This special meeting of the Santa Rosa City Council was convened for a Goal Setting Workshop, focusing on establishing priorities for the upcoming fiscal year and evaluating the City Manager's performance. The meeting included presentations from Jacob Green & Associates (JGA) on strategic planning best practices and from the Chief Financial Officer on the city's financial outlook, followed by extensive public comment. The council then adjourned to closed session to discuss the City Manager's performance evaluation.
All right, good morning. It is now nine. Oh, two in seeing a quorum. We will be starting our meeting for the day. Madam City Clerk, may you please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Chris Rogers. Councilmember O'Krepke. Councilmember McDonald. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Councilmember Alvarez. Councilmember Vice Mayor Stapp. And Mayor Rogers present. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Councilmember Fleming. Very nice to see everyone in the chamber. Good morning and welcome. And the first would be to introduce our new public works director, uh, Dan Hennessy. So welcome Dan to the team. During our public hearing, 19 members of the public provided input to the city council, and the public will have another opportunity to today to provide additional input after our consultant presentation. Following public comment, the council will adjourn into closed session under government code section 54957 B1 to solidify goals, objectives, criteria, and clear expectations for our city managers' future performance review. This is critical to ensure that the city manager understands the expectation of the council and projects and programs that we expect the organization to deliver. Our expectations for the city manager as they relate to the performance and goals of the organization will be shared publicly as part of the budget adoption process where the public will once again be able to provide comment and input. So I would like to just point out how many times I said the public will be able to provide comment and input. We definitely value your comments and your input. And again, I would like to thank you all for being here. And with that, I now like to introduce Jacob Green from Jacob Green and Associates, a California local government consulting firm that will provide a presentation about the priority setting process and provide us insight regarding the municipal best practice. So with that, Jacob, thank you for being here. Good morning, Mayor. Thank you very much for having me, and good morning, council. Really excited to be with you here today in the process of developing your strategic plan for your city and your goal setting, which will ultimately lead to your budget. As we start this morning, I do want to introduce uh a few members of our team. My company is Jacob Green and Associates. There are 29 of us. We all specialize in California local government. We work primarily with cities, counties, and special districts throughout the state, providing strategic planning and a variety of other organizational development services. Behind me on my team here is Nicole Beach. She will be working with your staff on the work plans and implementation plans for council and community review, consistent with the council's priorities developed in this process. Also, uh not sitting to my left, but uh in spirit is Greg Devereau, who because of the weather this morning uh was not able to make it in uh here into the open session uh component. Greg is a former city manager of two cities in California, former county executive of San Mario County, and will be working very closely and has been working very closely with the council and staff in this process. The agenda for this morning's uh presentation will be talking about why conduct a priority setting workshop. We'll be talking specifically about the Santa Rosa process, priority setting fundamentals and best practice, as the mayor mentioned in the introduction, and finally, next steps. We'd like to start by talking a little bit about the why. Uh the city of Santa Rosa, there is nothing wrong with the city of Santa Rosa. We're not here because there's any problems or challenges or issues with the city of Santa Rosa. It's very much like my car. I love my car, but every three to five thousand miles, my car goes into the shop. Goes in the shop, we check it out A to Z, and we make sure that it can be have its own change, every you know, kick the tires, make sure that it can get back on the road. It doesn't mean there's a problem with my car, it just means that it's best practice to take it off the road so it can continue to function in a high capacity. The same for the city of Santa Rosa and every municipality.