The Santa Rosa City Council held a regular meeting on May 7, 2024, starting with a closed session at 12:00 PM, a study session on the FY 2024-25 budget at 12:30 PM, and the regular session at 4:00 PM. The meeting included proclamations, a public hearing, consent items, staff briefings, and future agenda requests. Key outcomes included approval of revised Bennett Valley Golf Course fees, adoption of the City Council Goals & Objectives with amendments emphasizing employee recruitment and retention and economic development, and direction to place discussions on senior overlay for mobile home parks and language access policy on future agendas.
Good afternoon. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. Will alert at the end of that period. Welcome back everyone to our May 7, 2024 Santa Rosa City Council meeting. It is now 1234, and we will be reconvening our meeting, seeing a quorum. Madam City Clerk, may you please call the roll. Councilmember OK. Councilmember McDonald. Here, Councilmember Fleming, here Councilmember Alvarez. Mayor Vice Mayor Stapp. Mayor Rogers. President. Let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Councilmember Alvarez. Thank you. We will now proceed to item four, which is our study sessions for the day. I would like to remind everyone as noticed on the agenda that public comment will be taken on this item tomorrow, Wednesday, May 8th, after all the departments have had the opportunity to provide their presentations. And with that, Madam City Manager. All right. Good evening, Mayor and members of council. So we will go to item 4.1 review of fiscal year 2425 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council members. My name is Veronica Connor. I'm the budget manager, and I am joined here by Alan Alton, Chief Financial Officer, and Scott Wagner, our Deputy Director of Finance. And today we're going to be taking you through the fiscal year 24-25 budget study session. I also do want to give a shout out to the rest of my budget team. So today we're going to start our presentation with some opening comments from the CFO and the city manager before we move into an overview of the citywide budget, followed by an overview of the general fund budget and a staffing summary. And then we'll get into the department presentations. Today we're hoping to get through all the administrative departments as well as IT, housing, fire, and police. So with that, I will turn it over to our city manager for some opening comments. Thank you. Thank you. So good evening, uh, Mayor and City Council members. So it's my pleasure to present the FY 2425 budget. I would like to extend my appreciation to the finance team and to the city staff for their contributions in crafting this budget. This budget has been developed with careful considerations, um, including the fact that we are expecting a revenue shortfall that could impact our financial stability. We are facing a projected deficit, and the staff have begun to develop long-term solutions to enhance our revenue streams. Um this budget does include strategic additions aligned with your goals following the recent adoption of the economic development strategic plan. We have allocated resources to support the uh synchronization of this plan. Additionally, we've introduced the role of an eco uh an environmental sustainability manager to help us achieve our sustainability targets uh by 2023. While not included in this budget, but we are hoping for some additional discussions or on the topic of school resource officers. Chief Cregan and I, in collaboration with Superintendent Trinell are working actively to develop a program to propose to the ad hoc committee. We are optimistic optimistic about the school board's approval of our proposal and have proactively applied for a state earmark of 2.2 million dollars to fund this initiative. Additionally, we have initiated internal discussions for the waiving of impact fees. As we are currently in the process of crafting a policy for your approval, we welcome your insights on potential funding strategies for the fees that are projected to be waived. This budget session is designed to be interactive, and we really want to have some um intentional discussions. Um staff um will present details of their departments and be ready to discuss and answer any questions that you may have. Questions that require further uh analysis will be compiled and forward following the conclusion of tomorrow's study session. I want to thank the staff again for their hard work, and we are looking forward to today's and tomorrow's discuss discussions so that we can begin to move your policies forward. So thank you for your support.