The Santa Rosa City Council met on December 10, 2024, at 2:00 PM for a closed session, followed by a study session at 3:30 PM and a regular session at 4:00 PM. The meeting included a study session on capital improvement program prioritization, a staff briefing on a homeless prevention pilot program, a public hearing on a property default, and reports on public safety tax and transit planning. The council took several actions, including approving consent items, accepting an annual report, and extending a development deadline for negotiation.
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 interpretation 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. It looks like a globe. Welcome back, everyone, to our December 10th, 2024, Santa Rosa City Council meeting. It is now 3:30, and we will be starting our meeting. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember O'Krepki. Councilmember McDonald. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Your Councilmember Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Stepp. Your Mayor Rogers. President. Thank you. Moving on to item four point one, our study session for today, Madam City Manager. Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, members of council. Item four point one is TPW Capital Improvement Program Prioritization Udate. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council members, Dan Hennessy, Director of Transportation Public Works, back following up from our August 20th discussion about how to prioritize TPW public works projects. They're also very difficult to deliver and honestly, they're just very difficult to wrestle with the priorities that the six of you put forward last time. So you can see in some years as little as $18.5 million, and other years almost $26 million. Makes it very difficult to think about this on an annual cycle. Also, I want to share that that bottom row where I've I've called them past promises. We've spent more than 44 million dollars in the last five years on just three projects. Those being the Hearn US 101 interchange, the Fulton Road widening, and the bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing. Again, all valid, valuable projects, but more than 40% of our CIP budget on those three things while we have any number of smaller scale sidewalk crossing pavement maintenance needs that just really hamstring our ability to make those changes. Thinking about how to reorganize that, if we sum those same categories over the past five years and look at a forward thinking budget for the next five, what does it look like if all of a sudden we're not hamstrung by those past promises and the roadway widening projects? Um what are we able to do by not committing ourselves to those types of things? And essentially everything else can see an increase in funding as a result of that. So based on those the buckets that you see up there of different project types, um, we're just through not being distracted by those projects that are not alignment with our goals and really focused on the deliverability of this scale of projects. Um we're able to deliver the types of projects that respond to the goals and that the community is continuously asking us for. Um the other thing that this does is it instead of doing this annually is that we start looking at this programmatically over a five year period such that this can become more predictable over time, and we're not allocating funds to projects before they actually need them. We can fund planning, design, permitting construction separately and sequentially as appropriate so that money doesn't sit. One of the things that in kind of reconstructing this moving forward that occurred to me is that in January each year we begin submitting our budget allocation for the following year, and then that gets approved by council in June and becomes available to us on July 1st. No new money becomes available to us until the following July 1st. So there's a period of almost 18 months where a new issue comes up and we don't have any resource available to us to respond to those issues. So some of the things that your constituents bring up to you that you bring up to me, my some of the times my default answer is that's great, we'll add it to the list. I can't do anything about it right now. And that's the honest answer, and it's a bad answer. And I think this this will provide us more flexibility to respond to those kinds of problems and have an honest conversation about whether or not it's worth doing, not just default to we don't have the resources, but we can talk about it uh on its merits instead. Um through this reorganization, you'll also note that the contingency category is removed from our budget. And what this really means is that essentially every category and every program manager here would be responsible for their own contingency. So your plan, the um staff member who's responsible for the bridge category is responsible for bridge programming. Same with sidewalks and intersection improvements, such that they're not reliant on each other. There will obviously be overlaps between these funding categories for certain projects, and I hope that encourages collaboration between our teams. It will almost certainly need to to make funding happen for some projects.