The Walnut Creek City Council held a regular meeting on June 3, 2025, beginning at 6:00 p.m. and adjourning at 9:24 p.m. The meeting included proclamations, consent calendar actions, public hearings on revenue bonds and city job vacancies, and review of the proposed FY26-27 operating budget and master fee schedule. All councilmembers were present.
Good afternoon. I am Cindy Darling, mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, and welcome to the Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 special meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council. The special meeting is called for the purpose of holding a closed session related to the following a conference with legal counsel on existing litigation times two. Does any member of the public wish to comment on a closed session item? Seeing no one, we will reconvene in closed session on the third floor. Thank you very much. Good evening. I am Cindy Darling, the mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, and welcome to the Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 regular meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council. The City Council is conducting this meeting from the City Council Chamber. The meeting is being video streamed and can be viewed live or later on the city's website. As some attendees may be participating in their first Walnut Creek City Council meeting, I wanted to welcome everybody and talk briefly about the public comment process. For each agenda item, there will be an opportunity for public comment on the item. Thus, if you desire to speak on an item on the agenda this evening, please hold your comments until we get to that item. Additionally, we have a section on the agenda titled Public Communication, and which is for public comments for items that are not on the agenda. Any comments during public communication should not relate to an item that is on the agenda for the evening. Consistent with section 9.5 of the city council handbook. We will allocate additional time for public communications for items not on the agenda at the end of the open session of the meeting if necessary. If you desire to provide a public comment, please complete a little speaker identification card and line up behind the lectern when I call for you. Wait your turn and when you approach the lectern, please state your name and city of residence for the record. You'll have two minutes to address the council. And I will talk about this later, but organized groups can have 10 minutes if nobody else in the group decides to speak. Please keep in mind that this is a city business meeting. The City Council has adopted rules of decorum to ensure that meetings are conducted efficiently and effectively, and that all members of the public have a full, fair, and equal opportunity to be heard. The City Council handbook outlines decorum expected in the council chamber and can be found on our website. All remarks should be addressed to the city council. Please do not use threatening, profane, or abusive language which disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of the council meeting. Again, each speaker is going to have two minutes to make your remarks. Written comments submitted and received up to two hours before the meeting have been posted to the city's website for public review and are included in the meeting record, but will not be separately read into the record. So now please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Councilmember DeVini. Here. Councilmember Francois. Here. Councilmember Silva. Here, Mayor Pro Temwell. Here. Mayor Darling. Here. All right, thank you. The first item tonight is a proclamation relative to recognizing gun violence. And this is one that is a huge issue in our community and our country because every day 125 Americans are killed by gun violence, and more than 200 are shot and wounded with an average of more than 17,000 gun homicides every year. Americans are 26 times more likely to die by gun homicide than people in other high-income countries. And firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. I could keep going on and on with the statistics, but it is something that we need to find a way to break the cycle and to get out of this. While we support the second amendment and the right of law-abiding citizens, we also need to make sure that we're handling guns responsibly and reasonably in this community. We are working in partnership with a number of groups here tonight, and um I would like to invite um I rearranged my schedule my list of things here. I would like to invite up Aaron Roder with Mom's Demand Action and Kathy Maloney from the Rossmore group that is the president of the end gun violence club to accept this proclamation from the city. And you can I welcome brief comments from both of you on your work to help end gun violence. So please come forward. Yeah, come up here.