The Folsom City Council convened a special workshop on March 8, 2022, to continue discussions on developing a strategy to close the city's projected future funding gap and to initiate strategic planning for the next five years. The meeting included financial updates, compensation reviews, public safety overtime analysis, and two strategic planning exercises (goal-setting and SWOT analysis). No public comments were made. Council gave staff direction to proceed with community engagement and to return with a set of visionary statements for the strategic plan.
We will call to order the special meeting of the special workshop of the Folsom City Council for Tuesday, March 8th, 2022. The clerk would call the rule, please. Council members Aquino. Here. Rodriguez here. Howl? Here. And Chalem Cherla and Kozlowski are both absent. Okay, if you guys will join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. And to the Republic for the United States. For which it stands. One nation under God. And we can start with our first item. You have no agenda updates this evening or this afternoon. So that takes us into workshop item number one. This is a council workshop on developing a strategy to close the city's future funding gap. Introduction to strategic planning and direction to staff. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. As you will remember, on February 8th, you convened in a special meeting format to discuss strategies for closing the city's future potential budget shortfall. I appreciate your time today to continue that very important discussion. And just a reminder, these are all very important steps and underpinnings for developing the city's strategic plan. As we shared with you last month, we are not bringing this to you 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 very constrained state into the next fiscal year. But looking out farther, we know the trajectories are showing 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 we're facing. We spent quite a bit of time with you providing detail as to our fiscal picture and future funding gap last time around, and we also discussed a suite of possible solutions that could be deployed, including uh using one-time ARPA funding as a you know crutch was the word I used, um, potential revenue enhancements, including a sales tax increase, potential cuts, and economic development strategies. At that meeting, we sought direction from you to move forward with a community engagement uh process, and you gave us the green light on that, and we are looking forward to bringing you results that hopefully will help inform your decisions about closing the city's future shortfall and also your strategic planning process that we will discuss later this afternoon. At that February 8th meeting, you also asked that we return to you with an item for your consideration to establish council subcommittees focused on economic development. And we did just that at the next meeting on February 22nd. And I want to extend my thanks for your direction and to uh council member Aquino and Vice Mayor Rodriguez and members of our community uh for serving on that ad hoc committee, which is examining opportunities as to um the uh underutilized or or unutilized city properties and opportunities that could be created there. Um I believe they're hosting their first meeting this week, so that's very exciting. Um today, just so you know the flow of the conversation. You're first gonna hear from Stacey Tamani, who is our chief financial officer and director of finance, who's gonna provide a brief overview, a recap of the financial information that she presented on February on February 8th, just in case anyone is just now joining the conversation and wants to be caught up. And from there, um, you all made great comments and asked great questions last time around, many of which we addressed, but some of which we wanted to come back to you with more information, and so we'll move from there into a series of report backs about um issues that you brought up last time. And then we'll conclude with a couple of exercises that are designed to further inform your strategic planning process and assist us in our ongoing community uh engagement efforts. So at this point, I'm gonna turn it over to Stacy for that brief recap. Um Stacy will address um at the conclusion of her kind of summary. She's gonna talk about report backs related to cost control measures we've already taken, uh, sales tax revenue, property tax revenue as it relates to South of 50 development, uh differentiating South of 50 costs from others, and the extreme and growing level of unmet um needs in our major operational departments. So I'll turn it over to you, Stacey. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council members, Stacey Tamani, Chief Financial Officer. As we went over in last month's presentation, the city has a projected future funding gap. That means that our revenues are growing at a slower pace than expenses, and that creates a gap in the future. It means we won't be able to balance future budgets unless we take proactive action now. Although we're meeting all of our current obligations, there are millions of dollars of unfunded or underfunded needs that the city has been deferring year after year. And these are deferred needs, not wish list items. And unfortunately, these needs don't go away when they're deferred. They continue to accumulate, and the cost to pay for them has continued to grow. And on a related note, we're we're currently working on the fiscal year 22-23 budget. And in preliminary meetings with the department heads, we've received about 25 million dollars in additional requests for next year's budget, including 53 requested new positions.