Half Moon Bay City Council Special Meeting: Annual Priority Setting - March 14, 2025
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Half Moon Bay City Council Special Meeting: Annual Priority Setting - March 14, 2025
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.
Public Comments & Testimony
- Hal Bagner urged a new commitment to transparency, a review of major projects that have overrun budgets (citing Carter Park and the Poplar Street project as examples), a firm grip on actual housing needs, and a re-examination of programs like rent control. He mentioned a citizen-led Half Moon Bay Transparency Project.
- Nancy Fontana asked the council to consider the impact of federal tariffs on project costs and to focus on infrastructure and safety, avoiding distraction by single issues.
- Leslie Dumond expressed concern about debris and eucalyptus trees in Frenchman's Creek, citing fire danger and past tree falls. She requested the city seek funding to remove debris and hazardous trees.
- Steve Hyman criticized the city's financial management, stating the deficit is being funded by depleting reserves. He advocated for deep spending cuts and expressed skepticism about grant funding reliability. Mayor Brownstone responded that the deficit was reduced from $4 million to $3 million in one year and that reserves are above average.
CIP Presentation & Discussion
- Public Works Director Maz Bozerunia presented the five-year Capital Improvement Program, noting 55 programs and projects totaling about $88 million, much of it unfunded or tied to grants. The city's general fund contribution to the CIP was an average of $3 million annually, reduced to $1.8 million in the current year due to the structural deficit.
- Several programs were defunded for the current fiscal year but work continued through council-approved funding. Key projects discussed include the Highway 1 South Corridor study, the Wavecrest Water Main and Smith Field project, the East Side Parallel Trail segments, and the Urban Watershed Management Plan.
- Council members posed questions about the distinction between programs and projects, tree maintenance responsibilities, neighborhood traffic safety policies, and the scope of the urban watershed plan versus individual ditch projects.
Core Services Discussion
- City Manager Matthew Lemmon framed the discussion around the city's financial situation, noting a structural deficit where revenue growth is outpaced by service delivery costs. He highlighted the need to define core services versus discretionary programs, and to assess opportunities for other agencies to take on more responsibility.
- The city operates as a contract city, with partnerships for fire, police (sheriff), library, and some park services. The council was encouraged to review staffing and structure to focus on essential services.
Priority Setting Discussion
- Each council member identified their top priorities. The following themes emerged:
- Fiscal Health and Sustainability: Councilmembers Ruddock, Nagengast, Johnson, and Brownstone emphasized budget oversight, project cost controls, and a citizens' financial advisory committee.
- Public Health and Safety: All members highlighted emergency preparedness (tsunami, fire, evacuation plans), pipeline/sheriff contract, encampments, and addressing PGE outages in the south grid.
- Infrastructure: Vice Mayor Ruddock and Councilmember Nagengast prioritized streets, sidewalks, stormwater management (especially known problem watersheds like Keyho, Pullman, and Seymour), and completing the East Side Parallel Trail.
- Economic Development and Tourism: Councilmember Johnson focused on downtown beautification, gateway improvements, and supporting businesses. Vice Mayor Ruddock supported permit streamlining for downtown.
- Affordable Housing: Councilmember Penrose made this her top priority, emphasizing housing for all income levels and exploring creative solutions like home-sharing. Councilmember Johnson mentioned ADU streamlining and workforce housing.
- Councilmember Penrose declined to list only three priorities, instead offering a broader set including affordable housing, the east side trail, watershed projects, city-school district cooperation, internet redundancy, and emergency planning.
- Councilmember Nagengast suggested renaming "Economic Recovery and Development" to "Economic Development and Tourism" and adding "Fiscal Sustainability" as a new priority area.
Key Outcomes
- No formal votes or decisions were taken. The council agreed to an iterative process where staff will:
- Send each council member their individual priority list for refinements.
- Compile all input into a draft work plan, removing completed or cancelled items from the existing 2024-26 plan.
- Bring the draft to a future council meeting for further discussion and finalization alongside the budget process in May/June.
- The goal for fiscal year 2025-26 is to eliminate deficit spending from reserves and begin rebuilding reserve balances.
- Mayor Brownstone acknowledged the need for better project management and clearer communication on project cost overruns.
Meeting Transcript
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.
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