The Visalia City Council held a work session starting at 4:00 PM and a regular session at 7:00 PM on Monday, November 3, 2025. The work session covered recognition of an innovation award, presentation of the 2025 public opinion survey results, an update on the Sanitary Sewer Master Plan, an overview of the Engineering Division, and establishment of strategic budget goals for FY 2026/2027 and 2027/2028. The regular session included public comments, consent calendar actions (with items pulled for discussion on animal services grants, bike lane redesign, and food assistance), a public hearing on senior meal program fee adjustments, and approval of the city's role as lead operator for a regional express transit service.
Hi, good evening or good afternoon, everybody. We're gonna go ahead and get this uh city council work session meeting started November 3rd, and we will call this meeting to order. We'll start off with public comments. Citizens are now invited to comment on issues within the jurisdiction of the Visaya City Council and items listed on the closed session agenda. The council asks that you keep your comments concise and positive. Creative criticism presented with appropriate courtesy is welcome. Each speaker will be allowed three minutes, and a timer will notify you when your time's expired. Please begin your comments by stating and spelling your name and providing your city of residence. Do we have anyone from the public wishing to speak? Seeing pretty much all okay. So I see no one. Is this microphone working? Okay. Perfect. It's a little low. It was working, then it wasn't. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and start off with item number one, which is uh recognition of City of Isaiah Innovators by Design Award. And that's gonna be given by Jason Serpa. Good evening, Council. Jason Serpa, Public Works Manager for Solid Waste. On October 8th, uh the workforce investment board held the Innovators by Design Conference, uh, which uh invited a lot of partners, community partners, community individuals, uh, to collaborate and uh um uh inspire change uh and in community involvement. Um, in addition to having a keynote speaker there and other breakout conferences that they did give out individual and uh team awards uh to recognize um uh not only organizations but individuals, and the city of Isalia was awarded the um innovation award for our eco program, and so I uh they also did a real special video. Uh they um which will I guess become a lot longer video for um to send out to other cities and organizations as an example and uh we do have the video to show today, but before we show the video, I do want to introduce our individuals that went through the eco program. I have Michael Gonzalez uh and Celeste uh Paras. They are both in our sweep program now, full-time uh full-time employees, and uh Griselda Harrow, who's a solid waste operator. And we do have Alyssa Ojeda also in our wastewater uh collections department. Uh she should be able to make it, she might be a little late today. Um Griselda was featured in the video, but uh they're all superstars, they all came through the program. Um, and we can go ahead and start the eco program was developed in order to provide individuals that are experiencing homelessness in the city of Aysaya with the skills needed to be successful and also the resources and confidence needed to be successful in the workforce. I had been evicted from my apartment, and I was not on the streets for a very long time, but I was on the streets for about three weeks before I got into a shelter. I saw another participant there in her yellow shirt with their pants and her boots, and I was like, where do you work? I want to work where you work, you know. The ECO program was always a partnership between the workforce investment board and CSAT, along with the City of Isaiah. What do I do? Start on here and then we'll walk up this way. C SET does run the level one crew, which is a cleanup crew supervised with a C set employee. It was like a real eye-opener to uh cleaning up the unhoused. I I was able to see if I would have stayed out longer on housed, and then that could have been me. That kind of gave me more of a motivational push to continue to move forward. So phase one, it helps people get their foot back in the door with the workforce, right? In addition, what they're doing is job preparation workshops, helping them with interview skills, with resume writing, you know, career expiration, figuring out what's out there, and then we also have phase two. Those individuals are then working directly under the supervision of the city of Visalia's public works department. They send them over to the City of Isaiah Solid Waste Department, and they work here in place of hour leaves that we would have hired anyways. There are folks out there that have a hard time finding the avenue to get back to work. We consider a success when they achieve outside employment. I really enjoyed the program getting up early and becoming responsible. I started saving money. That's when they asked me if I wanted to apply for a position here at the city. And then um I ended up getting my license, my license, and I got the solid waste operator job. I love my job.