, I think I should have the ability to say, I think you're right, Assistant City Manager Nut, we should go ahead and do that one, but can you make sure that this crosswalk gets on the list as soon as possible? So that would just be my two cents with that. And Mayor, thank you for that. And in response, I will say we're not losing track of safety concerns and specific locations. In fact, that's part of why the team is insistent on trying to add additional non-programmed locations so that we can begin to address those other high-profile sites around town. So they are cognizant of making sure that we're addressing the highest-profile issues we can while having geographic equity within the district. So I appreciate the feedback. Vice Mayor McDonald. Yes, I appreciate that, and I certainly wouldn't want to take away from a district that has safety concerns, but want to make sure that how we're capturing that information, because you said you're linear in thinking, is it based on accidents? Is there a way to report near misses? Because I'm not sure that that's how we actually, right now, capture the information in specific areas, either through our app. Is there a way to expand on how we're getting that data so that it actually isn't necessary for us to have a fatal incident for us to be able to be reactive, but in fact, understanding that this can be a problem every single day, several times during the day, and that because maybe somebody's paying attention, we haven't had that horrific incident occur, but I'm just curious how those statistics are actually captured through the city so that we are getting accurate data. I appreciate that. We take into consideration feedback from the community when we talk about near misses. Near misses are very difficult to calculate and to corroborate, and so, again, from, and when we try not to be bureaucratic to a T, we try to utilize that as a tool to help us gauge and prioritize. And so, we are routinely taking feedback, even if it's the assessment and statement of near misses, into the calculation as we start to move forward in. And you'll see every time we do a traffic and engineering study, because we have to do one for each of the enhancement locations, we do identify whether or not there's a known statistical report or whether it's based on community-oriented report or, quite frankly, report from other departments, such as fire and police. Thank you, that's helpful. Any additional questions? Council Member Alvarez? Well, with a discussion that just happened shortly, just a little bit ago, I do have to thank my fellow colleagues for recognizing the area of San Rosa that might need a little bit more help than others. So, to my fellow colleagues, thank you for recognizing that District One, specifically, has received a lot of help from not only staff, the departments, the focus, but my colleagues here as well. I believe that if we just go back a couple of pages in today's presentation, one of the words that you see most is Roseland and is District One, is Sebastopol Road, and I do agree that we should look at each district equitably, but I do feel that we as a city of San Rosa are recognizing what parts of our town needs a little bit of that push, and I have to again thank our council members for recognizing that as well, thank you. Any additional questions from council? Seeing none, I will ask the last questions. So, the EVIT, very interested in charging stations. The training, how we're gonna implement that, is that in the budget, are we doing it in-house, are we contracting out, and take it away, because I'm very interested in if we need to invest the money. So, our electrical staff, thank you, Mayor, for the question, our electrical staff is EVIT-trained. Those members that are new or are coming into that program will get trained, and so that process is underway. We have historically installed our own electric vehicle charging stations with our internal staff, depending on what the future holds for us that may shift purely from a resource and scale standpoint. So, we are in the process of putting together an electric vehicle master plan. What that plan will do is look at not only the city's current fleet and our desired need to have charging equipment, but also the city's public parking infrastructure and the need to provide charging equipment for private vehicles, and it will give us guidance on the numbers, the locations, and how we should be looking to not only install but connect to the grid or not. And so that particular initiative should be going out, soliciting for proposals this summer in the next month. A draft of the solicitation is already prepared and being circulated internally, and we would expect that we would have some results by the end of the year so that this next fiscal year's budget will look at how we can begin to roll out an implementation program. When we are doing our own installation, our staff will be fully and totally trained per state requirement. Training, are there different types of training? How does training work? Like, I know you said state requirement, but are there different types of training? There are private institutions that will, that you can buy training at. We've sent individuals to those programs for training and certification, and that's how we'll continue to do it for our staff. For private entities, contractors, or individuals looking to do that, there are a dozen or so companies that are providing that training, and we would encourage them to go and look them up to see if there's one locally that fits their needs. Okay. We are not providing training for the general public for EVIT. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. And seeing no additional comments or questions from my fellow council members, thank you very much for the presentation. You guys did awesome. And we will now recess for lunch. We will return at 1.45. Thank you. All right, and seeing that we have a quorum, Madam Deputy City Clerk, may you please call the roll. Thank you. Council Member Stapp. Here. Council Member Rogers. Here. Council Member Ocrepke. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor McDonald. Here. Mayor Rogers, present. Let the record reflect all council members are present with the exception of council member Fleming. Thank you. I think we left off with Santa Rosa Water Department. So Director Burke, please take it away. Thank you Mayor Rogers and members of the council. I'm Jennifer Burke. I'm the Santa Rosa Water Director. And with me here today is Nick Harvey and he is our budget and financial analysis manager. Before we start, I just wanted to take a moment to recognize all of the effort that your board puts into our budget every year. So we met with the Board of Public Utilities starting in February, actually starting in January. We had a couple budget subcommittee meetings with them, thoroughly went through our budget.  So the budget you see before you today in study session is actually recommended by the Board of Public Utilities as well as our Subregional Technical Advisory Committee. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Nick and he's gonna go through a few of our slides related to our funds and then I'll talk about accomplishments and the summaries for our enterprise. Nick. Thank you, Director Burke. So to start off today we're gonna do some variance analysis from a couple different looks in our department, one by the fund structure the funding mechanism and the other from a programmatic standpoint. To start off with, we're seeing the same challenges or increases that many departments around the city are including two and a half percent colas as of July 1, 2024. We're seeing increased electricity and chemical costs. We're seeing increased safety training and certification costs, things of that nature. And I'll speak to those more specifically when we get into the programmatic look because I feel that provides more context into our operations. Regarding the budget by fund here, the first thing I wanted to point out is as you all know, the general fund helps fund our stormwater enterprise. And so that 15.2% increase, that's general funds portion of the stormwater enterprise, mostly attributable to the two and a half percent colas and the addition of one position in our stormwater enterprise which we'll touch on later in the presentation. The other main takeaway I wanted to point out on this cap is the capital improvement funds citywide. I wanna avoid any impression that that is general fund money going towards capital improvement. What that is is our stormwater enterprise has a couple programmatic stormwater drainage improvement projects. And those because of the scope and nature of those projects have access to some special revenue funds. So those are actually coming from special revenue funds that are not in fact indicative of general fund transfers going into CIP. So I just wanted to clarify that. The last item I'll touch on is the water funds. You see we have a $3.2 million year over year change and two and a half million dollars of that is due to one line item in our budget that being the water purchase budget which I will get into in just a moment. Okay, so purchase of water, third from the bottom there 16.5% increase as you all know. Sonoma water put forth and recently formally approved the 10.56% increase to the wholesale water rate for the Santa Rosa aqueduct. That was fully adopted. And even though the increase was 10.5, 10.56% rather, we are seeing a 16.5% increase in that line item due to the expected bounce back of demand after the end of the drought emergency. When we look at wastewater resource distribution, wastewater resource recovery, that's really where the bulk of our electricity and chemical budget hits. As you might imagine with our sewer pumping operations and all the pumping and treatment operations at the treatment plant, our wastewater operation as a whole is the largest contributor of electricity and chemicals for our department. The treatment plant is specifically heavy on the use of things such as sodium hypochlorite, different chemicals used to treat the water. That's been subject to severe price spikes and supply chain disruptions. It's beginning of the COVID emergency. And so we're still continuing to see pretty high market prices on those items. In addition to a higher electricity rate, our treatment operation is also budgeting for a fairly significant increase in the quantity of electricity consumed. So stormwater increase, we see a 9.8% increase. Both council member Alvarez and assistant city manager Nutt spoke to what this is related to earlier. And what that is is that the debt service portion of the acquisition for the land for the lower Colgan Creek phase three project or the Bell property that city manager, assistant city manager Nutt spoke to earlier. So that accounts for $120,000 of that $233,000 increase or $254,000 increase rather. The remainder going to the 2.5% colas and the non-general fund contribution to the funding of that new position. And in terms of general fund changes, I spoke to this a bit earlier. There's one FTE quality control associates being added to the stormwater enterprise. And that 35% of that is being funded by the general fund with the remainder being charged with stormwater enterprise funds and being allocated through CIP efforts. And as I spoke to, colas and benefits are a large part of the increases we're seeing this year. And with that, I'll hand it back over to Jennifer Burke, our director of Santa Rosa Water. Thank you. So I wanted to take a moment and just talk about our accomplishments in addition to serving our customers 24 seven for water sewer wastewater treatment. There's a few things that I just wanted to highlight. First, we had a great response to the drought. A big thank you to the community and to the council for your leadership and supporting us through that effort. I did wanna note that I have some updated savings numbers. So we actually have numbers now through March of this year and still an 18% reduction by our community, but they saved 2.1 billion gallons of water through their efforts, which is amazing. We also worked really hard to get as much state funding as we could to assist our customers who were dealing with arrearages due to COVID. You may recall that during the COVID pandemic we were unable to shut water off, which is a tool that we do have that definitely can help people stay current on their bills because we were unable to do that. We offered various payment plans and other opportunities, but some customers saw very, very large arrearages. And so we worked very hard to get state funding to provide to our customers. And I believe we got over a million dollars of funding applied to all of our customer accounts, both on the water and sewer side. Also, we initiated the construction of our UV disinfection project. This is our new ultraviolet light disinfection system out at the treatment plant. Our current system is past its service life, and so we really need a new system that is going to allow us to continue to disinfect our wastewater and use significantly less energy in the future. As mentioned a couple of times before, we did begin Lower Colgan Creek phase three and we're very excited about that project. I did also want to note that not only is it gonna bring some additional flood capacity to the community and finish off that entire 1.3 miles of creek access. We did also get some grant funding. So we are excited that we're likely gonna get 4.36 million dollars from the state to assist with that project and 1.5 million dollars from open space to assist with the purchase of the property. We also expanded our program for monitoring viruses and wastewater. So we started off partnering with various entities to look at COVID and now we are able to provide samples and the analysis that's done looks for six different viruses in our wastewater, including COVID, influenza, RSV, Mpox, norovirus and HMPV. Please don't ask me to tell you what that one stands for. But they're all respiratory viruses. We share this data with local public health. It's all available on our website and it's a great program that also provides us with a little bit of funding as well. And then we also were able to produce 345 million gallons from our local groundwater resources. Our groundwater is significantly cheaper than purchasing from Sonoma Water. So that produced quite a bit of savings to our ratepayers. And then finally, a big effort that we're really excited about is we launched our Water Future Study, which we're looking at water supply alternatives analysis to try and potentially produce 30% of our demand from local sources. We are very highly reliant on Sonoma Water and we want to improve our ability to be reliable and resilient, especially during times of drought. Go to the next slide. In terms of challenges, I think on the flip side, we are doing the study, but we continue to be very concerned about ensuring that we have resiliency through times of drought. So everything that we can do to look at reducing demand where applicable and where we can look to have additional water supply sources that we control we are looking at. So that is the purpose of our Water Future Study.  We just recently did our new infrastructure report card and for our water system, we continue to maintain a pretty good grade. We have a B, which is consistent with what we had before, but we recognize that we are under investing year over year about $20 million in the water system. On the wastewater system, unfortunately, our grade did slip. We now have a C plus and we are under investing $29 million year over year in the wastewater system. For the regional system, we definitely have an older treatment plant. It's over 50 years old and there are a lot of things that need to be replaced. A lot of things that are reaching the end of their service life. And so the grade for our treatment plant is a D plus and we are under investing $16 million per year, year over year in the treatment plant. So that is gonna continue to be a challenge for us to make sure that we are investing and being able to get projects completed to improve our infrastructure. Again, as I mentioned, a 50 year old plant, urgent repairs continue to happen out at the treatment plant. We have a number of different ways that we're addressing that through on-call contracts and other things, but it definitely leads us to have to be more reactive than we would like to instead of proactive on a replacement because we are having to respond pretty quickly. We also are continuing to see lots of instability in terms of the market for chemicals and electricity. So having to be very reliant on those things, we just have to pay the price that comes. And so that is a challenge that we're doing our best to always get the best price and then continuing to work with Sonoma water and the increasing expenditures on the wholesale water side. So we are going to be launching a new rate study very soon. We'll be going out for an RFP this summer and we'll likely be bringing some higher rate increases to you in the future to deal with these challenges that we continue to deal with. And then last, staff recruitment and retention. I know you've heard about this in other departments and it's not unique to water, but we do continue to have right now a 32, 32 vacancies, which is about 11.8% year over year turnover. Last year, our turnover due to resignations, retirements, et cetera, we lost 25 staff, which was about nine little over 9% of our workforce. This year so far, just through this month, sadly, we are setting a new record and we have already lost 28 employees through this start of this year. So we're already at a 10% loss and turnover of our workforce. So we continue to work with HR and look at different opportunities and look at different recruiting strategies, but recruitment and retention, especially the retention part is incredibly difficult for the water department. Next slide, please. So we did wanna give you the summary of our funds. You'll notice for both the water and the wastewater enterprise funds, we are specifically spending down. We have, all of our reserves are fully funded on the water side after taking into account full funding of all of our reserves. We have 21 million of undesignated fund balance. And so we're specifically spending down one for some urgent and emergent projects and maintenance that we need to do. But two, this will allow us to absorb the wholesale rate increase from Sonoma Water this year. And we will likely be able to absorb next year, but we are gonna have to recoup that and build that into our rate structure in the future. So you are gonna see, as I mentioned, probably higher rate increases than we have done in the past. So again, we are spending about three and 3.4 million dollars spending down purposely on the water enterprise side for both of those purposes. If we go to the next slide on the wastewater side. Similar situation, we do have all of our reserves are fully funded and then we have $17 million of undesignated fund balance. Part of that is we received a demand fee payment for connection to our system that had been deferred for quite some time and they finally paid it. I believe it was almost a $5 million payment. And that only comes in as a reserve. It's a function of budget. So we are bringing that into our budget and spending that money on urgent repairs. And then also helping us absorb some of the variability in the chemicals and electricity costs. And then again, we are purposely spending down $3 million of that $17 million unfunded or undesignated fund balance to continue to work on our system. And then if we go to the next slide, the last slide, you'll see the, this is the sub regional enterprise fund. That surplus is not really a surplus. So this is the revenue we anticipate and then the our expenditures. But we have a requirement for an operating reserve for the sub regional system and because expenditures have gone up in the O&M, our O&M reserve had to go up as well. And so we need to collect more from our partners to fund that. So it's not really a surplus. That is what's needed for the regional fund. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. Looking to council for questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. Mayor and council members, Jason, not assistant city manager, acting director of transportation and public works and recreation and parks. And that means I get the hospice opportunity to provide the citywide capital improvement program. Now, I don't know if you didn't have questions for director Burke simply because they're so good at what they do.  We'll leave that question for now and we'll move on into the CIP. So there are a couple of things we do every year when we talk CIP. We wanna make sure that the public, more than anybody understands, when we talk about capital improvements, what is a value in our, or an asset in our organization? And so we provide the screen just to try to give you a snapshot of some of the assets that we have. And I will say that title is a little misleading. Actually, that total is almost nearly double that if you take everything the city owns into consideration as an asset beyond just roadway infrastructure. And so there is a big component to what we operate and maintain in this community and responsible for managing long-term. In total, we wanted to show how this year's general fund or non-water enterprise is working itself out by district just so that you can see some of the way that we're investing in our community. And we'll get into a little more detail about some of these along the way. But just to give you some highlights quick and early on, district one, obviously we're looking at the Herne Avenue interchange in district four, district five, we've got the Bicycle and Pedestrian over-crossing, we've got the Fulton Road widening, which is continuing in district six, and then we've got the Transportation Corridor and enhancements in district seven. There's just a ton of things that are going on. And I think we're working really hard to ensure that we get information out there. So if we look at where do projects come from, projects come from a number of different places predominantly through our goal-setting, our master plans, through community response, and through area plans and other organizational conversations that we're having with not only our internal and external partners, but the community. That's how all of this information gets derived, how it gets put into our system, how we start to look at things and determine whether or not it should be prioritized in our Capital Improvement Program. The total program, which is both non-enterprise and enterprise is about a $75 million total expenditure plan for this year. There's things that you'll see. We've got, as Director Burke just mentioned, we've got 13 and a half million for wastewater. We've got 10 million for the sub-regional. We've got about 14 and a half million for the water. And then about 8.6 million in park and recreation, which includes both the park development fees and Measure M. And then there's the large pot, which says transportation and public works special funds of 22 and a half million. What that encompasses is Measure M, the roadway and the regional sales tax Measure M, gas tax, SB1, community facilities fees, as well as our utility impact fees. All of those things get combined into that $22.7 million total. To walk you through the general fund component, general fund this year is a $2 million program, with 1.2 going towards our ADA improvements. You've got 60,000 going toward the Roseland Lighting District, 80,000 going towards the D Street Garage underground investigation, and then the 662,000 going towards Roseland Pavement. As you recall, the Roseland Pavement component is a pass-through as part of the 10-year allocation through the annexation document. But to give you some example of things that are going on, for our ADA improvements, we're looking at investing in the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens pathway repairs, Howard Park, accessible pedestrian entrances near the vehicle parking areas, Doyle Park accessibility improvements around the baseball field, and library improvements at all three of the branches. We are however gonna continue to plow forward or continue to complete work that was authorized last year that has yet to break ground. And some of that work you'll see is coming forward, for example, the Finley Pool Deck. That was last year's funding allocation that has yet to be spent because it's coming in this upcoming allocation or project award. We just completed the railroad depot restroom from last year, and we are working with granting agencies to undertake the Howard Park fishing pier this year. So that is our hope coming up. When we think about the Roseland Pavement maintenance, we've been working on projects year after year. This upcoming funding source, about 450,000 of this allocation will go towards a pavement program next fiscal year or next construction season. And that will be a Cape Seal on 16 segments in the Roseland annexation area. This year, the allocation from last year's being used to invest in doing all of the curb ramp construction and modifications that are required by federal law as we go and do roadway improvements. Monies that are banking are gonna be going towards a fiscal year 25, 26 major capital investment of grind and overlay for a number of streets in that community. So if you've been doing the math the last couple of years and you're wondering why there's a continued balance, it's because the project that we're gearing up toward is gonna be very expensive and we wanna get that all out at one time.  Fire station nine, which is the South Santa Rosa Avenue fire station called the new fire station here, Coana Springs and then temporary fire station five as they described earlier is in an effort to transfer the facility and decommission the site, getting it ready for surplusing. One of the other funding sources we talked about was park development impact fees. As you may be aware, we separate and collect fees into from four districts. We made it very simple for folks to understand North, South, Highway 101, East, West, Highway 12. You'll see that creates a Northwest, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast district and those districts collect money based on completed projects or projects that are actually going and obtaining their occupancy. It's at that time those projects are responsible for starting to pay their park development impact fees. When those come in, staff works with finance to determine how best to allocate those into the capital improvement program. In some areas we keep it in a general account, for example, the Northwest play zone equipment. That's a generalized account that we will take and pay for specific projects off of. And so when we come and award a contract to someone, for example, that's gonna come and do the Dutch floor playground improvements, you're gonna be awarding from this specific account associated with the Northwest play zone equipment. So in the Northwest we're looking at, as I said, Dutch floor that takes two playgrounds, combines it to one, adds some picnic areas and improves pathways. In the Southwest area is really gonna be focused on Lower Colgan Creek Park. You heard that from the Water Department as far as initiatives that they have as well as recreational parks. In the Northeast area, that fund is gonna go towards the implementation of Fremont Park. That is the park that's in the process of working through the master plan and it needs additional funds to make that happen. And in the Southeast, it's really looking at Kiwana Springs. It says Southeast Community Park. That's just the title that they used in the budgetary process. But for those who know it, it's Kiwana Springs Community Park. And it's a very robust program that we look to invest. That'll build trail heads. It'll have playgrounds, restrooms.  So it's very exciting to see how we're gonna be investing those funds moving forward. From the Measure M, this is the regional sales tax Measure M, the parks for all side of things. And the million dollars that we received this last year is gonna be split in a couple of different ways. Council authorized an expenditure plan that takes 50% of that towards investment. Capital investment, 40% towards maintenance and 10% towards recreation programming. The component related to capital investment, we're creating a five year plan because of the size of the investment and looking at how we can invest that five year plan. So for example, in the Northwest, we're looking at new playgrounds and fields at Jacobs Park off of Ninth Street. We're looking at improving the Jennings Park fields, which is adjacent to Helen Lehman Elementary. We're looking at improving the playgrounds at Live Oak Park in the Northeast. Rankin Valley Park playground is gonna be rehabilitated as well as the ball field at Tanglewood Park in the Southwest Cook Middle School playground, South Davis Park basketball court and the Southwest Community Park field improvements. For the Southeast, things like Peter Spring's playground, Howard Park's Tenecus and yes, even Howard Park pickleball. I said the word pickleball. Pickleball is coming. Some would say pickleball is here and I agree. Moving into the Santa Rosa Water Proposed CIP budget, you got the high level overview from Director Burke just a minute ago. I'm gonna more or less show you much of the same slides. From the water side, we're looking at investing about $14.6 million. That includes projects like the Terralinda water main, Myers Drive water main and Carrie and Peter Spring's emergency well rehabilitation as well as the Leetwell rehabilitation. On the wastewater fronts, again, we're looking at the other side of the Terralinda, the Myers and the Salem Avenue. We're doing water and sewer for both. Those projects are separated in a way that's able to draw from both accounts. But the big projects for the wastewater side is the Los Alamos sewer trunk replacement. There's a large city-wide siphon rehabilitation program and the Robeless trunk lining. Those are gonna be big projects in the upcoming years. On the regional front, predominantly at the treatment plant concepts like improving phase two of the filter valves, the aeration basins and replacing one of the process boilers from the geyser standpoint, looking at some electrical enhancements for their pumping system. So when we look at those investments, those are just a handful or a snapshot of the projects that are coming forward with the funds that are being allocated this year. On the stormwater front, really the primary and the primary piece in the big sales pitch here is the Lower Colgan Creek improvements. It's gonna be an exciting process and I think Director Burke explained it very nicely. Looking on the non-enterprise side of the house, as you can see, we're really looking at street rehabilitation as the primary, the biggest functions there is money going towards the Herne Avenue interchange project as well as funds being set aside for the Highway 101 bike and pedestrian over-crossing. Those are the big aspects for the roadway side of things. Some questions that have been asked about what are we doing from a bicycle and pedestrian standpoint obviously within this budget are also the rectangular rapid flashing beacons that we've discussed over the course of the day. There are other improvements as we're looking at how we install the bike and pedestrian over-crossing enhancements to get to and from that facility are important so there's gonna be a rehabilitation and reconstruction of Armory Drive that will include a protected bike lane on that road as an example. And then other grant projects coming forward include the Herne Avenue multi-use path that will connect the edge of the interchange project to the smart multi-use path. So just to give you some examples of things that are going on that make up this $24.5 million of investment coming in the near future. And with that, I am here and available to answer questions. Looking to Council to see if there are any questions. Council Member Rogers. Thank you so much. And GSI really appreciate the presentation especially going back to our previous discussion before the break a little bit about breaking things out into districts. You had slide 58 if you could put it up because I think that there is this overwhelming feeling by a lot of folks that the city is not interested in investing in Southwest Santa Rosa and that has historically been the case but I did wanna point out that 45% of our capital improvement funding is going to Southwest Santa Rosa in this budget as well as if you go on to your parks one on slide 63, 42% of the park impact fees are going to support parks in that area as well. So get it historical under investment in the area and wanted to just point out that this council has taken it seriously in trying to make sure that we make up for historic inequities. Any other questions or comments? Seeing none, thank you very much. Thank you. Looks like we have concluded our presentations for the day. Are we going back over to Veronica? Okay, Veronica, take it away. Yes, thank you, Mayor Rogers. We have concluded our presentations and thank you to all the departments for their time presenting and their input into this department. So at this point, we want to come back to council. We hope that this presentation has given you all the information you need and you've had the opportunity to ask any questions and seek clarification. The numbers we've presented to you are proposed. This is a proposed budget. So unless there are any changes, we plan to come back in June for a budget adoption. So we'd like to take this opportunity to hear from council if there's any proposed changes, things to amend, change, add. And I will just add the reminder that at this time, the general fund budget is at a $2.5 million deficit. So additions would exacerbate that unless there were trade-offs, et cetera. Looking to count council member Rogers. Thank you so much. And I asked a couple of questions about a few of these yesterday. And so I hope you'll forgive me. But I did want to revisit specifically two different budget items. One is the deputy director for community engagement position. I've been a big supporter of that as a position since it was proposed in the open government task force. It feels to me now as we've rolled it into a department of five people that already has a director that perhaps we don't need a director and a deputy director for a department of five people. And so I would propose that if there's value, and I know it's listed in the slide as the deputy director position and a coordinator position that perhaps we can make do with just the coordinator position. Again, didn't feel like that position was directing anything. And the department is high performing already in their functions. So I'd propose that if we are looking for some budget savings, that position is currently empty. That instead of recruiting to fill that position, that would be a spot that we could cut longterm. Then the other pot of money that I mentioned and still would like to be convinced on is the 500,000 set aside for a labor contract negotiator given that we are hiring for that position. And in particular, I get a little bit uneasy when it comes to our labor negotiations allowing it to go to half a million dollars before council even becomes aware that the bill is being racked up that high is 200,000 enough to get the ball rolling and then allow the council to provide additional oversight that if staff needs more of a contract position than the 200,000, you can come back and actually discuss that with us. Thank you, Councilman Rogers for your question. We just received the bid proposals back. I don't have the actual dollar amount in front of me. Yes, director of HR is here while she's getting ready to address the question. My only hopes would be that all of our contracts expire at the same time. And we're coming up on those. So Dominique and I would like to start opening contracts up sooner than later, given the fact that the deputy director position is vacant. If approving this contract allows us to move forward with at least bringing council some information on how we wanna move forward with negotiating our MOUs. I think that would help. Dominique, I don't know if you have that information in front of you or you have it, but our goal is not to wait until the nth hour to begin negotiating. I would like to at least start by August or September. Yeah, and good afternoon, Mayor, members of the council. So yeah, we did recently just go out to RFP to kind of look at what that costing would look like. And so this is just an anticipation of what that contractor agreement would be. We're not saying we're gonna spend this $500,000 but we would like to earmark it and have it in your guys' minds that we are going into labor negotiations with the 18 negotiating units. That's a lot to open up. So this is more of a precursor to be prepared for that while we also will be looking and hiring for the labor negotiation position. And I've only had about like 30 days within human resources. So we're looking at the structure of the department itself and that position. So that might be something that I'll be coming back to council with and it might be splitting off from the deputy director title and maybe its own classification again. And I can appreciate that. And I think I'd be more comfortable if we had a smaller dollar figure like 200,000 and in the, cause I do want us to get moving on that and that should be enough for us to get started. But given that we have a position we're recruiting for that is supposed to do that work getting to 500,000 before the council is even aware that that's been spent on an outside contract for labor negotiations just makes me uneasy. So I'd much prefer 200,000 as I mentioned re-looking at the deputy director position for community engagement, especially with the coordinator role there. And that should be a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of savings that we can, as we talked about potentially add some money into the planning and economic development committee to support whether it's the EIFD or the comprehensive strap plan or the South Santa Rosa annexation. So that's where I see we can have more impact without expanding how much we're actually spending from our reserves. Yeah, thank you for that. I also want to remind you the chief assistant city attorney is making as well and that position also assisted in negotiations. And I believe we're going to pause that recruitment until we fill the city attorney's position. So in any help, we will be happy to bring back a smaller amount or we can add a smaller amount in the budget. And if we feel like we're lagging on either recruitments, maybe we can bring you back another proposal. Yeah, and if we've got more information by the time we come here for the full budget adoption then certainly we can retool that. But I'd like more regular check-ins than the 500,000 mark. Councilman Burrow-Krepke. Thank you. I think the main two points for me with the city attorney's office, we spoke yesterday about the individual that might be able to pursue civil penalties and stuff like that. You would imply that there could be a reshuffling within the organization that could help alleviate that or alleviate the need for an additional body. So I'd like to see some, just when it's presented some clarification on whether that is able to be done or not. Happy to provide that. Okay. And then the only other thing I had was the question I asked earlier today of Chief Krueger and the ASO whose name escapes me, I apologize. What's that? Pam, thank you. Is I think the policy question of SROs are gonna come back to us before the end of the budget cycle next year. And so I'd like to see an actual definitive cost of what that would look like instead of just, I mean, we did estimates real here on the fly very quickly, but I'd like to see that within the presentation, understand what the true cost per the Chief's expectation of supplying that service efficiently and effectively would be just so that we have that information should the policy question come to us at any point. Thank you. We can include that information in the budget questions that we send out to council. Vice Mayor McDonald. Thank you, Mayor. I think it goes along the lines of what council member O'Crepkey had said and I would be interested in staffing up some of our law enforcement for a lot of different reasons. Some of it has to do with the response time, making sure that there's enough staff to be able to lower those response times, as he said in those priority ones. I think that there's going to be a call for potential support in our school districts, but I'd like to look at maybe a shared cost in that model. As council member O'Crepkey said, I think it could come back before the end of budget cycle. And if we're not doing staffing with law enforcement, could there be a potential for another type of staffing in an outreach coordinator position that works with school districts, particularly around restorative justice and outreach to communities? But really those are the areas that I think we're still not quite hitting the mark is around law enforcement and then looking at our rates for overtime in both fire and police to see that if we staffed up, if we could reduce overtime rates. Council member Fleming. Thank you. So a couple of my requests would be one that we, I mentioned earlier today that we get an estimate of what it would cost for us to provide the services that the supervised adult crews are providing using unincorporated labor or what a program would be to help those individuals who are incarcerated and working for us at below market rate to have ladders to careers. Another is that yesterday we heard that our DEI person is typically in most organizations, it's a pretty high level person. It sounded like the way it's organized in our structure is fairly low level. I could see having an equal employment officer is pretty standard for an organization of this size. I could see that person being pretty low and buried in HR how we have the DEI person, but I'd like to see a proposal come forward for a higher level DEI person and maybe next year in the budget cycle, an EEO person in HR, although I wouldn't be opposed to seeing a costing out of it for this cycle. I get that we don't have the money for it, but I think it would be an informative exercise. And then one thing that I was a little disappointed, this, you guys put so much work into such a great job, so please don't take this as a criticism, but it would be nice to, recreation is the most impactful and positive way that our community interacts and leaves a positive sense on our community on a daily basis. It's not like a negative, nobody's having an emergency when they go to the swimming pool, one hopes. And so when we do hear the budget, I would like to have a staff member here from the recreation department because it is such an important, exciting part of what we do. And just to not have them at the table, I think really leaves some of the vibrancy out of the conversation. Thank you. To answer your question, our staff member is out on medical leave and was not able to attend today. That's really unfortunate. I'm sorry for them, but perhaps maybe someone else can come next time. Council member Stapp. I w