On Wednesday, May 28, 2025, at approximately 3:50 PM, the Monterey City Council convened a study session and special meeting. The primary agenda item was receiving a presentation and approving the 2025–26 City Council Action Item Schedule, a comprehensive list of 174 initiatives across eight priority areas. The council also considered a governance policy for boards and commissions but tabled it due to time constraints. Public comments were heard on both items.
Recording in progress. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our study sessionslash special council meeting. It is Wednesday, May 28th, 2025. I'll go ahead and call the meeting to order and I'll ask Linda to do roll call and share announcements with the public. Okay, roll call. Councilmember Barber present, Councilmember Garcia. Councilmember Rash. Councilmember Smith. Here. And Mayor Williamson. Here. Okay. Information on participating in this meeting and providing public comment, including remotely by Zoom or telephone, is available on this meeting's agenda, which is online at Monterey.gov forward slash agendas. Remote commenters. You will be muted until it is your turn to speak. And a timer will be shown on the screen. If you are connected on Zoom, the timer is accurate with no delay. In-person attendees must keep phones and devices muted to prevent audio interference with the meeting. Thank you for participating in the democratic process in your city government. Thanks, Linda. And with that, we'll go ahead and go into our public appearance items. First, we have a receive a presentation and approve the 2025-26 City Council Action Item Schedule. With that, I'll pass it to our assistant city manager, Nat for presentation. Great. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor, and uh good afternoon, City Council. We're uh pleased today to provide you with an overview of the uh 2025 and 2026 City Council action item schedule. Uh with us uh this afternoon are all the department heads who represent uh the various uh areas of service delivery in our city, our public works director, fire chief, police chief, and others, and um here to answer any questions you have about the schedule. What I'll do uh this afternoon is walk through uh where we are today, how we got to uh developing and presenting uh this action item schedule, what that means, and then uh go through some of the examples of projects, programs, and initiatives that fall within each of the city council priority areas. And of course, uh we'll have time for uh for QA uh as well. So um first what I'll do is uh share the screen here and uh let's go back in time just a little bit. Um earlier this year, uh city staff, we presented the city staff work program to all of you on January 21st. Uh following that uh on the 28th, we held the prioritization and goal setting workshop at uh Schulte Park Center. You may recall uh lots of uh engagement, uh feedback on what are the city's priorities. We had the very challenging uh prioritization exercise, what's most important, what's least important, and um what items are the most urgent and and the least urgent. And on March 24th, council reviewed uh summary of the workshop, uh feedback, uh received updates on some of the initiatives within the top eight priorities, and uh and you all adopted those priorities by resolution. Um what uh some of the feedback we did here on March 4th is that it might be helpful for each and every one of you to learn a little bit more about when specific items are going to be brought to council for deliberation or for a presentation or action. So that's what we've done here in the uh three-page 11 by 17 sheet of uh initiatives uh so uh again. Here's uh just uh a reminder of uh what we brought to you on January 21st, the council priorities that were adopted on the 4th of March, and then the schedule that we're bringing before you today. Uh this uh graphic may look familiar to you. This is the uh import levels of importance and urgency based on the various city priorities, everything ranging from at the top community engagement and government transparency uh all the way through to uh other areas of service delivery as well. Okay, yeah, you may recall this as well. This is the ranking of city priorities based on what's most important to all of you. And what we're gonna do today is focus on these areas. This is not to say that other areas of city service delivery aren't important, but based on what you all identified as most important, uh, and these are eight of them. Uh that's Weber's presenting uh to you today. So this is actually a slide from our council workshop back in fall of 2019. And some of you were on council during that time. Uh, we talked about how managing the agenda is also about managing priorities.