This special meeting of the Half Moon Bay City Council was held on March 14, 2025, from 1:00 PM to approximately 4:30 PM, to set priorities for fiscal year 2025-26. The meeting included a review of the Capital Improvement Program (CIP), a discussion on core city services, public comment, and individual priority statements from each council member. No formal votes were taken; instead, the council directed staff to compile the input into a draft work plan for further discussion at a future meeting.
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our annual priority setting session. Welcome, council members, members of the public. I believe we have folks also at home, right? Participating today remotely. So welcome everybody. Thanks for coming. This is um this is a very participative process that we do each year. In preparation for this annual priority setting session, we have a number of listening sessions. Anyone here participate in any of the listening sessions this year? Yeah. Great. And um we have them in both English and Spanish, and they're all translated into English and Spanish to ensure as much uh participation as possible. So what we do is we collect a lot of data from those listening sessions. And our wonderful staff has been great in summarizing those and starting to sort those into categories. Usually the categories are pretty similar, but the various issues that come up each year can differ. Um, and each year we have quite a number of issues to uh contend with things changing in terms of you know the external landscape, climate change, um, housing, and so we try to incorporate whatever's going on that impacts us, our budgets, uh, et cetera. So again, this process is intended to identify our high-level policy issues and priorities. And then within those, we may also discuss a few key projects within those higher levels. Usually we have about five or six high-level areas of that we are focusing on. Um, yeah, we will talk about capital improvement projects. We'll have a review. Um, who is director of our public works department. And that department spends a lot of time reprioritizing some of our projects based on budget, based on which ones are most critical to health and safety, which ones that we sometimes are waiting on funding and grants. So the prioritization process is uh pretty extensive and elaborate. So thanks, Maz, to you and your staff for helping put that together. Um that point, we will then take a break. And we will start our priority setting exercise. So we will have a number of um moments where we will ask for public comment and both from in the room and people who are online. Matthew, am I forgetting anything? No, um, I we've we've done this pretty consistently for the last several years and had a pretty consistent format. Um, we're making a few tweaks this year just based on feedback we heard from city council members at our retreat uh last weekend. And uh because we had our mid-year financial update just last Tuesday night, that will not be included uh as part of our meeting today. Um but we do have Ken Styles, our finance manager and Lisa Rossi, our admin services director here, to answer questions about the budget or provide clarifications if we need them. One thing that wasn't mentioned, but after Moz talks about the capital projects, um we will have a little discussion. Uh well, it's as much of a discussion as you'd like to have about core services. Um given the city's current financial situation. Uh we think it's it's an important opportunity to stop and talk about the core functions of cities and some of the things that we do and and talk about what we do that is really required versus things that we we do because they're values of the community and things we think are important, but we have more discretion over. And and that I think helps set the context for priorities today as well. And uh, as you mentioned, uh opportunities in two different settings to provide public comment as needed. So thank you. And I'll just say, you know, one of the overarching goals is we hope and outcomes is after all the listening sessions we've had, um emails. We've also had a lot of uh emails that contributed to listen after the listening sessions. So we hope that by and large the public feels heard. Now, whether or not we all land on the same priorities, hard to say. We'll see how the process goes. But the good news is we have five council members here representing five districts. We keep our ears to the ground across the city and in our districts both. And in addition to all the feedback that we get at the feedback sessions, you know, we spend all year getting a lot of feedback from your uh from conversations we have and from your emails. So we will have um an opportunity where each council member will identify what they consider you know their top three priorities. We'll have conversations here among ourselves.