The Merced City Council held a regular meeting on Monday, May 19, 2025, beginning at 6:03 PM in the Council Chamber. A study session on the 2025/26 City Council Goals and Priorities was held from 5:10 to 5:50 PM, followed by a closed session from 5:50 to 6:00 PM. The regular meeting included special presentations, proclamations, public comments, consent calendar items, public hearings, action items, a budget review, and formation of a Citizens Advisory Focus Group. Key actions include continuation of a public hearing on a General Plan Amendment and Zone Change, approval of an annexation into Community Facilities District No. 2003-2, approval of a final subdivision map for Royal Wood Estates Phase 1, failure of a police vehicle outfitting contract, and continuation of several action items due to lack of five affirmative votes.
Yep. I will call the study session to order. Okay, agenda item A, study session roll call. Council Member DuPont. Present. DeAndra? Harris. Smith. Zhang? Yeah. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Boyle? Here. And Mayor Serrado. Here. Okay. Gender item B, study session, continue study session to review the 2025-26 City Council goals and priorities. Thank you, Jennifer. Good evening, City Manager McBride. Can we zoom in on this a little bit? Hold on. I think I can do it right here. Welcome back for continued uh study session to review the goals and priorities. Absolutely. Uh Mayor, what you see is probably still a pretty rough document in some aspects. Formatting could be worked on for sure. But uh following the last meeting where we talked about goals and priorities, uh, we went back. We tried to come up with more specific goals. Uh we tried to have some majorable time frames involved. We also added in what we thought would be responsible parties uh to kind of work on these. I would say we probably swung from one side of the pendulum being very broad to maybe being a little bit too specific. Um there's probably a sweet spot somewhere just in the middle or a little bit to one side or the other. Um, we we did go back to we looked through all of the comments at the uh goal setting workshop that we had. Uh we had all the comments provided by the departments, everything we received from from yourselves at the meeting. Um the big picture things don't really change, right? They're public safety. It's it's transportation, roads, road safety, pedestrian safety, uh, parks, community services, economic development. Um those tend to be the high priorities from everything we look through. Um I think those also resonate with what you heard at your your town hall meetings that we had. Um with that in mind, as we start to work through this. I think one area too that came up from our uh five-year forecast is more fiscal stability about planning a little bit farther ahead for for our resources. And so just to start with this first one here, um, we just call this fiscal stability, so to speak. We listed several things here in the middle goal section um that have come up before or things that we know that we should be working on. And as I mentioned, we set a timeline and then some some department responsibilities. So I don't really want to read through each one of these. If there's any things you guys want to comment on, I can keep going. But obviously at the bottom of the page here, you can see public safety is the next one. These are not organized in any specific order hierarchy. Like we just did fiscal stability first and public safety, and whatever order they fell in is how they fell in. So please don't take that as like this is a higher priority than than any of the others.