Don't leave yet.

What I'd like to do, because there are I think there are many people here that are here for our ceremonial matters.

And so if it's okay with you all, I'd like to move forward and do our ceremonial items so that way some folks can leave if they don't want to stay.

So yay.

So in that case, I'm going to call to order the Berkeley City Council meeting.

Today is Tuesday, May 19th, 2026.

It is 626 p.m.

And if we could please take the roll clerk.

Yes, uh, calling the role for the 6 p.m.

regular meeting, Councilmember Kessarwani.

Uh here.

Present.

Here, Trega, present.

Okay, I'm here.

Still here.

Lunapara.

Here.

Um I'm here.

And Mayor Ishi.

Here.

Okay.

For Mr.

President.

We're having too much fun, you guys.

Calm down.

All right.

So all right.

So let's move on to our ceremonial matters.

Um we have a very exciting one.

It is Public Works Week.

Woo!

Yay!

Give it up for public works.

We lost.

Don't leave.

Don't leave Wahid Ray.

Still are still here.

Okay.

All right.

I have a proclamation.

Uh, well, first of all, actually, public works folks.

Do you want to come up here?

Yeah, come hang.

Come up here.

We want to celebrate you.

Yay.

Oh, my thing came out.

Come on up.

Yeah.

You can come stand by the podium or there's there's more room over here.

There you go.

All right.

Very nice.

As you shuffle up, I'm gonna read the City of Berkeley proclamation.

Celebrating National Public Works Week 2026.

Whereas this year marks the 66th annual National Public Works Week sponsored by the American Public Works Association, whereas public works professionals provide a vital role in creating sustainable and resilient communities through a focus on infrastructure, facilities, and services, which maintain public health, high quality of life, and the well-being of the people of the City of Berkeley.

And whereas the City of Berkeley Public Works Department serves over 120,000 Berkeley residents by providing integral services to 214 miles of streets, 400 miles of sanitary sewers, 78 miles of historic water piping.

Yes, okay, yes.

30 green infrastructure installation, 8,000 plus street lights, 3,750 parking meters, 54 public buildings and waste recycling and composting.

I think we need to give it up for that section first.

Okay, yeah.

And whereas recently the department oversaw the implementation of red curb painting to 1700 intersections, a monumental stride for Berkeley as one of the first cities to comply with the new state law that prohibits parking directly next to intersections.

And whereas the City of Berkeley Public Works Department Department's contributions are instrumental to everyday services, thus, civic leaders and community members of all ages in the city are encouraged to maintain an ongoing interest in all public works services provided.

Now, therefore be it resolved that I, Adina Ishi, mayor of the city of Berkeley, do hereby proclaim the week of May 17th to May 23rd, 2026, to be National Public Works Week in the City of Berkeley.

I urge all to recognize public works as substantial contributions to protecting community health, safety, and advancing the quality of life for everyone.

Thank you all so much for your work.

Do you want to say anything?

Um I'll just keep it brief.

Um, as you guys know, this year's theme is very appropriate.

Uh it's rooted in service and powered by community, and thus says a lot.

Um, I just want to take a quick moment to recognize the dedicated professionals here tonight representing public works.

These are the people in the field and in the office who keep Berkeley running, often behind the scenes, but always with a deep commitment to serving this community.

So thank you for what you do.

You are appreciated, and it's all about love.

Do you guys you want to get a picture?

Okay, let's see.

Maybe my staff can stand on this side.

Sydney, you want to pop over?

You want to pop over to this side and take it this way?

Over here, Sydney.

There's a.

We're gonna need a white lens.

Oh, that was a little bit of a biggest apartment.

We can take it up, anyway.

Can you can you see everyone?

One, two, three.

Nice evening.

Thanks for coming too.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Thank you again to public works for being here and for all of the work that you do in our city.

Um, okay, so our second ceremonial matter for this evening is uh the Willard Park Clubhouse and Restroom Replacement Project CPRS Facility Design Ward of Excellence.

Yay!

Is anyone here?

Staff here also from the oh, you're right here.

Okay, all right.

Did you want to stand or be up here?

Yeah, would like that.

Yay!

Okay.

Very good.

Wonderful.

Okay, so tonight we are proud to recognize the City of Berkeley staff who brought the Willard Park Clubhouse.

Oh, sorry, staff and also designers, who brought the Willard Park Club House and Restroom Replacement Project to life.

This measures T this Measure T1 project is receiving the California Parks and Recreation Society's Facility Design Award of Excellence for cities with a population between 50,000 and 125,000 people.

This award recognizes exceptional projects throughout California that exemplify innovation, impact, and leadership in the field of parks and recreation.

The Willard Park Clubhouse and Restroom Replacement Project is being honored for transforming an overcrowded, outdated facility into a safe, inclusive, and climate-resilient community hub.

Guided by years of public input and collaboration, the project expanded health uh child care and recreational opportunities, creating new reservable community spaces, improved park usability and safety, and delivered a lead gold net zero neighborhood resiliency center.

Yay, to uh to formally present the award, I'd like to invite Leah Martinez, representative from the California Park and Recreation Society to the podium to share a few remarks and present the award of excellence to the City of Berkeley.

Thank you.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor Ishi and Berkeley City Council members.

My name is Leah Martinez.

I'm a recreation supervisor with Hayward Area Recreation and Park District.

But this evening I am here as the Secretary Treasurer of the California Park and Recreation Society State Board of Directors, as well as the Awards of Excellence program.

The California Park and Recreation Society annual awards program celebrates outstanding examples of quality facility and park design, programming accomplishments, effective communications, community leadership, and professional successes that take place daily in our profession.

Through our five award categories, we highlight the people, places, spaces, programs, and stories that make communities like the City of Berkeley special.

As one of five awardees in the mixed use facility community center center category, the City of Berkeley's Willard Park Clubhouse and Restroom Replacement Project stood out from a total of 186 award applicants.

This project transformed an outdated 565 square foot building into a vibrant, inclusive, and climate smart hub for South Berkeley.

Programmatically, the after school enrollment programming jumped 100% from 45 to 80 participants and no longer spilled into the park with the added space.

This facility books up to eight months in advance and includes warm, well ventilated rooms, gender neutral restrooms, and flexible spaces for quiet or active play, while staff can provide hot meals, diverse programming, and conduct confidential staff operations as needed.

Park visitor love the centrally located public restroom with 88 accessible stalls and baby changing stations, dramatically improving usability for caregivers.

Guided by input from at least 200 community members over a three-year process that was challenged by COVID.

The lead gold net zero solar powered clubhouse also serves as a neighborhood resiliency hub during climate and emergency events.

Congratulations, City of Berkeley, on your award-winning Willard Park Clubhouse and Restroom Replacement Project on winning the 2025 Mixed Use Facility Community Center Award of Excellence.

Oh, so beautiful.

Yes.

Let me take a photo.

Oh, two.

Okay.

I have something to add.

It's so nice.

So we can find that.

Sorry, did folks did staff?

Did you all want to say anything?

Here we go now.

Other than I just want to thank the perseverance of my staff and uh council member Humbert, but also Councilmember Drossy.

So a lot of public feedback on this project.

It took a long time to come to fruition.

And big thanks to the designer EOS.

Many changes as we move forward.

And this is I think the most awarded project in the state of California, not only this year, but for the city of Berkeley in a long, long time.

Not only has been awarded the CPRS State Ward, CPRs District Awards.

We are also the American Public Works Association, Northern California Project of the Year, and we're in the running for the APWA National Project of the Year.

And we've just found out this afternoon that Ashby is awarded it a technology award to the to the two other pro to the two other technology awards to that project.

So it's won five awards at this point and is still eligible for a couple more.

So it's it's pretty amazing project.

So that's so amazing.

Thank you, Scott.

Thank you.

Thank you to the designers, the city staff, everyone.

And I also have a note here that says this project would not have been possible without the 2016 Measure T1 bond measure.

So thank you very much to T1.

Uh and perfectly timed since we were just talking about our new measure that we were just uh we were just discussing in our special meeting.

So thank you very much.

Um, those are our two ceremonial items for this evening.

So now we will take a 15 minute break between uh the section so that uh and we will be back in 15 minutes.

Thank you.

Recording stopped, yeah.

Oh yeah, but we have a little bit of twenty four hours.

But and it wasn't really so far, but I was fine.

I don't think I've been to that.

I think we're gonna be able to do it.

Um, it's a little bit of a little bit more than that.

Um, I think we're not going to go back to this one, like whatever.

But it's more like the other one.

Yeah.

So it's just uh, we're not working on it.

Oh no, it's okay.

That's we're probably watching.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

So we'll do it.

I think what I want to do is.

So, we're going to get to the house.

I don't know if I'm going to make it very much.

So I think that we can put it in.

So, I'm not going to be able to do that.

So, what do you think?

So, I think that's not big.

Yes.

Recording in progress.

Hello, everyone, good evening.

We're gonna start back up again.

Thank you so much for your patience.

For those of you who came in a little later, we were finishing our special meeting, so we were wrapping that up.

We started the regular meeting and we did two ceremonial items, and now we're moving on to city manager comments.

The reason for that is because we had to go through a sequel process.

So we'll be we'll be doing that over the next couple weeks, uh, with a plan to bring it back on June 9th, hopefully.

Um, so June 9th is our target day for that.

I just wanted to say that.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay, folks, please.

Please take your conversations outside.

If you're having a side conversation, please take it outside.

People in the first few rows, I can still hear you.

Thank you.

All right.

So we are now moving on to public comment on non-agenda matters.

Okay, so we will uh choose uh five cards uh for in-person speakers, and then we'll go to the first five hands raised on the zoom.

And again, this is for comments.

Uh oh, each speaker only have one minute to speak, and this is for comments that are not for items that are not on the agenda.

So we have Steven Alpert.

We have Celeste Marks, and Rohan Prasad.

Uh, and that's it.

We just have uh four cards for in-person speakers.

Uh, Stephen Albert, Abby Viera, Rohan Prasad, and Celeste Marks.

So you can come up in any order and uh you'll have one minute.

So I have two minutes.

Yes, two minutes.

Thank you.

Um we cannot accept any new cards at this time.

I am Dr.

Stephen Alpert.

Berkeley residents have reason to be profoundly disappointed and disillusioned by the actions of this council, its committees, and its commissions.

Council members proclaimed they're pro-housing.

It demonstrate clear pro-developer bias.

Local business owners were not consulted about the plant's up zone North Shaddock, Solano, or College Avenues.

In fact, the council members met with developers first.

This council overturned Berkeley's labor standards, passed in 2023, which required developers of large projects to provide contractors with fair pay, health insurance, and funds for apprenticeship training.

During a planning commission meeting last September, over 40 individuals expressed concerns about the proposed upzoning building heights, that they were excessive.

Every council, every commission member then stated the higher heights were not a problem.

Foremost, this council needs to stop pushing the utterly false narrative that building market rate housing will readily produce affordable units.

Real world data directly contradict this.

As presented last week, a recent study debate buckholz demonstrated that even under overly optimistic, don't smile.

Even under overly optimistic conditions, in our area, it takes over 20 years for newly built house market rate housing to eventually filter down and become affordable.

Whereas with historical data, it takes over a hundred years.

Evidently, these findings were very troublesome to Councilmember Humber, who deceptively tried to reminder not to refer to individual council members.

Just refer to us as a body, please.

This is of use to the community.

When people tried to just represent information that's false.

Okay, these filings were troublesome to Councilmember Humbert, who tried to discredit Blackholz as shown in this composite screenshot of Mark Humboldt.com.

Please note the highlighted questions.

Thank you for your comment.

A reminder that when you come and speak to us as a whole, that you refer to us as a whole body, please.

Thank you.

Again, when people link it to the community, your time is up.

Thank you very much.

You need to listen to the rules that we have in this chamber.

Thank you.

Hey, how's it going?

Good evening.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Rohan.

I like to talk about artificial intelligence.

Um, experts say that we are heading towards mass unemployment, the empowerment of dictators and oligarchs, and potentially the annihilation of the human race because of developments across the bay.

Um our government has done nothing about this.

Governor Newsom has struck down AI legislation.

The state legislature has been lobbied by um corporations like OpenAI.

Um, I'd like to call on Governor Newsom to hold a citizen's assembly about AI policy and govern AI like an existential threat, just like we've done for nuclear weapons.

Um Berkeley, I urge you to pass a resolution um calling on Governor Newsom to do these actions and be a leader in free speech and democracy like you have before.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, folks.

Please please keep your side conversations outside.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Abby Viera, and on March 16, I had the great pride and great pleasure of joining City of Berkeley with the Berkeley Rent Board.

Um, I was so proud to take on the job because the City of Berkeley has always demonstrated the values that I truly believe in.

City of Berkeley has always led by example.

And after 18 years of working with marginally housed communities, I was so proud to advocate for one of the most comprehensive rent board uh rent or get a little bit of rent stabilization ordinances in the country, one that has led by example.

Uh, two and a half, three weeks into starting that new job, I received an impact notice that I was going to be laid off.

Um, just left a job with stable hours, just um moved my family who was all here, they're now looking for pizza elsewhere.

Um, just moved them to Berkeley care.

Um, and here I am facing layoff.

I'm here to advocate that due to um that nobody walk out the door right now in this job market.

I think with all of the intelligence that we have, creativity, innovation, but the values we say that we believe in, nobody should be walking out the door in this job market.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so we'll go to online for um again.

This is comments that for items that are not on the agenda.

We have one minute.

Uh first is uh phone number ending in 211.

Hi, indeed.

First of all, I say beautiful to hear Loni Hancock voice.

She was a great mayor.

Maybe we should just have women mayors.

No.

She was great.

She was a good mayor and I'm very happy here.

Okay, my assistant, uh uh Chitroy, and you some baby.

But we'll file formal complaint with that it's California.

City of Berkeley totally, totally, totally betrayed us and tens of thousands of our customers.

So read that carefully and also request meeting with the mayor on the chat time.

Uh the other part of it is our business contributed more than a million dollars to Berkeley, City of Berkeley Tax Treasury.

Our hired thousands of employees.

Our business hire more women uh than men in our big great time than all of our competitors.

Uh we don't need help.

We need action, not action everything and the rest of them was criminal.

We need action.

We need to also be able to not only our business suffering, but also tens of thousands.

Next is Cheryl Daville, a former council member.

So now you're taking 15 minutes after 45 minutes.

That's kind of pathetic and sad.

You're really wasting uh people's time having them come to the meeting and then starting the meeting and taking a 15-minute break after a short period of time.

Um side conversations of the council should also be outside.

Actually, you shouldn't even be talking or on your cell phones, which you all do 20 all the time during these meetings, which is also pathetic.

Um, and since you've gotten the raise that I initiated by my legislation, um, you've lowered the amount of time that people are allowed to speak in a meeting.

You you limited the time for the flock cameras to two hours for public comment in the room and an hour online.

That's unfair, and everything should be fair, which I know you're not.

Free Palestine, free us all, free us from the fascism of this Berkeley City Council, and they're pathetic.

Thank you.

Thanks for your comments.

Next is uh phone number ending in zero zero zero.

We left copies of our complaint on the table in the front of the council meeting.

Please audience, copy of this.

Sorry, I think you've already spoken during that.

Next is Della Luna.

Yes, thank you.

I want to talk today about Zoran Mamdani, a mayor who's only been in office for four months, and has already uh closed a 12 billion dollar deficit without uh cutting benefits from the people nor the workers, eight billion dollars in aid from the state, an additional two billion in pension restructuring, and he has invested in child care for the people, uh the housing and city infrastructure.

So I wanted to highlight this is in only four months, and I think that Zoran Mamdani is showing what is possible, that good governance is possible, that it is possible to care for your constituents and make the city actually work for people, and I think you all have someone to look up to in that regard, but you cannot tell us that it's not possible.

So I do expect you all to uh move in that direction because it's possible.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um next is um Kieran Slaughter.

Yeah, good afternoon, good evening, Kieran Slaughter here.

Good to be.

Well, to make it as part of the public speaker, just wanted to give a quick announcement about the 21st annual Tommy Smith Youth Track Meet uh presented by the 100 Black men of the Bay Area.

Celebrating two decades of promoting athletic experience.

Karen, I'm sorry, but I I think that's actually on our our consent calendar.

Oh, it is?

Yeah.

Oh man, okay.

Well, I'll well let me just speak on how proud I am of the Willard Park renovation project as someone who actually played in that park and worked at Willard Park as my first city job.

I just wanted to say how beautiful that center came out, and how proud all the staff should be and former councilwoman uh Lord Drossy should be.

I didn't know that there weren't any opportunities to speak on the ceremonial items, but I saw that and I just want to give you all kudos.

It's an amazing project.

It just really brings to life the rest of Willard Park.

And also kudos to all the hard work and public work staff during public works week.

Uh, whenever I see them servicing the trash cans and recycling, they're always smiling and they're always um waving back at me in the morning.

So I'll hold the rest of my comments to the other item.

Thanks, Karen.

Good pivot.

Uh last speaker is um Denise Jones.

Hi, good evening.

Um, good evening to the mayor.

Um, this is Denise Jones again.

I'm the director at the Berkeley Drop-in center, and again, I am reaching out for whatever monetary support we can get.

Um the Berkeley Drop-in center was impacted by proposition number one and the BHSA funding changes, and effective July 1st of 2026.

There will be no funding.

Um, we are an entity that helps um our community with food, clothing, mailboxes, locker services, and despite the major cuts that are coming, I am currently running the drop-in center with three staff, and who will be gone by June the 30th, but we still have over 300 clients.

That will be without food effective June 31st.

I'm reaching out for 500k for the next two years.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's it.

That's it for non-agenda public comment.

Okay, very good.

Thank you so much.

Thank you everyone for your public comments.

Um, and we will now move on to the consent calendar.

Uh Councilmembers, do you have any comments on the consent calendar?

I will start with Councilmember Taplin.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and good evening, everybody.

Um, on items 16-17, these are my office's resolutions relinquishing funds for the Berkeley Humanes 12th Annual Pines Repos Fundraiser and the 100 Black Man of the Bay Area's Tommy Smith Youth Track Meet.

I want to thank my co-sponsors and my colleagues for their support this evening, and I encourage all to attend.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Councilmember Vice Mayor Traeger.

Uh thank you so much.

I uh wanted to comment on a few items on this agenda.

Uh first of all, um, item six and seven.

Uh both are joint home key plus applications, and I'm very excited to see both of these move forward tonight.

I would like to thank uh staff who made this possible.

Um, you know, um I had the deep uh honor, um, thank you so much to the mayor for um sending me to the uh a press conference uh today uh where it was announced that uh countywide there is another um major reduction over um 10% uh for the unhoused population and the unsheltered unhoused population.

Um, and uh projects like these are integral uh as we uh do everything possible um towards a Bay Area that we can all call home, um, including in Berkeley.

Um item 14, a recommendation to add three ceremonial street name signs in honor of Daniel Ellsberg on Kittridge.

This is in my district, and I am uh very grateful to the uh Transportation and Infrastructure Commission for uh taking this on and making this recommendation.

Um, and it would be and uh all who uh all the community uh members who uh first reached out to us uh to do that and uh very excited that this is moving forward tonight.

Um thank you.

Um items um item 15.

I would like to.

This is a referral to incorporate food insecurity as a funded category in future community agency grant funding cycles.

I would like to thank Council Member Kess Harvani for her work and wanted to see if it would be possible to be added as a co-sponsor.

Yes, Councilmember Traeger, we'd be delighted to have you.

Thank you so much.

Um, items 16 through 18.

I um want to thank the authors of those items, and uh we'll contribute a hundred dollars out of my G13 account to each of those items.

Uh and item 19, which is uh the Barclay Rotterley Endowment Education and Community Welfare support.

Um this is going to uh help the Barclay Rotterley Endowment to raise funds for the Rodicare Health Clinic for your collegiate scholarship program, supportive housing and hygiene kit programs.

Uh in previous years, uh these funds were raised uh together with and through the Taste of Downtown Barkley event uh this year um there was a decision made uh by the Rotary to move it towards a biannual event, so there will be a bigger and better event in 2027.

Um, but the need for this funding still continues and so um I would like to thank the Rotary, and I believe Tina is on the Zoom uh tonight uh who can say a little more.

Um, but uh thank you for continuing to move this really important effort and would welcome um any uh D13 allocations from my colleagues.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Moving on to Councilmember O'Keefe.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um I first want to comment about item uh 14, I think.

Yes, um, just want to say Daniel Ellsberg is personal hero of mine, and I actually, even though I teach computer science, seems unrelated.

I actually find a way to work him into my curriculum every year because the students do not know who he is, and so um I just wanted to say I'm really um happy to to be supporting item 14 and thank you so much for bringing it.

Um, and then um the for the D13 items, I will contribute to all of them except the one I'm already on, so that means 250 dollars.

I would love to contribute to the Pints for Pause item 16.

Um to the uh track meet.

I recently became a track mom, so I was especially excited about that.

I am 250 dollars and uh the flea market um absolutely would love to contribute to that, and I'm already listed as a co-sponsor for item 19.

So thank you so much.

Um, Councilmember Tragu for Vice Mayor Traeger for um allowing me to do that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Humbert.

Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor.

And I first have a question about item 13, which is the disaster and fire safety commission recommendation about the bike plan.

I'm wondering if that could be continued to the meeting where we uh take up the bike plan.

I guess that's in June.

You certainly could.

I mean, I think the point of that item was to ask that staff do certain things in the bike plan, and we have considered and done most of those things.

So I think it's it could come tonight as like a precursor to that item and say hey, these are things we want to make sure you include it in the plan.

Or it could come on the night of the plan either way.

We just I decided to leave it there since it was it was before the plan and at least not after.

Okay, yeah, it sounds like there's no need to move it, at least to me.

Um number 14.

Um Daniel Ellsberg is also one of my personal heroes.

I read a lot of his writings before I turned 20.

Um, my wife was at a writer's retreat in Point Reyes Station, and the writers are supposed to sign uh their names in the closet.

I walked in the closet where she was gonna sign, and there was his name, and it was really it was a moving experience for me.

So thank you for for doing this.

Number 15, I appreciate, which is the uh referral to incorporate food insecurity as a funded category and future community agency grant funding cycles.

I appreciate uh councilmember Cassarwani adding me as a co-sponsor on this important item.

Food insecurity is a fundamental problem.

It's gotten worse after prices have risen with the pandemic incidents.

The organizations in Berkeley that address this are doing essential but often behind the scenes work, and we must be empowered to participate in our community agency grant funding process.

That was an oversight, and I'm glad it's being corrected.

Thank you.

Councilmember Cassarwani.

Um as to item number 16 pints for pause.

Um I'm a co-sponsor, thank you, Councilmember Taplin.

Such a wonderful organization, Berkeley Humane, and I'd like to contribute 250 dollars for my discretionary account on 16, 17, 18, and 19 would like to contribute 100 each uh from our discretionary uh D8 account.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Blackby.

Thanks, Mr.

Ishii.

Um, just a couple of comments.

Um again, I also want to appreciate uh Councilmember Castrowani and team for item 15 um the referral to incorporate food insecurity as a funded category in future community grant funding cycles, incredibly important, uh, and I'm proud to support that effort.

Um, on item 16, would like to relinquish 250.

Uh, was proud to co-sponsor item 1700 Black Men of the Bay Area's Tommy Smith Youth Track Meet.

I wanted to relinquish $500 for that.

Um, and then item 18 and 19, um, the Berkeley Flea Market and the Berkeley Rotary Endowment Education Support, also $250 for each of those.

Uh, and then I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask on um information item number 30 and 31.

Um, I think Mr.

Oyuncon me is on the on the line.

Um I really appreciate getting these quarterly reports on the performance of our um investment portfolio that leads in very directly to the conversation we're gonna have about the budget later tonight.

Um, I'm gonna share my screen really quick just to highlight one piece, um, and then ask Henry a quick question because if there's any policy adjustments that we should consider.

Um just to note uh again, there's huge clarity and transparency in terms of the returns we're getting on the investment portfolio.

We have about 600, 700 million dollars of assets.

Um previous councils I know have put very particular constraints on what the finance team can do with this pool money.

Um I also know there's you know uh kind of the vagaries of the market and the length of time of various uh various instruments that we have and when they come to maturity.

Uh and Henry and I have already had a back and forth on this on email.

Um so I think my question for um finance team and for Henry is um is there more that we can do on the policy side uh to relax any of the constraints that are inhibiting returns.

I'll just observe that you know, even if we got a half a point better and matched Burbank or a point better and matched San Francisco or San Jose, that's worth you know several million dollars to the top line on the revenue side.

Um, so anyway, so question just to Henry is are there things that we could be doing from a policy side, adjustments we could make that would give you more of the flexibility to uh aid on bumping that rate up.

So that's question number one, and question number two is what the assumption is in next year's budget for return uh and what we're assuming in terms of revenue from the portfolio.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you uh for the question.

Um I just wanted to give you a little bit of context for this.

Uh but if you look at the report that we had about a year and a half ago, we had we're very close to the top at that time.

This is cycle.

We buy um investments for three, four, five years, and we lock them in.

So when you lock them in, if you look at the reports that we have, because we locked them in at that rate, we had it was like 0.5 or 0.75, like just 775 busiest point.

But now, if you look at the same report, uh, I think there's an exhibit E1 or something in there, it tells you 10 of all the investments that we looked in at 0.1 to 0.75% are all going to be mature, maturing this year, within the next six months.

And the market is at about 3.5 to 4.2.

So we are going to buy those investments after they mature, and we are going to be at the top of it by the time maybe next to two years, we're going to be like probably at the high top of that of that ladder.

So it's always cyclical because of the investment timing and when we we lock them in.

So that's number one.

And then from a bigger picture, yes, um, we are trying to see if there's anything we can do.

I know the markets are very volatile now, so this is probably not the time to be changing stuff.

So we're looking at it in terms of standardized.

And so if you look at the revenues projection that we did for next year, we are taking into this account that yeah, we're going to have more revenues for next year than we had this year.

And that's one of the reasons why if you look at the investments, uh, the the earnings that we are assuming we are going to get, it's probably going to be about 10 to 11 million, even though we have less money to invest, because we are running, we are we have a budget deficit, so we don't have enough cash.

But even with that, we're still going to have more revenues and our rates are going to go up because we are going to be able to lock in these higher rates once these 10 or 11, I think we have about 14 uh maturities that are coming within the next six months.

And once those maturos are coming in, we are going to be buying at a higher rate of about three to four to five percent.

So we are going to be at the top of that cycle again, uh while everybody else goes down, and then once we start re uh maturing again, then everybody will come up again.

So that it's always been a cycle in terms of uh lock the way we lock those investments.

Great.

Thanks.

And at the same time, we're looking at um, we are going to cancel to do to see whether we should change our investment report.

Me and you have been having this conversation.

So we've been talking about what can we do on the margins, what are the things that we can do that can help us um unlock some of the things that that we had.

Like you were right, we couldn't do so many things we couldn't do.

So we are trying to see whether there's anything we can that council can help us and give us the permission to do a little bit of it, broaden our investments to see whether we can make, even if it's just a million dollars more, that makes sense, which everybody's looking for revenues, and that will help with our budget deficit.

Thank you.

Thanks, Henry.

And just folks, just a reminder, consent calendar.

You know, we we shouldn't really be having much discussion or inquiry at this time.

So I want to ask if in the future you want to have a conversation about this, that we take it off the consent calendar.

Okay.

Uh I'll just close by saying, you know, uh, thanks for this.

Um, a million dollars here, a million dollars there, it's real money, as we've heard in the past.

Um, and so um again, I appreciate the effort um here and um and know you are doing everything you can to maximize um the return here.

Uh we've rightfully so been focused on the cost side of the equation on the budget because that's the part that's in our most direct control.

Um, but this does feel like a lever where, hey, if we can figure out a few other things to do here, and I pop, you know, we we've all been talking about this, so this is not you know, so I appreciate the conversation, the ongoing work here, and anything we can do uh to support you, please uh let us know.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Lunopah.

Thank you.

Um I'd like to donate 200 um to items 16, 17, 18, and 19 from discretionary funds.

Um, and I also briefly want to speak on item six, the um home key application for supportive housing in People's Park.

Um, I did not support the development of People's Park, and I mourn the people's park that was there.

And now our our job is to make sure that there are as many units and permanent supportive housing units as possible at that site, um, to support our unhoused neighbors.

Um, and so I I support that strongly.

Thanks.

Thank you, Councilmember Casarwani.

Um, thank you very much, Madam Mayor.

So I too wanted to um just note and thank our staff for I believe it's items six and seven for the supportive housing at People's Park, 110 units for low-income and previously unhoused individuals.

Um, and for North Berkeley Bard, that is in my district.

Um, very proud to see our application um with the developer insight housing for 85 studio and one bedroom units serving homeless individuals and veterans.

Um, these two projects are just a tremendous demonstration of our city's commitment to housing people at all income levels, and I I really hope that these two applications are successful because when we do these affordable housing projects, we have to have what's called a funding stack.

So it's the local affordable housing bond monies, it's the state funding.

We're trying to get some here, it's the low-income housing tax credits, and all of that comes together um to help us create these new units for people.

So thank you for that.

And then I also wanted to thank everyone for their kind comments about the item related to incorporating food insecurity as a funded category in our community agency RFP process.

I want to add the mayor as my final co-sponsor.

I want to thank the co-sponsors and and everyone supporting that.

And I I also wanted to note that we the reason why we're simply asking for the category in the community agency RFP process is because we were really lucky and we were able to repurpose federal funds through home ARP American Rescue Plan dollars to the tune of 377,000 over two fiscal years.

So that RFP is out, and you know, we encourage our uh providers of food assistance to respond to that RP.

I think Indy it's still open for for that purpose.

So, so that's that, and then I did want to just make the donations.

I I'm just uh pleasantly surprised by all the opportunities to show my appreciation.

So $100 to the Berkeley Humanes 12th Annual Pints for Paws fundraiser, $100 to the black men of the Bay Area's Tommy Smith Youth Track Meet, 100 to the Berkeley Flea Market Art Walk Event, and finally 100 to the Berkeley Rotary Endowment Education and Community Welfare Support.

Um so thank you all for bringing those forward, and that's all.

Thank you very much.

Councilmember Bartlett.

Thank you, madam mayor, and um uh thank you, so Kesselwani for bringing forward item 15, this food measure.

Um, you know, the the during the pandemic, we we saw the food shocks, the first um supply chain shocks really hit us and scarcely became scarcity came into our into our you know consciousness.

Uh we responded and created this this food uh resilience measure called farm a while ago, and uh so you know the war in Iran we know is offset is taking fertilizer offline.

Uh so crops are not being planted right now over in different parts of the world, including America, uh, and also the fuel prices going up tremendously will also raise the price of food.

So I think number 15, this decide this food resilience will be front and center uh in our conversations next year.

Um sadly.

Um and I want to co-sponsor it, but of course you left me out again, Councilman Kesserwani.

After all of our years of doing together, I can't you always leave me off the good ones.

Okay, um, whatever.

Still a fan, though, I'm still a fan.

Um, you know, so uh Pines for Pause want to give uh 250 to the Pines for Pause celebration, beautiful event every year.

I love it.

Uh very very thankful to Councilmember Taplin for the Tommy Smith um 100 black men track me, like to donate 200 out as well.

Um, and number 18, the the flea market, uh what art we're art walk.

This is this is uh came out of our office, and so this came from uh you know a couple of years, more than a few years.

Right, Paul.

I see you uh of diligent effort to take this community treasure and give it you know, give it the tools to reinvigorate, to evolve, to grow, to expand its mission, and because mission was set when BART uh displaced many black businesses in that little area there to give some sort of economic conduit for people.

And so this is a chance to kind of reinvigorate, get it going again, as I said.

So thank you again for all those who contribute.

Um, and the Rotary Club, um, great organization.

Donate 150 to that.

Thank you, Councilman like Mr.

Vice Mayor.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Taplin.

Uh thank you.

Um on item 18, I would uh be your quarters contributing $500.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Um, I also want to add my thanks and enthusiasm for item six and seven for the two home key projects.

Just another example of the city of Berkeley continuing to apply for funding to support affordable housing and also access grants um at the state level.

Um, but also, you know, we're doing it state, federal, county level.

So I really want to thank staff for all of their work there.

Um, that's for the People's Park Project and also uh North Berkeley BART.

Thank you for Councilmember Castro for adding me to the food insecurity item.

Grateful to be a part of that, as it's an issue that's very near and dear to my heart.

Um, and then for items 16, 17, and 18, that's pints for pause, 100 black men track me, and the Berkeley Flea Market Art Walk.

Um, I'd like to donate 250 dollars to each of those items.

Thank you very much.

Um, can we move on to public comment, please?

If you have public comment on any consent calendar or information items only, um, please come on up or raise your hand online.

Kieran, now's your time.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, City Council, City Manager, and city staff.

My name is Pam Gray, and I'm the chair of the board of directors for the Berkeley Food Network, and we are Berkeley's largest food assistance nonprofit.

First, I want to say thank you to Councilmember Kessarwani, um, and also um Councilmember Humbert for authoring and co-sponsoring um this item number 15 on the consent calendar, as well as the mayor and also councilmember Trigroub and in spirit um councilmember Bartlett for also co-sponsoring.

Um I really want to say thank you to the mayor and to all council.

You have all I know been down to the Berkeley Food Network to see our operation, and you know exactly what it is that we're doing and the importance of the work in town.

And I just want to say thank you so much for that support.

Um, so uh really on behalf of all of the community members in Berkeley who received this critical food assistance.

I just want to say thank you for all of your strong and ongoing support for our work.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Good evening, honorable mayor, city council, city manager.

My name is Andrew Crispin.

I'm the executive director at Berkeley Food Network.

On behalf of Berkeley Food Network, I want to acknowledge council members Kesarwani, Trey Group, Humbert, and the mayor for supporting item 15 to make food security an addressable and fundable item uh in an ongoing funding cycle.

Earlier this week, I was in Sacramento meeting with staff from food banks and policy and advocacy organizations from across California to help prepare for the impacts of HR 1.

It doesn't look good.

April 1st, we had five over 5,000 Alameda County residents kicked off CalFresh starting June 1st and every subsequent month on the first, an additional 55,000 Californians will be kicked off CalFresh.

Uh and the governors may revise funding for food banks cut in half.

We're approaching a food security cliff at the same time as economic pressures, forcing more families to choose between rent and food.

Here in Berkeley, we are continuing to focus on building resiliency here, especially as we celebrate our tenth year of service, and we're greatly looking forward to partnering with the city.

Good evening, Council.

My name is Joe Listener.

I've been uh in Food Not Bombs feeding people on the streets for 26 years.

So I know how important um housing is for the homeless.

I also am for some reason indelibly a supporter of People's Park, especially in as our constitution is being subverted as we breathe.

If only they could both, you know, come to fruition.

So what I want to tell you is University of California threw RCD under the bus, the very um flippant, you know, legal brief that totally submerged them.

So what you've got to look out for is what's the total price?

They are applying for um project-based uh vouchers, which means they're gonna look for federal money, which means they have to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act.

There's nothing in item six about who's gonna pay for that or um how it's gonna be brought about.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm uh Patricia Ellsberg, married to Dan for 53 loving years, and uh I deeply want to thank you on his behalf and the whole family.

It means so much.

And he dedicated his life to peace and and he loved being in this living in this area.

He drove a little sports car, and I can just see him going around the street so looking at his name.

Thank you so very much.

He's my personal hero, too.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Phyllis Olin, and I live in District 6 in Berkeley, where I've been for many years.

Um it has been my honor to shepherd um this um getting the seats street signs named after Ellsberg.

Um the process has been about two years now.

So um I am so grateful that this is finally happening, and I really appreciate the comments from several council members supporting this.

Um I want to note also that the signs are going to be on one side, Milvia, this is on Kittridge, which borders Berkeley High, and on the other side, Fulton, which borders the university.

So hopefully more and more young people will become aware of Daniel Ellsberg and what he's contributed to us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Jackie Cabasso.

I'm the executive director of Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, a nuclear disarmament advocacy organization founded in 1982, and it's been my pleasure and sometimes a little bit for frustration working with Phyllis and our team over the last couple of years to make this uh this street renaming a reality.

But we're really, really pleased that it's happening.

Uh and I want to say something about why it's so important in this world today.

Dan Ellsberg was also a personal hero of mine, but also a friend of mine and a colleague.

And what he stood for truth telling, whistleblowing, peace, anti-war, nuclear disarmament, and social justice, and he was a giant, and young people need to know about people like Dan and look and for him to become their heroes as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is uh John Burroughs.

I live in the Greater East Bay, but I was a graduate student at Berkeley.

I too, like Jackie, uh, knew Dan Ellsberg fairly well.

He's pretty well known for being a critic of the Vietnam War and releasing the Pentagon Papers.

What needs to be known more is that he was a critic of nuclearism and an activist against reliance on nuclear weapons.

He wrote a book, which I recommend it's called The Doomsday Machine.

One of the memories of my life is being involved in a protest at the Nevada test site in the 1980s with uh with Dan.

So it's really terrific that the streets are gonna be named in his honor.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name's Judith Ehrlich.

I'm a filmmaker, and I've made three films about Daniel Ellsberg.

One is the Most Dangerous man in America, Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers, which was nominated for the Oscar and Emmy and won the Peabody Award and brought some more attention to Dan.

And then uh The Boys Who Said No, which was uh about draft resistors during the Vietnam War focused on Joan Bias, but Dan was a major character in that.

And now a new film that we're just going to release online, June 4th.

It's going to be free and available.

It's a half hour film about nuclear war, and Dan's speaking about nuclear war.

So we're really glad that we can put it out at no cost, and a lot of groups are embedding it on their websites as well.

So hope you all get to see it.

Thank you.

And I really, it's going to be wonderful to have.

I live a block from this from Kittridge, and I get to see it every day.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, Council members and Madam Mayor.

My name is Claire Greensfelder, and I'm a 45-year or longer, I can't remember anymore, resident of Berkeley and homeowner in District 6.

I'm also the executive director of the California Institute for Community Art and Nature that produces the annual California Native Ways Festival in O'Neill Park and the Berkeley Bird Festival downtown.

But I'm here tonight because Daniel Ellsberg was also a personal friend and colleague of mine.

And I've been uh I knew him.

I met Dan Purst at a Patricia both at an event in Berkeley about 1980 when I was working on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign that actually won in California and made a difference globally.

Although I've worked many years on other issues, climate change, indigenous rights, and others, like our West Berkeley Shell Mount.

I'm helping with the promotion.

I was one of the producers of the Most Dangerous Man, and I'm also helping with the promotion of this film.

June 4th, we'll have our online launch.

And when the film when the street is dedicated, we're very much hoping to have a big event in downtown Berkeley to show all three of Judy's films.

And we hope that you all will join us.

Thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, feel free to pass it uh to the clerk and we can pass around.

Thank you.

Hi, Kelly Hammergren.

I'm going to talk about something that probably that no one else has mentioned, and probably most of you don't care about a lot, but it's the record retention schedule.

And of course I would really like everything saved forever, but I understand we can't do that because of space and expense, but I really wish that that was laid out for us what that what the problems were.

And I just think in terms of the boards and commissions, I know sometimes people feel that they don't contribute much, but going to those meetings, I feel I see they contribute a lot.

And then the minutes really don't give us uh a good documentation of what actually happened in that meeting.

With the action minutes, um, so much is lost, and sometimes it'll just say discussion held.

Well, what was that?

And only 90 days to retain records, recordings of the meetings is way too short.

Thanks, Kelly.

Appreciate it.

Okay.

Carol Morasovic.

Uh first has former chair of the homeless commission.

We did recommend maximizing the number of units in the support of housing in People's Park.

I believe we said 125 or 150.

So we're pleased to see this moving forward.

I also want to address uh the records retention.

And it first, legally, I understand that uh the city attorney has advised that the correct records will be um will be retained.

However, it could be that someone is unknown at the time the issue and something a legal issue could emerge later, and then you won't have the records.

I'm also um concerned from the purpose of historical value.

It's really important to have records to be able to go back and research and find information on issues, sometimes individuals.

Um, and I'm I hope that this is scrutinized carefully.

Thanks, Carol.

Thank you.

Bless you.

Thank you.

Um, good evening, council.

I'm my name is Andrew Pritchard.

I'm with Berkeley Crop Watch, and I'd like to address hyperspray reporting in 1997 when CropWatch launched our campaign to ban Pepper Spray.

We felt that it was potentially lethal.

There were many deaths that had been attributed to its use, and we were very against it.

The pepper spray reporting requirement that was in that 1997 legislation was there because our fear was that the police would use it against mentally ill people, against people who are marginalized, against people who can never in this day and age be able to bring a complaint to the police accountability board, that people who are falling on our sidewalks, people who are disoriented, people for whatever reasons don't do what the police say when the police say to do it, they're the ones who are going to be suffering, and the fact that that reporting requirement was meant to have a unique was it justified, because those folks will never ever be able to complain.

We just suck it up.

Um I'm gonna tell you also that now that the mobile crisis team is gone, we have no non no non-police alternative.

So you're gonna have untrained people with with compliance in a can, and that's how we're going to govern.

And when the police chief tells us, well, just look at the dashboard.

Look, it does those statistics don't tell any story.

Somebody's got to get their head in there and look at other police are using it.

And we all know damn skippy well too that if the police are allowed to use pepper spray for crowd control to go after that one person, and all the rest is just collateral damage.

And I say that to you as somebody who was a victim of police collateral damage and their use of tear gas.

So I don't take this lightly, and I also say this.

Poor people deserve parks too.

And I don't know how you're gonna spend $3 million on a triangle and Dwight and Telegraph.

Thanks, Andrea.

Hello, good evening, honorable mayor Ishi, wonderful council members, and city manager.

My name is Dr.

Monique Allen.

I am here representing Community Services United, who operates as the Berkeley Flea Market, which is under brand new leadership, stewarded by all female energy, and remains committed to providing family-centered cultural activities, seasonal celebrations, music, art, and workforce opportunities through the flea market.

Also, I would really like to establish the fact that we appreciate this investment from each of you as it affirms Berkeley's continued commitment to community unity, cultural preservation, and inclusive public engagement.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm looking for a few minutes.

Anyone else?

Two minutes.

Anyone else?

Three minutes, I do.

Alright, thank you.

That's all I need.

I appreciate you all.

So that's total four minutes, great.

Good evening, Mayor, Council members, and staff, residents of Berkeley, my friends, my neighbors.

My name is Aidan Hill.

I'm a candidate for Berkeley City Council District No.

I'm asking you, please, pull consent calendar item six on People's Park and refer it back to the Housing Advisory Commission.

Now, to be clear, Berkeley needs housing.

Berkeley needs supportive housing.

But this item involves people's park, public land, publicly accessible land, south side density, and a 14,359,593 spending in public housing funding.

It also comes while Berkeley faces a structural deficit of nearly 30 million dollars.

A total amount, nearly half the deficit should not move forward quietly on consent.

This item has not earned community consent.

Residents found out after the housing advisory commission had already acted.

We wrote letters, we showed up, we asked for the item to return for public input.

We were told only a commission member could place it back on the agenda.

None did.

South side has 12,195 residents and a density of more than 63,000 people per square mile.

It is already carrying UC growth, housing pressure, service strain, and a severe shortage of public open space.

This is not opposition to housing.

It is opposition to making South Side absorb another major decision after the destruction of our urban ecology, our urban forest, the 2.8 acres of land that we had for climate change.

Students need housing, unhoused people need housing, long-term residents need better housing, including myself, and uh South Side needs stability.

But South Side isn't empty.

South side isn't here for corporate aka UC Berkeley, aka a multi-billion dollar corporation that sells nuclear weapons.

You have a responsibility to your community, not to corporations, and so if you go forward with this item, if you pretend the community, the ones that were tear gassed, the ones that were arrested, the ones that were thrown onto the ground, and their children had to watch them because they wanted to protect a public park.

They wanted to protect a place where they had swing sets, where children blew bubbles in the wind, where we saw dragonflies, we look outside at Strawberry Creek.

You're welcome to protect that.

We see San Pablo Park, Ohlone Park.

You all have those parks, but 12,000 people in this district can't have one open space that doesn't belong to UC Berkeley, that doesn't belong to people.

That means they need community.

So I ask you, give us a fair hearing, a fair process, bring it back to the housing advisory commission.

We deserve that much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other public comment on consent or information items only.

Five hands raised online.

First speaker is Ruben Lazardo.

Um, I just want to thank and follow on Kieran Slaughter's um expression of gratefulness to uh Mr.

Terry Kaplan, his co-sponsors, the mayor and the council for your support.

Of the Tommy Smith.

You track me, we're really grateful.

Want to also uh I think your other folks from the 100 Black Men and Cal Athletics waiting to also thank you, but also want to let you know that if you want can make it to the track meet this Saturday at eight, you could participate in the parade of champions, or if you can make it at any other time, just let us know so we can introduce you to folks.

Also, want to thank the mayor and the council and the staff for their leadership and helping get behind the Sahred and ten units of affordable housing at People's Park.

Really grateful for that leadership and the historic investment of affordable housing in the South Side.

Thank you.

Next is Cheryl Davilla, a former council member.

For one, the records retention is problematic.

Uh specifically for legislation of previous council members when you converted your website, you did not all the links to legislation that were previously working are no longer working.

So I hope you um seems like you should have rectified that when you did it, but you know, you didn't.

So I hope all the legislation is available.

Um I agree with Aiden's remarks, um, as well as Andrew Pritchard.

Pepper spray should not be on the freaking consent calendar.

It's it's just it's terrible that it's uh I wish someone would have the courage to pull that SHIT off the consent calendar.

It should not be on there.

People probably don't even know this is at the meeting tonight, or else that room would be.

Next is Kieran Slaughter.

Good evening, honorable mayor and city council.

I just want to once again thank you for supporting item 17.

Thomas Smith Youth Track Meet.

I'm joining you, you know, from home, but I'm also a proud member of the 100 Black Men and well, as well as a proud member of two student athletes at Berkeley High.

And so we're really excited to bring this signature event back home to Berkeley and Edwards Stadium.

Events like this create tremendous social and economic value uh for our community by bringing families, athletes, and visitors to the city while supporting local businesses and showcasing Berkeley as a destination for youth sports.

Also, want to just highlight the work of the hundred black men of the Bay Area and the committee for the 100 Black Men Youth Track Meet, and just want to once again invite folks out there and thanks again for the partnership with UC Berkeley and the City of Berkeley and the sponsors of this ad.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kieran.

We miss you, City of Berkeley.

Next is uh caller phone number ends in 211.

Daniel, was a great man.

He also was a friend.

I talked with them.

He was just quite unique, was a beautiful man too, very good looking.

And he actually wanted him today more than ever because the big plan, the above that monsterity in the West House to start World War III.

Doom day clock, right?

Now it's closest effort in midnight.

We are in horrible, horrible shape.

Meanwhile, just live in peace.

Why we'll have five in the wood, Berkeley and everywhere.

So let's work together.

May I give me a call?

Have a beautiful and good night.

Greatest city in the wood.

Good night.

Thank you.

Next is Tina Etchivary.

Okay, I'm unmuted.

Um, well, first of all, thank you very much for putting this on your agenda tonight.

I am Tina Etchiveri.

I'm the treasurer of Berkeley Rotary Endowment.

And we have organized as a major fundraiser every year, The Taste of Downtown Berkeley, where we try to showcase the restaurants along Shaddock Avenue.

However, we've moved it to a biennial event.

So the next one is in 2027.

However, we still have major uh financial projects going service needs.

Um we have 14 scholarships that we give to Berkeley High students, and these are four-year college scholarships.

So there's it's a major uh need financially to support these uh students from Berkeley High School.

We give them to students that are low income in their family and usually first to college, and not only is it a scholarship, but we mentor them for the full four years.

We also have the roticare free clinic.

Tina, thank you so much.

I'm sorry your time's up.

Next is Demarcus Williams.

Hello, everyone.

Uh, my name is DeMarcus Williams.

Um, and I run the risk of sounding redundant, but I'm actually the chair of the Tommy Smith Youth Track Meet.

Um, and it's just wonderful to be in your presence.

Um, on this evening, I just really want to thank everyone for their participation.

All the council members who are donating.

There's been a lot of talk about food, right?

And one element that is pretty unique to this track meet is we actually feed all of the athletes.

So there's going to be over 4,000 meals given out for free to these young athletes.

This is a community event and not the traditional track meet.

Tommy Smith, who is dedicated his life to being a humanitarian, will actually be present.

So I really want to stress the opportunity for you to come out to that meet and join he and the rest of the 100 black men in that epic um ceremonial parade and really see where your funds and your efforts are going to be able to make an impact over on so many people.

We have nearly 50 teams and over a thousand athletes coming out to compete.

Thank you so much.

Thanks everyone for your public comments.

I think that's our final one.

That's all.

All right.

Is there a motion to approve the con to approve the consent calendar?

So second.

All right.

Is there any opposition to approving the consent calendar?

Okay, we will approve that by unanimous consent.

Our consent calendar is approved.

Thank you all.

Okay.

Sorry?

Oh, yes, here.

Alright, there it is.

Ceremonial thing of the gavel.

Okay, so we are now moving on to our action calendar.

We have a number of public hearings this evening.

And I'm gonna start us off with number 20 to reestabl, uh reestablishment of the downtown Berkeley property based business improvement district.

Now, this is kind of an unusual item in the way in which we have to go about it, but I will um explain to you all the sort of process.

And um I will start it off.

We're gonna start it off with Elinor.

Do you actually I'm gonna pass it over to you and then I can talk more about the process after that?

Sure.

Thanks.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

I'm Elinor Hollander, I'm the manager of the Office of Economic Development here at the City of Berkeley.

And tonight I have the pleasure of uh introducing an item we've actually talked about two other times before.

This is our third uh meeting regarding the renewal of the downtown property-based business improvement district.

Um, as many of you know, the downtown PVID is uh managed by the DBA, the downtown Berkeley Association, and it provides cleaning and hospitality and marketing services for Berkeley's downtown commercial district.

Uh the downtown bid was first established in 2011 for a five-year term and renewed in 2016 for a 10-year term.

And the item before us tonight proposes to renew the district for another 10-year period through 2036.

Um, the authorizing legislation uh for renewing a property-based business improvement district in California requires uh council to conduct a public hearing.

And upon conclusion, if no majority protests exists after the tabulation of the assessment ballots, then you have the privilege of uh considering the resolution to reestablish the downtown uh PBID.

Um, and if the district is adopted, we'll also consider a contract with the DBA for 10 years to administer the management district plan of the how many acronyms can I say of the PBID.

Um I just wanted to say one thing.

Speaking of the DBA and the Downtown Berkeley Association, I wanted to extend a special thank you to John Kayner, uh the DBA CEO, um, for his dedicated service and partnership of this district since 2011.

Thank you.

Um, did I miss anything, Mr.

Clerk, in the process that I should make sure I mentioned.

We're gonna go look at the ballots, but I'll turn it back to you, Mayor.

That concludes my my remarks.

Yes, thank you very much.

So we've already opened the public hearing.

Um we're gonna take council questions now on this item, then we'll take public comment, then uh council will vote to close the public hearing.

The ballots will be counted in the gym, which is over by the parking lot.

The public may view the process, and after the tabulation ends, the city of clerk prepares and size signs the certificate certification, and we will reconvene the item to accept the certified results and consider the rest of the item, which it includes adopting two resolutions.

One approving the down potentially.

I guess it depends on what happens with the ballots, but potentially approving the downtown property-based bid for the next 10 years and approving the contract of the DBA to implement the bid.

Um, and so what is gonna happen is they will go and count, but we will move on to the next item.

So just so folks understand, we're doing a little bit of crossover tonight.

Um, so with that, are there any council questions?

Okay, is there any public comment on this item?

We are on item number 20, which is re-establishment of the downtown Berkeley property-based business improvement district.

Yes, if you have public comment, come on up.

My name is Tim Southwick.

We've been a uh landowner and business operator on Shaddock Avenue for over 50 years.

And uh 10 years ago we signed up for this project, and uh we have about a hundred and forty thousand dollars invested in this project, and the one main reason we like we like what they do.

It's they're they're trying very hard.

We like them, we like the like what everything they're doing, but we signed up for it for a graffiti, and the BART, our main issue is the BART station, the BART tunnels that go into the BART station, they're filthy, the graffiti is crazy.

They're they're not cleaning it up, so I have an idea.

I'll opt out of the next 10 years.

Actually, I don't like 10 years, five years.

I'll opt out of it, and our company will take it upon themselves to get rid of that graffiti.

It's awful, it's an expensive project.

They say BART's gonna come by and do it.

Yeah, 10 years they didn't come by and do it.

So the downtown association, they had a chance to do it, they didn't do it.

I drive by every day and I see this.

I can't stand it.

I'm gonna invest the money, our money, to clean up the tunnels that go down, just figure people that come from out of town that walk up those stairs to go to the University of California, and all they see is this damn graffiti.

You can't believe it.

And I'm gonna clean it up, but I need your permission.

I need your permission to opt out because I think this mission this uh ballot is gonna pass, which is fine.

I don't have any problem with that, but I want to opt out because this cleaning up this graffiti is gonna be a big project, and so I I hope the council will allow me to do it, and you'll see a clean bar station that you don't have to worry about.

Thank you.

Thanks for your comment.

Hello, all my name is Tom Parrish.

Uh I am the vice chair of the board of the downtown Berkeley Association, and I just wanted to speak to the value of the downtown PBID and the downtown Berkeley Association for what it does to keep downtown clean and safe.

Um, and as the manager of four properties for Berkeley Repertory Theater downtown, I can attest to the value of those services.

Thank you.

Thanks, Tom.

Thanks for coming.

Any other public comment?

Oh, yes.

Good evening, council members.

I'm Tim Southwood Jr.

You've spoken to my heard my father this evening.

And I just want to tell you that I applaud what John Cainer and the downtown association has done since 2011.

However, as my father said, we're in support of the measure.

The term is too long.

Ten years is too long.

I'm in favor of reducing the term to five years, as we're committed to to clean up all of the graffiti and everything that the downtown uh downtown association does, but I implore you to look very carefully at the term of the P bid.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Any other public comment um online?

It looks like we have two hands raised.

First is phone number ending in 211.

I had a very good very good discussion within all under a few years ago.

You know what the subject of the discussion was.

She left.

She really left.

We're wondering how it's at.

What we need to do.

Why in the hell do we have all of this empty?

Vacant.

This is all about telegraph.

Shadak and Pablo.

Anybody's avenue?

When this could be thriving businesses.

Why?

Don't just you did do what they did years ago.

But fine is that what is the hell are they including our ordinance?

Drive business out of town.

He's considered that very company.

Again, and all hi.

Perhaps we could meet sometime soon.

It'd be very good person uh to have a talk with.

Thank you.

Have a good night.

Thank you.

Uh next is uh Cheryl Davila, former council member.

And excuse me.

Um this is a no-boot contract.

It should not be for 10 years.

I see 33, 558, 89 million, million dollars for this con 10-year contract.

That is so ridiculous.

I'm sure you could do better when you're facing a 30 million dollar deficit.

Come on now.

This is ridiculous.

And I don't even know if they do that great of a job.

And if they did, they if they're gonna you're gonna pay them that much, they should because that's a lot of money.

And it's a lot of money that really is not justifiable at this day and time.

Just like all the other actions that you do are not justifiable at this day and time.

You haven't done anything about the arms embargo, you haven't said no to fascism, racism, Zionism, and the genocide continues.

But you guys aren't remorseful, but hopefully you won't be here for that long because it is an election year.

And and please do vote, everyone.

Vote Pamela Price for DA, butchware for governor.

His name wasn't on it because it was an orchestrated attack to keep his name off.

So write where in on the ballot, and stop talking while I'm talking.

Pay at least try to pretend like you're paying attention.

It's really sad.

How you guys play games?

And you know what?

I noticed that also people have told me that when I speak, you don't have me on camera when I'm in the room at the podium.

What kind of shenanigans is that?

Everybody should be treated equally.

Thanks, Sharon.

Thanks for your comments.

Any other public comments?

That's it.

Okay, very good.

Thank you all so much.

Um, so can we have a motion to close the public hearing?

Wait, I'm sorry.

Give me one second.

Yeah, I was gonna say we we did council questions, but um what's not on my list is comments.

On the bed itself, so I think we should take comments and then we'll close.

Or we could close and then take comments.

Doesn't really matter.

Let's close.

Does there a motion to close?

Second.

Um can we take is there any opposition to closing the public hearing?

Okay, we will close the public hearing then.

That was for you.

Okay, go ahead.

Do you want to speak?

Uh yeah, thank you so much.

And um, thanks, uh Director Hollander and everyone.

Um I just want to say, you know, this isn't my district, but I have had the pleasure and honor of getting to know the folks in the DBA and and work with them, and we you know, some of us are partnered on things over the years, and John, I want to thank you so much.

Um, and I want to say thank you to Matt Matt Durbis and everybody, Purdy, the ambassadors, Tom from the rep.

And I mean, you y'all are more than welcome to do the whole city.

If you could find a way to do that, well, we'll be happy to have you.

Um, but I want to just thank you all for what you do for the downtown and for your advocacy for all of our commercial districts, and just I, you know, it's it's your vote and it's it's your these just for the record we're not spending any money this is their money that they're spending so thank you for doing that as well um and whatever you all decide I just hope we can continue working together.

Thank you.

Thank you yeah Councilman or Vice Mayor Traegu.

Uh thank you so much uh first of all to the gentleman who spoke about concerns with Kofi at the BART station um uh my chief of staff is here we're happy to connect you with the BART director and our point staff point of contact there um I want to uh just echo uh council member taps comments uh one uh in the twenty three months that I have been in office as the downtown representative one of my uh most joyful and proudest uh uh parts of the job was spending a lot of time at uh uh with John and his entire team uh whether it's at downtown Barkley association monthly meetings our one-on-one's uh and just in general um I the downtown Barkley community is so fortunate uh to have uh you at the helm john um as well as uh all the members of the DBA team some of whom are here uh tonight um and uh just very excited to hopefully be able to move this forward for 10 more years thank you very much any other comments from council members I just want to add my thanks um is just an incredible advocate for the downtown um he's been an amazing partner on so many different projects and uh my office has been really focused on supporting our business districts and just generally our our local businesses um and John's advocacy and making sure we have vibrant storefronts supported businesses clean streets um and also serving our unhouse population is just really it's admirable so John just please know that um I really see all the work that you do and just um just totally uh based on my own experiences I I was recently I had guests visiting and they they saw a glass bottle that had broken and a traffic light and literally we walked on the block came back and the glass had been picked up and I just think that that really just uh illustrates so beautifully how much work that people are doing to keep our streets clean so thank you so much to your ambassadors and and all the work that's going into the the work that you're doing um we want to continue to make sure that our downtown businesses and all of our business districts are are being supported so thank you all very much um okay so we've already closed the public hearing the ballots are going to be counted in the gym and then we will return back to this item so in the meantime thank you very much Eleanor and in the meantime we will move on to item 21 which is the proposed FY 2027 FY2028 biannual budget and proposed biannual budget public hearing number one I sort of want to give us five minutes just so you can have staff come in and get settled and we can take a quick stretch break.

So we will be back in five recording stopped the I think I'm gonna go to the community Recording in progress.

Okay, thank you everyone so much for your patience.

We are going to open the public hearing for item number twenty-one, which is the proposed FY twenty twenty-seven and FY twenty twenty-eight biannual budget and proposed biannual budget public hearing number one.

I will pass it over to our city manager and ask that everyone quiet down, please.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Thank you, Mayor.

As you all know, we have a significant structural budget deficit.

We've talked about it quite a number of times with the budget and finance committee.

Um we've talked about it with all of all the city staff a number of times.

Um you've seen the reports that are in front of you tonight.

Uh so tonight we will go through uh both the budget balancing plan, which focuses mostly on the general fund part of the budget, but we will also cover the full budget, um, all funds um and all positions.

And so uh it's a fairly long presentation.

We'll try to not belabor it too much, but we do want to we do want to do it justice and uh speak about it in a fair uh fairly high level of detail.

Um this is our our first budget hearing with you.

Our goal is that we would bring this back June twenty-third for adoption.

Um, and there would be iterative steps between now and then with the budget and finance committee and coming back here as well.

And so uh presenting the budget tonight will be budget manager Marikar Dupaya and our deputy city manager David White.

We also have all of our department heads either here in the room or online if there's more detailed questions about those budgets.

So with that, I will pass it over to Marikar to start us off.

Good evening, mayor and council members.

Thank you.

So tonight we are going to propose uh present the proposed fiscal year twenty-seven and twenty-eight uh annual budget to the full council.

First, we're gonna give you the big picture situational overview.

Then we're gonna go and move on to the summary of our general fund.

Thank you.

After that, we'll move on to all funds, which is our overall budget for the city for the next two years.

We're gonna talk about our proposed uh twenty seven twenty-eight staffing.

Next steps, and of course, impacts, and unknowns.

We've mentioned this several times, but it's worth repeating that we are experiencing a structural deficit, not only in the general fund, but also in other funds, and some examples of that are parking, marina.

Oops, and our CIP.

There's rising costs in personnel, pension, healthcare and liability insurance, and that's nothing new.

Uh, there's labor negotiations that are unknowns.

Inflation, which is coming back with a vengeance, reliance on one-time sources.

We're also waiting still on our year-end results for fiscal year 26.

We have deferred maintenance and significant unfunded infrastructure needs, which we just talked about in our special meeting, increased service demands and community expectations, and the November 2026 ballot measures.

I want to pause a little bit here and talk about not just the two local ones that we discussed earlier today at the special meeting, which is the Go Bond for infrastructure as well as the um use tax and sales tax, but there's also a state ballot that has garnered enough signatures and will be on the ballot this November, and it's called the uh local taxpayer protection, and that has three components.

First one is it's now going to require two-thirds supermajority vote to pass any citizen initiative uh tax measures.

There's also going to be a really strict restriction on property transfer taxes, and it cannot go above state level rates.

And lastly, the third component is it will repeal any property taxes that were passed two years prior.

And last but certainly not least on this uh list is our state and federal revenue limitations, as well as our chaotic economic and political uncertainty.

So I've heard this asked before.

Have we faced deficits before, and how did we avoid large-scale reductions?

Uh, this slide specifically to address that, and the short answer is yes, we have.

So for fiscal year 17 through 2026, we took about a 10-year look back, and city costs grew faster than revenues.

So average growth of the last 10 years, 8% growth in expenses, and 6.5% growth in revenue, and that's actually skewing the average a little bit because in fiscal year 2022, we had that one large anomaly of our um property transfer taxes reaching 40 million dollars.

So that was like a 24% increase in our general fund revenue.

COVID-19 shift shifted our economic uh landscape for the city and for the whole world globe, actually.

Um, the city balanced our budgets by using temporary one-time measures.

This is not an exhaustive list, but some examples of those balancing measures were using ARPA funds, the property transfer taxes that I just spoke of, hiring freezes, project deferrals, use the fund balances, reserves, and transfer in from other funds.

Now, these approaches never address the underlying structural deficit of the general fund.

And although budgets were on paper technically balanced, expenses continued to outpace revenues.

This slide goes into more details of the type of balancing measure that we did for those 10 years.

So for 208-19, we had a deficit of about 10 million, and that was resolved by resetting property transfer tax baseline.

Originally at that time, it was um 12.5 million dollars.

It got reset to 10 million so that we could have 2.5 million dollars more for operating.

Uh transfers from other funds increased transfers to other funds decreased.

In 2021, 40 million dollars was the estimated deficit, and that was addressed through hiring freezes, no capital investments, and the use of our reserves, 11 million dollars.

In 2022, 27 million dollars, and that was when we utilized 23 million dollars of that of the ARPA funds, deferment of large capital projects, equipment purchases, and new projects.

In 2023, 22 million dollars, we use fund balance and salary savings from vacancies, 2024, 12 million dollars, the same balancing measures, 2025, 17 million.

We use the same balancing measures, but we also added the use of the Section 115 trusts and taking a workers' comp holiday, meaning that the general fund did not contribute into the workers' compond.

Fiscal year 2026, the most recent one that we addressed, $29 million.

There was an increase in the general fund revenue projection.

There was a use of the Section 115 trust again, a workers' compond, IT cost allocation, small sites reallocation, and the freezing of 45 vacant positions, which will come into the conversation later on.

For the 27 and 28 budget development process, we knew that we were going to have a structural deficit.

However, we wanted to approach developing the general fund baseline a little bit differently than in the past.

So what we've done instead of just copying prior um base prior adopted budgets, we actually looked at actual expenditures, look back about four years, and asset departments not just to look at the four years actuals but look ahead to see what their actual needs are, and that's how we developed the baseline budget.

Hopefully, this will eliminate inefficiencies and replace outdated budgets, and this was um based on data-driven spending patterns and the real costs of services.

The updated general fund baseline for overtime, hourly, and non-personnel expenses reflects this approach.

For the baseline, our personnel assumptions includes the following.

Increases to all benefits, and the majority of that is from health and pension costs.

A good example is our health costs increased 10% from 26% and 12% from 27 to 28.

Vacant positions are budgeted at step one, and the frozen positions, as part of the 2026 mid-annual budget update, are not budgeted also in 27 and 28, and that's a total of 45 FTEs.

The budget process continues.

So after we developed the baseline, we knew that we had a deficit and we had a more revised deficit.

So our budget balancing framework was there was a citywide effort for a 10 to 12.5% general fund reduction, and other funds that also had structural deficits were asked to also come up with reduction plans, and there were also revenue generating ideas.

So the general fund deficit ranged from 31.3 million dollars in fiscal year 2027 to 29.5 million dollars in fiscal year 28, and this is after the revenue and expenditure adjustments have been made.

And there's a separate slide to go into that in more detail.

This includes strategic cost shifts, non-departmental, and other budget refinements, required debt service support, and parking fund stabilization.

Use of one-time resources.

Before I go into this, I want to explain where we're getting this one-time resource from.

$4.17 million dollars of that is coming from what we called operating reserves, but it's actually came from the AA-1 excess equity calculation, and it's just a fiscal year 2025 unassigned fund balance.

We had the foresight to put that aside because we knew we had to balance this deficit.

About $7.8 million of that came from the dissolution of rural development, about $7.8 million, and that was um came from uh the finance director's uh projection for fiscal year 2026, and that is being utilized for the following: $2.1 million in one-time funds used to smooth out the deficit because we have two very different uh deficit amounts to solve for in 27 and 28.

9.4 million dollars of that is used to sustain services for public safety and youth and adult programs in fiscal year 2027 until the outcome of the potential sales and use tax measure in November 2026, and about half a million dollars is allocated to employees impacted by the budget balancing plan.

The 2027 revenue projection is also reflected the sales and use tax measure.

Additional budget reductions will be needed if it does not pass.

So building the baseline, balancing the budget.

Now we're on to the proposed budget, and that's what we're gonna talk about tonight, and there'll be several other discussions after this.

General fund budget balancing phase.

This is what happened really briefly.

I'll just go over 2027 because 208 is very similar.

So the initial estimate of general fund deficit in 27 was about 32.3 million dollars.

Um, the additional income from the revenue projection that came from the finance department on February 2026, we netted about 5.1 million dollars.

So the revised deficit after the revenue projection, our deficit came down to about 27.14 million.

We adjusted it to rev we adjust.

There were some adjustments made, and so we looked at to see what are some of the things organizationally that we needed to address.

And one of that was that we have a debt service payment for 1947 Center Street that if we don't pay could impact our ability to borrow in future years, um, and 1947 Center Street is one of those funds that are stressed.

So we allocated 1.6 million dollars towards that of the general fund.

There's also the parking fund stabilization, about 1.05 million dollars.

Those are also two funds that are stressed.

Other adjustments to non-departmental that happens to any regular budget cycle, and with all of those adjustments, the total deficit before using one-time resources went up to 31.35 million dollars in 2027.

And the use of one-time resources of 2.1 million dollars, and that is to smooth out the two years.

It's hard to um but balance a budget when they're very different in two years.

So we wanted to just kind of come up with very similar plans for both.

So using the one-time resource, the general fund deficit after revenue and expenditure adjustment came down to 29.3 in 27 and 29.5 in 28.

So, given all of this, what has what have we been focusing on to come up with this um balancing plan and this proposed budget?

So the goal has always been it's a recurring sustainable structurally balanced budget, prioritize core services, reduce reliance on one-time short-term budget balancing measures, match one-time resources to one-time needs, take proactive steps on the factors we can control, ensure long-term fiscal stability, pursue revenue enhancements and alternative funding sources whenever feasible, and live within our values and live within our means.

Program service and staffing impacts.

So, despite nearly 30 million dollars in general fund reductions each year, with reductions in several special funds, the city relied on its values and prioritized minimizing impacts to the following core and essential services, including safety net services, community well-being, service continuity and workforce stability.

And at the same time, the city also focused on strengthening the city's long-term fiscal foundation, achieving structurally balanced budget.

While the impacts of the balancing plan and this proposed budget are significant, the city conducted due diligence to mitigate effects wherever possible.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

And I won't, I'm gonna take a little bit of time to talk about the impacts of our budget balancing plan, and so we'll go through this in some uh detail but not too much detail.

But before I do that, I just want to talk a little bit about um the work around addressing homelessness in our community and what we've done with this budget to help uh do our best to continue to fund this work and prioritize this work.

So uh what I want to comment on in the context of this budget is that resources are allocated for a very broad and comprehensive approach to addressing homelessness.

So this includes continuing to support outreach, shelters, uh, our public works teams that's out in the field addressing community impacts, all the work that is so very important to moving the needle on homelessness.

We continue to do our best to support and fund.

When we came to you last fall, we brought forward a presentation uh under the leadership of Peter Verdue to talk about our comprehensive approach to addressing homelessness.

And in that presentation, one of the things that we talked about was the fiscal cliff that we were confronting in being able to support our motel programs, a very vital component uh to providing shelter to help people bridge into permanent supportive housing.

And we had uh brought forward and admitted that we understood that we had two motels of the three that we were supporting uh that we're gonna run out of funding in fiscal year 2027, and the two that we were specifically worried about were the Beyond Horizon program down on San Pablo and the campus motel on University Avenue.

And one of the things that I think we can see is a bright spot in this budget, is that we're able to preserve funding for one of those two motels, and that's the Beyond Horizon Motel.

However, uh, because of our deficit, there are reductions that are proposed uh in our work to address homelessness, and so I just want to talk about those for a moment.

So uh we do propose eliminating the city share uh for the outreach worker uh that is uh supported and led by the downtown business association.

The seasonal winter shelter program is a resource we also proposed uh not moving forward with in the coming fiscal years.

This is a program uh that has moved around over time in the past more most recent history.

It was a program that was operated out of old city hall, Model Shirec.

Um, in this past fiscal year or past calendar year, uh it was moved to a location in Emeryville, and that was done so because Old City Hall is not habitable and appropriate for individuals to sleep in and live in.

Unfortunately, the Emmerville location is no longer available to us, and so uh we do not have another location for this program, and so we are proposing to eliminate the funding for this program.

However, we do have continued support for the inclement weather shelter program, and that will continue to operate under the purview of our budget.

The social service specialist position that was uh funding was provided for in the last fiscal year budget.

Uh, that position is vacant.

Uh, unfortunately, we are proposing to eliminate that position as well.

Also, uh, we are proposing to uh reduce funding for the Backstair Center.

That's a program down on 2nd Street by about 200,000 dollars.

We think that reduction in funding matches a right sizing of the program.

Uh they went through some extensive renovations over the past year, and and unfortunately, have had to reduce capacity, and so we think that this reduction in funding uh does match more with what their capacity uh currently is projected to be.

In addition to that, in order to keep programs funded, we are proposing some strategic reallocations of funding.

For the Boss Step Up Housing Program on University Avenue.

We're proposing to reallocate funding out of the general fund into another general fund revenue stream that is accounted for as a separate fund, and that's measure U1.

And also we are proposing to reallocate a portion of the funding for the Backstair Program into a state revenue source of permanent local housing program, PLHA.

I do want to comment a little bit on Measure U1 and how we're proposing to allocate resources under Measure U1.

And this chart summarizes a line item budget for that program.

So just to remind everyone, the revenue stream that we get from that last year was budgeted about $6.5 million.

Those revenues have been reevaluated under the leadership of our finance director, and we now anticipate about $6.6 million in annual revenue stream under measure U1.

You can see the personnel breakdown on the slide.

In addition to that, from a programmatic perspective, there are annual allocations attributed to the housing trust fund.

We have a very robust affordable housing project portfolio, about 1,500 units in the pipeline.

And so this allocation is important to make sure that there are resources to help support the affordable housing pipeline that this council has committed to.

There are resource allocations for two projects here as well.

These were actually resources that were allocated in last year's budget, but were not spent, so we're merely proposing to carry those forward, both for 1740 San Pablo and Ephesians Court.

And then you can see some of the other categories here as well.

I already mentioned Boss Step Up Housing.

There's capacity building for emerging developers, and our health housing and community services department issued an RFP for this program in this past fiscal year.

All about, you know, doing all the work that possibly can be done to assist people from becoming homeless.

We also propose the third motel that I did not talk about before was the Capri Motel.

This motel is also on University Avenue.

And we previously were funding this with state uh ERF funds.

We also have a city match involved in those.

And so uh we propose to use in fiscal year 27.

Uh we are responsible for half a year of funding uh for the lease.

We're proposing to use measure U1 resources in fiscal year 27, and then continuing to use general fund resources in fiscal year 28 for that motel program.

And there's a small amount of money as well for flexible funds to assist people with various needs to keep them housed, rental assistance, utility payments, etc.

So that outlines the totality of measure U1 as proposed for fiscal year 27 and 28.

Now I want to go through a number of different slides to talk a bit about the budget balancing plan.

So, um, this budget balancing plan was uh presented to our workforce on April 15th.

Um, our city manager led an all-employee webinar.

Um we also then uh presented this to the budget and finance policy committee on April 16th, and I'm not gonna go through the totality of that presentation, but I do want to talk about some of the impacts about amongst the various departments that are in front of you this evening.

So, first I want to talk about the police department.

And I think as everyone here knows, the police department is a personnel-driven organization that not only works to proactively address public safety, but they also respond to calls for service.

Over the past five years, the police department has been very busy.

They've responded to nearly 62,000 calls for service.

And as we all know, when a call to 911 call comes in, we have an obligation to respond.

The proposed 10% reduction in the police department requires significant personnel reductions that materially reduces public safety service levels and compromises the department's specialized units to respond effectively to community needs.

This is because calls for service will continue.

For the communications center, the proposed budget reductions will threaten the department's ability to timely answer 9 11 calls and reliably dispatch police and fire resources.

Patrol is the department's core function and must be preserved to maintain emergency response.

The proposed reductions of 25 sworn personnel, 23 police officers, and two police sergeants would require consolidation or elimination of specialty units, including the Traffic and Motors Division, the Community Services Bureau, the bicycle team, and significant portions of the detectives bureau, all of this in order to backfill the patrol division.

However, as part of the proposed budget balancing plan, we have allocated one-time resources to bridge the gap until the outcome of the sales and use tax measure becomes more clear.

Those one-time resources will be used to help maintain 15 police officers, so a net reduction of 10, as well as six of the 13 dispatchers.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the fire department.

So over the past 20 years, Berkeley has experienced significant growth and is taller, denser, and more urban, which brings greater emergency response demands and a more complex operating environment.

At the same time, the fire department's call for certain call volume has increased 36% to over 17,500 calls for service in 2025.

The proposed cuts will leave the department less prepared to meet the urban fire, rescue, EMS, and wildfire risks that continue to grow.

The fire department's 12% budget reduction proposal is very impactful.

Of all the proposed reductions, the one I want to talk about first is the proposed closure of Fire Station 4 that impacts a total of nine positions.

Fire station 4 is very busy.

Closing this station will certainly degrade response times and first alarm effectiveness in its service area and adjacent districts.

And that is why, as part of the budget balancing plan of the proposed budget, we are also proposing to use one-time money in fiscal year 2027 to keep fire station open to preserve all of those nine positions until we can understand better the outcome of the sales and use tax in November.

In addition to the closure of Fire Station 4, the department's budget reduction plan decreases the department's ability to support development reviews for construction projects and special events.

It ends the department's street trauma prevention work, limits the department's ability to monitor and apply for grants, and diminishes EMS oversight.

Finally, through cost shifting, the department will significantly reduce its employee health and wellness programming and education, which is troublesome.

Since the pandemic, employee injury leave related to workers' compensation for physical and mental injury has remained about 6,000 hours 6,000 hours higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Certainly, while the department will work to reassign much of this work, there's obviously no way that it can absorb all of it.

Health Housing and Community Services Department.

So the health housing and community services department budget reduction plan is inclusive of not just the general fund, but results from the loss of funding in special funds managed by the department, including mental health, public health, aging, and housing.

As a result, in totality, the department is eliminating 45 positions.

The department's budget reduction plan proposals results in the transfer of our vector control program to Alameda County, eliminates our mobile crisis response team, eliminates the heart-to-heart health community education and promotion program, as well as as well as diminished emergency preparedness capacity that will result in the department not having the capacity to coordinate comprehensive citywide emergency readiness and response initiatives.

While the department worked hard to leverage other funding sources to preserve programs for people experiencing homelessness, as I described before, and I won't get back into them, the department did have to propose some difficult cuts in our work to address homelessness.

I also want to comment on the significant reductions proposed for the mental health division.

For this division, there are 32 proposed position reductions.

These reductions represent a right sizing of the division that has been in the works for some time due to the fact that anticipated revenues never materialized and the loss of revenue due to state law.

As a result of this right sizing and changes in the funding landscape, the mental health division will continue to provide specific intensive services and focus on navigating residents toward county level alternatives to ensure that residents have a clear pathway to all other mandated psychiatric and emergency services.

Finally, due to state and federal funding cuts, there are a number of different programs outlined in the staff report associated with the budget balancing plan that attribute program reductions that reduce health, nutrition, equity, and mental health services.

For the parks recreation and waterfront department, in addition to having to reduce expenditures in the general fund, the department had to address marina fund deficits and expiring T 1 funding that will do capacity in recreation, maintenance, and capital project delivery.

Within the general fund, in addition to some cost shifting, the department is proposing to reduce after school programs, camps, as well as operating hours for community centers and pools.

These reductions to youth recreation and adult programs are proposed to be maintained by using one-time resources with future-year funding assigned to the sales and use tax.

For the marina fund, which has been operating in a deficit for many years, the department is proposing staffing and reduction in non-personnel expenditures that will reduce capacity to oversee marina operations, leases, and secure grants.

Finally, because of all the funding generated by T1 has been allocated, the department has had to recommend staffing reductions that reduce capacity to deliver capital projects.

Not only did the public works department have to address the general fund deficit, but their budget balancing plan proposals address challenges that are being experienced in other funds, such as the building maintenance fund, off-street and on-street parking funds, and the capital improvement program fund.

In total, the department is proposing a 5% reduction in its workforce, and the department will prioritize their work to focus on essential public life safety systems, legal compliance, and preventing catastrophic infrastructure failure.

So, what the department will continue to emphasize includes emergency response to storms, down trees in the right-of-way, and immediate hazard mitigation, regulatory and environmental compliance, critical life safety infrastructure that includes items such as maintenance of traffic signals at high volume intersections, and structural integrity of public buildings with high occupancy, and essential sanitation such as core trash collection and basic maintenance of public health facilities to prevent and address disease vectors.

Delays are anticipated in repairs and facility work, non-emergency community concerns received through 311, such as standard pothole repair, graffiti abatement, litter and illegal dumping, and reduced support for special events.

In addition to the service level impacts described, the department is proposing a reduction in security services for the corporation yard and project deferrals that ultimately increase long-term maintenance issues and revenue risks and defer capital projects.

So, now going to touch on a variety of other departments, and there's more than I'll describe that is actually on the slide.

So for the city clerk's office, there's proposed elimination of resources for overtime and temporary staffing.

There will be delay plan software upgrades, there will be reduced captioning costs by relying on Zoom functionality, and we're proposing to reallocate about 75% of our rental costs for this boardroom to other special funding streams.

For the city manager's office, the proposed plan represents expenditure reductions of about 13%, with nine positions that are impacted.

However, over the past two budget cycles, there are 13 positions impacted, representing 20% of the department's total staffing.

In terms of service impacts, I would like to highlight the following.

Between the this fiscal year and last fiscal year, all of the staff in the office of DEI will be eliminated.

We will do our best in the city manager's office to pick up some of the priority projects, but the portfolio of work will be vastly less than what was envisioned when the office was established, and the level of community engagement that was anticipated will not occur.

In economic development, there will be reduced support for small businesses, loan fund management, business improvement district and commission support, as well as marketing activities.

Within civic arts, there will be a reduction in operational capacity, grant opportunities, and staff work will be prioritized to focus on the backlog of public arts projects.

For communications division, with the loss of both communications specialists, there will be delays in response times and work will need to shift to departments to develop communications and respond to the media.

Also, our ability to respond to crisis and emergency incidents will be impacted.

In addition, there will be increased administrative workload that will be spread throughout the department.

And as I mentioned, there are proposed reductions to our work with DBA and the homeless outreach coordinator, and a reduction in animal services contracts.

Within the finance department, there are four positions, all of which are vacant that are proposed that are part of the budget balancing plan.

Eliminating these positions will have the following impacts.

Diminished capacity for system modernization and technology system upgrades, loss of the only broad scope analyst, which will limit the ability to perform internal analysis, revenue monitoring and providing providing vital backup coverage, and there will be reduced staffing for business tax audits and collections, reducing revenue generation for the general fund and zero waste fund.

In addition, there's a proposal to reduce training by 25%, which we think will be manageable with online offerings.

For human resources department, as a result of the positions that are part of the budget balancing plan, the department's focus will shift from proactive and strategic efforts to a compliance-driven baseline model.

Portions of multiple human resource employee roles will be shifted to the workers' compensation fund, and their responsibilities will limit broader human resource services for the organization.

As a result, there will be slower response times associated with ergonomic assessments, site visits, and compliance support.

And in addition to the personnel impacts, there are a number of non-personnel reductions proposed, including the elimination of some consulting work, software, and modeling tools that will increase manual work and require that some work is redistributed amongst existing staff.

In our information technology department, with the reductions proposed, there will be diminished capacity for system support and modernization, project management, infrastructure improvements, 311 customer service, and slower response times to employee concerns.

Projects that will be deferred or delayed include modernizing the city's phone system, developing an integrated accounts receivable and general billing platform, and certain AI tools that could streamline city processes and improve service delivery.

Within our planning department, there's a reallocation of eligible staff costs to the permit service center fund and other funds, reducing general fund spending with no immediate service changes.

There are also adjustments to internal service charges to a properly aligned with workload that will also generate additional general fund savings.

On to the charter offices.

So we received proposals from the charter offices, and you can see what they are here, and we provided you with all the background from the charter offices that we received.

I do want to note we did receive a proposal from the city attorney's office uh late last week, with personnel and non-personnel savings of about 250,000 dollars.

There's a non-personnel savings of 52,456, and then one uh position, a paralegal position that is currently filled that generates about 201,000 in savings.

The impact of these um proposals have not been built into this budget balancing plan in this budget because they came in uh just last week.

Uh, but we certainly will work with our city manager and city council to integrate them as we move forward.

And I'll turn it back over to Merikar to talk about workforce impacts.

Think thank you.

So all of those uh things that David talked about leads to this very slide, workforce impacts.

Uh, the city of Berkeley has a very personnel driven budget, and this really limited our balancing options, and this was probably the most difficult part of the budget balancing exercise.

About 70% of the general fund baseline budget um is for personnel.

So this really limited our ability to close our deficit through non-personnel cuts alone, and other funding sources face similar constraints.

During the budget balancing uh phase, departments really prioritized eliminating vacant positions and looking at other appropriate funding sources to reallocate positions whenever possible, and they only identified filled positions as a last resort with focus on preserving core services and to support long-term fiscal health.

The budget balancing plan, which um David spoke about, uh, includes 183 FTEs.

However, this proposed budget includes 150 FTE reduction, 45 of that uh is vacant from the prior fiscal year 26 budget balancing measure, and 85 vacant plus 20 filled in this biennium.

The remaining 33 FTEs um from the 183 in total are preserved.

And what we mean by that is that 15 of those uh 33 FTEs are vacant and 18 are filled, and they are preserved by using the one-time resources that I spoke about in prior slides, ensuring that these positions are funded in fiscal year 2027, and we're allocating this cost to the sales and use tax for fiscal year 2028.

The revenue is included in the projection, but however, if the measure does not pass in November, additional reduction will be required in the mid-annual budget update to balance.

The next three slides really just gives you a more detailed look at the cumulative reduction in force and this broken down by position.

So this includes 183 positions that I spoke about earlier, um, and this is cumulative with fiscal year 26 and 27 and 28.

This um is actually also included in that financial summaries that was uh part of this um item for tonight.

Let's see.

Mayor, did you want to pause here for questions?

Yeah, so because this presentation is so long, I wanted to pause during certain parts of it to allow us to ask some questions, so we're not just asking 100 questions each at the end of the night.

So um do you have uh does anyone have questions?

I want to start with council member taplin.

Uh yes, thank you very much.

I have four questions for budget uh fire, PD, and PRW.

Um so FY28 assumes a passage of the sales tax.

Do we have any draft projections of what things look like if it doesn't?

It's okay if we don't have those, but I just want to know if we do ask having projections of what?

If the sales tax doesn't pass, do we have any like draft numbers of what uh what deeper cuts you might have to make?

Do we have any kind of scenarios that we might point for nine point.

So we are currently allocating in fiscal year 27 9.4 million dollars of programs and services between police, fire, parks, recreation, and waterfront that goes up to about 9.6 million for fiscal year 2028.

So if the sales tax measure does not pass, assuming all else remains unchanged, we would have 9.6 million dollars of proposed budget reductions to address in fiscal year 28.

Thank you.

Um for PD, um Chief Lewis, I'm wondering if you can describe some of the work that the special units do and how CSB interacts with the community.

And you said public works as well.

So PRW.

Oh, PRW, sorry.

Yeah, of course.

Maybe if you want to start heading up this way.

So as you know, our patrol personnel do the immediate response to calls for service, all those other units that we mentioned the bike force, um, the community services bureau, the detective division, they're the ones that do the follow-on investigation or relieve the immediate tension um that the patrol officers would face if they had to handle those calls for service.

It allows us to engage with the business districts, the community, um, and ensure we have uh proper follow-up of investigations.

Thank you.

Um for fire excuse, can you talk about uh the street trauma prevention program and the neighborhood utility of the CERT trainings?

Sorry, what was the second part of the question?

Uh, second part was the neighborhood utility of the CERT trainings.

Yeah, so street trauma prevention program, I think everybody's somewhat familiar with it's a novel program started here.

I think it's the first in the nation where we're trying to integrate the fire department into the vision zero process for the city um and look at how we can achieve what are two righteous goals, both reducing street trauma and death and also maintaining or improving response time so we don't see an increase in injury and morbidity from uh on the emergency response side.

Uh let's see, cert.

So this is a long-standing community education program that helps repair individuals and drive neighborhood preparedness for all types of disasters.

Um, essentially operating under the idea that people are going to be on their own for 72 to 96 hours following a major disaster.

So there should be a personal preparedness plan and neighbors should come together to prepare uh for that period of time.

Thank you for uh director Ferris.

Um can you give us a sense of the number of uh community center and pool hours that would be reduced?

And how many families might be impacted by camp and after school reduction reductions?

I think um we had uh you know it depends on how you divide it up, but we had planned on one scenario means that we close the pool on weekends, reducing after-school spots by I think it was 35 or 45, and reducing a variety of uh summer, uh you know kind of low income uh camp spots and a variety of other programmatic changes.

Um, thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Moving on to Councilmember Bacabee.

Thanks, Madam Mayor, and thanks to everyone for being here.

Um, just to be really clear about the the next fiscal year budget.

So uh station four and the nine fire department personnel and the 15 police officers and six dispatchers that had been considered to have been reduced in the initial balancing plan, those are those are retained.

I just want to be crystal clear about that in the process, so so folks know.

That's correct, along with three positions in the parks, recreation, and water to waterfront department that will continue to maintain pool hours.

Yeah, so we know what's at stake, and we know that this is an option that's been considered, but for the next fiscal year, those those are all retained.

Okay.

Um, one kind of global question, maybe this for the city manager.

Um, you know, what we're seeing is certainly not unique to Berkeley.

We're seeing a lot of local jurisdictions, we're seeing the county, we're seeing city San Francisco that are struggling with these really big structural diff deficits.

Is there anything, you know, are there are there any other trends or things that are going on that we can look at there that apply, and how does that affect how we balance our budget here?

I mean, how much basically it's how much is this is local to Berkeley and how much is our other effects that we're trying to deal with?

Well, as you point out rightly, this is uh a phenomenon that we're seeing in a lot of other jurisdictions, as you said, ranging from San Francisco to Oakland to Alameda County to Hayward, San Leandro.

It's uh you we're seeing it happen all over.

And um, you know, there's different reasons for the deficits in different places.

Um, I think as the staff described here today, part of it on our side is um expenditures going up higher than revenues, driven by a lot of different forces, whether that's inflation related to whatever's going on COVID related, or in this case, we're anticipating more, you know, Iran war and and oil oil price related increases, and so uh there are a lot of different reasons, but it's um we're we're seeing similar deficits all over the bay area, and in the private sector too, yeah.

Um, on the homeless services side, it feels like one of the big elephants in the room when it comes to the budget is just what if anything's happening with measure w from the county and when we can expect funds or do we have any visibility?

I I just I find it incredibly difficult to budget when we don't really know what's happening there.

Could you speak a little to that?

I can, but not with a lot of comfort, unfortunately.

We also don't have a lot of insight into when the county's going to release various tranches and types of measure w resources.

You all have done a collectively as a council a good job advocating to the county for Berkeley's deeds.

We also on the staff side talk to staff uh in the county a lot, and so we do have good and open lines of communication.

I think partly they're just still figuring out on the county side also.

Would we expect that when the funds come that they are supplementary, or could some of that actually replace city spending?

I'm just is that free up city spending or how would how are we thinking about that?

Well, that it's a good question, and we we have really tried to make the case to the county on both of those sides of that equation.

Um, one you heard today that and you know that we have this fiscal cliff issue with the motels, and that has been something that we have really highlighted with the county to say, you know, we respect and appreciate that we want to do more and and create more programs and housing opportunities, but at the same time we we need to be thoughtful and cognizant of not adding to the problem by letting programs that we already have established and know work cease to exist.

And so we we've made that case quite clearly to them.

Um you all have helped make that case also, so they're very aware of it, and I and I'm hopeful that they they'll take that into account when they start figuring out how exactly they're gonna put forward the measure w funds.

Great.

Two more two more things, and then I'll I'll be done.

Um, on the fire side with Chief Sprague, um, some of the feedback we've gotten certainly from residents, um, in addition to obviously opposing the closing of the fire station, which I which I share.

I couldn't I could not vote for a budget that closed station for.

But folks are asking about uh, you know, we passed measure GG in 2008, we passed measure FF in 2020, but the fire department is also significantly supported by the general fund.

Um, just help us kind of again understand the sources of funding and why we can't just rely on FF and GG to fund kind of the overall fire department efforts and why why general fund is an important part of that?

So the fire department I think fairly uniquely is um 30% funded by special funds.

So our general fund budget has now um about 90% of it is pays for sworn staff operating out of firehouses, whereas most of the administrative functions have um been shifted to these special funds over the years, primarily because they've either stopped and then be restarted when these special funds were passed by the voters or services were expanded by the voters that are paid for exclusively by these special funds.

So when we're talking about a general fund deficit and reduction in the general fund, um there's not a lot of positions that are possible to cut um that don't directly impact service delivery.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, it's like so 30% of your budget is from the special funds, but 70% is still from the general fund.

Correct.

So that's yeah, part of what's happening is the majority of your funding still comes from the general fund.

It does more than that.

But because of all those administrative services have been pushed to special funds, 90% of that uh general fund allocation is paying for people that are in the firehouses delivering service.

Got it, okay.

Last last one.

Um a PRW question, it's actually a PRW to fire connected question.

Um, and we've talked about this before.

I notice one small bullet point in the PRW um slide was reduction in spending on fire fuel work.

Obviously, that's important to D6.

Can you talk about that?

How sizable is that?

And is that something we could figure out a way to at least restore some of?

The reduction typically in the last couple budget cycles, we've gotten $450,000 to do vegetation management and tree removal in the right-of-way in the hills.

And this year we with the cut, we'll probably eliminate all the tree removal.

I think the money started coming in in 2016, and that uh we're in pretty good shape there.

Um and so the remaining, I think the proposing not to cut the 223,000 will go into vegetation removal in the hills.

Okay.

And that might look different in fiscal 28 than 27.

It would be the same.

Maintain 27.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Um Councilmember O'Keefe.

Thank you.

Um I think this question's for the WDC city manager, or maybe Chief Sprague.

Um, I was wondering if you could speak a little more about how the decision was made to target um station four for potential closure.

Yeah.

Um there's no good firehouse to close.

Each firehouse has um a huge impact.

The way we landed on station four was it's the second to second slowest station, station seven on Shasta is the slowest station, but it's so isolated.

Well, if we close that station, response times would be so much longer, and also um I can only cover it from one from one side from the west from station four, whereas station four is the second slowest station, I can cover it from three sides.

Seven can come down the hill, station two can come from downtown, and station six can come from the west.

So if there was a station to close, it you want to close a little lower volume station because all those calls don't go away, they have to be redistributed to other companies, and then you look at how can I fill that hole, fill the gap that's left.

Do you have um have you done an analysis or do you have an estimate on how long um how much longer it would take the average response for uh the real work?

Unfortunately, we don't have that type of technology like at our fingertips.

Yeah, I wasn't sure if that was mathematically modelable.

Um, I was wondering if um any alternatives um like did you consider perhaps trying to save the same amount of money by distributing the staff reductions in a different way, like um uh like a more like a brownout model or like um, you know, reductions sort of across the board rather than closing a station.

Yeah, I mean, closing a fire station to us is kind of the nuclear option.

Um we looked at every other scenario.

Uh brownouts, keep in mind that's savings via overtime.

So you're not saving full staff costs there, you're only saving the difference between what it costs per person to staff full time and what it costs to backfill that vacancy with overtime.

So it's a much lower uh savings, and um in order to reach the three and a half million dollar target, we'd have to close upwards of two fire stations a day with the brownout model, which just isn't feasible.

Okay, um second to last question.

Do you how many residents in the high fire zone are currently served by station four?

Is that I mean I don't need an exact number, but do you have a sense?

Uh I can get it, I'm not sure.

Okay, some some many.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to venture to guess, but um thousands for sure.

Okay.

Okay.

Um thank you for the those answers.

Um, yeah, this is very concerning, and I I didn't know you share the concern, but it's just good to um for the public and for us to get an understanding of how this decision was made.

So thank you.

Um I just would like to clarify um also for the record, this is more of a procedural question.

You know, obviously we're not gonna vote on this budget tonight.

Uh we're not we're we're way from far away from that, but um let's say this was the proposal that we voted on.

Um, you know, the the idea of closing the station is a it's a projected outcome for the next fiscal year.

So is it true to say that if um if we did pass this proposal or something like it, um that we would have another chance to vote on actually closing the station the following year, like we it comes back.

If you could help us understand that process, I'm not sure.

Yeah, I mean, I can start it.

Yes.

So the short answer is that our hope is that the sales and use tax in November passes and we don't have to have that conversation.

That's that's the plan.

Um if that fails and we're back here having that conversation, we would immediately start planning on well, what would that look like?

And so then we would be having another series of um budget and finance committee meetings where we're talking about that budget hearings here, preparing for what's what's the fiscal year 28 budget look like, and we'd have to decide that obviously between um November and June.

And the council would get another chance to weigh in on that.

Correct.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, because I think like I think Council Member Black could be said, I'm I'm not comfortable voting on a budget that would actually um close the fire station, but I understand this is sort of this is a projection, sort of a loose plan for next year, and we'll hopefully won't have to figure that out.

But that's that's helpful to have that clarified the procedurally.

Thank you so much.

And just to reinforce the city manager's point and the point Merrick Armade about our budget projections, the fiscal year 28 revenues assume the sales and use tax measure passes.

Of course, yes, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Um Vice Mayor Tregub.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Uh I have five questions.

Some of these um I've asked before in committee, but I thought it would be valuable for the public's benefit to ask them here.

Others are new.

Uh three of them are related to HHCS, um, specifically mental health and behavioral health.

So I don't know if um uh who the appropriate um person would be who's available to answer these, but I will just step through these.

Um I wanted to um ask about the impacts of uh moving uh certain uh funding for like mental health and public health to the county um uh specifically um I just need the percentage generally what percentage of the funding streams um come from the general fund versus those that are passed through through the county or other revenue sources.

Um I am certainly not advocating um closing any department uh just just to be clear so that but since we have received some questions uh what or I have received questions from constituents uh if we were to move all of our public health functions to the county, would that even be possible and would it save any money?

Um could you uh speak to that?

The first part of your question, are you asking specifically what percentage um general fund supports public health and mental health?

I believe our fiscal manager is also online, and song.

I'm online and I'm working on test calculations right now, and I can try to provide them sometime during this meeting.

I can say at a high level, council member, that part of your question was what would the process be?

It would it would be a uh complicated process where we'd have to get authority from the state and authority from uh work out an agreement with the county.

As you're alluding to there, there is general fund subsidy in in public health, mental health, and environmental health.

And so, you know, one of the questions that would that would be asked of of all of us is okay, if we were to transition the public health division to the county, um, what part of that what part of that city subsidy would go along with it, if any, and and we would just have to be clear-eyed that if the answer was none, then we'd be understanding here's here's what we're not funding anymore.

And so the budget and finance manager can come can speak a little bit to that later on in the meeting about how much that is, and and if you want, we could come back with more detail about specifically what programs we're talking about.

Yeah, thank you for um my understanding based on past conversations is any savings would be somewhat minuscule as a proportion of the overall budget to fund uh mental and behavioral health, but I just wanted to confirm that.

Um, okay, my next question is um around the operational impact of um discontinuing mobile crisis and um the county picking up that function.

Uh if I am um walking in the district as I do every day, and I see a mentor health call and or a mentor health uh situation.

Um, do I have options available to me around calls for service or uh other than uh PD, or do I call um 911 or the non-emergency line um depending on what the issue is?

So yeah, mobile crisis uh services would go to the county.

Um and my understanding is that the county would be your option there.

And this is a probably a longer conversation, not to but um around how would the public be informed what number to call if they want a call to go to the county.

Um moving on, um, I wanted to ask what direct or indirect impacts to behavioral and mental health services um there might be uh as a result of the governors may revise.

And specifically, are there aspects?

I know it just came out, so um really this is a question of how um to the extent you've had a chance to look, does it impact any of the projections uh positively or negatively?

Yeah, the mayor revise budget just came out, so we haven't um taken that into account and um it's not finalized.

Um, so especially as it pertains to behavioral health monies.

Okay, thank you.

Um this is um my penultimate question.

Um can you speak broadly?

Um, this might be for uh David.

Um when it comes to revenue generating positions that may be at risk of being um cut.

Um how uh projections being made in terms of um the opportunity, the potential opportunity costs of then not being having staff available to apply for certain grants or to realize additional uh revenue generating opportunities.

I mean, I'll start off with, you know, in developing the budget balancing plan and looking at our revenue projections.

We did not anticipate any impact to our revenue projections from the budget balancing plan.

However, you know, there is reduced staffing um that is proposed in the budget balancing plan that will impact our ability to go after grants.

We're trying to preserve some resources to maintain our flexibility to do so, but it won't be as broad as it is today.

Um, you know, in terms of other revenue opportunities, as we mentioned, there are two uh positions in the finance department.

Um they're vacant today, they've been vacant for some time, uh, but if they were filled, they certainly could enhance our ability uh to generate revenue as well.

Um so those are some of the things that we uh we're looking at.

Thank you.

Um my last question is around um, you know, later on this agenda we will be voting on potential uh fee increases.

Um you're gonna have some of my time.

Okay, thank you.

Um can you just confirm that uh the current budget uh assumptions does not factor in uh those fee increases um uh and what if if that is the case, uh what may be the impact directly or indirectly on the budget projections if we do not uh approve the recommended fee increases tonight?

So the the fiscal 2027 fees that we'll be discussing later are not included in our proposed budget, and therefore if they do pass and we start receiving revenue, uh we will then have a better idea, and that will be implemented in the 2028 new annual budget update.

Thank you.

Those are all my questions.

Thank you.

Excuse me.

We have a few count a couple council members left.

I want to remind folks we're only a third of the way done with this presentation, so if you could keep your comments brief, we will we will keep getting back to it.

All right, council member Bartlett.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and uh thank you for this um uh very sobering and uh of course very alarming uh budget.

Um, question about the uh Mr.

Sprague, are you here still?

Yeah.

Um this is regarding the uh the forest station closure.

Right.

Um so how does the the budget string work?

Because I'm thinking about the measure FFs of the world and the the things that we worked hard to provide would felt like direct funding to BFT.

What's the interplay there?

To this budget reduction process.

Yeah.

So the budget reduction exercise was there's a general fund deficit, so cut 12 and 10 or 12 and a half percent from the general fund.

Uh we looked at, you know, the there is some cost shifting that we did do to UC funds, measure GG and measure FF, but we were very careful to stay within the confines of um how those measures were written.

Um alternatively, we we could have legally gone in and taken the full, you know, six million out of those measures, but then um our feeling was we were kind of um going back on the promises that we made to the voters when they passed those measures for expanded services.

Um if we were to use those funds and supplant uh general fund dollars, if that makes sense.

Okay, I think so.

I think that made sense actually.

Um, to watch it later and break it down again.

Um yeah, very, very uh very disturbing.

Um is the HCS person here online?

Yes, I'm oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Excellent.

Hey, so um regarding the significant cuts to your department.

Um I'm wondering um if if any of those cuts are restored via the proposed bond measures and tax sales tax measure that we are contemplating um putting for voters.

I don't believe any of our will defer to you on that.

I guess Mr.

White, would you know that?

Can you repeat the question, please?

Uh regarding the the um HSCS officers who are who are who are cutting of the plan, does the does the sales tax and the bond measure um restore any of those or any of the services uh performed therein?

No, the sales and use tax measure only supports um within the police department, the officers and dispatchers, buyer station four, and then three position and parks recreation and waterfront uh to preserve community um programs.

Okay.

That's all for now.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Um, was there another council member?

Did you no?

Okay.

Thanks.

Um, okay, I want to get back to the presentation, and I also am wondering if the tally's done so that we can finish that off so folks can leave.

The tally is done.

We just need to they just need to get over here and confirm it.

Yeah, they have to, you know, put it all together.

And they'll bring it over here for me to sign.

We also need to open the other public hearings before 10 p.m., yeah.

Um okay, so what I want to do is I'm gonna say first, I'm going to open all of the public hearings for the remaining items.

That is item 20.

Do you need me to read them all or can I just 22 the animal care services fee schedule, 23 the neighborhood services code and forth and fee schedule, 24 changes to the environmental fee, health fee schedule, 25 fees, health housing and community services facility rental fees, 26 changes to selected recreational recreation facilities, and program fees 27 changes to the planning and development fee schedule, 28.

Repeal and reenact Berkeley Municipal Code Chapter 14.52 to adjust the Go Berkeley parking management program, change parking permit fees, establish a new schedule for parking violations, fines, and late payment penalties, and rescind resolution number seven one, six two seven-NS, and twenty-nine zero waste plan checks and compliance inspections fees.

Those are now all open so before 10 o'clock.

So um, and then I think we still haven't gotten that.

So what I'm gonna do is gonna go back to the presentation and hopefully you finish another third.

Go ahead.

So this next section is focusing on the general fund.

We wanted to show you the trajectory of the general fund from the baseline development all the way to what we're proposing right now as the proposed budget.

So for 2027, um, the baseline, the revenue projection was 297.2 million uh personnel expenditure at the time was 225.5 million, non-personnel came in at 105 million, uh, a total expenditure of 329.5 million.

So we were looking at a deficit of 32.3 million dollars.

Do we need to stop there here?

Um the fiscal year 20.

Oh wait, yeah, go back.

Thank you.

One more.

Oh no, okay, that's fine.

And with the fiscal year 2027 proposed, what we are presenting to you today, tonight is a revenue of 314.9 million dollars, and the total expenditure of 313.9 million.

We're actually um have a surplus of 981,000.

And the proposed surplus is subject to change obviously at the butt as the budget is refined.

Um the current estimate reflects a combination of the revised revenue projection from February 2026, uh routine budget cleanup that occurs working with departments.

We added a one-time general fund resources to the revenue, as well as an increase in indirect cost charges and implementing the budget balancing items.

This slide uh talks about the same thing, but for fiscal year 2027, the baseline revenue at the time was 302.3 million.

The total expenditure came in at 335.6 million, and we were looking at a deficit of 33.2 million dollars.

After the revised revenue, the budget balancing, and um typical budget process cleanup.

The proposed includes a revenue of $320.3 million dollars, total expenditure at $319.6 million with a surplus of almost $700,000.

So this slide talks about what changed from 27 and 28 baseline versus 2027 and 2028 proposed, and it breaks it down a little bit more than the prior slides.

And what this really talks about is this is all personnel, and it goes tells you the decreases from those major cost drivers under the personnel category.

So health and retiree, other pension salaries, workers' compensation, and overtime.

And it really just highlights that the bulk of our reduction came from our personnel costs.

Try to catch up.

General fund revenue by category.

So this is a breakdown of the revenues that we receive.

We receive we have a lot of revenue sources from the general fund, so we categorize some of them.

Those are our top revenue generating, which is why I spent a little bit of time earlier talking about the state measure that might be on the ballot this November.

This slide shows a breakdown of our expenditure by department.

So the city, the city clerk's budget shows uh a million dollars more than what was in the budget balancing plan.

That's because we kept that one million dollars to preserve it for the known increases in our property and liability insurance.

The city manager budget decreased more than what was in the budget balancing plan because we are moving the whole budget for the animal services to its own fund, fund 115 animal shelter fund, and then departmental increased because we are transferring out money from the general fund to fund 115, and also just a slight note that the library does not get any, typically does not get any general fund allocation, and the rent board um gets an annual fixed amount of 370,000 dollars.

Our biggest cost driver for the general fund, and it's no surprise that it's public safety, then HHCS.

There's also general government, which is administrative, our legal department, so that's city manager, mayor council, HR, IT, city audits, all the charter offices, finance, and non-departmental is also a big cost driver, and that typically is um transfer outs from the general fund to other funds.

One of the examples of that is um the 13 million dollars or so that we transfer annually from to the CIP fund for uh $4 point million dollars of annual baseline and that $8 million plus CPI for the PCI improvement.

This is just another look of the proposed um general fund by expenditure, but it's broken down by category.

So I wanted to point out um that the biggest driver again is salaries.

Can you guys hear me?

Is salaries and the next point is I wanted to point out that the capital outlay is significantly smaller than prior years, and that's because this budget cycle, we did not have any one-time allocation to um capital projects that stems from the general fund.

Some of you who've been here before are familiar with the term tier one, where we would have general fund um funding available and we would allocate those to one-time uh programs or projects.

This time around, we do we did not have that opportunity in this proposed budget.

Thanks.

This is another one of our like little pauses.

Does anyone have any questions?

Yep, go ahead.

Uh oh, sorry.

I think uh, yeah, Councilmember Taplin.

Okay, Councilmember Linopara.

Thank you.

I'll just have a quick question about the vacancy tax.

Um, and if that's in the other tax section, I just didn't see it on the list.

Yes, it's in the um other taxes.

And did it did the vacancy tax underperform or overperform this year?

Like where is it on the uh our finance director can speak more specifically?

I understand for this fiscal year we had I think two million dollars budgeted, and right now we've collected about four hundred thousand was the last time I checked.

I haven't seen the most recent uh monthly numbers.

Um if Director Oyakame has anything updated, he can strongly we have about half a million.

We've received about uh half a million dollars it's underperforming.

Is that because um property owners aren't paying it that have vacant units or because there are less vacant units than previously?

Um combination of both.

Um this is the first time we're building it, um, and we we are partnering with the rent board, the REM boat send us uh um the two departments that are working on it.

The REM board sends us who to build and we build them, and so we've been having um issues with maybe the the building itself and the collection piece.

But this is the first time we're doing it, and so we are in the middle of looking at one of one of the reasons why are we not bidding enough, or if the assumptions we had was was wrong, whether the information we had about how, how, or whether the the rental people are actually doing their renting uh were not having enough um vacancy as we thought they would have, but we're looking at it to review why it's not performing as we proposed.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Taplin.

Thank you.

And um, for my edification, can you clarify how slash why there would be a surplus if we have a structural deficit?

Clarify what again?

How there would be a surplus if we have a deficit.

Do you want me to answer that?

So we started off with a general fund deficit.

However, after we did a budget balancing measure, plus the application of the one-time use of the 12.045 billion dollar one-time revenue and the um changes in indirect cost charges, among other things, we ended up with uh a very small amount of uh of um no longer a deficit but a surplus.

Thank you.

Um had we considered using that to replenish some of the one-time borrowing that we did, or so-called one-time borrowing that we've previously done from let's say the pension trusts or the workers' compund.

No, no, we didn't, council member.

We as budget manager by I said, we're concerned about some uh expenses coming in higher than we thought.

For example, the insurance came in, I don't know, quite a lot higher than than budgeted, and we think there might there's going to be some other ones behind that one.

Right.

So we want that for to account for volatility.

Exactly.

Yes, to address some of those issues, the the challenges and unknowns um that we talked about earlier.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilmember Bakabe.

Two questions.

Um first um around the sales tax.

So our fiscal twenty-eight proposed revenue, that assumes a full year of the sales tax, is that right?

Correct.

Okay.

Um so without the sales tax, we and we've again we think that's around eight or nine million.

I think that's uh 9.64.

Okay.

So just looking at fiscal 27 versus 28 revenue.

Without the sales tax, our fiscal 28 revenue would actually be 31.

And fiscal 27 revenue is 314.

So without the sales tax, we're actually projecting a reduction in revenue year over year.

Do we know kind of what's driving that?

Is that a Henry question?

If Henry's there, I'm just curious year over year, what's what's happening to cause us to project a reduction in revenue if there's any one or two particular things.

Um we know we're all the projections that we have for the next five years.

There's just imaginal rate of revenues, like about 2.3 uh 3%.

We there's no reduction in revenues from well for the next five years that we have.

Did you just imagine the rate of return is what we have?

So for 27, um, I think we projecting uh we changed that, and then it's like 310 for 28 or 31, and then it's 318 for 29, and it's 325 for 2030.

So on our five-year projections, like about two to three percent increase in revenues.

Okay.

I was just observing on that slide between fiscal 27 and fiscal 28.

If you subtract out the sales tax in fiscal 28, it looks like anyway, just take a look at that.

That's a really good observation, and and yes, uh, because in 2027, we incorporated in the revenue the uh one-time the 12.05 million dollar for the one-time use.

That kind of in 27.

And that's not included in 2028.

It did, yes.

Last thing, um, non-personal expenditures.

So even after again, we've gone through this exercise, we're trying to reduce where we can.

Baseline to proposed in both 2728, like non-personal expenditures or forecast increase, is that where we're seeing the things like increased insurance and some of these, like, you know, everything else is coming down.

You know, personal expenditures are down seven percent, total expenditures are down 4.7%, but non-personnel expenditures are up a million dollars even after this sort of budget balancing exercise.

Just curious again, what's driving, yeah, what's driving that?

If we know uh our non-departmental, because we we did uh move some we increase our general fund non-departmental again uh to offset some of the uh animal services uh move.

We also uh increase our non departmental to uh predict some UAL costs due to because UAL cost is a fixed cost, no matter how many staffing, how many FTEs we have.

So we did a a very you know rough estimate of how much we would still need to pay, um, even if we we lose um FTEs, and there's uh and other various various things that we added.

We did tell and there's this unexpected insurance.

I know there's other things that we've seen.

Um in 2027 and 28, even though we in the baseline we we treated up what we have budgeted in the past for insurance, um then US estimate we we received is still about half a million dollars more than the increase that we have already implemented in our 2027 budget.

And this is for things like seismic fire, you know, just kind of okay, thank you.

Thank you so much.

I'm sorry, I have in my rush to continue us on.

I didn't get to ask two questions for both chiefs.

Um, one of the question is maybe chief or David, um, can you clarify which of the specialty units will shrink and which ones will end?

Um, I just wasn't clear on that slide.

Yeah, so um most of our units are already working at reduced staffing just from attrition we've had over the years.

Uh we would get to the place where we'd have to make the assessment about whether we just continue to shrink them and try to keep them all open, um, but but relatively ineffectual or or close one together.

We haven't got to the point where we we we've uh really laid out what that exact decision making would be.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Um, and then for Chief Sprague, can you just speak to just follow up on what council member topping was asking about the street trauma prevention position?

Like how has that been working?

Is there currently anyone in that seat?

Can you just talk a little bit about that, please?

Sure.

Yeah, it's it's a filled position.

Uh Ronia's here in the audience, and um it is it's an exciting program because it's new because this is an issue across the country where fire departments and vision zero uh employees and in public works and advocates in the community are kind of coming into conflict often when everybody's focused on saving lives.

Um but it it's it's a difficult situation.

So we're trying to create a program that can deconflict that, bring people together that find themselves at odds in this situation, and uh the work that's coming out of um STP and that Ronnie's doing is is novel.

It's from everything.

I'll put it this way.

But until Ranya came, I was the only one that had time to think about this stuff in our department.

So there's just nobody to do this work.

So she's helping move things forward that are as simple as adopting um a modified speed hump that allows us to pass that many other jurisdictions already have in place.

Uh, to as complex as um having numerous groups of Cal students work on a variety of different projects around technology, um, community perception.

So all kinds of interesting work is is really starting to flow out of that program right now.

Um, and unfortunately, all that would stop because there's it would it go back to just me being able to focus on it when I have time to answer your question?

Yeah, thank you.

I appreciate that.

That's helpful.

Um okay, and in the theme of making this an even more confusing meeting, we are gonna pause this really quickly so that we can take care of this item that we had not finished earlier.

Now that we have gotten the tabulation um of the votes, and uh was the were city clerk.

Were you able to prepare and sign the certification?

Yes, so uh um the city received 175 ballots.

Um the staff um reviewed and tabulated those ballots.

Uh 170 of which were valid.

Uh they are weighted by the um proportional financial obligation of the affected property, how much of the assessment that they'll pay, and um the weighted tabulation of the ballots is um yes 81.53 percent and no, 18.47%.

Um the uh the bid can be um renewed.

So there's the two actions on item 20.

Um there's the resolution um reestablishing um the downtown um downtown bid for a 10 year period, and then the second resolution authorizes city manager to execute the contract with the DBA um for the the 10-year period as well, move the staff recommendations.

Thank you.

Did you have another comment, Councilmember, or was that it?

That's it.

Okay, is there a a second a second from council member Casarwani?

Um, did you were you gonna say something, Councilmember Barn?

All right, very good.

Um, can we please take um take the roll on this?

Okay, to approve the recommendations to re-establish the downtown Berkeley property-based business improvement district.

Councilmember Kisserwani.

Yes.

Taplin, I Bartlett, yes, Dregum, I.

O'Keefe, yes, Lackaby, yes, Lunapara, yes, Humber.

Yes, and Mayor Ishi.

Yes, okay, motion carries.

Okay, thank you all so much.

Now you can leave.

Um, all right.

So thanks everyone.

All right.

Back to the budget.

Sorry everyone I know this is very confusing.

All right.

Let's finish off the last third of this unless you have another question right now or you have a quick question.

Yeah okay.

I know and and this is something that's that's been on my mind for a while trying to just kind of quantitatively think about the assessment of of you know position cuts right position eliminations etc versus the cost uh I guess the medical kind of wear and tear on the body from overtime or early retirement or burnout.

I'm trying to just have you have you thought about that or other people that think about those numbers.

Well it's it's an interesting point because it's it's the same thing we discussed if we cut our staffing levels to a minimum just to fill minimum staffing then any absence requires overtime to fill it that's what we're experiencing in our communication center right now.

And we we do see a lot more end of career uh um workers comp related injuries or stress related injuries as a result of it we see um what we experience is some degradation in the quality of service we can provide uh you know by the officers because they're they're tired the communication center is tired the officers are tired so absolutely that's a that's a real factor that we look at when we uh look at how we address the budget deficit um with the the money we have to save which is in personnel is is there some sort of Berkeley inspired smart ratio of sort of overtime balance with you know not adequate staffing but some sort of marginal um balance between available staff and amount of overtime that functions kind of well we know a couple things to be true one is that um even at a set staffing level you have 10 to 15 percent that are gone for injury vacation training time off and whatever so that's that's one um allowance you have to consider um the the other thing that we know is that um the uh the the balance of the the cost it for an FTE and the salary savings you might experience by not hiring um which then is has to be um filled by a position doing a minimum staffing for overtime creates an automatic deficit a structural deficit in the way that our our system works um we know a couple other things too which is that uh we have been able to work within our budget so our patrol um division which is the largest uh financial driver of our overtime that's our biggest division the division that has the minimum staffing um they are able to work year over year pretty close to at their budget so we know that there's just a certain cost of business of unexpected calls um needs for training um wellness um needs for the officers that that cause you to have some amount of overtime the unpredictability of it um in other situations like our communication center uh we're over 300 percent over our budget because of of how um decimated we are in staffing in in that unit and those things are harder to absorb um and so as you're looking at how you can like I said look at salary savings to cover um or reduce your minimum staffing or the way you staff a unit when you know you have a bare minimum that is required to do the work um if you if you get too close to that margin then then you then you force overtime which has a negative health effect negative service effect and also um raises up your over your overall cost question is is that is that a similar sort of um understanding around uh the dispatch the dispatch personnel because the you know that they're they they're stretched as well uh do they do overtime or how does that work yeah, we have a significant amount of overtime that's mandated for our communication center.

They have been understaffed for a very long time uh working under very hard conditions um that is uh like I said, they're 300% over their normal budget because of how how how narrow that that margin is.

Thank you.

All right, let's finish off this last chunk fees.

So this next section is talking about all funds, so not just general fund, but it does include our general fund.

It's broken down by categories.

So capital project funds is at um $34 million for 2027 for 2028 is at 34.3.5 million for both enterprise funds, which is one of our biggest funding sources for the city, comes in at 137.2 million dollars for 2027 and 140 uh for 2028, and general funds is 327.7 in 27 and 333.2 at 2020 in 2028.

I want to pause here to explain for those of you who can recall that the general fund revenue we mentioned earlier is like 314 in 2027 and 320 in 2028.

This general fund, all funds includes the whole general fund family, and so that includes funds anywhere from measure U1 as well as our payroll deduction trust.

So the whole general fund family is included in here.

That's why there's a discrepancy in the number.

The grant funds is at 42.5 for 2027 and 42 for 2028.

Our ISF or internal service funds at 51.7 million in 27 and 51.7 in 2028, other funds at 15.4 and uh in both in 27 and 28, and special funds is at 155.8 in 2027 and 148 in 2028, totaling 772 million um in 2027 and 773 million in 2028.

This is just the same information, um, but broken down just to see the bulk of our all fund sources.

Um, the number one source is coming from the general fund and at 42 percent, and coming in next is our special funds at 20 percent, enterprise funds at 18 percent.

So those three funding funding sources alone combine 80 percent of all of our funding sources for the city of Berkeley.

We're now moving on to the expenditure side of all funds, and this is broken down by department.

So uh for this is a little bit different.

I just wanted to show how vast um the services we provide in our funding sources instead of just focusing on the general fund.

So in general fund, um, the number one um expense source was public safety in terms of department, but now it's it's flipped a little bit.

Um public works is 26 percent, HHCS is at 18 percent, police is at 12 percent, non-departmentals at 11 percent, and general government at 10 percent, uh fire at 8% and PRW at 6%.

This slide shows a difference between baseline and proposed.

So for 27 baseline was 832.2 million dollars, um, and the base and the proposed here is 95.2 million dollars.

So that's a huge increase of about 73 million dollars for fiscal year 2028.

Um the baseline all funds was at 848.1 million, um, and in the proposed budget it is 865.3.

So that's a difference of 17.2 million dollars.

So I just want to address the um examples of the increases in the nonpersonnel.

So um we open up the budget to the departments after developing the baseline because they know their funds that they manage best.

There's measure O's 27 million dollars.

There's also a capital programs that have been um budgeted.

That's where there's a huge increase in non-personnel.

For example, measure FF Streets is a good example.

There's a 29 million dollar addition from baseline to proposed.

Another one is for another 14.5 million dollars just in overall capital projects.

Some of the decreases come from fiscal year 27-28, the CIP fund is about two million dollars decrease.

We talked about their stressed fund.

So public works did a really good job cost-shifting that uh fund 501 personnel cost to other appropriate funding sources.

Do we need to pause?

We're not gonna pause.

So this is um the next section is about staffing.

We we kind of touched on this um during the first part of this presentation, but this breaks it down more into uh detail of what we are looking at.

So the the full-time equivalent total is 1,604 or 1,605 FTEs.

The largest departments are public works, police, HHCS, and FIRE.

The general fund supports uh 663 FTEs or 41%, and all of the other funds support 941 FTEs, totaling 59%.

This total of 1,605 almost includes the library and the rent board, excluding these two, and we only talk about charter offices and city manager managed departments.

The total goes down to about 1,445 FTEs.

And as you can see, we had 1,504 FTEs in 2024, and in 2027-28, we uh with the proposed budget, we have 1,604.

I want to point out that the highest uh increase in our FTE came between from 2022 to 2023, where our workforce increased by 8.7 percent or 127 or 128 FTEs.

The 2027 and 2028 proposed staffing level decreased by 9.3 percent of or 164.3 FTEs compared to 2026.

This proposed budget, as mentioned earlier, uh reflects a reduction of 150 FTEs from the budget balancing plan, and the 33 FTEs um from the 183 total that we mentioned is preserved for the meantime.

So that concludes our presentation.

So we're gonna talk about next steps and discussion.

So before we go into discussion, we just wanted to briefly talk about timeline and expectations.

So we're here today to talk about, we presented the proposed budget.

On May 28th, we are going back to budget and finance policy committee to talk about the CIP, the five-year CIP, and also the mayor's budget recommendations.

On June 9th, we are going back to the full council to present the five-year CIP.

June 16th is a potential discontinued discussion in front of all of you regarding both the biannual budget and the five-year CIP, because at by that time you would have all um seen and heard we would have presented them, and then hopefully June 23rd.

Um, we are going to adopt the uh 27-28 biannual budget and the five-year CIP.

And just looking ahead, July 1st, the fiscal year 2027 begins, and the budget balancing plan that's adopted, whatever form that is, will will take into effect.

And July 2nd, um, employees being impacted um by the adopted budget receives notices.

So we're now ready for a discussion of the proposed budget.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh I think we actually have questions first.

Um, so are there any other questions for this last section of the budget?

Um I will start with Council Vice Mayor Traegup.

Thank you.

Uh this is just a request um on slide 36.

No, I'm sorry, on uh, whichever I guess slide 34.

When you talked about the discrepancy between the general fund and the general fund plus family of other funds, um uh if it might be possible to share a breakdown of all of those funds, um I would be interested in seeing a tabulation of that.

I'm not it might have been in the budget book, and if so, I apologize.

I didn't see it there.

Um also on slide 37.

Um, the uh accounting of how non-personnel uh expenditures increased from the baseline to proposed um I would benefit from seeing a graphical representation of the cost shifting to get there.

Thank you.

We'll get it, okay.

Yeah, thank you for sure.

I wasn't sure if you wanted to address that.

All right, and uh um was there another question?

Okay, anyone else questions?

No.

Um we will go on to our public comment on this item.

If you have public comments on item number 21, which is the proposed FY2027, FY2028 biannual budget, and proposed biannual budget public hearing number one.

Please come on up.

Yeah, I think I have a couple of minutes over here.

Okay, one, two, is there a third minute, please?

There's one online.

There's one online.

Uh the last name is DJ Kowski.

Okay.

Theodore.

Yes.

Theodore, are you okay with giving your minute?

I'm gonna assume yes.

Go ahead.

Okay, good evening, honorable mayor and members of the city council.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Justin Pitcher, and I'm a recreation program supervisor in the parks recreation and waterfront department.

Here to speak tonight in my capacity as president of public employees union local one after me.

Before unite is the first reading of the budget.

It has been a long ride to get here, but at the same time our work has just begun.

My representational unit stands to lose 20 positions, five of which are currently filled.

Proposed cuts include one in engineering, two in mental health, one in the waterfront, and one in the fire department, subject to bumping.

Many of our team are here in Stall of Solidarity tonight.

Earlier tonight, you heard from one of our members, Abby from the Rent Board, who stands to lose your position through the bumping process, having received an impact notice just weeks after joining the city team.

I want to reiterate that the city decided to fill this position, and Abby brought her family to Berkeley, giving up stable employment to serve our amazing community with an implied insurance that the city intended to fill the position it advertised for the long haul.

Also in the audience tonight is Ranya, who serves as the program manager and only staff member to the pilot project for the street trauma prevention team.

Through her work, we're on the cutting edge of making a difference across Berkeley.

Her program will cease to exist with the elimination of her position as Chief Sprague has indicated that he has no other staffing to shift the program to the city's in the current process of applying for a grant that would fund this program over the next four years starting in July of fiscal 20 or of 20 calendar 2027.

Eliminating this program now is very short-sighted.

These are but two stories of public service that will be lost in the budget elimination process.

All budget reductions have an immediate impact on the services we provide across the city.

As you can imagine, this is a trying time to be a member of the City of Berkeley team.

Tensions are high.

Uncertainty is next level, and expressed feelings make some days at the office unbearable for those of us that continue to give our all to fulfill the duties of our assignments and more.

We're an amazing group of dedicated individuals who serve our constituents day in and day out around the clock.

As we progress over the next six weeks, and we work hand in hand with the council to ultimately adopt a budget in time for the June 30th deadline.

We ask that the council uh act with care for all of us, especially those who provide the services that are on the table for elimination through the budget and finance committee process.

The union has continued to uphold its commitment to being a partner in balancing the budget.

Furthermore, we are grateful uh for the partnership forged by the esteemed city manager through his union leadership budget meetings and are looking forward to continuing that partnership with each of you.

Keep an eye out in your email for our meeting requests.

Well, each of us is a civil servant.

We're also members of society, members of families, and upstanding citizens who stand to lose a lot through these reductions.

Tonight the council celebrated the work that many of our members provide.

We are the managers and supervisors that make man that make public works happen.

We are the engineers that built Willard Clubhouse.

We are the analysts and admin and fiscal services managers that have made the hard recommendations to make these cuts that are impacting city services.

We all are the boots on the ground that engage with our community every single day.

In closing, I urge the city council to look at each of your employees as real people and not a statistic on a budget spreadsheet.

Think of our families and those we support in each hard decision ahead.

Plan to work within our means and work today to protect services tomorrow.

We can't change the past, but we can prepare for a more stable Berkeley tomorrow on be um and on behalf of the hardworking members of public employees union local one asked me.

I thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Um, I'm Leah Simon Weisberg.

I live in District 2.

I serve on the Housing Advisory Commission.

Um, I'm here tonight because um there are several projects in district two that are ready for funding from the small sites.

We don't have enough money for any of those sites, and so we have housing that is being put at risk.

Um, last year, last time we did the budget.

Um, you know, when you look at the coverage, we talked a lot about small sites.

Um, we didn't have the money was not placed in that, and now we've not been able to have fund projects.

Um, I think I know you're balancing a lot of different things, but I think just to echo the situation that the county is placing us in, and that they they are not ensuring that we can fund programs that we know work, and we're gonna lose them.

The same thing is happening with small sites.

It's a program that really really works, but you have to actually fund it.

Please, please protect what we have, and if possible, add so we actually have enough for the projects.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have one volunteer to cede her time to me.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I'm Rebecca Webb, and I am the chapter president of the clerical chapter, and I'm here representing both the maintenance and clerical chapters today.

Can you talk into the mic, sorry?

Sorry, sure.

You can hold it up.

Yeah, there you go.

When we first received the proposed budget in March, we breathed a sigh of relief because we saw that none of our people were going to be out the door.

As you um recently heard, that's not true for all of the units.

But that sigh of relief was kind of short-lived when we looked at the list and saw that what we were losing is 50, 50 positions in our unit alone.

That's about 10% of our workforce.

And that represents your laborers, your landscape gardeners, your 911 dispatchers, your 311 customer service, one of my personal favorites, your payroll clerks, your um all a whole slew of boots on the ground employees.

And um, and that's just a hard pill to swallow that we're going to be losing those positions because that we know means that that work now lands on the people who were still here.

And we did hear our city manager tell us in an all staff meeting that it is understood that you cannot do more with less.

But that is that that's easier said than done, because we are the ones who are seeing people face to face, and the community expects just as much out of us today as they did yesterday, the day before, and tomorrow.

We're not going to get any less 9-1-1 calls, we're not going to get any less 3-1-1 calls, we're not kind of any less potholes or any less blades of grass that need to be cut.

All of this work needs to be done.

And it will be on the on the backs of people.

As you saw, the majority of where we have to cut is in the budget.

One of the things that I really want to touch on that is important for you to make sense of, is that this really does the buck stops here.

We are all stewards.

Everyone who collects a paycheck, is there someone who will cede a minute to me?

Thank you, a minute over here.

Thank you so much.

Everyone who receives a paycheck in the city of Berkeley, thank you, payroll clerks, is stewards of our resources and our assets.

But really, the buck stops with you all on where those resources are led.

I oftentimes will see items on the agenda that um to your point a million here, a million there, there's a half a million here.

Where is that going?

And sometimes I see in the rationale not much more than because we need it.

Really?

If I had said that to my mom in the 10th grade when I wanted to go to Great America, can you give me 50 bucks?

Why?

Because I need it.

That wouldn't have flown very far.

That's a that's uh you really please pay attention to what is before you and what you're spending on because that is your decision whether you approve or don't approve of the actions that were that are brought before you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good evening, council.

My name is Christina Oatfield.

I serve on the planning commission, although I'm just here speaking on behalf of myself tonight.

Um, while listening to the staff presentations and prior speakers, I'm um appreciating how challenging the budget situation is and and how the city is between a rock and a hard place.

But I am here to ask that the council try to come up with um a restoration of at least some of the funds that were previously cut from the small sites program to fund um basically anti-displacement strategies for vulnerable residents.

Um, I work with affordable housing organizations in various jurisdictions around the state, and I've seen over and over again how local government dollars can be used to leverage other fundings to um acquire and rehabilitate um properties with vulnerable tenants.

So I hope we can continue to invest in that strategy.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You're gonna have an extra minute.

Okay.

Um council members, I I'm no expert on the budget, but I can say this.

It's really jarring to hear that there's not going to be a warming center.

That just it's just not what they would just they was.

How much does it cost to pick up the bodies?

Because that's what you're talking about.

It's a total abdication, and I have to say that it really chaffs to see three million dollars allocated for the Dwight and Telegraph.

How can you possibly spend three million dollars on on that triangle?

And yet nothing, not a dollar to people when it's freezing cold, when they're wet, when they're hypothermic, when they're dying in the street.

And I don't understand because I heard the chiefs say that there's a that there's a staffing crisis.

I've heard you guys worrying about money and so forth by eliminating all non-police responses.

I'm sorry, all by eliminating, we have no non-police response to calls for service that don't require police.

You've got the community services bureau, they're responding to non-criminal calls.

We taught, we did this through the reimagining process.

We said that what you have in your budget, it says that the only response to mental health emergencies and women's chicks will be police.

That's the absolute most expensive alternative you could choose.

That is the that's just a total waste of money.

You could have actual people actually trained who actually are trained in this field to respond with care and and with you know thrift.

So I, you know, I please justify some of the choices because it's making no sense to those of us who live in this town and pass people in need every day.

What are you doing?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

My name is Matt Gustafson.

I'm a resident of district two, and I work with the Bay Area Community Land Trust.

I'm here to advocate for the small sites program to be adequately funded in the FY2728 budget.

Berkeley's naturally affordable so-called housing stock is rapidly shrinking according to the California Housing Partnership since 2020.

Uh Berkeley's lost around a thousand homes affordable to low-income households in this town.

A thousand Berkeley Small Sites Program was built to preserve these homes and to transform them, not just to preserve them as affordable, but to transform them into community-controlled social housing, really.

And it's the program is working.

Um, we're grateful that the council's funded this important program in the past.

And I just want to say that the allocation that's currently coming from housing trust fund this year, it's just not really enough.

The program is built for projects of five to 25 units right now.

It could support maybe a five to seven unit project at most.

There's residents of a 23-unit property in uh district two.

Some of them were here earlier tonight and they had to go home, but there's not enough money to purchase that property right now.

So thank you.

Please fund small sites.

Thank you.

Thanks, Matt.

Hello.

Good evening.

Um, my neighbor Lisa is ceding her time to me.

Um, good evening, council and mayor.

My name is Angela, and I'm here to ask the council to fund small sites, a critical program to preserve and create natural naturally occurring affordable housing.

I'm a part of I'm part-time staff with City of Berkeley um recreation at the Adventure Playground.

I've loved working there for the last year.

I'm also a resident in district two of Addison Court Housing Cooperative, which is just two blocks across the street.

A limited equity housing co-op that the city helped grant an initial loan 30 years ago.

We house income tiers from 50 to 80 percent AMI and diverse ages from one to eighty-three years old.

And some of our elders have moved out, allowing for new generation to come in with me.

We maintain affordability through collective decision making, real life mutual aid and care for our neighbors through life changes, resident labor to maintain our 100-year-old garden departments, which are really cute.

Thank you to Lisa standing over there, who is our longest-term resident and one of the founders when the previous landlord needed to sell.

Um, she had our 80th birthday party around the block at BK Studio, and it's a big reason our buildings are so beautiful and sustainably maintained as a maintenance gardener by trade and former gardener teacher in town.

We also maintain affordability due to our 99-year ground lease with the Northern California Land Trust.

Recently, I've joined the staff with Matt at the Bay Area Community Land Trust and the skills I've gained in living in cooperative living here and in Illinois.

There's hundreds of projects around the country maintaining affordable housing and caring for our neighbors and for the communities we truly live in, and we can invest in it because we have permanence and love our neighbors and the people we live with.

And now I can support other low-income tenants in Berkeley to buy their property and learn how to collectively manage it and stay in place.

Please appropriate appropriately fund and support the small sites program before long-time community members and naturally according naturally occurring affordable housing becomes this place.

Thank you.

I always have a little with a microphone here.

I'm sorry.

Oh okay, yes.

Two minutes.

Thank you very much.

My name is Michelle Tuedi.

I know a lot of you in some way or another.

I am one of the organizers for uh the firewise groups as well as hellbookly.org.

Uh I am not here to advocate for specific programs, but to talk maybe more about process.

Um my corporate career was in more than 30 years in startups.

In startups, we typically have a runaway of approximately two years, sometimes less, sometimes more.

We constantly have to make priority decisions that involve people and involve money.

And when we hear the employees and the union reps and everybody uh discuss the consequences of these of these decisions, it's always very difficult.

Um, what we do, however, is we use a very different uh budget management system in in those in those organizations that's priority-based, it's called priority-based budgeting.

And that's the only way that we're able to actually manage the constant changes that we have to effect to be able to reorient companies that have very short runway ahead of them.

Now, in 2013, the auditor of the city of Berkeley commissioned a study by the Gellman School of Public Policy that recommended the use of a hybrid version of priority-based budgeting for the city of Berkeley.

Um, when you look at what it would enable, it would make a very significant difference.

You have time to adopt a system such as this one over the next couple of years because the decisions you're making today over the next couple of months are going to have to carry through.

But by using priority-based budgeting, you can actually use strategy to be able to make changes to allocations rather than looking at a 10 to 12% cut across the across the budget.

Uh, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Carol Morasovic, Chair of the Homeless Services Panel of Experts.

Speaking to our unanimous recommendations, uh, first I want to state that there will be additional revenue that will be coming in in late 2027 when city measure W kicks in, and if we can get past these hurdles.

Um, we vigorously uh oppose uh ending, terminating the emergency shelter uh staff's position is that there is no location.

However, the city manager has produced a list of locations to you of city owned properties that can be used for a shelter.

And as far as the monies, uh contracts can be renegotiated for the leases uh at the various um uh uh motels that are going on and have was we have calculated 10% reduction would result in 370,000 to the 358 I have changed in minutes.

I have one from Ron Torres.

Okay, one from one from that with two more minutes.

Kelly Hammergrim.

Thank you.

Uh we recommended uh fund continuing to fund the DBA social workers.

Uh it's less than a half.

It's 40,000.

You see unhouse people lined up all over downtown without outreach.

We would like to see this to continue to be funded, and but we want more uh vigorous uh coordination with the city as and better case management.

We do believe that um uh the community services bureau has performed an important function because they they actually respond a lot to the public and puts a human face on policing, and they hear complaints about the homeless and mitigate those concerns, and otherwise they're just gonna go bombard the city manager with more complaints.

Also uh BFD.

Uh the um mobile crisis team was already operating a skeleton crew.

This investigation by the Federal Department of Justice and the Federal Litigation is extremely important that holds the county responsible.

We need to held their feet to the fire on these services.

This investigation, which included persons from Berkeley in mental health crisis, showed that they were people were being disproportionately, particularly black males sent to Santa Rita jail and John George, and this requires community-based services, and we need to be very aggressive to make sure that Berkeley gets the services that is required under this under the settlement agreement.

Uh we concurred with uh with the pathways uh reduction and we asked that uh the city spend a little more money in consultants going back to the the mobile crisis again.

This involves community-based services, which is mobile crisis, crisis residential and um and peer respites, and we need to make sure that we get our fair share at the county's dime.

Thank you.

Thanks, Carol.

Uh, let's move online to public comment on item number 21, which is the proposed FY2027 and FY2028 biannual budget and proposed biannual budget public hearing number one.

Okay.

First speaker is Ben Nash.

Yes, good evening.

My name is Ben Nash.

I represent District Three on the Parks Recreation Waterfront Commission.

I'd like to present some highlights from the commission's first annual state of the parks report, which we hope you'll read in full.

Uh, first, we strongly encourage the council not to cut the parks department budget.

Further reductions will worsen existing inequities and strain already limited facilities and programs.

We recognize the city's difficult fiscal situation, which is why the commission recommends several long-term strategies, most importantly, a parks impact fee.

Berkeley is expected to add thousands of new residents in the coming years, yet we already fall below state parkland standards and are considered critically underserved under state law.

Without new investment, population growth will place even greater pressure on our parks parks facilities.

A well-designed parks impact fee is fundamentally pro-housing.

It would ensure that new development contributes to the infrastructure needed to support a dense livable city.

These fees do not burden existing taxpayers and can include exemptions for affordable housing.

We encourage the council to fund Nexus study for future parks impact fee, which would not commit the council to adopting the fee, but would provide the information necessary to seriously evaluate this.

Ben, thank you for your comment.

You're out of time.

I appreciate your comment.

Next is Andy Katz.

Good evening, Andy Katz, Chair of the Community Health Commission.

Speaking on behalf of our unanimous recommendations to recognize the difficult fiscal constraints, we ask for three things.

First, retain the heart-to-heart program with at least one FTE or require a real transition plan to a community-based organization before any position is cut.

Heart to heart is not duplicated by FQHCs.

It is the community bridge that connects black Latino, low income, and uninsured residents in South and West Berkeley to care they would otherwise never access.

The health status report documents a 10-year life expectancy gap between flatland and hills neighborhoods, driven largely by cardiovascular disease.

This program is how we close it, but eliminating the program could disrupt the experience learned in continuity with community partners.

Second, retain at least one FTE for public health emergency preparedness.

And third, we express deep concern about the unhoused population and all who are served by behavioral health programs.

These cuts fall hardest on residents with nowhere else to journal.

Thank you.

Next is John Canor.

Hi, John Kane or Downtown Berkeley Association.

As I spoke at the budget committee, um the homeless outreach uh position, specialist position uh that has been co-funded by the city started off as a 50-50 match, and over the last uh four or five years, we now contribute 50,000 in the city 40,000.

It's not clear at all that we can afford to continue that um going forward, and I know there's a lot of pressure, but this money is levered with the downtown Berkeley Association, and as Carol said, this position is really important for the downtown.

Um, so um thank you for your consideration.

Bye.

Thanks, John.

Uh next is Tom Parrish.

Hi, uh, I'm Tom Parrish.

I'm a resident of District 6 and an arts leader in Berkeley.

I'm calling in to advocate for maintaining funding for the civic arts grant program.

Cutting civic arts funding is a bad fiscal decision, and could cause the city to lose more revenue than the amount of expense savings.

According to the Berkeley Creative Economy Economic Impact Analysis from December 2025 by CBL Economics, civic arts funding has a high return on investment.

Every dollar of civic arts funding catalyzed 197 in total economic impact across the city.

The creative economy is a generator of property tax, sales tax, transient occupancy tax, and other forms of revenue.

And in 2024, Berkeley's creative economy helped generate 10.7 million dollars in tax revenue, representing 3.9% of the city's tax base.

Maintaining or growing funding for the creative economy is critical for both the recovery of this sector and the fiscal growth of the city of Berkeley.

Thank you.

Thanks, Tom.

Okay, that's that's all.

Okay, thank you very much.

Uh we are gonna go to comments from my council colleagues, starting with Council Member Taplin.

Uh thank you very much, and thank you to uh everyone who spoke.

I especially want to thank our labor partners and our city workers, and I want to thank the budget team and city admin and the budget and finance committee.

Um Madam Mayor, I think uh I don't know if it was at the last council meeting or our budget and finance, but you did ask us for come prepared to share our budget priorities.

Is that correct?

I did, yes.

Okay.

Uh, thank you.

Thanks for remembering.

Of course, of course.

Um, I've write down everything to say, just gonna um I I didn't want to I didn't want to preface um what I'm gonna say by sharing.

I think you know, we all remember a time when the city um could do all kinds of amazing things, and that was because we have amazing organizations and community partners and staff and and leaders, and we were able to like you know subsidize parking at the marina, subsidize the Kite Festival, subsidize events, pick up people's fees, make generous contributions to people doing really great work in the community.

And I think we did that because we believed in the work they were all doing, we wanted to make people happy, we wanted to invest and hold our public spaces in a way that could really flourish and resonate and embody our values, and I think we did that as long as we could in a way that perhaps we are now being confronted with a need to reevaluate how to not just keep what we have but get back to a place where we can do more.

And that is going to be very difficult, but I do think that we are all committed and dedicated to do that.

If we can keep, you know, focus and persevere through these tough seas that we find ourselves on.

Um to answer the priorities question, um, I have I'll just go through these.

First and foremost, and to the extent possible, my priority is further minimizing or even if at all possibly preventing reductions to the city workforce and disruptions of core city provided services and critical city-run programs.

And the capital improvement program, the marina fund, waterfront projects, and parks and recreation programs.

Sorry.

Slowly.

Slowly, sorry.

Uh, capital Group Program, the marina Fund, and waterfront projects and parks and recreation programs, keeping station four open, sustaining this reach harm prevention program and cert trainings, a retention of the fire crew positions created by the Safer Grant, and the maintenance of the community services bureau operations and special units like the bike force, the flex teams, and community safety partner partnership programs like Live Free.

And that's that's my list, and I have some more time left, and I think that you know I do want to call out what the person said about priority-based budgeting.

Um I that resonates with me.

I think it's easier said than done.

There are there are nine of us, there are no there are eight districts.

We have a very we have a very large dedicated uh involved community that has a vast array of economic needs, and we have a lot of disparities, but I think that we have to keep the balance of subsidy and investment with fiscal viability because we can't fund programs that we don't have workforce or revenue to sustain.

So moving forward, I want to offer my commitment to my colleagues and our our city admin and and everyone to getting us out of this mess.

And you know, I I'm proud of myself for not blaming everyone who came before us, but we're here now, and I am cautiously optimistic that we will find ourselves in a place where we can not just keep what we have, but give even more than we have before.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um Councilmember Bartlett.

Thank you, madam mayor.

And um, just to quickly um note my priorities here for you.

And there's sort of a sort of more thematic.

There's a couple of specifics, but essentially um, you know, recognize we're going into a turbulent time.

This is there's really no way around this.

We have to go through it.

Um, you know, the the pension fund, the pension funding formulas and the health care costs.

The president just took out a trillion dollars out of health care in this country.

Um, you know, so what we see is gonna get a lot worse.

And so uh my priorities are uh the catch all is to defend the weak.

So that takes take care of seniors, small sites, mental health departments, outreach people, um, a warming center.

I can't listen in there, I can't like miss that one.

A warming center, okay.

So you're good, and uh police and fire, obviously.

Um, and so that that's sort of catch all.

Just making sure quality of life does not degenerate, so we have to step over people starving in the streets in front of us.

Thank you, Councilmember Vicemor Traegu.

Oh, sorry, I'm sorry, that was wrong.

Uh Councilmember Humbert.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Um, I want to thank the city manager, um, the deputy city manager, um, and their staff, and I also want to thank staff in the finance department, especially budget manager Dupaya.

Um, and I also want to thank everyone who spoke here tonight, um, very moving statements, and particularly by our city employees.

Um I found them very moving.

Um we have a difficult budget situation, to put it mildly, to deal with this year.

It's something that has been decades in the making, unfortunately.

Um, between the but be between the economy, the federal state and state pullbacks, which, as council member Bartlett said, are just gonna get worse, and at least on the federal level, and one-time fixes that have run out.

We're having to look at some devastating cuts.

Tonight, my personal goal has been mainly to listen and hear everyone's concerns and suggestions and carry these forward with me as we consider what adjustments we want to make may want to make to the budget proposed by staff.

In terms of my personal priorities, um, I would say public safety and fire.

I would say preserving as many um jobs as possible.

Um, and and particularly um retaining positions or the proposed one position to be cut in OED because I think long-term OED is going to help us grow our tax base.

They've been doing it a heroic job, so I want to put in a pitch for OED.

I want to make sure that we still have adequate neighborhood services.

And given what's happening just globally, we need to focus on cyber security, frankly, I think we need to make sure to really bear down on that in our budget.

But that's all I have really at the moment, so thank you, everybody who spoke here tonight.

Thank you so much, council member.

Vice Mayor Tracob.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

I want to what has already been said by my colleagues.

In a way, this is a budget that meets the moment that we are in that does not make it at all easy.

And we can no longer afford to continue to um the status quo because doing so would just continue to um backdate the pain and make it the shared pain uh even harder in the future.

Uh that said, there's an enormous amount of um shared sacrifice that has already been made.

Um and when I um you know um this is um the budget um is a reflection of our values.

Uh it is one of the most consequential uh votes that we will take on the council.

Um I know that uh whatever this budget looks like uh in the next month, this will by far be the most challenging vote that I hope to ever have to take in uh on uh in my council career.

Um runs or wishes to serve to try to prioritize which programs to cut um that is quite inemical to the reasons that we all ran and uh serve.

Um, however, um due to a variety of reasons um we must exercise um a kind of uh priority-based budgeting, and so I I do appreciate uh the mayor asking us to come up uh with priorities um broadly.

Uh I um I will uh name mine, I will say um and I uh this was ingrained in me on day one of my fourth job.

Um, and uh I mentioned this I think on the fourth day that I took office.

Um the people are our greatest resource.

Anything we can do to protect the jobs of as many people as we can, um, because thank you for sharing um who is behind uh these 311 and 911 calls that I too have had to make as I walk around the district um uh within that um and this is again not to the exclusion or minimization of many other worthy uh and worthwhile um programs, but these are my three uh go to the mat priorities.

Um, oh, and I will move to extend time second to what time is it?

Um by 11 11 30.

11 30.

Yeah.

Um, is there any opposition to I guess my point is we have a bunch of stuff still to do?

Are we gonna do all those?

No, we are not.

No, we're gonna try to get through as many as we can.

I also you know, I don't want to get into it too much, but I I will just I do want to say that I really don't want us going super late on these items because I I just feel like we're not in the right space to make good decisions, and so I I think it's better if we um end by 11:30.

So that's my my push for the 11 30.

Okay, is there any opposition to approving an extension to 11 30?

No opposition.

All right, we will move to 11 30.

Thank you very much.

Um council member, you have 41 seconds.

Go ahead, your priorities, please.

All right, priorities.

Um trying to s uh retain uh the filled one FTE position within the economic development department for the reasons my colleague, council member Hambert already said these are vital to the downtown and all commercial district and its revenue generating.

Um trying to find a way to uh you know finding uh the 40k match to the DBA and then the street trauma prevention uh program would be my um my third um uh within the top three uh priorities.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, moving on to Councilmember O'Keefe.

Um I want to start by thanking um City Manager, Deputy City Manager, the budget team, um, all of the department heads who um came and spoke and also who um worked hard to come up with.

I know each department came up with its own proposals for cuts, and I know that was very painful and hard work.

So I just want to thank everybody, um, everybody who is part of this fund process.

Um I really want to acknowledge that many of our city employees will be losing their jobs.

Um, and that is a deeply painful reality, especially given inflation and the um job market right now and the rising cost of living.

And I just really want it.

I know we've all we're all naming that, and I'm gonna name that too because it's really important and just give some space for that reality.

Um, unfortunately, uh it's our responsibility to make decisions that preserve the longtime financial stability of the city.

Um it's a really heavy and profound responsibility that I know we all feel.

I do want to say um as a district five council member, and also from a perspective of citywide prepared emergency preparedness, I have really really profound concerns about the prospect of closing fire station four if the tax measure um does not pass.

And I want to emphasize that is a hypothetical closing, but it is something that's being discussed.

Um the Berkeley Hills, um, of which I represent part of faces unique wildfire risks, constrained evacuation route, steep terrain, narrow streets, um, and we can all remember, and I know Chief Sprague included uh the lessons from the 1991 fire storm.

And the area around station four, which I happen to represent, is has one of the oldest populations in the entire country.

And so this is um, these are people who are more prone to emergent health problems and also more vulnerable in the event of a wildfire.

So, you know, this isn't really a matter of life and death.

So as we move forward, my only my main priority is just to remain focused on protecting all of the services that are most fundamental to public safety, most specifically preserving the fire and other public safety positions.

I would add the street trauma position.

That seems that's I would prioritize that.

And beyond that, I just I want to make sure we get a permanently balanced budget so we can move forward with protecting the long-term stability and resilience of our city.

Thank you, council member.

Moving on to council member Blackaby.

Thanks, man, mayor.

I'll try and be uh quick.

Um I just want to associate myself with the comments on my colleagues with our appreciation for all the staff work that's gone into this from the city manager on down.

Uh, I'll just say uh Mari Carr, I don't know how you keep all the facts and figures in your head.

Um, it's amazing.

Your eyes look like they're glazing over, but we appreciate everything you've done uh and Dave as well for just uh walking us through this through countless budget meetings as well as tonight.

So thank you.

Um I'll say, look, I mean, um, everything is important.

We all um we value so much the work that our city staff does.

Uh I also know that um, you know, when I was elected, I think I was elected with the knowledge that our most important priority is keeping people safe.

People want to live in Berkeley and they want to be in a place where they feel safe.

That is still kind of my North Star public safety is still for me the number one priority.

Um, as I mentioned before, I mean, there's just no way I could vote for a budget that closed station four.

Um, is along with council member Councilmember O'Keefe, you know, the responsibility representing the Berkeley Hills.

Station four is important to that, station seven, so important to that, given the wildfire safety that we face.

So I appreciate the fact that we're not um being faced with that now.

I know that's still hanging out as a future prospect, but I appreciate that that's off the table for the next fiscal year at a minimum, and hopefully for good.

Um, I also appreciate the fact that we're able to retain the 15 police members and six dispatchers that were initially considered for reduction.

Um I'd also ask for the you know, potential of maintaining some of the cert funding and some of the fuel reduction funding we talked about before.

Um, this all to me goes in that public safety bucket, and to me that's preeminent.

That's just the basic expectation of a citizen in this city is that they pay taxes and they should be safe in their city.

Like that just I think that goes without saying.

Uh, second, I think is just the expectation that we have an infrastructure that works.

Um, you know, uh, you count on the sewers, the storm drains, you count on the streets and the sidewalks, and we've got a big backlog and a lot of work to do on the street and sidewalk side, so we can't lose sight of that over the coming year.

Um, we've got to make a huge amount of progress there.

I know there's not much again that we're proposing reduced reduction in that area, which is good, but again, just in terms of priorities, it's safety and infrastructure to me are the basics that people just expect of their municipal government.

So we need to deliver on that.

Going forward, and this has less to do with this budget and more about yours in the future.

Um, you know, we've talked, and I continue to harp on, and my questions tonight are on revenue around business stimulation, and I agree with with um my colleagues, the OED function, the mighty team that does so much work.

Um, you know, we've got to do a better job of keeping the innovation economy going.

All the companies that are starting on the campus UC Berkeley, making sure they have a place here in Berkeley that's gonna be critical to the future of our city, is being a place where those people want to uh create jobs, hire people, bring people to live here, bring people to work here, uh supporting our retail small business and in commercial corridors.

We know that there have been folks that have been challenged in those areas, um, just the business climate and being a hospitable place where people want to do work and people want to live to do those jobs.

Um that's so critical to the future of our tax base.

I'd also say unsticking some of the stalled housing projects is part and parcel of that.

Again, none of these are gonna affect this year's budget, but they start to make things a little bit easier as we go if we can work on on those priorities.

The other thing I'll say um on the um staff side, and I appreciate and have been moved by the the stories and the, because you're right, these are not just numbers, these are people behind the numbers.

And we will expect a lot from the people who stay.

And it's not fair to expect more from the same.

But it also, though, to me is a function where technology also becomes important.

We have to how do we provide our employees with the tools that will make them more productive, um, will help help them get more done in the same amount of time.

Um, we'll help maybe receive some of those service requests that come from residents at all hours of the night, but just how can technology again be a force multiplier for the people that are continuing to work here and provide excellent service, not customer service, uh to Cecilia Lampara's point, but service to residents that they expect.

Uh so those things that I'm thinking about.

Um, and I appreciate again the effort that's gotten us here and look forward to helping to move this across the finish line in as expeditious and um effective a way as we can.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Councilmember.

Councilmember Kessarwani.

Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.

Thank you, Mr.

White and Ms.

Dupaya for your um lengthy and detailed presentation, and um thank you to my colleagues for your comments.

Thank you to the members of the public who gave um public comment on their priorities.

Um, you know, I think it's already been said that this has been a very difficult budget process and will continue to be, and um I, you know, I I I do want to say that I'm really proud that we are looking at a combination of strategies in a way that I think um and and I hope will continue to align with our values.

You know, I asked us to do the community survey on the sales tax because I knew that the level of reduction um and what it would feel like in our community to cut 30 million dollars from our budget um would not be acceptable.

You know, it's not acceptable to me to cut that deeply, and and I want the community to recognize that is why we have pulled uh for this sales tax to raise, you know, an approximately 9.4 million to save, if I have the numbers correct, 33 positions, some of which are filled in, and those are public safety positions.

That's the staffing for fire station four that we're hearing a lot of concern about.

That's the staffing for programs that serve low-income and vulnerable populations, and and so to me that is making sure that what we are doing here aligns with our values to take care of those populations to make sure that the response time when people call 911 and they need, you know, the types of services that we send out from fire station for that that can be available.

Um and you you know, I want to focus on the budget, but we have a number of items here tonight that will also raise fee levels to be in line with costs, something that we have not been doing regularly.

We need to continue to do that, and so I'm pleased to see that those are before us.

Um, and of course, in addition to raising revenues, uh, we have this difficult decision.

You know, 9.4 million still leaves a substantial gap that we have to find a way to close, and so that is where I know you have provoked proposed um eliminating a lot of vacant positions.

I wanted to ask Mr.

White, I don't know if you have the answer right now.

Are there vacant positions that have not been proposed for elimination?

Okay, so I want to look at that the next time we come to budget and finance, if you can have that available, because the reason why I want to know what those positions are is because you know, we have folks here tonight, we have folks who are worried about getting laid off, you know, 20 filled positions that are proposed for elimination.

So I want to make sure that that's the right call.

I don't want to do that if we can find vacant positions and save those folks.

Because, you know, this is, you know, one city, one team, and um so that's my commitment that that we have to look at that.

And and I, you know, I think there's sort of this other category that we haven't talked a lot about, which is, you know, what can we do smarter?

Um, I had mentioned at the last budget and finance committee that I was at that I want to hear how we are monitoring our contracts.

You know, we haven't heard in this but budget process which contracts are underperforming that we should not continue.

Um, and and so I I think we need to be thinking about that.

You know, I also have an a council item that's going to be heard at budget and finance to require competitive procurement across all city departments to ensure that we are getting the best value for all goods and services, including professional services, which our city auditor said we have not been doing, you know, we need to we need to do all of these things so that we are being as cost effective as we can.

And uh, you know, I I know a lot of effort has been put in, but I think there's more we can be doing around the contracts, and so um, so so I want to have those conversations, and in terms of priority, you know, I would agree on preserving the filled position in the Office of Economic Development.

This is the community development project coordinator, and um, but you know, when we say that we'd like to find you know, like to be able to save things, you have to cut something else.

You have to find the funds to do that.

So, you know, respectfully to the folks asking for more funding for small sites.

You know, it's my understanding, and I think it is yours as well, that we have put out a request for proposal for 2.5 million for small sites.

And I'm really grateful that I I reduced the allocation for small sites in the last budget, because I understand that we have had structural deficits for years, and we have to make hard choices.

We can't always do the full amount that everybody is asking for all the time.

Sometimes being a leader means knowing when to say no.

So, um, so I'm really grateful we've had this hearing.

Uh, I think we do want, I you know, really want to emphasize we need to look at the vacant positions that are still in the budget and know what those classifications are and what the fully loaded costs are.

Um, and and and if I can get the org charts of where they are in the in each department, that will also be helpful.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you, Councilmember Lunapara.

Thank you.

Um I first want to express my deep appreciation for the immense amount of time and energy and exhaustive effort that our city manager, um, deputy city manager, budget team, and department heads have poured into developing this budget proposal.

Facing a decades-long structural deficit is incredibly daunting, and I want to thank you for addressing it with transparency and such deep care.

I also really want to thank the city workers who have stayed with us late into the night.

It takes incredible dedication to speak here after a long work day to advocate so fiercely for your departments, your colleagues, and the services that our community relies on.

Your presence tonight matters and your work does not go unrecognized or unappreciated.

We know that you make the city what it is, and we know that these numbers represent real lives, real families, and the people who work alongside, we work alongside every day.

As we move through this budget cycle, I am deeply committed to working alongside my colleagues and staff to ensure that we find a fiscally responsible path forward that protects the integrity of our workforce and minimizes the impact of the city the people who make the city run.

So, in terms of my priorities, I want I think it's important that as we're as we are laying out the things that we want to save from this budget, that we are also proposing things that we are willing to reduce or eliminate because that's the reality of how we're dealing with this budget right now.

So in terms of the the priorities that I um for for me, I want to make sure first that we are minimizing the impact to our workforce and minimizing layoffs.

I think that's the most important piece of this.

Um I also think that we I I feel strongly that we should maintain our non-police responses to homelessness, mental health, and addiction crises.

Um I support retaining the street trauma prevention program, maintaining small sites funding, um, and making sure we have a long-term financial solvency plan.

Um, and in terms of some things that I think that we should look at reducing.

I think we should look at reducing or eliminating council policy committees, consolidating more commissions, and reducing council non-personnel budgets.

Um, I think we also really need to look figure out how to structurally reduce police overtime, which consistently goes over its allocated budget.

We need to figure out how to how to address that in a in a structural way.

Thank you.

And thank you to everyone who has put so much work into this.

Thank you.

Thank you so much to my council colleagues for your comments and also for giving us your priorities.

Um, that's very helpful as I think about what my budget will look like.

Um, I really want to thank, of course, um, all of the city staff who have been working on this, um, from the department heads to of course Mari Karen and your team to David White to our city manager.

Um, I I just I like to start.

I want to start by talking about just people and the impacts on people.

Um, we have had people come already to council and share their stories and tell us about the impact that these cuts are gonna have on their lives.

Um, and I'm somebody who does this work because I care a lot about people, and so um I I just want you all to know that that is something that is um is really kind of the focus of the the work that we're doing right now and thinking about um you know the budget that we're gonna propose from my office, and I really want to thank the city manager for I feel having a very people-first approach in in this and trying to be as communicative as possible, really considering everything that's going into it.

Um I really do want the public to understand that it's it's having an immense impact um on him and that he's losing sleep over it.

Um, these are not easy decisions for any of us.

Um believe me when I say that we are all you know suffering, and um we really do feel for for folks as we're talking about these positions.

Um we're aware that these are individuals that we're talking about, um, not just the positions that are filled that are getting cut, but also in thinking about the impacts on people when we cut positions that aren't filled.

Um, so I I do want to thank you all so much to everyone who's come and shared their stories and shared the impact that these cuts will have on them and their lives and their families.

I really do appreciate you being here and sharing, and to everyone who's also written in to us as well.

Um, you know, this is not something that any of us want to do, certainly in my first term as mayor to make these kinds of cuts.

It's it's really challenging.

And um, I also know that there are some things that we need to be doing that we we have very little option of what else to do at this point.

Um, we really can't afford to depend anymore on these one-time measures to balance the budget, and we have to phase these one-time measures out, and that's really what the plan is for this is to address the underlying structural deficit to make changes.

Um, you know, that are really tough, but hopefully we'll create the ability for us to have a sustainable budget moving forward.

I think that's really key because if we fund things a little bit here and there, we throw in money for a position for one year, that's not sustainable.

That means that the next time around, we're gonna have to cut someone else somewhere else again.

Um, and that also isn't fair.

So we really do need to consider that.

Um I also really appreciate the charter offices for responding to my request to reduce their budgets.

Um on the city council, we all cut our budgets by 12 and a half percent.

Um that's our average across the councils.

And um I really do want to thank my colleagues for making those those those decisions.

Um, and thank you, of course, also to our city attorney's office, our um director of police accountability, and also our city auditor.

Uh, they also made cuts to their budgets as well.

And um, you know, we really we heard today, you know, how we got here and situation, and one thing I did just want to mention as well is the impacts that have really been felt uh for generations by Prop 13, which has really taken a lot of funding from local government and made us rely on special funds, which really honestly I think are not the best way to be filling our our budgets.

Um I am really hopeful that we will have state change on this matter so that we can have more funding, come into local jurisdictions.

And then there are some specific things I want to mention that I think are really important.

If anyone's had a conversation with me about my priorities as mayor, you will have heard me say a million times my priorities are housing and homelessness, public safety, and infrastructure.

And these are really things that I'm looking at when I'm thinking about this budget, and of course, accountability and transparency are really key to me.

Um I want to make some comments about homelessness in particular.

So just so folks know, the inclement weather shelter is still going to be open.

That's not recommended to be cut.

I think that there was some some confusion about that versus the winter shelter.

Um, and in terms of the winter shelter, um, it's true that there was an alternative housing item that was brought forward by council member O'Keefe and a number of us, and we are still working on that issue.

So when we think about the winter shelter being closed, our hope is that we have this alternative shelter open so that it's not just winter time where it's open, that there's actually space for folks to.

I'm running this meeting, so I'm gonna go over my time.

Um, so um that we that we will continue to do that work and apply for measure W funds on the county level.

Um, and then around mental health, uh, something I just wanted to mention is that the CAT team, which is the county's crisis response team, that they are losing funding on a state level, and so that is something that I will be advocating against, so against cuts to that, um, because that is where we have we're relying on the county to cover mental health, um, and also advocating for that to be a non-police response because we also know about the success of a non-police response.

Um, and then around the revenues piece, I think that's something that the city staff didn't get to talk about enough, is also how much work they're doing around revenues.

I know we're focused really on cuts because that's really where we're feeling the pain, but I also want the public to understand that the city manager's office and all the different offices are also looking for other sources of revenue.

So that's grant funding, um, that's looking, of course, at fee increases.

Um, we are looking at a sales tax and also an infrastructure bond.

Um, and you know, I'm also really I have also spoken to the city attorney's office about recouping more money with litigation or writing uh letters to folks legal letters to bring in more funding for money that's owed to the city because there's actually a lot of money, millions of dollars that's owed to the city that hasn't been brought in.

Um, and I've also been working very closely in my office and and many of the other offices as well to encourage tourism to bring in people into our city because this is a source of funding that doesn't require us to tax people more, and um it doesn't require us, it really just allows us to bring in more funding from outside of the city, and so we've been doing a lot more work around tourism.

So I want to thank the Office of Economic Development for being a really important partner in that work and also the different business districts, Chamber of Commerce, Visit Berkeley.

Um, in the event that the sales tax doesn't move forward or pass, although I've already said earlier in the evening that I will be working personally very hard on both both taxes together and and want to encourage my council colleagues to reach out if you have questions about that.

Um but I if the sales tax doesn't move forward, I've also asked staff to cost out mandatory time off and um and uh I think the word is variable time off as well.

Uh options, including non-sworn officers, not including, sorry, not including sworn officers in fire and police.

And my understanding is that if we do an MTO, it'll garner approximately $7.6 million dollars, which doesn't completely cover that money from the sales tax.

Um, and I understand also that this is a meet and confer issue with our labor partners, but this could be something that's worth exploring.

So I do want to just throw that out there because I know we're concerned about losing positions, so this could potentially be something that would help prevent us from losing positions.

So I want to throw that out there.

And then as was mentioned by some other folks, one thing that I am particularly interested in is saving this Office of Economic Development position, as we've mentioned, bringing in more funds into the city is really important to us.

And so if there are positions that can assist with that, we really want to make sure we maintain those positions.

So you know, as was mentioned, I will bring uh another budget in.

I'm working with my current brown act circle, but I've also heard everyone's priorities as well.

So we will work to try and bring those priorities in as much as possible.

And of course, understanding as was commented on earlier, that when we make um when we bring something back, that means we have to cut somewhere else.

Um so these this really is about trade-offs, and those are really challenging.

And um you have my word that I will do my absolute best to make sure that we are continuing to have this process that's transparent and accountable, and that is respectful of the people that not only work for the city but also live here.

So thank you all very much.

Um it is 11 20.

We have 10 minutes, and uh I think that there's a request to try to go to 1145 to try to finish a few more of these.

Um move to extend to 1145.

Quick second.

There's a second.

I'm gonna ask you to take the roll on this one.

A second from Council Member Cassarwani.

Okay, to extend to 1145.

Councilmember Kessarwani.

Yes, Taplin, no, Bartlett, yes.

Okie.

Sure.

Blackaby.

Yes.

Luna Para.

Yes.

Humbert.

Yeah.

Mayor Ishi.

Yes, but only because Paul asked me.

Okay.

Motion carries.

Sorry.

I know.

I'm sorry.

Okay.

All right.

So I know we're we have an order.

Um, we're gonna go as quickly as possible.

Um, there are the position, uh, sorry, the we've already opened the uh we've already opened all of them, but I just realized we also need to close the previous item.

Is there a motion?

Yeah, second.

Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing on the budget item?

Okay, the public hearing is closed.

All right.

So we're gonna try to go 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, those are the ones that don't have uh presentations, and then um go from there.

So um we're going to we've already opened the public hearing, but we're gonna start with item number 22.

There's no presentation on that, but are there any questions?

Oh, questions.

Yes.

I just have one comment before you start.

Thank you, madam mayor.

Thank you for uh thank you all.

Really appreciate you extending this meeting to 1145 so that we can get through at least the ones with no presentations for the staff that have been sitting here all night.

That's much appreciated.

Um, so for this item, one quick note is that we do have a fee in here for um for the senior-owned licenses for for altered animals, which means animals that have been spayed or neutered, and it turns out that we um we don't have to actually charge that fee per our Brooklyn Municipal Code.

So I want to strike that fee out for the three years we have it in there for senior altered uh animal permits.

Okay, thank you very much.

Any other questions?

Is there public comment on this item item number 22 animal care services fee schedule?

Is there oh this person online?

Are you making comment for item number 22, animal care services fee schedule?

We'll try them.

This is for public comment only on the animal care services fee schedule.

I want to wait until to make uh comment uh public comment on agenda items out.

I will uh mute my okay.

So we're gonna wait for that.

Thank you.

Okay, is there any other any comments on this item?

Oh, Councilmember Blackaby.

One quick question.

Just uh for staff.

I know that um the total budget is about 2.5 million, and we're generating about 300,000 in revenue.

Uh is that is there anything else we can do to close the gap?

I mean, raising these fees is what we're doing.

Um, is there any way that I mean is it appropriate to think about this ever revenues covering costs or is this always gonna be running a deficit out of this fund?

I think it's unlikely that we're gonna be able to fully recover our costs with fees.

Okay, council or vice mayor Traegum.

I move the staff recommendation as amended by Paul.

Second, need to close the public hearing.

Oh, and I also move to close the public hearing.

And I'll second that motion.

Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing?

All right, the public hearing is closed.

And you want to make a motion to move the recommendation?

Yes, second again.

Is there any opposition to approving the animal care services fee schedule item as recommended by the city manager?

No.

All right, we will pass that then by unanimous consent.

Thank you very much.

We are moving on to item 23, which is the neighborhood services code enforcement fee schedule.

Are there any questions about this?

Okay, is there any public comment on item number 23?

Neighborhood services code enforcement fee schedule.

No comments online, no raised hands.

Okay, very good.

Close the public hearing.

Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing?

Public hearing is closed.

I move the item.

Second.

Okay, is there any opposition to approving the recommendation from item 23?

Alright, we will pass that as well.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Peter.

All right.

Moving on to item 25, which is the fees, health housing and community services facility rental fees.

Are there any questions?

Nope.

Is there any public comment on this item?

Carol, are you moving up here for public comment?

No.

Okay.

Any public comment online for fees, health housing community services facility rental fees?

No hands raised, no.

All right, very good.

I move to close the public hearing.

Okay.

Is there a second?

Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing?

Public hearing is closed.

I move the staff recommendation.

Second.

Is there any opposition to approving the staff recommendation?

No.

Alright, staff recommendation recommendation is approved.

Thank you very much, Tanya.

Moving on to item number 26, changes to the selective recreation facilities and program fees.

Are there any questions for this item?

Okay, is there any public comment on this item?

This is item number 26 was changes to selected recreation facilities and program fees.

Please raise your hand if you have any questions, comments.

Seeing none, I will see if there's a motion to close the public hearing.

Oh wait, John raised his hand.

Okay, apologies.

John Cainer.

Yeah, what happened to item 24?

We skipped that item.

We're not uh on that item right now, because that one involves a presentation, so we will likely not have time this evening.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, all right.

Is there a motion to close the public hearing?

I move to close the public hearing.

Is there a second?

Second.

Is there any opposition opposition to closing the public hearing?

All right, we have closed the public hearing for item number 25.

I move the side recommendation.

Okay, whatever.

Staff recommendation, okay.

And there's a second from council member Humbert.

Is there any opposition to approving the staff recommendation?

This item 20.

26.

Sorry, thank you.

26.

All right, we have approved the sack staff recommendation for item number 26.

Moving on to thank you very much.

Item number 27, changes to the planning and development fee schedule.

Hi, folks.

Are there any questions?

Okay.

Question from Councilmember Caserwani.

Um, yes, uh Director Klein, I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

So is we are increasing fees for appeals, correct?

I'm I'm I'm here with uh Jim Bond, the associate management analyst.

I'll let Jim feel this.

Okay.

Uh only for building official appeals, which until about a year ago, none of us could ever remember having received, and then we've gotten about three of them in the last 18 months.

And we created a fee last year, and it's not sufficient, so we're articulating it better, but the rate is not increasing.

Land use appeals are not being increased.

Okay.

How much are the land use appeal amounts?

I think they're in here.

So there's a number of different appeals.

So an appeal of it of a ZAB decision by uh some anyone other than the applicant is three thousand dollars.

That was increased last May, uh, and an appeal.

Uh I think it was was doubled, I believe, last May from 1,500 to 3,000.

Okay.

Okay, I saw those fee amounts.

So they have already been increased to reflect cost.

Uh I would say we're not quite at cost recovery there.

Um, we considered proposing an increase again this year, but felt like uh increases in consecutive years.

We just we weren't ready to proposed an increase, but it's something that we're gonna look at for next year.

Okay, all right.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Oh, Council Vice Mayor Trackab.

Yeah, thank you.

Just wanted to confirm under PV or uh battery storage install.

So are there any proposals to change that or does that stay static?

It's static, and in fact, we uh because a few of the other percentage fees might impact those.

We have built in a uh um uh language into the resolution which will keep those within the state mandated caps, even if the percentages would otherwise have put them over those caps.

Great.

That's the answer I was hoping to hear, so thank you for confirming.

Thank you very much.

Any other questions?

Are there any comments on this item?

We are on item number 27, which is changing to the planning and development fee schedule.

Anyone online?

No hands raised on that.

Okay, is there a motion to close the public hearing?

Second.

Is there any opposition to closing the public hearing?

All right, we have closed the public hearing for item number 27.

I'll move the item.

Second.

Is there any opposition to moving the recommendation?

Okay, recommendation is been approved.

Thank you very much.

All right, that was actually our final one for the evening.

Um, so that by the way, that left 24, 28, and 29 that we will not be able to finish for this evening.

Since we've already opened the public hearing, what is the proposal?

So we can continue uh the public hearing on 24, 28, and 29 to the June 9th meeting or another date if.

Yes, I think that makes sense given our conversations about the upcoming meetings.

All right, is there a motion?

Is there a motion?

So, okay.

Okay, is there any opposition to the motion?

Which is to continue these items this is the June 9th meeting.

All right, motion is approved.

All right, we have moved those items to the June 9th meeting.

Is there any public comment for items not listed on the agenda?

Yes, Carol.

Uh, yes, physical disabilities and homeless services programs.

I speak as Carol Morasovic, uh chair of the homeless services panel of experts.

So when we were at pathways, a stayer doing a site visit.

Uh I asked, has I had other programs?

How would you accommodate persons who are blind slash uh visually impaired, deaf slash hearing impaired?

And we uh we were told uh maybe they don't belong here.

Maybe they need to find another place.

And this is especially particularly concerning because the city has just spent all this money, hundreds of thousands of dollars making this pathway stair accessible.

Uh another question that I asked every provider was um, what would you cut if you had to cut five percent, 10 percent, and they said a pathway stairs, uh flex funds and a service coordinator, which is contrasted.

I I really will you give me a minute, please?

Someone, okay.

Okay, let me conclude this.

But the so this is particularly contrast this with the other uh programs that we visited that actually approached me afterwards asking for accommodations, and uh uh, and also the uh the complaint from other providers at the motel conversions we we visited, uh providers inside housing door today, was they were concerned that they didn't have enough availability of flex funds, and so this is something that's really important for the clients, but that's the response that we received at STARE.

Thank you.

Thanks, Carol.

Any other public comment online?

Non-agenda items, yes.

Um caller, the phone number ending in 211.

Hi, okay.

This is a little different topic.

I'm really concerned about that.

Uh uh the uh virus in the Midwest, the subject is now which is in the ship and it's coming to the United States.

Also, Paula in Africa.

We this are very dangerous.

Um COVID 19 is a little baby compared to the design, because we'll have to be very careful.

As far as the business community, all the shutdown places in Berkeley should be open, should be staff, should have businesses.

Here's the policy, mayor Ishi, you're great woman.

We need your help.

This will fill all of this empty places with good thriving business that could bring tax money to the city and good service and sales to residents of Berkeley and the whole B area.

We did over 200 million dollars of business over the last 53 years.

This make example of Eid to everybody else.

Thank you.

Have a good night.

Have a good night, or we have uh Christopher Kohler.

Hello, all um, I just wanted to add to uh Ms.

Marisovich's remarks that um uh I happen to have completed the hard training in auditing uh recipients and sub recipients of federal funding, and it's quite detailed.

I know that our commission goes into site visits, but nowhere near uh the same kind of audit.

And I'm wondering if the city has any function of that kind to audit their efficacy.

Thank you.

Any other public comment for non agenda?

No, no more.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Is there a motion to adjourn?

Second.

All right, any opposition to adjournment?

We are adjourned.

Thank you all so much.