Thank you.

I call to order the special meeting of the Berkeley City Council.

Today is Tuesday, January 27, 2026.

Clerk, can you please call the roll?

Okay.

Councilmember Kessarwani is currently absent.

Councilmember Taplin is currently absent.

Councilmember Bartlett is currently absent.

Councilmember Tregum.

O'Keefe.

Blackaby.

Here.

Humbert.

I am present.

Well, I guess Mayor's okay.

Here.

And Mayor Ishi.

And Councilmember Taplin is also present.

Okay.

I'm going to move over there.

Thank you.

We have one item on our special agenda today.

It's the 2026 City Council referral prioritization process using reweighted range voting RRV.

And I'm going to pass it off to staff to present this item.

Okay.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

My name is Mark Newmanville.

I'm the city clerk for the city of Berkeley.

And I'm going to bring up a short presentation on the RRV prioritization process.

And bear with me just one moment.

Okay.

RRV City Council.

Referral prioritization process.

Doing two jobs at once, sorry.

Okay.

So today's presentation.

We'll have a brief review of what re-weighted range voting is and how the RRV process works.

We can then discuss a little bit about the items marked for removal.

And I'll summarize also what actions are up for the city council to take at today's meeting.

So, how does reweighted range voting work?

There's a list of referrals.

Each council member rates every referral on a scale of zero to five, zero being the least amount of support, and five being the most amount of support.

There's no limit to repeat scores or how many or how few referrals a council member assigns a score to.

After the meeting today, the scores are all tallied up for all the referrals, and the referral with the highest total score becomes the first priority.

Then for all of the remaining referrals on the list, the scores are reweighted based on a formula.

And that's affected by how much influence each council member has used up to that point.

And this guarantees sort of an equal influence over the long run and gives more voice to minority opinions.

That's the how the system was designed to work, and that's that's how it works.

So our current process from start to finish is the council adopts a referral on the city council agenda.

Then that referral is categorized by the city manager, either long term, short-term, or urgent.

The long-term referrals are added to the RRB list to be prioritized by the council.

The short-term referrals, work is started on those right away.

Annually, the city council assigns the scores to the long-term referrals on the RRV list, the process that we're doing right now.

And staff generally starts to address the referrals in the order of council priority.

Of course, some departments are overrepresented in the results, so the city manager and those departments have some discretion as to how many referrals they can take on all at once.

Completed referrals are reported back to the city council through an item on the agenda, or also often through an off agenda memo.

So the data that we have in the item itself.

Is the raw scores assigned to each referral by the mayor and all the council members?

Where no rating was assigned, the default score is zero.

And the list in the agenda packet is sorted by meeting date from the most recent date back to the oldest date.