This special workshop was held on February 11, 2022, from 1:00 PM to approximately 4:00 PM, to begin developing a strategy to close the city's future funding gap. City staff presented detailed financial information, potential solutions, and a proposed community engagement plan. The council provided direction to proceed with community outreach, explore a sales tax measure, and form ad hoc committees on specific economic development topics.
All right, I have one o'clock, Mayor. Me too. Okay, we will call to order the excuse me, special meeting of the Folsom City Council for Tuesday, February 8th. If the clerk would call the roll, please. Council members Kozlowski. Here. Rodriguez. Aquino here. Challenge. Here. And how if you guys will join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge Allegiance to the flag. Of the United States of America. And to the Republic. Okay. So we're on to our only item for today's agenda, which is a council workshop on developing a strategy to close the city's future funding gap and direction to staff. Okay, thank you, Mayor. And if I could ask uh Stacey Tamani to uh share our screen for the presentation today. Please be enabled. Okay, perfect. Uh good afternoon, everyone. Uh we as staff are bringing you this workshop in our continuing effort to bring critical fiscal information to you as early as possible to allow for timely, thoughtful strategic decision making. I have served as your city manager for over three and a half years now. And unfortunately, within weeks of me taking the job, it became clearing in progress. Became clear that we needed to ratchet back fiscally. Consequently, the near entirety of the last three and a half years has been marked by a need for financial restraint and constraint, which only dramatically deepened as the pandemic hit. I am deeply appreciative of the Folsom City Council's continued attention and commitment to prudent, wise fiscal decision making. It is never easy to lead, but leading is particularly challenging when resources are scarce and scarcer. I thank you for stepping up, and I thank you for making the hard decisions. I am also deeply grateful to the city staff and particularly the city's executive management team who have strived to focus on a get to yes mentality and approach, even in lean, uncertain, and unprecedented times. I am a proud 30-plus year resident of Folsom and also a proud 17 year city of Folsom employee. I can comment from both perspectives that as one would hope for from an outstanding dynamic city, home to so many talented people. Our community and you as the city council have high and ever growing expectations in terms of current and future city service levels, personnel, programs, facilities, technology, and infrastructure. We are here today, not because there is an immediate budget problem. We can hold our own in our current constrained state in the current fiscal year. And we can do the same again, still in that constraints state in the next fiscal year. But looking out farther, we know the trajectories are showing us that this is not sustainable, not only in terms of meeting current needs, but also in terms of making sure that we are meeting and ideally exceeding that very warranted community expectation pace. Please consider consider today's presentation and workshop as the first step in a strategic planning process for the city council. We feel very strongly that we need to take a quote first things first, unquote, approach to looking hard at some tough numbers as a first step. So that's what this afternoon is all about. This afternoon, you're going to hear first from Stacey Tamani, our director of finance and chief financial officer, who is going to very thoroughly take you through the details of our fiscal picture and the funding gap that we are seeing in the future. Stacy will also highlight current and future needs organization-wide, many of which have been deferred for far too long. We will then discuss our American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA allocation from the federal government. We will also discuss potential revenue enhancements. Cuts are also an option for the future, and we will discuss those. From there, communications director Christine Brainerd will discuss economic development strategies that the council may wish to prioritize as we plan for the future. These categories reflect the city's vision and guiding principles as outlined in the vision statement and guiding principles of the city's 2035 general plan, which we brought to you for your adoption. Her presentation was prepared in consultation and partnership with Joe Galliardi of the Greater Folsom Partnership. And finally, Christine will discuss how we propose to engage our community in this critical conversation and to help us understand what their priorities are and what their appetite is for various possible approaches to close that future funding gap. We're very much hoping to leave this workshop with direction from you to embark on that process.