The Santa Rosa City Council held a regular meeting on May 6, 2025, starting at 12:00 p.m. with a study session on the Fiscal Year 2025-26 Operations and Maintenance Budget and Capital Improvement Program, followed by a regular session at 4:00 p.m. The meeting was adjourned at 6:21 p.m. Council Members Mark Stapp, Eddie Alvarez, Caroline Bañuelos, Victoria Fleming, and Natalie Rogers were present; Dianna MacDonald and Jeff Okrepkie were absent (Okrepkie participated remotely for the study session but was absent for the regular session).
Good afternoon. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence interpretation of the meeting. For those of us joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish. Is available a 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. If you're on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly, and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Interpreter, will you please restate this in Spanish? Yes. Thank you very much. Back to you. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Rogers. Present. Councilmember O'Krepke. Here. Councilmember McDonald. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Councilmember Ben Wellows? Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Mayor Step. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Thank you very much. Madam City Attorney. And I will hand it off to the clerk because this is a new meeting from this morning so that she can facilitate the information we need from the council member. And then as I am understanding, once we get beyond that, based on what I understand, the reason is for the remote participation. So I'm going to hand it off to the clerk to facilitate having the council member explain and provide the disclosures that he's required to provide under the statute. Thank you, City Attorney. Uh Councilmember O'Krepke, can you please state the provision under AB 2449 of the Brown Act under which you are participating today, either just cause or emergency provisions? Yeah, uh I will be attending this meeting remotely under AB 2449, applying the just cause uh provision uh because I have a contagious illness and cannot attend in person. I will participate with both audio and video turned on throughout the meeting. In this room, I'm accompanied by no one over the age of 18. With that, Mayor, uh, we can proceed. Thank you. We have no closed session items uh for this session, or for or on this afternoon rather. Uh, we'll move on to item 4.1, our review of fiscal year 2025 and 2026 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. Uh and with that, I'll turn it over to Madam City Manager. Thank you, Mayor. Uh good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members. Uh so today we will begin our um day one of budget presentation. So you'll hear from various departments, uh, beginning from finance to just to discuss uh ongoing budget reductions. Uh what is going to be important by the conclusion of this meeting is we would like clear direction on budget cuts uh that council would like to implement. Um while several options have actually been presented to you. Some of these options actually necessitate further uh conversations with uh labor uh to discuss some potential impacts. So want to make it clear that if there is direction, there will still need to be some ongoing discussions with our labor representatives. Uh today staff, we have staff from each department and some additional staff members in the chambers that are available to answer your questions.