City Council May 7, 2024

May 7

City Council Meeting Summary

Time	Item	Item Summary	Motion Summary	Comment Summary
00:00:04	I: CALL TO ORDER, APPROVAL OF REMOTE PARTICIPATION BY COUNCIL, ROLL CALL & ADJOURN TO CLOSED SESSION	The meeting of May 7th, 2024, was called to order in council chambers and via Zoom, with broadcasting available on the city website and cable TV. The city clerk conducted the roll call, with council members Blaustein, Hoffman, Kuhlman, and Vice Mayor Cox present, along with Mary Sobieski. Two items were announced for closed session: anticipated litigation per Government Code Section 54956.9 and existing litigation, Yes, in My Backyard versus the City of Sausalito. Public comment was opened for the closed session items (00:01:03).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:01:19	II: RECONVENE TO OPEN SESSION - 7:00 PM	The meeting reconvened to open session after a closed session with no announcements from the closed session (00:02:45). The meeting continued with the Pledge of Allegiance (00:02:55).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:03:11	1: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS/MAYOR’S ANNOUNCEMENTS	This agenda item was a presentation on the city's new Fix-It app, an active response tool for public works maintenance issues. Kevin McGowan, Public Works Director, introduced Megan Lockett, the permit technician leading the project (00:04:25). Megan Lockett explained that the app, developed by RockSolid, allows residents to report issues like potholes and blocked storm drains via the city website or smartphone (00:05:57). The system aims to increase responsiveness, track progress on a GIS map, and streamline maintenance reporting (00:06:06). She demonstrated how to submit a service request through the website, highlighting the easy-to-follow steps and the ability to upload photos (00:09:58). The app also sends immediate email confirmations (00:12:56). Lockett showed examples of existing requests on the website and the app interface, including the back-end view for staff, showcasing the GIS map with color-coded tickets (00:14:28). She noted that while the app is helpful, some issues like street light maintenance or issues outside city jurisdiction cannot be immediately addressed (00:17:33). The app also has a duplicate submittal detection software. Kevin McGowan thanked Megan and emphasized the importance of the app for identifying problem areas and improving response times (00:19:52). Councilmember Kalman inquired about the possibility of downloading aggregate data and comparing it to the capital improvement program (00:20:46).	No Motion	2 Total: 2 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral
00:21:56 Sandra Bushmaker was In Favor: Sandra Bushmaker expressed her appreciation for the app, noting its effectiveness and ease of use, stating that she has already used it a couple of times since downloading it a month ago. 00:22:26 Sharna Brockett was In Favor: Sharna Brockett also commended the staff for the app's development. She shared her positive experience using a similar app in San Francisco and expressed excitement about using the new Sausalito app.
00:23:28	2: ACTION MINUTES OF PREVIOUS MEETING	The council reviewed the action minutes from the previous meeting. Mayor Sobieski opened the floor for comments from the dais, and upon receiving none, opened public comment. There were no public comments. A motion was made to approve the minutes and seconded by Councilmember Kalman. Due to a member participating remotely, a roll call vote was conducted. Councilmembers Blossy, Hoffman, Blaustein, and Kalman voted in favor. Vice Mayor Cox was marked as absent for the vote.	Motion to approve the minutes, seconded by Councilmember Kalman (00:23:48)	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:24:38	3: CONSENT CALENDAR	The consent calendar includes several items expected to pass with unanimous council support, including proclamations for Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, waiving a business license tax penalty, receiving and filing the treasurer's report, adopting a resolution for a new position in the police department, adopting a public official reimbursement policy, the library Q3 report, resolutions authorizing the city manager to execute agreements for pipeline replacement and electric vehicle charging stations, adopting a resolution approving the installation of new stop signs, and resolutions related to consulting services and professional services. Councilmember Hoffman requested item 3F (public official reimbursement policy) be removed for further discussion (00:27:04). Councilmember Blaustein read both proclamations for Jewish American Heritage Month (00:27:42) and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (00:28:23). Councilmember Kalman clarified that for item 3I (electric vehicle charging stations), the third-party vendor will own the chargers (00:29:48). Councilmember Hoffman recused herself from item 3K due to its proximity to her home (00:30:39).	A motion was passed to approve the consent calendar items 3A through 3L, excluding 3F and 3K, with Councilmember Hoffman recusing herself from 3K. (00:31:01)	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:32:18	5.A: Receive Report Regarding City Insurance Procurement and Risk Management; Discussion and Direction to Staff Regarding Joining Public Risk Innovation, Solutions, and Management (PRISM)	City Manager Zapata and City Attorney Sergio presented a report on the city's insurance procurement and risk management, focusing on the possibility of joining Public Risk Innovation, Solutions, and Management (PRISM). Zapata highlighted the importance of insurance for the city's operations across various areas such as property, auto, and cyber security (00:32:26). She explained that the city had been a member of the Bay Cities Joint Powers Insurance Authority since 1986 but faced potential expulsion due to an excessive loss history (00:34:08). Sergio discussed the city's efforts to procure insurance from both public and private markets, contacting multiple risk pools including PRISM. He noted challenges due to the city's loss history and the need for comprehensive information on assets and risk management practices (00:38:42). He mentioned that private insurance market pricing indications are high with aggregate limits, while PRISM is still evaluating the city's participation (00:42:37). He highlighted the increase in the city's self-insured retention from $50,000 to $500,000 (00:44:53). Councilmembers asked questions about the payouts by the pool, the city's expenses, and the benefits of the public market versus private insurance (00:46:10). Councilmember Blaustein inquired about the benefits of the public market versus Hub, and the context of a letter written to the PRISM executive committee (00:51:44). Councilmember Hoffman discussed the number of lawsuits and deferred maintenance issues (01:00:10). Mayor Sobieski raised the issue of self-insurance (01:02:39). There was significant discussion amongst the councilmembers regarding the thoroughness of the risk analysis strategy that staff has undertaken and how to mitigate risk. Several councilmembers endorsed the creation of a risk and resilience subcommittee, including Councilmembers Blaustein and Kalman (01:10:23). There was significant consensus that the priority is to ensure that the city has catastrophic insurance coverage (01:12:07).	No Motion	1 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 1 Neutral
01:07:41 Sandra Bushmaker was Neutral: Thanked the council for the presentation. Recommended that the city council and staff create a program to address deferred maintenance and reduce claims.
01:15:15	5.B: Discussion on the FY2024-25 Budget	City Manager Zapata introduced the first of four budget meetings, emphasizing auditing and fiscal responsibility, highlighting $10.8 million in city cash and $5.7 million in pension/OPEB savings. He noted a $2 million+ challenge due to insurance, pension costs, and a slowing economy, but advised against diminishing service levels, suggesting measured consideration of cash reserves and pension/OPEB trusts. He called for a 10-year financial model. Director Hess differentiated accounting from finance, focusing on the latter's forward-looking, story-telling approach. He defined budget surplus, deficit, fund balance, and reserves. Hess highlighted challenges in the general fund: rising pension/OPEB costs (UAL payment near $3 million, up $470,000 with $250,000 impacting the general fund directly) , insurance increases (potential $1.7 million impact), and softening sales tax revenue (down $300,000). To address a projected $2 million deficit, he proposed transferring $500,000 from the workman's comp fund, increasing the parking transfer by $300,000, and potentially using $1 million from the Section 115 trust. Hess recommended increasing the reserve to 25% and presented fund balance details. He also suggested establishing minimum cash balance policies for the MLK and parking funds, and accelerating the payback of the general fund advance from MLK. He said that parking revenues were projected to transfer $700,000 to the general fund. Council discussed the budget challenges and potential solutions. Councilmember Hoffman noted that the presentation was not on the agenda and wanted to ensure they focused on risk management. Hess requested council feedback for how to proceed with budget options.	No Motion	2 Total: 1 In Favor 0 Against 1 Neutral
02:16:30 Sandra Bushmaker was In Favor: Advocated for tightening the city's belt and stopping discretionary spending. She urged focus on priorities such as paying down pension debt, securing insurance, completing the facilities assessment, and addressing geohazard mapping study recommendations. 02:43:37 Babette McDougall was Neutral: Suggested more concentration on the use of TOT funds to accrue back to the hospitality and visitor serving sectors, suggesting the lack of discussion around TOT may explain why there is a lack of trust in the community. The speaker stated that the TOT has traditionally been for those visitor/hospitality sectors, which does not appear to be happening in Sausalito.
02:45:12	5.C: Receive and File a presentation from Miller Pacific Engineering Group regarding the draft Geologic Hazard Report for the City of Sausalito; Discussion and Direction to Staff Regarding Request for Proposal for Geologic Services to Map Assets, Implement	Michael Jewett from Miller Pacific Engineering Group presented the draft Geologic Hazard Report for Sausalito. The study identified local geologic conditions, seismic and hydrologic risk areas, and combined these with updated development guidelines. The purpose is to assess vulnerability to future mudslide disasters and identify early warning signs and proactive measures, with the primary goal of public safety (02:59:50). The study included geologic mapping to create a GIS database, using current topographic data and field reconnaissance (02:48:22). Hazard zones were developed based on landslide inventory, slope angles, and material strength (02:50:07). About 20% of Sausalito's land area falls into high landslide susceptibility zones and another 20% in liquefaction or settlement hazard zones (02:58:23). Recommendations include developing cooperative relationships with other stakeholders like Caltrans and NPS, using the GIS database as a living document, developing an infrastructure database for prioritizing site evaluations, and considering a geologic hazard abatement district for funding (03:01:00). A hazard zone development ordinance was suggested to enforce minimum engineering standards for new development (03:10:10). Councilmember Kalman asked about how historic slides were considered in the methodology (02:53:38), and how the strength value map combines with the slope angles (02:55:17). Councilmember Kalman wanted to understand how this data would be integrated and how it would effect new constuction housing ordinances like SB9 (03:13:29). Mary Sobieski asked about the feasibility of using microelectronics and mesh networks for real-time earth movement mapping (03:16:56). Councilmember Hoffman stated that landslides are not uncommon in Sausalito and significant ones are also not uncommon (03:24:41).	No Motion	2 Total: 2 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral
03:25:11 Sandra Bushmaker was In Favor: Sandra Bushmaker, a member of the landslide task force, emphasized the need to prioritize actions based on the report. She referenced a 2019 report with recommendations that need to be followed through, as many areas in Sausalito are in the red zone and that they had been talking about a geologic hazard assessment district. 03:26:32 Steven Woodside was In Favor: Steven Woodside, also a member of the task force, complimented the presentation and emphasized the need to connect the geology with budget and liability concerns. He suggested mitigating risks through a geologic hazard abatement district or development requirements, referencing the Susan Gordon house slide and the impact on insurance costs (03:27:31).
03:35:07	5.D: Introduction and Waiver of First Reading of Ordinance No. 03 - 2024 An Ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito Amending Sausalito Municipal Code Section 2.58.040 Relating to Residency Requirements on City Boards, Commissions, and Commit	Vice Mayor Cox asked if public comment should be taken. The city clerk confirmed that public comment would be taken.	No Motion	1 Total: 0 In Favor 1 Against 0 Neutral
03:35:24 Sandra Bushmaker was Against: Sandra Bushmaker stated that item 3F (regarding reimbursements) needs more work, calling it an "open checkbook" (03:35:29). She raised concerns about the lack of provisions for retroactivity and the ability of other boards and commissions to get reimbursement (03:35:41). She also expressed concerns about the item's acceptability given the current budget environment (03:35:45).
03:35:57	6: COMMUNICATIONS	The council opened the floor to public comment on items not on the agenda. Cameron Razavi expressed concern over the state of disrepair on Locust and Humboldt Streets, including potholes, lack of trash cans, and the deteriorating bulkhead. Sandra Bushmaker discussed attending Catalyst California meetings and shared information about litigation regarding SB 9 and its potential impact on general law cities like Sausalito, suggesting an opportunity for the city to participate and potentially gain relief from the state mandate (03:39:23). Steven Woodside declined to comment.	No Motion	3 Total: 0 In Favor 1 Against 2 Neutral
03:36:21 Cameron Razavi was Against: Expressed concern regarding the disrepair of Locust Street and Humboldt Street area, including potholes, lack of trash cans, and the deteriorating bulkhead. 03:38:31 Sandra Bushmaker was Neutral: Shared information about the Catalyst California meetings, and a charter cities' litigation win against SB 9, and the ongoing appeal for general law cities, suggesting Sausalito could participate to potentially gain relief from state mandates. 03:39:53 Steven Woodside was Neutral: Declined to comment.
03:40:04	7: COUNCILMEMBER COMMITTEE REPORTS	Councilmember Hoffman reported on attending the City Leaders Summit a couple of weeks prior, noting discussions mainly focused on legislative updates and expectations. A key takeaway was the significant amount of housing legislation in the pipeline that will impact city management of building and development. Hoffman offered to share the legislative updates with city staff as they progress through the legislature. (03:40:28) Hoffman also mentioned an email regarding recommendations for the city to engage with BCDC to obtain permits to meet the weather window (May 10th to the end of May) (03:41:34) for a project, possibly related to sea lions, but deferred to the city manager for a more detailed update.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:41:51	8A: City Manager Information for Council	City Manager Zapata provided an update on several items. There are four permits needed for a project. BCDC and the Army Corps of Engineers permits are still outstanding. The Water Board and Fish and Wildlife permits are fine. He requested the Mayor and Council assist in calling BCDC to expedite the permit process to coincide with the right timing of the tide for the Sea Lion project. City Hall will be closed from 8 AM to noon tomorrow for active shooter training. Noelle Gonzalez had a baby girl named Ever Luna.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:43:15	8B: Future Agenda Items	Councilmember Kalman requested confirmation that a resolution designating June as Pride Month for Sausalito would be on the May 21st agenda. Vice Mayor Cox stated that the agenda setting committee would consider this item at their next meeting and potentially place it on the consent agenda. Councilmember Kalman expressed concern about the agenda setting committee acting as a gatekeeper for council member requests with time sensitivities. Vice Mayor Cox clarified that the item could be pulled from consent if unsatisfactory. Councilmember Hoffman requested that the appropriate reserve number for the city be agendized as part of the budget discussions and suggested receiving slide presentations earlier to focus discussions. Councilmember Hoffman also voiced support for the charter city discussion and Pride Month request. Councilmember Blaustein voiced support for the Pride Month request and asked the council to consider a project labor agreement, considering the state requirements regarding union labor.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:46:51	8C: PUBLIC COMMENT on Items 8A-8B - limited to 2 minutes/person	This agenda item opened the floor for public comments specifically related to items 8A and 8B. The chair, Mary Sobieski, announced the start of the public comment period, limiting each speaker to two minutes.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:46:58	9: ADJOURNMENT	The meeting was adjourned by Mayor Sobieski in honor of Councilmember Blaustein's birthday (03:46:58). Councilmember Kalman thanked Chris (03:47:07) and mentioned there was chocolate cake for those who stayed (03:47:08).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

City Council Meeting Transcript

Adrian Brinton

City Council May 21, 2024

Time	Speaker	Text
00:00:04.77	Unknown	And council members, this is the meeting of May 7th, 2024. It's being held in council chambers at 420 Little Street and at the courtyard by Marriott, Sacramento, 2101 River Plaza Drive, Sacramento, California, 95833. Staff and members of the public are also watching and participating through Zoom. This meeting is also being broadcast live on the city's website and on cable TV channel 27.
00:00:32.01	Unknown	Thank you city clerk, would you please call the roll?
00:00:34.91	Unknown	Council member Blaustein?
00:00:38.99	Councilmember Blaustein	Yes.
00:00:40.06	Unknown	Council member Hoffman? Here. Council member Kuhlman? Here. Vice Mayor Cox?
00:00:43.23	Vice Mayor Cox	Here.
00:00:44.95	Vice Mayor Cox	Here.
00:00:49.32	Vice Mayor Cox	year.
00:00:50.57	Unknown	and Mary Sobieski.
00:00:51.87	Mary Sobieski	here. Alright, we called the meeting to order.
00:00:55.36	Mary Sobieski	roll. We have two items in closed session.
00:00:58.67	Mary Sobieski	Conference with legal counsel anticipated litigation
00:01:03.16	Mary Sobieski	Government Code Section 54956.9 and Conference with Legal Counsel existing litigation, Yes, in My Backyard versus the City of Sausalito. We will now open public comment on these closed session items.
00:01:17.84	Unknown	Seeing none.
00:01:19.43	Mary Sobieski	All right, we will close public comment and join the closed session.
00:02:45.56	Mary Sobieski	All right, we are coming back from closed session to no closed session announcements, and we're going to begin the meeting with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
00:02:53.27	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
00:02:55.21	Mary Sobieski	I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
00:03:06.62	Mary Sobieski	Thank you very much.
00:03:11.92	Mary Sobieski	We will now move on to
00:03:14.58	Mary Sobieski	Special presentations and mayor's announcements. We will have a special presentation on
00:03:21.22	Mary Sobieski	the new Fix-It app, which should be
00:03:24.57	Mary Sobieski	of great interest to everyone in the community as a step forward in how the city administers its trouble tickets from
00:03:31.76	Mary Sobieski	It's infrastructure and other issues. And Director McGowan, I think you're doing the honors.
00:03:39.74	Kevin McGowan	How's that? Good evening, Mayor, members of City Council. I'm Kevin McGowan, Public Works Director for Sausalito. And we do have a presentation this evening. Hopefully our city clerk or assistant can help out with that and bring up the presentation. This evening, the presentation regarding the city's new reporting software, the new Fix-It application is an active response tool
00:04:02.69	Kevin McGowan	to address public works maintenance issues.
00:04:06.42	Kevin McGowan	Utilizing this software will help Sausalito be a more, sorry, up-to-date smart city by improving response times and developing data
00:04:16.19	Kevin McGowan	in regards to our responses.
00:04:18.89	Kevin McGowan	So luckily this evening we have
00:04:20.87	Kevin McGowan	Megan Lockett, who is our permit technician, will be presenting this item.
00:04:25.44	Kevin McGowan	And Megan has been leading the way with this effort on behalf of the city. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Megan to kind of walk us through the presentation.
00:04:46.97	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:04:47.41	Megan Lockett	I'll just share my screen instead of the presentation if you don't mind.
00:05:06.40	Megan Lockett	Okay, okay. Good evening, Mayor and Council members. In 2022, based on direction from the City Council and-
00:05:14.78	Mary Sobieski	Could you speak a little, maybe move the microphone down a little bit to help yourself out?
00:05:16.56	Megan Lockett	down a little bit to help.
00:05:17.80	Megan Lockett	A little shorter.
00:05:19.61	Mary Sobieski	And then I know Director McGowan did, but please just introduce yourself to everyone in the community.
00:05:20.76	Megan Lockett	Okay.
00:05:25.14	Megan Lockett	So good evening, mayor and council members. In 2022, based on direction from the city council and the city manager, the Public Works Department initiated a project to implement newer reporting technologies to improve the public's ability to report maintenance issues in the public right of way or on city property.
00:05:45.33	Megan Lockett	The new issue reporting software system developed by RockSolid includes a fix-it application that can be accessed through the city's website
00:05:54.69	Megan Lockett	as well as through smartphone devices.
00:05:57.14	Megan Lockett	The Fix It app allows the public to report problems such as potholes,
00:06:01.54	Megan Lockett	or block storm drain systems directly to the maintenance division.
00:06:06.22	Megan Lockett	This system will increase the city's responsiveness, allows our maintenance staff to respond directly to the person submitting the report and tracks progress on a graphic information systems map or GIS system.
00:06:20.06	Megan Lockett	prior to the implementation of this new application
00:06:23.28	Megan Lockett	Residents and members of the public could report a maintenance issue on the city's website.
00:06:28.22	Megan Lockett	Um,
00:06:29.88	Megan Lockett	Finding the correct website location proved to be somewhat cumbersome to locate and took additional time to fill out. In addition, responding in a timely fashion and corresponding with the person submitting the request was time consuming.
00:06:52.17	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:06:52.68	Megan Lockett	So the new fixed application is intended to allow members of the public a simple way to report a city maintenance problem. The software is also helpful to staff because of the GIS approach that visually identifies what actions have been taken by staff in response to a request. Staff is able to simply address the issue, take a picture, and note that the request has been addressed.
00:07:16.17	Megan Lockett	implementing newer technologies that are compatible with cell phones, can better streamline maintenance reporting
00:07:22.54	Megan Lockett	and is part of a smart city approach.
00:07:24.81	Megan Lockett	To implement the Fix It app, staff reached out to a local professional firm called the Department of Civic Things to assist with starting this development process.
00:07:34.86	Megan Lockett	Civic Things developed a request for information, gathered information on vendors,
00:07:40.72	Megan Lockett	and assisted with a selection team made up of city staff from public works, maintenance and engineering divisions and the community development department. The panel reviewed demonstrations of three software providers and refined the selection based on internal city needs, vendor attributes and an ease of community interaction.
00:08:02.18	Megan Lockett	RockSolid was selected to develop the software and implement the application on behalf of the city. The planning and development process took a little longer than expected with app build approvals from the app stores, training of staff and internal testing of the system being recently completed. In March of 2024, the city council and
00:08:23.77	Megan Lockett	The various Sausalito Commission chairs beta tested the new application. The system now is ready for an official public launch.
00:08:34.89	Megan Lockett	So let's take a look at the city's web page. So you can see here the web versions up and running on the city's website. You can find it by visiting Sausalito.gov, then selecting services, and then report a pothole that are circled on the screen there.
00:08:57.13	Megan Lockett	And then here's the online service request page. You can use this page to submit a service request or check the status of an existing request. So you can see there's the create a request button. You can view an existing case, create a new case, or create an account to use the system in the future.
00:09:20.97	Megan Lockett	And then in addition, the Fix-It app for Sausalito can be found on Apple and Android app stores. The apps include all the same features available on the website, along with the ability to take and submit photos and videos directly from your mobile device.
00:09:40.02	Megan Lockett	and then future announcements in the Currents newsletter and on city social media pages will be addressed in the next few weeks. Staff will also be posting signs in parks and other public places to inform visitors and residents how to access the software.
00:09:58.86	Megan Lockett	Okay, so let's go back to creating an online service request. When you select create a new service request that I had circled up above before, you're taken to this form which shows a simple, easy to follow outline of the steps needed to create the request. And then let's go to the website and I can show you a live version of submitting a request. And the creation of a service request looks the same on the app as it does on the website.
00:10:36.29	Megan Lockett	Okay, so you can see the service request page on our website that I got to from clicking services and report a pothole.
00:10:49.36	Megan Lockett	You scroll down and then you can click create a new service request.
00:10:58.22	Megan Lockett	Okay, so then I'll use an example that I actually submitted on here before for a pothole that was just down the street on Caledonia and
00:11:07.52	Megan Lockett	Litho Street, so we'll go to the first one select a report type and
00:11:13.21	Megan Lockett	You'll choose from one of the categories, so we'll go to streets, and then choose pothole. You can see there are several different categories and subcategories, and there's also an other category if there's something that isn't on that list.
00:11:27.79	Megan Lockett	Then you'll click on where's the request you can
00:11:32.78	Megan Lockett	There's a couple of ways you can kind of click on there, highlight the area. So it's at this intersection here.
00:11:40.61	Megan Lockett	Oops.
00:11:42.59	Megan Lockett	And then go back, okay. Then you can tell more details, where the pothole's located.
00:11:48.93	Megan Lockett	It's in the street, in the crosswalk.
00:11:51.75	Megan Lockett	what type of material is a pothole in. So it was in asphalt and then a brief description. So I'll put it was
00:12:00.36	Megan Lockett	in the...
00:12:02.97	Megan Lockett	you
00:12:03.06	Megan Lockett	Crosswalk next to.
00:12:11.48	Megan Lockett	Okay.
00:12:13.92	Megan Lockett	and then you can upload photos. Just click on the link here.
00:12:19.64	Megan Lockett	Saved on my desktop. You can also do it from the mobile device the same way. So I have a picture of the pothole itself there. And then I took a picture of the street sign, so it's easy. Even though we have the GIS location, it's easier to see where it is. And then if I wanted to submit this and keep it private so it doesn't show up on the city website for everybody else to view, I can click this, keep this request private. Otherwise, I'll keep it open so anybody else can see that it's already been submitted.
00:12:49.33	Megan Lockett	So we submit that.
00:12:56.06	Megan Lockett	and then it shows the confirmation that your report was received. And then it'll also immediately send an email. So I just got this email that popped up. You can't see it though, but it does say that I got a comment right away saying the request was received and that they're going to be working on it.
00:13:15.55	Megan Lockett	and I'll go back.
00:13:23.35	Unknown	Oops.
00:13:25.85	Megan Lockett	Let's see. It's slightly delayed, apparently.
00:13:31.57	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:13:41.76	Megan Lockett	Oops.
00:13:43.99	Megan Lockett	Sorry about that.
00:13:56.25	Megan Lockett	Sorry, I don't want my mouth seemed to have disappeared for some reason.
00:14:02.06	Megan Lockett	Um...
00:14:02.53	Unknown	Thank you.
00:14:03.36	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:14:03.46	Unknown	Thank you.
00:14:03.51	Vice Mayor Cox	Well, just.
00:14:03.97	Unknown	Thanks.
00:14:04.17	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:14:09.40	Megan Lockett	Um...
00:14:12.76	Megan Lockett	I can't seem to
00:14:15.95	Megan Lockett	Do you think you could pull the presentation back up? For some reason, my mouse is not letting me go to
00:14:22.92	Megan Lockett	Oh wait, hold on. Oh, never mind, I think I got it.
00:14:28.08	Megan Lockett	Okay, sorry. Okay, so then here is an example that's already existing from the website.
00:14:37.73	Megan Lockett	So you can see all the information that was submitted is listed on here. You can see unless the request was made private, like I said before, or it was made anonymously, the public can view the ticket and all the details, so we don't get duplicate submittals. But if we did get duplicate submittals, it has a detection software built in, so it's supposed to catch that and prevent duplicate submittals from being submitted.
00:15:05.63	Megan Lockett	Okay, and then here's an example of what the request looks like in the app. So that's my request that I did before for that same pothole. So it shows information submitted, all the updates that were received from the maintenance division, letting me know the status of my request.
00:15:22.18	Unknown	I'm not.
00:15:29.39	Megan Lockett	And then this shows kind of the back end page that staff sees when we look at the service tickets. So we can send messages directly to the author as well as upload the progress photos showing the work completed and then update the status of the tickets. So you can see all the information submitted there and we can add to that as well. And that will show up on the public side as well.
00:15:52.52	Megan Lockett	So then this shows another back end view. It's kind of a map view showing the list of service tickets that are submitted as well as a GIS map showing the location of the tickets. And so it's helpful too that the tickets are color coded. So all the little points on there show the status of the tickets based on the color. So that comes in handy.
00:16:14.39	Megan Lockett	So then I can show you a live version of that map showing all the requests that have currently been submitted as of now for about the last month and a half.
00:16:37.17	Sandra Bushmaker	Let's see.
00:16:39.84	Unknown	Oops.
00:16:42.42	Unknown	All right.
00:16:44.92	Unknown	Thank you.
00:16:44.94	Vice Mayor Cox	Yeah.
00:16:48.62	Unknown	like,
00:16:49.04	Megan Lockett	Oops, let's see.
00:16:52.97	Megan Lockett	Sorry about that. Okay. So there you can see, it looks the same, but that shows all the current tickets that have been submitted.
00:16:56.28	Cameron Razavi	same.
00:16:59.89	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:17:00.43	Megan Lockett	as of right now.
00:17:16.17	Megan Lockett	Okay.
00:17:17.94	Megan Lockett	So then just, software is also a reminder that residents, visitors, and city staff are all on the same team. The software is an excellent tool to help us all work together more efficiently to keep Sausalito running smoothly and make it a better place for all.
00:17:33.44	Megan Lockett	While the software allows staff to fix many issues, please note that not all issues can be fixed right away. Some examples include street light maintenance and the installation of shields that take time to schedule with our street light contractor. Private property issues and maintenance requests that are outside of the city's jurisdiction, such as Marin City or Caltrans right away, come up quite often and we can't fix those since they're not within the city limits.
00:18:01.26	Megan Lockett	Other issues which are related to capital improvement projects may be linked to the completion of other specific projects can't be addressed immediately through this software since they'd have to wait for that project.
00:18:15.71	Megan Lockett	And so far, staff has received positive feedback in addition to the suggestions that we received from the beta testing that we're currently working on. So many thanks for all the compliments and we appreciate the collaborative approach with our residents with this new software. So as we can easily get buried with some adults and inquiries, having the system that automatically sends updates to the applicant and the general public will help our communication with the public.
00:18:46.13	Megan Lockett	Okay, so this is a dynamic reporting software, which does have some limitations. So staff's investigating some additional measures, such as setting up the reminder system for staff to address open cases. In addition, it's not uncommon to identify minor problems with the software as it is developed.
00:19:07.68	Megan Lockett	such as some Android users have reported issues with uploading photos from their mobile devices. Staff will continue to work with Rock Solid to address these issues. So I'd like to thank the rest of the implementation team, which includes Abbott Chambers, our Director of Communications and City Librarian, Eric Graham, our Sewer Systems Coordinator, and Kevin McGowan, our Public Works Director. And at this point, I'll turn it back over to Kevin for a few final comments.
00:19:33.96	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, Ms. Lockett.
00:19:34.53	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:19:34.62	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:19:35.26	Megan Lockett	Thank you.
00:19:36.69	Mary Sobieski	Good job.
00:19:40.30	Kevin McGowan	Thank you very much, Megan. Great job. Megan doesn't always get up and speak in front of public.
00:19:46.36	Kevin McGowan	And so I just want to thank her. She's done a great job this evening, and she has been a lead with this project.
00:19:52.25	Kevin McGowan	I'm really excited about it to tell you the truth. Just the graphic information piece of it, the fact that our staff can take a look at a map of the city and find out which areas or which fix-it tickets have not been addressed is pretty important. In addition, we can use this application, especially during heavy rain seasons and other times at which we don't have enough eyes in the field in order to take a look at issues. And if we can get our residents, members of the public to help us out,
00:20:19.64	Kevin McGowan	Tell us where we have problems. That will help us out quite significantly.
00:20:23.48	Kevin McGowan	So many thanks again, and even though Megan has done a great job with the presentation, she's led us with this particular project. So many thanks, and thanks to the council for helping us out with this as well.
00:20:39.35	Kevin McGowan	And with that, if you have any questions or comments, we're here for you. Any questions for Director McGill?
00:20:39.90	Mary Sobieski	.
00:20:39.97	Councilmember Kalman	if you have any questions.
00:20:42.98	Mary Sobieski	Gowan or from his
00:20:43.68	Kevin McGowan	Like it?
00:20:43.97	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
00:20:46.55	Councilmember Kalman	What would be the best way for members of the community to see? Can we download these things in aggregate and see a status and compare it to the capital improvement program? Is that future functionality?
00:21:00.81	Kevin McGowan	I believe it is. Megan, do you want to comment on whether...
00:21:03.98	Kevin McGowan	Thank you.
00:21:04.22	Kevin McGowan	We can actually do that.
00:21:08.31	Kevin McGowan	So we'll have to investigate a little bit, but I think it is possible to give an update on each one of the Fix-It tickets that come in. And so it's kind of a reminder system to those who might have submitted something.
00:21:21.59	Mary Sobieski	Any other questions? All right, let's take public comment on the presentation.
00:21:25.91	Unknown	City Clerk. Members of the public that would like to comment. There are sheets over by the table, by the television. You can fill out one of those sheets and then turn it back in. And if you're on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function and speakers have two minutes to speak. And we do have one speaker right now and then one speaker on Zoom.
00:21:47.54	Unknown	We can start with Zoom. Okay, so we'll start with Senator Bushmaker.
00:21:48.55	Mary Sobieski	Okay.
00:21:56.82	Sandra Bushmaker	Hi, everybody. I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate this app. I have used it several times and I found it really effective and very, uh,
00:22:06.51	Sandra Bushmaker	Easy to communicate. I just downloaded it a month ago on my phone and have already used it a couple of times. So thank you for implementing this. I really appreciate having this service available to the public.
00:22:20.82	Unknown	All right, next speaker, Sharna Brockett.
00:22:26.08	Sharna Brockett	I just want to also say the same thing. Huge kudos to staff. Wow, that's amazing.
00:22:26.59	Unknown	I also say the same thing.
00:22:31.53	Sharna Brockett	Um, I lived in the city for a long time in San Francisco and they have a fix it app there that I use all the time. So super excited to see this and start using it. So kudos.
00:22:43.63	Unknown	All right. Seeing no further public speakers.
00:22:45.69	Mary Sobieski	Okay, we'll close public comment. Any comments here from the dice?
00:22:49.62	Councilmember Blaustein	Just thank you very much for the hard work on this. I know it was a long time coming and I appreciate the efforts and also having seen it from the early phases of what the app was gonna look like and how far along it's coming, how much progress you've made and responded to feedback. We really appreciate the engagement of all of you.
00:23:05.50	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
00:23:05.62	Councilmember Blaustein	I'm sorry.
00:23:05.65	Councilmember Kalman	and basically say what Councilor Blasin said, except say it,
00:23:09.57	Councilmember Kalman	even more energetically. This is awesome. Really cool job. Great job, staff. Chris, thank you for pushing this through. I think maybe it was even your idea. Councilman Blastin. So thank you for that. I think this is a really wonderful way to engage with our community and super stoked to see it. So thank you and thanks, staff. And thanks to the city manager.
00:23:28.28	Mary Sobieski	Okay. Thank you very much. Congratulations. And we will now move on to the next item, which is action minutes of the previous meeting.
00:23:37.46	Mary Sobieski	The minutes are attached. We can take public comment on them. And then the first, are there any comments from the dais? And if not, we'll do public comment. All right. Public comment, city clerk.
00:23:47.56	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
00:23:47.57	Unknown	See you, none.
00:23:48.72	Mary Sobieski	All right, no public comment, we'll close public comment and now move to approve the minutes. Is there a motion to do so? So moved. Is there a second?
00:23:55.00	Councilmember Kalman	I'll say it.
00:23:55.86	Mary Sobieski	All in favor, aye.
00:23:56.82	Unknown	I think we have to do a roll call vote, sorry.
00:23:58.61	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
00:23:58.89	Mary Sobieski	Oh, yes, that's right. Thank you for the catch. Because one of our members is participating remotely. We will do a roll call vote.
00:23:59.01	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:06.96	Unknown	Councilmember Blossy.
00:24:08.21	Unknown	Yes.
00:24:09.05	Unknown	Council member Hoffman? Yes. Council member Komen? Here.
00:24:10.47	Councilmember Blaustein	Yes.
00:24:11.92	Councilmember Blaustein	Careful.
00:24:12.09	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
00:24:13.49	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
00:24:13.53	Councilmember Kalman	Sorry. Yes.
00:24:14.05	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
00:24:15.99	Unknown	Vice Mayor Cox.
00:24:20.21	Mary Sobieski	Yes, all right.
00:24:20.87	Unknown	All right, so we'll...
00:24:22.50	Mary Sobieski	Count her as an abstention or no.
00:24:24.58	Unknown	I'll count her as absent for this vote for zero.
00:24:26.72	Mary Sobieski	Okay. And yes, for me. So there we will now move on to the consent calendar. These are matters generally considered routine and non controversial and require no separate discussion.
00:24:38.20	Mary Sobieski	They're expected to pass with unanimous council support and may be enacted in one motion.
00:24:43.38	Mary Sobieski	There'll be no separate.
00:24:45.08	Mary Sobieski	discussion on consent calendar items, however, before we vote.
00:24:48.22	Mary Sobieski	Any council member can request that an item be removed from the consent calendar. Items removed will be discussed later on the agenda. And we will hear public comment for that item at that time. So the consent calendar items currently are 3A, the Proclamation of Jewish American Heritage Month. 3B, the Proclamation of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. 3C waive the business license tax penalty imposed on Brody in an amount of $6,884. 3D, receive and file the treasurer's report for March 31st, 2024. 3E, adopt a resolution to approve a new position in the police department and an updated position allocation table with the following change in related classification. Quote, the addition of a police community service and evidence technician, unquote.
00:25:39.64	Mary Sobieski	3f adopt public official reimbursement policy required by government code section 53232.2 3g the library q3 report for fiscal year 2023-24 3h adopt a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute a reimbursement agreement with the city of sausalito in the marin municipal water district for the construction of the edwards avenue pipeline replacement project 3, the adopting a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute the license agreement with the interactive charging to purchase, install, maintain, and manage electric vehicle charging stations at Sausalito City Hall and Dumfey Park. 3J, adopt a resolution approving the installation of two new stop signs at the five-way intersection of San Carlos Avenue Dillon drive and Harrison Avenue. 3K adopt a resolution to execute a professional consulting services agreement with a scent environmental for cost recovery planning application processing services. That's sequel review for Bridgeway Commons housing project application. 2018 double zero four one three and three L adopt a resolution to authorize the city manager to execute an amended professional services agreement with Robert Brown. In an amount of $29,050 for a total contract not to exceed $95,215. Do any of my colleagues wish to remove any of the consent calendar items? Councilmember Hoffman.
00:27:04.35	Councilmember Hoffman	Yes, I would like to remove item 3F, adopt public official reimbursement policy required by government code section 532. I received several requests from the public to remove that and discuss that.
00:27:16.30	Mary Sobieski	Okay, we will remove that and it will be heard as part of a five E at the end of the agenda. Anything else? Yes, council member Boston
00:27:23.50	Councilmember Blaustein	I was wondering if you might allow me to read both of the proclamations. Please. Because I think that they're important to acknowledge. And as a Jewish woman, I'm excited about the proclamation of the Jewish American Heritage Month, but I also want to acknowledge the AAPI Heritage Month. So we'll start with the
00:27:27.76	Mary Sobieski	Just because I'm not.
00:27:34.02	Cameron Razavi	excited about
00:27:42.17	Councilmember Blaustein	with item A, which is the proclamation of the city of Sausalito honoring Jewish American Heritage Month 2024.
00:27:48.95	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
00:27:49.05	Councilmember Blaustein	Whereas during Jewish American Heritage Month, we celebrate the remarkable contributions of Jewish people, community, and culture to America and the American story,
00:27:57.10	Councilmember Blaustein	And whereas for generations, the story of the Jewish people is one of resilience, faith, and hope in the face of adversity, prejudice, anti-Semitism, and persecution,
00:28:06.32	Councilmember Blaustein	And whereas Jewish Americans have served in government and the military,
00:28:10.20	Councilmember Blaustein	have won Nobel Prizes, headed universities and corporations, advanced medicine, created and performed an enduring works of performing and visual art, written great American novels and become emblems of justice as members of the Supreme Court and so much more.
00:28:23.49	Councilmember Blaustein	And whereas we honor the timeless values, contributions, and culture of Jewish Americans who carry our nation forward each and every day, now, therefore, the Mayor and City Council of the City of Sausalito hereby proclaim May as Jewish American Heritage Month in the City of Sausalito. And then I will read the proclamation for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month as well. whereas during Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month we celebrate the diversity of cultures and remarkable contributions of these communities that have been part of the American experience for more than 200 years and whereas in the last in less than 50 years nearly one of every 10 people in America will trace his or her heritage to Asia and the Pacific, a region that covers more than one-third of the Earth, including the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Pacific.
00:29:16.03	Councilmember Blaustein	And whereas generations of Asian-Americans, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders have helped develop and defend the United States, often in the face of a range of adversities, including racial and cultural prejudice, and now, therefore, the mayor and the city council of the city of Sausalito hereby proclaim May 2024 Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in Sausalito.
00:29:37.56	Mary Sobieski	Thank you very much, Councilmember Blaustein. So are there any public, oh please, Councilmember Kalman.
00:29:43.04	Councilmember Kalman	It was just an item, oh gosh, it's the electric vehicle charging.
00:29:48.36	Councilmember Kalman	So I am very excited to see item 3I, adopt resolution authorized and city manager execute the license agreement with integrative charging to purchase, install, maintain, and manage seven electric vehicle charging stations, a long time coming. I just wanna clarify, because I believe the term of the license agreement is that integrative charging purchases it. I just, it's worded funny, so I just wanted to clarify that, that the city won't own the chargers, it is the third party vendor that owns the chargers. So that's all.
00:30:19.70	Mary Sobieski	That's correct, council member.
00:30:20.99	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you, Kevin.
00:30:23.38	Mary Sobieski	So we will have public comment on the consent calendar, except for item three F, which has been put onto the general
00:30:29.72	Mary Sobieski	Councilmember Hoffman.
00:30:31.47	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
00:30:31.56	Councilmember Hoffman	I just have to know that
00:30:32.67	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
00:30:33.45	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
00:30:33.97	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
00:30:36.62	Councilmember Hoffman	Cannot hear.
00:30:39.29	Councilmember Hoffman	Sorry. I need to recuse myself from item 3K, which is a property at 1755 Bridgeway. That's within 500 feet of my house. Okay.
00:30:49.63	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so we will have first, well, we'll take public comment on all the items and then we will manage the vote. City Clerk, could you please open public comment on the consent calendar?
00:30:59.40	Unknown	All right. Seeing none.
00:31:01.41	Mary Sobieski	OK, we will close public comment on the consent calendar will have a vote on the consent calendar items. A 3 a through 3 L except for 3 K and 3 F. So please call the roll.
00:31:17.58	Unknown	Councilmember Blalstein? Yes. Councilmember Hoffman? Yes. Councilmember Kelman? Yes. Vice Mayor Cox?
00:31:18.91	Vice Mayor Cox	Yes.
00:31:21.09	Vice Mayor Cox	Yes.
00:31:22.72	Vice Mayor Cox	Yes.
00:31:25.04	Vice Mayor Cox	Yes, and I will note that I was using my phone as audio and I could not respond to the consent calendar, but I mean to the.
00:31:34.57	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm not sure.
00:31:35.43	Vice Mayor Cox	minutes, but I was here and I did vote in approval of the minutes. Thank you.
00:31:40.53	Unknown	And Mary Sobieski.
00:31:42.25	Mary Sobieski	Yes, now we'll hear from the council with the council member Hoffman accused for item 3K.
00:31:50.53	Mary Sobieski	Please call the roll.
00:31:51.50	Unknown	Council member Blossene? Yes. Council member Hoffman?
00:31:52.98	Unknown	Yes.
00:31:58.40	Unknown	Oh, sorry. Sorry. Councilman Kellman?
00:32:00.51	Unknown	Thank you.
00:32:00.54	Unknown	Yes.
00:32:01.18	Unknown	Vice Mayor Cox.
00:32:02.99	Unknown	Yes. And Maris will be asking.
00:32:04.83	Mary Sobieski	Yes, okay, we'll now move on to our business items. The first item is receive a report regarding the city's insurance procurement and risk management discussion and direction from staff.
00:32:18.46	Zapata	Yeah, I will handle that. Thank you, city manager Zapata. So can we put the PowerPoint up, Wofford, please?
00:32:26.46	Zapata	So if you read the San Francisco Chronicle today, you saw that insurance was front page news for homeowners trying to get protection and it's been front page news for the city of Sausalito for a good eight months. So one of the things that I want to point out to the public and I think it's well known that as insurance is fundamental to your home, insurance is fundamental to our city. We must have insurance.
00:32:49.48	Zapata	And when we talk about insurance for the city, we're not just talking about one area. We're talking about multiple areas that we have coverage in that are required and, you know, that we have in order to contain or keep our city functioning with some level of risk assurance or risk, being able to deal with risk. And some of those areas are obviously property, automobile, workers' comp, cyber insurance, employment practice, and general liability. So it's two slides. And so in order to have insurance, back one more for please. In order to have insurance, the city has basically joined other cities that made this work for them and created what they call a joint powers authority, which is a pool of cities and special districts to provide insurance coverages where cities share their risk and, you know, savings as a group. And so the city has been a member of what's called the Bay Cities Joint Powers Insurance Authority since 1986. And at this time, that's 19 cities insurance authority since 1986. And at this time, that's 19 cities in two special districts. And typically what the city pays for basic insurance coverage is about $1.2 million a year. Next slide, please.
00:34:08.08	Zapata	So one of the things that's happened with our insurance and the reason it's been front and center for the city and city staff and the city council for the last eight months is that in October we were notified that we were going to potentially be expelled immediately from the pool by the executive director and that there was a board of directors meeting in which Sosilita was going to be without insurance if the executive committee recommendation carried through so this recommendation was based on what the pool says is an excessive loss history over the past 10 years and you know significant events that we've had where there's been big claims so the pool executive committee and the city manager and city attorney met to you know basically tell them this is not how you treat longtime members we want to talk about a mutual separation and so they agreed and so on October of this past year the city attorney and I met with the board whereby they agreed to keep us on in the pool until June 30th of this year with the stipulation that our self-insured retention amount go from fifty thousand to five hundred thousand dollars in November of this past year the City Council approved that separation agreement and so here we are so one of the things that happened as this was all unfolding is you know what is it that we have to do to make sure that we acquire coverage for the city and its operations and so we were directed to pursue bids from pools and from the private sector and we were also directed to hire a risk manager to help us lower our risk profile we were also given direction to look at our city quote or a municipal code because some of it is antiquated doesn't have compliance with local laws and that needs to be freshened up to be right we're looking at our contracts to make sure that there was equitable risk transfer that the city didn't share all of the burden of something going wrong and that our employment practices and how we procured services would be reviewed as well so that we could in fact begin to talk to our potential new partner in providing insurance about how we are mindful and making this a priority by virtue of a risk manager position, by virtue of improving our practices, and at the same time asking that they provide us an opportunity to join either a pool or the private sector. And in that process, that has been driven by myself and a team that's really been working hard on it our city attorney our finance director our HR manager and our former human resources consultant to make sure that we provided bids or pools the information that they needed so that they could see what it is is Sausalito had in terms of its property that need to be covered its loss run history its personnel practices its cyber security all the things that a risk pool wants to know or a private insurance carrier wants to know so so we've been working really hard on that and so our city attorney is going to take it from here and give you an update on where it is that we are and what we're doing and then at the end our finance director is going to talk about the financial implications of our situation as we are in right now. So Sergio can you run with it from here.
00:37:43.46	Sergio	Yes, so
00:37:47.53	Sergio	Let's see. So the city has been looking at procuring insurance on both the
00:37:54.83	Sergio	Public market.
00:37:57.33	Sergio	In terms of contacting additional risk pools, the city's contacted Plan JPA, CIRA, the Municipal Pooling Authority of Northern California, Golden State Risk Management Authority, and Public Risk Innovation Solutions and Management, which is more commonly referred to as PRISM, which is the largest risk pool in California, and they are expanding outside of California. Additionally, the city has been using Hub International, which was
00:38:26.69	Sergio	a broker that was referred to the city
00:38:30.57	Sergio	by its coverage council to
00:38:34.32	Sergio	look at the private insurance market as well. Again, as the city manager has already overviewed, the city's 10 year
00:38:42.57	Sergio	Loss history has been a significant issue in terms of the city's
00:38:48.92	Sergio	Um...
00:38:51.53	Sergio	present situation with its current pool and it's exiting from its current pool. Of course, that same information with regards to its loss run history has to be provided to all potential insurers. So this has been something that has been a pretty significant challenge moving forward. Next slide.
00:39:08.39	Sergio	So again, as I've overviewed, Hub is a private broker that the city has been working with to look at the private insurance market. Hub has contacted
00:39:21.52	Sergio	I think over 20 different insurers in the private market that provide insurance to public agencies.
00:39:29.62	Sergio	Again, Prism is
00:39:31.66	Sergio	the largest risk pool in California and has a lot of member entities that include cities and counties throughout California.
00:39:40.60	Sergio	In order to
00:39:42.58	Sergio	get pricing information from
00:39:45.77	Sergio	insurers the city has had to compile not only its loss run history for various lines, and those include all losses for workers' comp claims,
00:39:55.22	Sergio	for general liability claims,
00:40:00.18	Sergio	information on its existing assets so that it can get property insurance. So preparing complete and correct inventories of what sort of property, both in terms of real property and vehicles and other
00:40:13.36	Sergio	insurable assets the city has, and then answering questions about various losses the city has had, as well as its risk management practices from various insurers, as well as the status of ongoing litigation and pending claims. So we've provided all that information and we've received information.
00:40:33.42	Sergio	indications of pricing from PRISM as well as from HUB in terms of what is available out there on the private insurance market. The details of that are in the staff report. Next slide, please.
00:40:45.67	Sergio	Um,
00:40:46.87	Sergio	in terms of the
00:40:48.59	Sergio	Um...
00:40:49.86	Sergio	private insurance market,
00:40:51.60	Sergio	At this point,
00:40:53.10	Sergio	the indications of pricing are relatively high and additionally they would be subject to
00:41:00.36	Sergio	aggregate limits, which are
00:41:03.86	Sergio	less typical in
00:41:06.94	Sergio	risk pools and public agency risk pools because typically the structure of public agency risk pools are that the other members are
00:41:15.88	Sergio	providing the insurance so.
00:41:18.29	Sergio	There's not a limitation on the number of claims you can make or the number of losses that you can incur. But of course, if you incur too many losses, then...
00:41:25.60	Sergio	your fellow members look at you and decide whether or not they want to continue doing business with you.
00:41:31.07	Sergio	So on the
00:41:33.78	Sergio	private insurance market, depending on the levels of coverage that the city would like to procure and it is
00:41:41.45	Sergio	a good idea to have coverage in the range of 10 to $30 million for various events that have occurred in other cities and where cities have had to have very significant payouts for wrongful death litigation and things of that unfortunate nature. But the pricing has come back, at least with the general liability line of
00:42:08.07	Sergio	Um,
00:42:09.04	Sergio	you know, exceeding 1.5 million for the first 5 million general liability coverage.
00:42:14.61	Sergio	And likely the city would want more coverage than $5 million in general liability coverage.
00:42:22.55	Sergio	All in, it is likely that the city would probably be looking
00:42:27.21	Sergio	at close to $3 million per year in premiums just to have
00:42:30.97	Sergio	general liability coverage, workers' comp, employment practice liability, and property insurance.
00:42:37.91	Sergio	On the PRISM side, the city is still being evaluated for participation in PRISM.
00:42:44.69	Sergio	The Underwriters Committee of PRISM actually met on May 1st, and we received some additional feedback
00:42:52.68	Sergio	and request for information from the underwriters committee. So the city is still being considered considered for membership in prison at this time.
00:43:00.51	Sergio	Um,
00:43:01.20	Sergio	And we anticipate
00:43:03.46	Sergio	having another meeting where the city manager and the city attorney attend that underwriters committee meeting to answer questions.
00:43:10.55	Sergio	of the
00:43:13.31	Sergio	participating board members with respect to city's loss run history and risk management practices.
00:43:19.84	Sergio	to address any concerns that PRISM has about the city's participation in that risk pool.
00:43:25.24	Sergio	Um,
00:43:26.21	Sergio	with regards to
00:43:29.48	Sergio	the figures we've received from the private insurance market
00:43:32.74	Sergio	The feedback we've gotten to date has been while the premiums you are facing are high,
00:43:40.20	Sergio	It is anticipated that some of those premiums, particularly for the general liability line, would come down.
00:43:47.00	Sergio	after a few years, once the city's five-year loss history
00:43:52.61	Sergio	is more stable and excludes the 2019
00:43:58.27	Sergio	landslide
00:44:00.58	Sergio	losses that were faced by the city, which were relatively significant and resulted in payouts by insurers of
00:44:09.15	Sergio	several million dollars, I believe off the top of my head that number may have been five to six million dollars for those particular incidents.
00:44:19.34	Sergio	So...
00:44:21.96	Sergio	That is generally the status of where we are in terms of the private insurance market versus prism. We'll have a better sense of whether or not we are...
00:44:33.01	Sergio	Eligible for acceptance in to prison by the end of this month, but if we are the costs of getting general liability coverage will be significantly less than the private insurance market and we would anticipate that it would provide for better coverage, although it'd be at a slightly higher retention.
00:44:50.55	Sergio	Next slide, please.
00:44:53.38	Sergio	And then in closing, the big change that the city is facing with regards to its insurance situation is as a result of its separation from Bay City's, its self-insured retention increased from $50,000 to a half million dollars. We're anticipating that regardless of where your insurance is procured, you're going to have a self-insured retention in line with that.
00:45:18.00	Sergio	which means the city is likely going to be paying the first half million dollars
00:45:22.44	Sergio	more or less, of defense costs and
00:45:27.08	Sergio	settlement cost with respect to any claim filed against the city. While this gives the city a lot more control over the defense and resolution of claims within the self-insured retention,
00:45:38.44	Sergio	Um,
00:45:39.55	Sergio	Most of the claims the city faces are under that self-insured limit.
00:45:44.78	Sergio	It is a rare circumstance, and I would say probably
00:45:48.02	Sergio	in the
00:45:49.78	Sergio	Last 10 years, there's less than 10 claims that I can think of where the city has paid more than half a million dollars.
00:45:55.48	Cameron Razavi	$500,000.
00:45:56.97	Sergio	in terms of resolution. So again, the bulk of the claims the city would be dealing with itself.
00:46:02.94	Sergio	Any questions?
00:46:05.91	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, Sergio. I have a question, but I'll be happy to...
00:46:10.48	Mary Sobieski	Deferred others are my question Sergio over the last 10 years, how much has the pool paid on our behalf for all claims from the city of South Slito over that over that 10 year period?
00:46:21.17	Sergio	So according to Bay Cities, the city has incurred $13.1 million in losses
00:46:27.36	Sergio	in the general liability program alone. So that excludes workers comp claims, or excludes property claims.
00:46:34.28	Sergio	due to 36 claims. And so that was information back from September 2023.
00:46:40.35	Sergio	Bay Cities indicated that the city paid
00:46:43.58	Sergio	that the risk pool paid $11.2 million out of those $13.1 million in claims.
00:46:49.72	Sergio	And basically the city would have paid the remainder and self-insured retention costs.
00:46:53.77	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so between the city and the pool, there was approximately $13 million paid out. And then in addition to that, are amounts for worker comp claims and property claims. Do you have a sense of how big those are?
00:47:05.63	Sergio	Thank you.
00:47:08.15	Sergio	I suspect that they're significantly less, but I don't have those figures offhand.
00:47:12.94	Mary Sobieski	like a million dollars or
00:47:14.64	Mary Sobieski	more
00:47:15.94	Sergio	I won't speculate on those.
00:47:18.05	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so $13 million.
00:47:19.70	Mary Sobieski	So that's in addition to the premiums we were paying. During that time, we were also paying policy premiums to the insurer, the base cities, right?
00:47:26.62	Sergio	Yes. And according to the city's finance director, the premiums paid during the 10 year period were around six point nine million.
00:47:34.10	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so 13 million was paid out on our behalf, but we paid and of that 13 million 1. How much was it from the city and it's self insured a self insurance retainer?
00:47:47.31	Sergio	That would have been around 1.9 million.
00:47:50.52	Mary Sobieski	1.9 million was basically our deductible put it in language. I understand 1.9 million from the city of that 13 million. And then in addition to that was 6 million in premium. So the city paid 7.9, it was $8 million. And then the city's paid roughly $11.1 million in claims. So that's roughly how much we paid out over the 10 year period. Is that what I understand?
00:48:16.00	Sergio	Yes, and of course, I think that on top of that, there were defense costs and certain other expenses that likely aren't figured into those numbers, but those are rough estimates, yes.
00:48:28.71	Mary Sobieski	So as a rough swag though, the city over that period of time invested six, 7.9 roughly $8 million between premiums and it's deductible and the pool paid on our behalf, roughly $11.1 million. So that that's how it split out. But if we, for instance, weren't insured and we were paying for everything ourselves, we'd have paid out a $13 million.
00:48:51.67	Sergio	Yes.
00:48:52.08	Mary Sobieski	Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Councilor Mayor Hoffman.
00:48:56.59	Councilmember Hoffman	But on a lot of those claims, we weren't paying the cost of defending, correct?
00:49:02.26	Sergio	Yeah, so basically the city's under the existing risk pool, the city pays $50,000 in a self-insured retention or deductible.
00:49:13.27	Sergio	And then afterwards, all defense costs and settlement are typically covered.
00:49:18.18	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah. So in other words, we didn't pay the attorneys to defend us in those cases.
00:49:22.35	Sergio	Yeah, after probably the first couple of months. Yeah.
00:49:23.99	Councilmember Hoffman	Or the litigation court.
00:49:27.60	Councilmember Hoffman	So I don't know the order of what those additional costs were. And we also didn't anyway.
00:49:33.17	Unknown	you
00:49:33.84	Councilmember Hoffman	And we also didn't have the risk of a large
00:49:37.14	Councilmember Hoffman	you know, a large, um,
00:49:40.90	Councilmember Hoffman	judgment against us because we were insured for that, correct?
00:49:45.25	Sergio	Correct.
00:49:47.02	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
00:49:47.75	Mary Sobieski	Councilmember Cox.
00:49:49.62	Mary Sobieski	Yes, I'll give it to you.
00:49:51.31	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:49:53.34	Vice Mayor Cox	This is not the only insurance policy available to the city, Sergio. Correct. We have various historical
00:50:00.09	Vice Mayor Cox	policies which have also afforded us a defense for certain actions over the years. Correct?
00:50:06.36	Vice Mayor Cox	Correct.
00:50:07.59	Vice Mayor Cox	And we still have those policies available to us moving forward.
00:50:12.54	Sergio	Yeah, those policies are available, but they are limited in terms of the kinds of claims that you can tender to them. Typically they do have to have claims,
00:50:21.47	Sergio	where you can plausibly allege that damages reach back to those historic periods. So, you know, for example, if you
00:50:28.94	Sergio	have an incident that happens tomorrow and
00:50:34.07	Sergio	There's really no nexus to events happening back during the policy period in, say, the 1960s or 70s.
00:50:42.02	Sergio	you know, it would,
00:50:43.88	Sergio	the city should expect the denial of coverage for those particular claims. But if you can demonstrate, like, for example, if there was...
00:50:51.94	Sergio	a pollution incident in the 1960s and just gets discovered now, then yes, those historic insurance policies are valuable for those kinds of claims.
00:51:02.22	Vice Mayor Cox	And since 2016, we have relied on that historical endurance for various
00:51:09.56	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:51:10.28	Vice Mayor Cox	Bye.
00:51:11.11	Vice Mayor Cox	we have
00:51:16.16	Mary Sobieski	Council Member Cox, I think you dropped out there for a moment.
00:51:16.22	Sergio	I'm not sure.
00:51:16.60	Unknown	THE FAMILY.
00:51:16.65	Sergio	I'm not in trouble here.
00:51:19.87	Sergio	But I believe Councilmember Cox is referring to the fact that the city has
00:51:24.76	Sergio	had certain kinds of
00:51:26.72	Sergio	historic related pollution claims that it has tendered to those historical insurers and yeah that would be correct.
00:51:32.19	Sergio	And those...
00:51:33.44	Sergio	The losses and the figures that are given to us by Bay Cities would not include those kinds of claims.
00:51:42.68	Mary Sobieski	All right, Council Member Blaustein.
00:51:44.84	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you. Sergio, could you just give a little bit of context to the benefits of the public market versus hub here in terms of our coverage as a city and what we might receive from PRISM?
00:51:60.00	Sergio	So in terms of overall limits, again, the indications of pricing that we've preliminarily received from PRISM is that our general liability costs
00:52:11.96	Sergio	just for the premium for the general liability line of coverage would be about a million dollars a year. That is more or less in line with what the city's paying right now to Bay Cities, which
00:52:23.24	Sergio	maybe a little bit more.
00:52:25.38	Sergio	Um,
00:52:27.51	Sergio	The difference in terms of coverage is that PRISM does not cover inverse condemnation claims, nor does it cover pollution claims. There's some limited pollution coverage with Bay Cities. There's also some limited coverage for inverse condemnation claims to Bay Cities.
00:52:42.83	Sergio	And the limits of coverage are a little different. I believe right now the city has limits of coverage in excess of $30 million through Bay Cities and its reinsurers. With PRISM, that would be around $25 million.
00:52:55.60	Sergio	On the private market side, the picture is significantly different. The city's looking at significantly higher premiums with much lower limits of coverage.
00:53:05.84	Sergio	Thank you.
00:53:06.20	Sergio	So that would be the big difference between participating in PRISM
00:53:12.44	Sergio	Um,
00:53:13.91	Sergio	Additionally, when we
00:53:15.62	Sergio	had discussions with other risk pools, including CIRA.
00:53:19.41	Sergio	Um,
00:53:20.51	Sergio	The discussions we had, or the information we received was that the city would not be provided general liability coverage, but if the city improved its loss run history and
00:53:33.05	Sergio	you know,
00:53:35.22	Sergio	proactively addressed risk management and took a significant steps towards reducing its magnitude of claims that basically the city could apply to those other risk pools as well in the future.
00:53:49.35	Sergio	So again, and similarly, we received information from the private insurance market that
00:53:55.46	Sergio	you know,
00:53:56.94	Sergio	at present that they're not willing to make, give the city a deal on insurance, but if the city can demonstrate that it's,
00:54:05.26	Sergio	you know, has a steady track record of
00:54:08.49	Sergio	decreased losses, then obviously the insurance market would respond positively and on the private insurance side that it would be competitive with some of these risk pools.
00:54:19.54	Councilmember Blaustein	And-
00:54:19.84	Councilmember Blaustein	In the staff report, you included a letter that was written to the prison executive committee. Could you give a little bit of context for that to the members of the public?
00:54:28.09	Sergio	Yes, so in terms of we received, we've been working with Alliant, which is one of the largest reinsurers of public agencies in the state. They're also the manager for the PRISM program.
00:54:45.63	Sergio	Um,
00:54:46.52	Sergio	we received information from them that they had spoken to Prism's management and
00:54:52.14	Sergio	they wanted a explanation and history of how the city had come to a exit of its present risk pool and
00:55:02.47	Sergio	In particular, they were looking for the city to address some of the coverage disputes and prior litigation that had occurred between the city and CARM and provide some sort of explanation for that.
00:55:14.05	Sergio	So we had provided that to them in terms of trying to explain our relationship with our prior insurer.
00:55:22.85	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you for that. And I noticed there's an explanation for why we might have had the higher liabilities that we've had and trying to make a claim for a case for why, just to provide context for that. So are you, did they indicate or the Prism Executive Committee indicate that if we were able to sufficiently de-risk the city's liability, that they would potentially decrease premiums as well to be more competitive, similar to the private providers?
00:55:49.13	Sergio	I mean, the way that most of these risk tools work is that
00:55:53.53	Sergio	Thank you.
00:55:54.19	Sergio	Your premiums on any given year are based on a risk modifier.
00:55:58.14	Sergio	And that takes into account your track record and loss history.
00:56:03.99	Sergio	As your risk modifier changes over time, you know, their premiums reflect that. So the short answer is, is yes, we would expect that PRISM would adjust the premiums to reflect the risk.
00:56:16.68	Councilmember Blaustein	And in that letter, you also just again, just to the members of public that wasn't in the presentation indicate some of the things that might have gotten us to the situation we're in with regards to basically a higher risk. So one of those was the landslide. The other was the the litigation in 2020 and 2023. And these are considered sort of as it's written in the letter blacks one events.
00:56:40.29	Sergio	Yeah, they're pretty atypical and they're all unique events which the city hasn't really
00:56:47.38	Sergio	had, they're all unique events and yes the city has had a you know three of them um but they have nothing to do with each other and
00:56:56.49	Sergio	The city has never had similar kinds of events in its past, and there's no real expectation that they would recur.
00:57:02.53	Sergio	So, yeah, in my opinion, they would be about black swan events. You know, it's it's atypical for the city to expect, you know, significant landslides that affect 50 properties in one year.
00:57:14.08	Sergio	You know, additionally, you know, the city hasn't had any sexual abuse and molestation claims other than the one incident that the city had faced.
00:57:23.43	Councilmember Blaustein	And just more generally as well, this is as as city managers have pointed out, this is an ongoing discussion with a number of municipalities. So in any of the other cities that you work with, are they seeing similar issues with rising premiums and insurance?
00:57:38.14	Sergio	Yes, this is this is an issue that is affecting municipalities throughout the state. Additionally, Sausalito is not the only public agency that has had issues with this risk pool and has been expelled. BBK does have other
00:57:50.97	Sergio	has represented other agencies where that has occurred. It would not
00:57:56.50	Sergio	You know, even as
00:57:58.10	Sergio	the city was having issues with
00:58:02.73	Sergio	its risk pool-based cities,
00:58:04.60	Sergio	At the same meeting, Bay Cities took issue with another member city's membership. And while they were willing to give them a chance to turn things around, you know, based on the fact that they only had one significant loss.
00:58:17.98	Sergio	Um,
00:58:19.11	Sergio	You know, it's...
00:58:21.04	Sergio	you know, it is something that is increasingly affecting
00:58:24.60	Sergio	all municipalities and
00:58:27.50	Sergio	As property values increase, the dollar value of claims against public agencies increases.
00:58:33.84	Sergio	So, you know, risk pools are taking steps to try and protect themselves and protect their members, which means less coverage for each individual member typically or higher premiums.
00:58:45.35	Councilmember Blaustein	Okay, thanks Sergio, I appreciate that context.
00:58:47.53	Mary Sobieski	Found some memory coming.
00:58:50.20	Mary Sobieski	Council member Hoffman, you had another question it seemed.
00:58:54.70	Councilmember Hoffman	So, Sergio, with regard to, you talked about the numbers of
00:59:01.62	Councilmember Hoffman	I don't want to spend a lot more time on this, but...
00:59:03.80	Councilmember Hoffman	You talked about the numbers that the Bay City's pool paid out in response to the mayor's questions and that the city paid out
00:59:11.44	Councilmember Hoffman	But on some of those claims, there were other defendants that paid
00:59:15.04	Councilmember Hoffman	that also paid out in those claims, correct?
00:59:17.55	Sergio	Yeah, that's correct. And, you know, again, these are figures that were provided to us during our meeting with Bay Cities in their public facing staff reports.
00:59:28.94	Sergio	obviously doesn't have that level of granularity that you're pointing out. But yeah, typically with
00:59:34.51	Sergio	you know, sidewalk maintenance claims, you know, if there's liability for somebody else, you know,
00:59:41.39	Sergio	the city's attorney, whether they're paid for by Bay Cities or somebody else,
00:59:46.64	Sergio	or paid for directly by the city, they will look for other sources of money
00:59:50.34	Sergio	You know, and they will
00:59:52.06	Sergio	potentially sue the business owner or the property owner responsible for maintenance of the condition.
00:59:58.89	Sergio	and seek contribution from there, I'm sure.
01:00:01.75	Sergio	So, I mean, that is pretty typical.
01:00:04.01	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, but my point is that the total risk for those claims was higher than than what we paid and what Bay City's paid.
01:00:09.59	Sergio	Correct.
01:00:10.40	Councilmember Hoffman	And the other question is with regard to, with regard to the, part of the reasons why
01:00:18.42	Councilmember Hoffman	we were let go from Bay Cities was not just the three, you know, it's been described the black swan events, but it was also the sheer number of lawsuits that we had and that many of those were related to deferred maintenance and infrastructure.
01:00:37.79	Sergio	Yeah, I'm not sure I can...
01:00:41.66	Sergio	agree or disagree on that point, but yes, the sheer number of claims and
01:00:47.06	Sergio	Um...
01:00:48.79	Sergio	In part, I suspect it was the city's low self-insured retention, which made the city responsible for less share, was
01:00:58.40	Sergio	driving the city's lost run history, which in turn was the motivating factor for
01:01:03.78	Sergio	the pool to ask the city to leave.
01:01:06.68	Councilmember Hoffman	So let me ask this then to the city manager, because I believe the city manager has given us that information. And that part of the reason that is that that the reason one of the reasons again, combination with other things was the number of the lawsuits that we had and the issues related to deferred maintenance and infrastructure issues.
01:01:25.46	Zapata	They're they're related council member often thank you for the question and you know my recollection and Sergio can help me with this is over 10 year period we had 252 claims and you know we can break down for you which of those were infrastructure related or others and we're happy to do that I think that's important information because that will help drive some decisions on your part about where you invest your money in the future.
01:01:47.42	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay. Thank you. We'll see if that's of interest. Thank you.
01:01:58.62	Mary Sobieski	So it's just to follow up on Council member Coffin's question about the litigation expenses or rather defense expenses associated with the $13 million paid by the actually the 11.1 million paid by the pool on our behalf. Do we have any way of assessing or getting that information if we wanted to have it?
01:02:17.64	Sergio	I can ask Bay Cities to confirm that information. I would expect that that $13.1 million figure for those 36 claims over the last 10 years
01:02:27.99	Sergio	I assume that includes defense costs, but I would, again, I'm, I am speculating at this point because their staff report where I pulled that figure from is not that specific.
01:02:38.24	Mary Sobieski	Okay.
01:02:38.87	Mary Sobieski	with it.
01:02:39.29	Mary Sobieski	what if any effort has staff done to assess you know the obvious alternative of uh being self-insured versus paying insurance companies when i look at this just as a swag when i look at these numbers and add them up and divide them by 10 over the 10-year period i get roughly 1.5 million dollars a year which is roughly what we were paying in premiums uh that's just the payout i said we're we were already paying 6 million over that, 7.9 million over that period of time. So I'm just wondering if staff has sort of methodically started to block out by checking with other municipalities what the standard of excellence is for self-insurance or other entities, whether they've done that.
01:03:25.49	Sergio	Yeah, I mean, so technically, these risk pools, these public agency risk pools, they are functionally self insurance. I
01:03:36.14	Sergio	because you're pulling the risk with other
01:03:39.38	Sergio	participating municipalities and you're agreeing that you're going to help them pay for their claims if they agree to help you pay for yours.
01:03:47.52	Sergio	Um...
01:03:48.41	Sergio	In terms of the city not participating in a risk pool and not participating in a
01:03:53.96	Sergio	you know, having some form of insurance from private insurer, I would strongly discourage that in part because Sausalito as a small city just doesn't have the kinds of reserves available to pay a catastrophic loss.
01:04:07.19	Sergio	You know,
01:04:08.70	Sergio	there are certain wrongful death claims that have
01:04:12.73	Sergio	you know, been paid out by cities.
01:04:14.87	Sergio	in California in the last 10 years,
01:04:18.79	Sergio	where a single claim, you know, of a tree limb falling in a city park, killing somebody has resulted in a
01:04:25.49	Sergio	you know, settlement in a range of $28 million. You know, and that's the sort of,
01:04:31.41	Sergio	issue that would be very difficult for the city to deal with. Cities have had claims where they have lost
01:04:39.04	Sergio	Um...
01:04:40.30	Sergio	and they have been uncovered.
01:04:41.97	Sergio	And to my mind, I can think of one immediately, and it deals with the town of Mammoth, and they lost a litigation to a developer over an airport.
01:04:53.31	Sergio	The verdict against the city was more than the city's reserves, and typically when that happens, you have to take out judgment bonds.
01:04:59.49	Sergio	So you have to borrow debt on the public market to pay back any of your liabilities and
01:05:04.43	Sergio	As a result, the taxpayers pay for that.
01:05:08.33	Sergio	Thank you.
01:05:08.35	Mary Sobieski	I think.
01:05:08.64	Sergio	end.
01:05:09.39	Mary Sobieski	Thank you for that. So have you looked at then a staff looking at and I'm really just exploring the edges of what staff's been working on to address this issue. How about looking at, you know, a hybrid combination of getting paying for an insurance policy that covers for these kinds of catastrophic events, the same kind of thing we have in health care where you cover for catastrophic injury, but you don't get every test covered. So you basically self-insure for the small stuff and pay a premium for the big stuff.
01:05:35.47	Sergio	Well,
01:05:40.31	Sergio	I mean, functionally, that is what is being proposed here and what has actually been offered to the city, because I would say probably 90 to 95% of the claims faced by the city are small dollar value claims where
01:05:54.64	Sergio	insurance where the settlement and the defense costs together probably approach half a million dollars at most. Most slip and fall injuries, you know, the
01:06:05.82	Sergio	you know, the kind of claims the city faces in terms of sidewalk maintenance claims, maybe small dollar claims for sewer damage where there's a pipe that leaks but doesn't
01:06:15.83	Sergio	cause a lot of property damage. A lot of those claims are typically
01:06:19.86	Sergio	um you know and somewhere in the range of you know maybe five thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars um and the typical cost of defense um
01:06:29.60	Sergio	depending on the length of reaching a resolution, maybe 50 to $100,000.
01:06:35.78	Sergio	In terms of the city's loss run history, there's only a handful of claims that have
01:06:43.36	Sergio	exceeded the half million dollar mark. So functionally, if you get
01:06:48.77	Sergio	either sign up for
01:06:50.61	Sergio	insurance from the private market right now at a self-insured retention of $400,000, which has been the best the city's
01:06:58.09	Sergio	been able to get pricing for. Or if you joined Prism where your self-insured retention is a half million dollars,
01:07:05.63	Sergio	you know,
01:07:06.96	Sergio	Again, I'd probably say
01:07:09.04	Sergio	somewhere in the range of
01:07:11.35	Sergio	Um,
01:07:12.63	Sergio	80 to 95% of your claims
01:07:15.47	Sergio	are not going to be claims that are covered because they'll fall. All of the costs involved in dealing with the claim will fall under the self-insured pension.
01:07:25.14	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:07:25.96	Mary Sobieski	Are there other questions from the Dias before we take public comment? All right. Can we take public comment, City Clerk?
01:07:33.17	Unknown	I'll wait for anybody on Zoom. Yeah, we have Sandra Bushmaker.
01:07:41.03	Sandra Bushmaker	Hi everybody again.
01:07:42.59	Sandra Bushmaker	Thank you for that presentation. It helped explain a lot of our situation.
01:07:47.02	Sandra Bushmaker	It seems to me that
01:07:49.47	Sandra Bushmaker	One of the things that this council should be doing and our city staff should be doing is looking at a program on how we can reduce our claims.
01:07:58.67	Sandra Bushmaker	And as several council members and the city manager said,
01:08:02.95	Sandra Bushmaker	Deferred maintenance and preventive maintenance seem to be two issues that really would help
01:08:09.28	Sandra Bushmaker	Our, our, uh,
01:08:10.84	Sandra Bushmaker	City.
01:08:12.29	Sandra Bushmaker	in this program to reduce our claims. But I would look to staff also to come up with a program
01:08:18.80	Sandra Bushmaker	on steps that the city council can take
01:08:21.20	Sandra Bushmaker	to reduce that claim history.
01:08:23.91	Sandra Bushmaker	That's what got us into this situation to begin with. And if there are things that we can do as a city.
01:08:29.47	Sandra Bushmaker	You know, back to basics again.
01:08:32.22	Sandra Bushmaker	To reduce that exposure, I think that's time well spent and we should proceed with that and focus on issues that will help reduce our exposure. Thank you.
01:08:50.39	Unknown	Seeing no further public comment.
01:08:52.99	Mary Sobieski	OK, we'll close public comment. Is there discussion from my colleagues?
01:08:58.40	Mary Sobieski	Anyone want to say anything.
01:09:04.01	Mary Sobieski	No.
01:09:04.68	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:09:04.97	Mary Sobieski	We just did public comment.
01:09:08.28	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
01:09:08.31	Unknown	you
01:09:08.38	Councilmember Kalman	Now it's your
01:09:08.50	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:09:08.53	Mary Sobieski	THE FAMILY.
01:09:08.70	Unknown	Thank you.
01:09:08.72	Mary Sobieski	Now it's your turn. Now your turn to comment.
01:09:09.91	Councilmember Kalman	to comment.
01:09:10.57	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
01:09:11.62	Councilmember Kalman	Yeah, I'll jump in. I'm gonna think it's worth mentioning that our city attorney, to Ms. Bushmaker's astute comments, our city attorney has undertaken a very thorough risk analysis and developed a strategy for us to mitigate a lot of that risk. I do a lot of this work with my nonprofit. And one of the big problems in the state of California is that most insurance companies do not reduce premiums for any type of proactive mitigation. And so if we can get to the point, I know the Department of Insurance wants to work with insurance companies to increase that, I think we'll be in a much better direction. So I would suggest, as I think staff is already doing, that we continue a program where we identify our biggest ticket items. And then when we receive, maybe from Director McGowan or others, receive staff reports on critical infrastructure we also have a staff report a component from the city attorney as to the risk that has been associated with that historically and any potential future risks so to help guide our policy making and our allocation of funds as the city manager suggested so that would just be my additional direction I would not be comfortable with any type of self insurance program although I do appreciate you mayor exploring that
01:10:23.40	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you. I really appreciate the attention to this really critical topic of how we're going to get our city insured. We have a lot of risk, and there's been a lot of thought by both our city manager and our staff and our city attorney put into it. And I appreciate Sandra Bushmaker's comments regarding a real emphasis on risk. And I know we're going to hear from our finance director next about our budget and how much of our funds need to be put towards really de-risking our our city as much as possible and I would like to suggest that potentially and given that we as well have had a risk manager position open since November and have not yet been able to hire or fill that position I'd really like to see us create and I would volunteer to serve on but I would leave that to your discretion mr. mayor some sort of subcommittee just work focused on risk and resilience I think there is a lot here in terms of how we look at the lens of what we're gonna do over the next five to ten years as a city to both prepare for and mitigate the risk of climate change and also shore up our city's expenses and get us into a place where we have a much less liability and we're operating with the appropriate levels of service. So I'd like to see some sort of smaller working group that sees that through, make sure that we hire that risk manager sooner rather than later, and that we can continue forward, hopefully as part of a public pool, given the cost of the private market. But again, everything is evolving, so those are my thoughts.
01:11:44.66	Councilmember Kalman	Can I add to that, Mayor? I just want to say, well said, Kinsman-Blastain completely endorsed all of that. I think the sewer consolidation is a good opportunity to undertake that analysis. What type of risk are we offsetting here? What would be the risk if we kept it? And try to monetize that risk, and then utilize that in our future negotiations.
01:12:04.99	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, Councilmember Hoffman.
01:12:07.73	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, I agree with the strategy that's laid out in the staff report for addressing this issue. I strongly agree with the city attorney that we need to make sure that we're covered, especially on the catastrophic side of insurance claims. The risk is just too great for our city not to be. And as he points out, a high deductible pretty much means we are self-insured. Completely agree with the strategy of identifying the risk that led us to this point and the number of the lawsuits and attacking that and the other risk factors that we have in the city. So thank you for this presentation and the explanation and I look forward to hearing more about this. Thank you.
01:12:52.49	Mary Sobieski	Vice mayor.
01:12:55.47	Mary Sobieski	You're muted.
01:13:03.01	Mary Sobieski	Nope, still muted, still muted. Give it a go.
01:13:08.19	Vice Mayor Cox	Can you hear me now?
01:13:08.81	Mary Sobieski	Yes, we can.
01:13:10.67	Vice Mayor Cox	Oh, great.
01:13:11.63	Vice Mayor Cox	Okay.
01:13:13.34	Vice Mayor Cox	I...
01:13:14.47	Vice Mayor Cox	Also, would like to thank staff for the very thorough and explanatory
01:13:18.97	Vice Mayor Cox	presentation to really help us understand this complex issue.
01:13:22.33	Vice Mayor Cox	and I will endorse
01:13:23.77	Vice Mayor Cox	all of the comments of my fellow council members as well as the direction. Thank you.
01:13:29.25	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, vice mayor. Yeah, I think we are in a version of self insurance and always have been. It's just a question of where we draw the line of what we're getting for our premium. So I appreciate that staff's been looking for the best bang for the buck in terms of premium for coverage. I would love to just look at what the optionality is for higher deductible plans so we can choose among them, instead of just looking for the lowest deductible. So we have that in the mix. So I know that that's what staff's been working on, and there are limited number of options, but would love to see that as well. That's my only additional comment.
01:14:09.75	Mary Sobieski	So we'll move on then from this item and move on.
01:14:11.39	Zapata	One, two.
01:14:12.31	Mary Sobieski	Amen.
01:14:12.64	Mary Sobieski	Yes.
01:14:13.02	Zapata	City manager, you know, I appreciate what resident former mayor Bushmaker said about working on the basics and infrastructure and I mean, I think it's important to note that you know that's been a focus for some time here. You know and tonight, you know, we're finally going to talk about the landslide issue in the geologic hazard study that's been a long time in coming and you know a meeting before we talked about sidewalks and how to work with partnerships with the community so that you know we could have more resources to maintain our sidewalks and you know in talking to a few of you today about the resiliency aspect of it and is that's preparedness aspect of it I think it goes without saying that you know this has been in my mind priority number one along with working on our housing programs so it will continue to be our priority. I heard about the need to be more aggressive in recruiting our risk manager. We will do that and so I just wanted to share the community and council that's all happening.
01:14:13.72	Mary Sobieski	Yeah, if I may.
01:15:15.51	Mary Sobieski	Thank you city manager. So now we'll move on to item five B to the discussion of our 2024 25 budget director Hess.
01:15:21.84	Zapata	Yeah, mayor if I can kick this off. Yeah, sorry. So so first of all, this meeting marks the first of four meetings, not one, not two, not three, but four meetings in which we're going to talk about our budgets for the 2425 fiscal year, which starts July 1st. As you know, we have to make sure that we adopt the budget by June 30th, which we will do. And tonight, you know, I'm happy that we're providing information. the chat and our city team have worked on diligently to give you base information and you know receive input and comment from you as we go forward and adopting a final budget because I think it's important here your comments the public's comments on where we are at this point and what we're thinking I think the one thing I want to stress is that in the staff report one of the things we talked about was auditing and fiscal responsibility and hiring different auditors we did that we hired a new auditor that auditor came in and gave us a report on where we were financially for the past year and you know one of the things i noted was there was ten point eight million dollars in city cash that was in the general fund that is something I really value the work that was done by prior councils to save that money prior administrations to save that money because now with what we're seeing today there's going to be a challenge the second thing is in addition to the cash that was saved the staff report points out that some policy decisions to save for pensions and postpone post employment benefit costs have also worked and been done by intentional decisions of the council and staff has implemented them so there's 5. seven million dollars in that account that can be used specifically for pensions or post-employment benefits and so I say all that tonight to say this is a moment where we see the raw numbers the challenge in front of us it's a two million dollar plus challenge in my mind I think that with the savings you have it's really a question of at the next meeting or the subsequent meeting we get some direction from you but not tonight what you decide to do in terms of if you want us to you know dig into the cash reserve or if you want us to dig into the pension trust or the OPEP trust but tonight we're going to give you the landscape we're going to tell you that we don't I will tell you that we don't believe this is a year to diminish or change our service levels and that's why you know we're showing you the amount that's in your savings as opposed to the amount that we believe this year we're going to be short for the factors that Chad's going to discuss, which include insurance, pension costs, and a slowing economy. But all that to say, this is not the time to panic. It's the time to be measured and start to look forward. And we won't have all the answers for you tonight. We won't have all the answers for you down the road, but there is work being done for a 10-year financial model that we need to ramp up so that we could look at You know what scenarios might be on a go-forward basis because it could be this way next year And we won't know that it could be this way two years from now, but we need to do some work Get that back to you, but tonight, you know, we want to give you some basic information Chad's going to review it and understand that we have not one, not two, not three, but four meetings in which to adopt a budget, beginning with this night where we kick it off. So, Chad. Thank you.
01:15:24.00	Mary Sobieski	Sorry.
01:18:55.00	Chad Hess	All right. Thank you. City Manager Zapata.
01:18:57.48	Chad Hess	Good evening mayor council public. My name is Chad Hess. I'm the director of finance and
01:19:03.68	Chad Hess	So I want to start off by talking about what's the difference between accounting and finance. As you all know, I'm a classically trained accountant. I'm a CPA and we look backwards. We're very factual. We like to dig into the numbers and present details.
01:19:18.32	Chad Hess	Whereas finance is more forward looking and the goal is to tell more of a story.
01:19:23.45	Chad Hess	So,
01:19:25.36	Chad Hess	if we envision that we're in a car together and we're driving to a concert,
01:19:29.75	Chad Hess	it's really less important from a finance perspective how fast we're going
01:19:34.85	Chad Hess	But
01:19:39.69	Chad Hess	Here we go.
01:19:40.26	Chad Hess	what you really want to know is if we're going to make it to the concert on time.
01:19:44.24	Chad Hess	you don't care if we're going 67 miles an hour or 64,
01:19:47.77	Chad Hess	I really want to try to convey some larger
01:19:51.16	Chad Hess	concepts here and not get bogged down in the details. So this will be a little bit different than what we've seen in the past as far as budget presentations. I'm not gonna get super detailed, so I've gotta put on my finance hat.
01:20:03.80	Chad Hess	So,
01:20:04.78	Chad Hess	As you can see here, last time we met, we talked about the concept of citywide funds, where we have everything except the sewer under kind of a mass umbrella. And we talked about things in aggregate.
01:20:16.58	Chad Hess	And we're still going to get there. I'm going to start talking about specifically the general fund
01:20:21.56	Chad Hess	But I want to break things down more as operations,
01:20:25.18	Chad Hess	versus capital.
01:20:26.84	Chad Hess	So tonight we're going to talk general fund and we're only going to talk general fund. We're going to talk a little bit about MLK, Old City Hall and Parking.
01:20:33.64	Chad Hess	because those funds really feed into the general fund. They make annual transfers or annual subsidies to fund that operation. So we'll talk briefly about those, but really the focus is on the general fund, our core operations.
01:20:46.78	Chad Hess	Next time we meet, we'll get more into the capital improvement section of this and what resources are available to fund that.
01:20:54.83	Chad Hess	Now I do want to talk about some terms, just to make sure that we're all talking about the same thing. So a surplus or budget surplus is an excess of receipts, revenues,
01:21:04.32	Chad Hess	over disbursements so revenues over expenses in an accounting period or a fiscal year is a surplus
01:21:10.49	Chad Hess	On the flip side of that, a budget deficit, again, we're looking at an accounting period, one fiscal year,
01:21:17.38	Chad Hess	That's really when we have excess disbursements over receipts.
01:21:21.73	Chad Hess	Another way to look at it, when a government spends more on goods and services than they collect in revenues.
01:21:27.20	Chad Hess	Now, the fund balance, we're going to talk about fund balance, and we're also going to talk about reserves tonight.
01:21:33.09	Chad Hess	But when we think of fund balance, what is the fund balance? How much do we have? It's really an accumulation...
01:21:39.94	Chad Hess	of prior year surpluses. So if we have a surplus in one year, it adds to fund balance.
01:21:45.44	Chad Hess	if we have a deficit spend, it decreases fund balance.
01:21:50.20	Chad Hess	When you have a positive fund balance, it's because we've had surpluses in prior years that enable us to build up those reserves.
01:21:57.59	Chad Hess	So another way to think about fund balance is those are resources that are available to be expended.
01:22:04.48	Chad Hess	Now we're going to talk about reserves. And reserves, I really want to restrict our usage of that term.
01:22:10.05	Chad Hess	to really a portion of our fund balance that is set aside for really true emergencies.
01:22:16.64	Chad Hess	It's really...
01:22:17.88	Chad Hess	the last dollar that we are going to spend. If we start digging into reserves,
01:22:23.46	Chad Hess	We have issues. We have real issues or troubles.
01:22:26.78	Chad Hess	So I've got a graph today that will help explain kind of where those reserves fall into our fund balance tower, if you will.
01:22:34.84	Chad Hess	Now, we're gonna talk about resources available in excess of reserves, and this is really a component of fund balance.
01:22:43.37	Chad Hess	And it's really the fund balance that is above
01:22:46.88	Chad Hess	the established reserve policy. So right now we have a 15% reserve policy. So anything above that is really resources available in excess.
01:22:56.40	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:22:56.45	Chad Hess	Under GAAP, we've always called this, and we still call this, unassigned fund balance. So I'm going to try to be very intentional about when I use the term reserves and when I use the term resources available in excess of fund balance.
01:23:12.67	Chad Hess	I wanted to kind of depict this, surpluses and deficits and fund balance, positive or negative, as a graphical representation.
01:23:21.75	Chad Hess	So real briefly, we have year one, FY1, and here you can see we had a $500,000 surplus represented by the green bar.
01:23:30.00	Chad Hess	Now the blue line represents our fund balance, and in year one, after we've closed that fiscal year, we have surpluses, we have available fund balance,
01:23:39.04	Chad Hess	And you can see that the surplus for that year and the fund balance at the end of that year are equal.
01:23:44.85	Chad Hess	In FY2, you can see represented as that second column, that year we had deficit spending.
01:23:50.08	Chad Hess	So again, our expenses exceeded the revenues.
01:23:53.25	Chad Hess	by $200,000.
01:23:55.01	Chad Hess	So here we still have positive fund balance. We have not gone into debt or we have not had to borrow money to fund our operations. We are using or consuming prior years surpluses.
01:24:07.02	Chad Hess	Now we continue on, we go to year three, there we had a much bigger deficit of 400,000.
01:24:13.74	Chad Hess	So now we are getting into areas where we have negative fund balance,
01:24:18.48	Chad Hess	and we have no longer a surplus or previously accumulated surpluses. You can see that blue line goes below zero.
01:24:26.55	Chad Hess	We are not in that scenario. We have accumulated fund balance over the years, and we're going to talk about that tonight.
01:24:33.60	Chad Hess	And then in FY4, you can see we had another surplus, and that did bring our fund balance back up to the positive. So as we talk about surpluses and deficits, just remember that they are for a single fiscal year.
01:24:47.84	Chad Hess	and that we measure those things in those accounting periods.
01:24:51.23	Chad Hess	I hope that was helpful.
01:24:53.95	Chad Hess	Tonight here on the screen you can see we have our treasurer's report. This was part of the consent agenda.
01:25:00.58	Chad Hess	And
01:25:01.70	Chad Hess	At the bottom of this, you can see total cash investments in this first column. We have $33 million of available cash.
01:25:09.56	Chad Hess	spread throughout all kinds of different funds, some are operations, some are for
01:25:14.24	Chad Hess	employee benefits, OPEB and trust in their section 115. Some are related to infrastructure.
01:25:20.56	Chad Hess	You can see up there in that blue box, that's really the component that we're gonna discuss tonight.
01:25:26.49	Chad Hess	So again, it's a very small subset of all of the funds throughout the city. But we're going to focus on that operations and the general fund.
01:25:40.16	Chad Hess	All right, here we go for the general fund.
01:25:42.97	Chad Hess	So as you've read in the staff report, we are facing some significant challenges in the general fund this year, and I'm gonna bring forward the three of the larger items. I'm not gonna get into the details, but we're gonna talk about these pensions,
01:25:55.97	Chad Hess	and OPEB.
01:25:57.49	Chad Hess	So as we've known and as we've discussed in the past, we have pension obligations or UAL payments that are going to creep up over the next several fiscal years with a peak
01:26:08.40	Chad Hess	in 2030. Yes. Sorry, Council Member Hoffman has it.
01:26:10.94	Councilmember Hoffman	I'm not asking a subsequent question, but I don't see your presentation on the agenda.
01:26:17.84	Chad Hess	Can it be added, city clerk?
01:26:24.76	Councilmember Hoffman	OK, I just did it and it didn't come up.
01:26:26.53	Councilmember Hoffman	Councilor Mayor Hoffman.
01:26:27.14	Chad Hess	I don't think I got it beforehand. That's fine. I know you got it late. Yeah, I got it really late. Then send it late.
01:26:27.74	Unknown	I think I got it beforehand, that's why.
01:26:29.53	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
01:26:31.14	Unknown	I got it really late. It's not up there yet.
01:26:33.95	Councilmember Hoffman	Oh, it's not up.
01:26:35.32	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah.
01:26:35.44	Unknown	Yeah.
01:26:36.20	Mary Sobieski	So it's not posted yet. It will be just pull it up on your screen as a.
01:26:40.97	Unknown	live feed.
01:26:42.15	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah.
01:26:43.28	Unknown	I apologize for the timeliness of that.
01:26:45.26	Councilmember Hoffman	of that.
01:26:50.10	Mary Sobieski	So the Councilor Hoffman says you can't flip between the slides then, which is a habit we all like to do. But that's great. Now you're at our...
01:26:56.65	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:26:56.68	Chad Hess	I've got your attention. You're a captive audience. Go right ahead. Thank you, Director.
01:26:57.27	Mary Sobieski	I'm going to go.
01:26:58.62	Mary Sobieski	your capital.
01:27:01.36	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:27:01.43	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:27:01.65	Chad Hess	So when we look at our UAL payment, as we've known for some time, our UAL, unfunded actuarial liability,
01:27:09.66	Chad Hess	is going to increase. So in fiscal year 25, our UAL payment will be just under $3 million.
01:27:16.41	Chad Hess	which is an increase over last year's payment of about $470,000.
01:27:21.03	Chad Hess	So that is a portion
01:27:23.24	Chad Hess	A portion of that, about $250,000, is going to be impacted directly to the general fund.
01:27:33.08	Chad Hess	Other portions of that will be spread across other enterprise funds that employ city staff.
01:27:38.65	Chad Hess	But again, looking at it from a total perspective, about $470,000 increase.
01:27:44.14	Chad Hess	OPEB costs are also increasing, and I just want to bring forward that our OPEB costs, the direct payments to retirees, is approaching 300,000 in fiscal year 25.
01:27:55.00	Chad Hess	Insurance, as we've just discussed, are
01:27:58.38	Chad Hess	going to be a significant challenge in the general fund this year.
01:28:01.65	Chad Hess	In my assumptions or in my planning, I've had to make some assumptions because we do not know where we're gonna fall, whether it's with Hub or whether it's with PRISM.
01:28:10.56	Chad Hess	In this example, I am using our GL, or I'm assuming that we get into Prism,
01:28:15.76	Chad Hess	and we are able to participate in the GL1 pool.
01:28:19.69	Chad Hess	With that pool, it's a $500,000 SIR, self-insured retention under the policy, meaning that we pay the first $500,000 of any and all claims.
01:28:29.31	Chad Hess	I'm also making the assumption that we participate in the state pool, the state plan for workers' compensation.
01:28:36.31	Chad Hess	This plan does have first dollar coverage. Premiums, I think, are about $350,000 for that plan.
01:28:42.17	Chad Hess	but they cover the first dollar. There is no self-insured retention under that.
01:28:47.45	Chad Hess	I'm making the assumption that we go to the commercial market for our property insurance. We have requested from PRISM an evaluation.
01:28:55.06	Chad Hess	I don't have any inclination on pricing, so I had to use what was available to me at this time, which is from the private market.
01:29:01.69	Chad Hess	The commercial policy for our property
01:29:05.07	Chad Hess	is about $400,000 a year.
01:29:07.47	Chad Hess	And then also,
01:29:09.42	Chad Hess	When I look at all across our lines of insurance, and I also need to factor in our very high SIR,
01:29:18.76	Chad Hess	The general funds impact I'm predicting is about $1.7 million dollars above what we've paid or it I'm sorry it is $1.7 million dollars in fiscal year 25.
01:29:31.38	Chad Hess	Part of that dollar, part of that amount, is setting dollars aside to pay those first dollars of claims, I've got $750,000 set aside
01:29:40.62	Chad Hess	We are going to use to pay legal fees as well as subtle those claims under our sir I can't be naive and assume that we're not going to have any claims. So I have to plan a
01:29:51.95	Chad Hess	So I chose $750,000.
01:29:54.97	Chad Hess	Another challenge in the general fund is we have a softening sales tax revenue. We are seeing projections bringing our sales tax down by about $300,000 a year.
01:30:05.80	Chad Hess	Perhaps it's the maybe the end of the COVID rebound.
01:30:08.91	Chad Hess	and things are starting to normalize.
01:30:11.34	Chad Hess	Um,
01:30:11.96	Chad Hess	We also had one of our local businesses change the location of where they ship their products and that made a significant dent in our sales tax. That one business accounted for about a reduction of $200,000.
01:30:25.90	Chad Hess	in sales tax revenue projected for 2025.
01:30:29.97	Chad Hess	Those are some of the challenges or the challenges that we are
01:30:33.90	Chad Hess	we're facing.
01:30:34.93	Chad Hess	As it stands now, I have a projected budget deficit of $2.05 million, so we'll call it $2 million.
01:30:42.49	Chad Hess	Um,
01:30:43.48	Chad Hess	In order to maybe bridge that gap, we are bringing forward a few different items or ways that we can kind of accommodate that or lessen the blow on the general fund.
01:30:54.27	Chad Hess	The first one up here is we currently have a workman's comp internal service fund being self-insured We had an SIR that we had to set dollars aside for
01:31:04.97	Chad Hess	As we transfer to perhaps the state run plan which has a first dollar coverage those resources would not be needed and
01:31:12.64	Chad Hess	To pay those claims under the SIR going forward. We currently have over 780,000 in that fund I'm proposing we bring a half a million back to the general fund
01:31:23.11	Chad Hess	We could also increase our transfer parking. Parking fund is doing very well in fiscal year 24, exceeding our expectations. And if that continues into 25, I feel comfortable that we could increase that transfer from 1.5 to about 1.8 million.
01:31:38.66	Chad Hess	And item three is in fiscal year 23, we did contribute our surplus for that year. We had a surplus of just under a million dollars.
01:31:47.73	Chad Hess	in the general fund and we transfer that over to the section 115 trust
01:31:52.42	Chad Hess	If council chooses we could bring those dollars back
01:31:55.88	Chad Hess	I'm going to go ahead and
01:31:56.86	Chad Hess	and pay our part of our $3 million UAL payment in fiscal year 25 as a way to lessen
01:32:03.81	Chad Hess	that impact upon the general fund.
01:32:07.67	Chad Hess	As it stands today, the general fund has $15 million in fund balance. 15% of this is designated as our reserves. We have our budget stabilization reserve at 5% and our emergency shortfall at 10%.
01:32:21.58	Chad Hess	I am proposing that we move that reserve up to 25% by taking that budget stabilization reserve, which is currently at five, and moving that up to 50%.
01:32:31.18	Chad Hess	15%.
01:32:32.99	Chad Hess	So we're gonna see this on the next chart, the impacts of this.
01:32:35.92	Chad Hess	But as it stands now, you can see that our fund balance and excess of reserves
01:32:40.19	Chad Hess	is 7.4 million.
01:32:42.08	Chad Hess	And then we have pension resources or section 115 trust assets of 3.5.
01:32:46.94	Chad Hess	non-spendable, about a million dollars. That relates to the interfund loans between various funds.
01:32:55.09	Chad Hess	And here's our fund balance slide.
01:32:57.27	Chad Hess	So let's take a little bit of time and talk through this.
01:33:02.05	Chad Hess	As we spend fund balance, we are going to spend it from really the top down. If you look at the green bars on this slide,
01:33:09.84	Chad Hess	That represents our fund balance in excess of reserves. So that $7 million in fiscal year,
01:33:15.75	Chad Hess	23, it was 7.7 million.
01:33:18.53	Chad Hess	what I am,
01:33:20.68	Chad Hess	As we move to that second column, so that's gonna be our projected fiscal year 24, there's a couple of things at play here. So the first, you can see that that orange bar, the orange section,
01:33:32.20	Chad Hess	That increases. That's going to be our budget stabilization reserve. Right now that sits at 5%.
01:33:37.70	Chad Hess	If we increase that to 15%, then we have 25% of our fund balance or 25% of that year's expenditure set aside as a reserve really for those true emergencies.
01:33:51.49	Chad Hess	And then we also have available resources above and beyond that. You can see the light green bar that represents our pension assets held in trust. And then the darker green bar represents the available resources in excess of reserves.
01:34:06.47	Chad Hess	Now there is one goofy thing with financial reporting. You can see that white box with the orange outline.
01:34:11.87	Chad Hess	That represents the assets held in our section 115 trust for OPEB.
01:34:16.67	Chad Hess	Now that is not reported as part of the general fund due to GASB rules or GASB standards. But as it stands now, there's 1.9 million of available resources within that OPEB trust that we could use to pay some of those direct subsidy costs for our retirees.
01:34:36.48	Chad Hess	If we look to that last column, that's really looking at fiscal year 25, the budget talk at hand.
01:34:43.14	Chad Hess	What we are asking is if we spend down a million of our section 115 trust you can see that there is a decrease within that light green bar as well as we would consume some of our
01:34:55.07	Chad Hess	fund balance in excess of reserves.
01:34:58.97	Chad Hess	Um,
01:34:59.98	Chad Hess	Again, simply based on those challenges that we've seen on the previous slides, that is one of the options that we're looking at today.
01:35:08.79	Chad Hess	Next, I want to jump real quick over to the general fund, the MLK fund.
01:35:13.52	Chad Hess	So in the MLK fund, as we do some of our
01:35:19.80	Chad Hess	As we're starting to develop our 10-year plan,
01:35:23.07	Chad Hess	it's come up that we need to start establishing some cash reserve minimums
01:35:28.55	Chad Hess	in some of these, or in all of our
01:35:31.74	Chad Hess	enterprise funds, the funds especially that feed into the general fund through their annual transfers.
01:35:38.29	Chad Hess	The intention here is as we plan and as resources accumulate, we wanna have some form of plan that helps us establish what are we gonna keep in those funds.
01:35:47.37	Chad Hess	I'm proposing that we establish a minimum fund balance of 15% of annual revenues for the MLK fund.
01:35:53.83	Chad Hess	as well as we set aside 200,000 which increases by 50,000 each year up until 500,000
01:36:00.04	Chad Hess	for emergency capital reserve. So if the roof needs to be replaced or if there's a
01:36:05.27	Chad Hess	an HVAC unit that needs to be replaced. We have some
01:36:08.50	Chad Hess	things set aside for those emergencies.
01:36:11.43	Chad Hess	Now the justification for this is we have long-term leases in place that brings stability to that fund.
01:36:16.73	Chad Hess	We have the new we have the French school that just signed a five-year lease with options to extend and we are currently in negotiations with New Village School.
01:36:26.20	Chad Hess	Now, in the staff report, there is the disclaimer that as we get information back from our facilities assessment,
01:36:36.14	Chad Hess	things are subject to change. If that comes back and there are health and safety issues that are raised up in that facility's assessment, we are going to need to address those much sooner.
01:36:45.50	Chad Hess	than what we have in our current five-year plan.
01:36:48.81	Chad Hess	The other recommendation that I would like to bring forward to council again is the acceleration of the payback of our general fund advance. So as of today, there's 467,000 that is yet to be paid back from MLK to the general fund, which is the, that loan or that inner fund advance is resulted from the acquisition, the original acquisition of that campus several, several years ago.
01:37:18.31	Chad Hess	this would free up some of the fund balance within the general fund if this was paid back.
01:37:23.56	Chad Hess	And also it would assist the general fund to earn higher rates of interest. It's simply because of our advances, a fixed rate of 3%, whereas the treasuries that we're buying, I just purchased a treasury today that yielded 5.1%. So that would.
01:37:41.31	Chad Hess	impact the general fund in a positive way if those dollars were in the general fund accruing interest versus the MLK fund.
01:37:47.84	Chad Hess	So that's my request. Can I pay that back this year?
01:37:51.74	Chad Hess	Looking at our projections, here you can see fiscal year 24, 25, and 26. We're projecting revenue growth, and here you can see we've got our COPs,
01:38:02.59	Chad Hess	Ranging about six hundred and twenty thousand per year in attachment. I believe it's attachment one to the staff report this is projected out through 2035 to give a
01:38:12.63	Chad Hess	a much longer than a 10-year projection, but gives you some inclination of capital spend in the future, as well as when those COPs fall off
01:38:20.88	Chad Hess	and there's available resources to transfer more to the general fund.
01:38:24.93	Chad Hess	This year I am proposing a $700,000 transfer. You can see right here, there's the $700,000 transfer to the general fund.
01:38:33.42	Chad Hess	And in fiscal year 24, there's the payback
01:38:36.35	Chad Hess	UM, of our Interfund loan.
01:38:38.99	Chad Hess	Now, the thing that here, this line here is our projected cash balances, and then here is our reserve analysis where we're looking at that 15% of revenues as well as our capital reserve starting at 200, increasing 50,000.
01:38:53.03	Chad Hess	per year.
01:38:54.24	Chad Hess	And then here you can see any.
01:38:56.20	Chad Hess	I'm not sure.
01:38:57.01	Chad Hess	excess cash above or below
01:38:58.98	Chad Hess	that minimum. So I am holding some additional cash within that fund.
01:39:03.32	Chad Hess	simply because I have a larger capital expenditure planned out here for FY27.
01:39:09.24	Chad Hess	Um,
01:39:09.99	Chad Hess	So that is my recommendation for the MLK fund, is to help us establish a minimum cash balance as well as pay back that interfund loan to the general fund.
01:39:20.82	Chad Hess	Next I want to talk real quick about the parking fund.
01:39:23.62	Chad Hess	And again, we would like to establish a minimum cash balance
01:39:27.54	Chad Hess	Here I'm proposing 30% of annual revenues and then again setting aside 200,000, increasing by 50,000 per year.
01:39:34.61	Chad Hess	up to half a million for emergency capital reserves. Anything above and beyond that, we would transfer over to the general fund
01:39:41.95	Chad Hess	Um,
01:39:42.73	Chad Hess	Now, I do have a justification that revenues in this parking fund are a little less stable. We've seen that during the COVID pandemic.
01:39:49.36	Chad Hess	where parking revenues have dried up. So I think that warrants a slightly higher reserve
01:39:56.19	Chad Hess	Here you can see fiscal year 24, 25, and 26. We've got some projections. The same sort of thing is going on here.
01:40:03.50	Chad Hess	where I'm showing
01:40:04.83	Chad Hess	The revenues up top, lesser expenses for salaries, benefits, professional services, supplies, materials.
01:40:11.31	Chad Hess	and then various CIP projects.
01:40:13.99	Chad Hess	Here's our projected cash balances. So you can see we currently have at the beginning of fiscal year 24, 1.3 million. There's our annual transfer of 1.5 million that took place in FY24. Here's FY25s. And you can see that we still have available cash in excess of that minimum.
01:40:33.38	Chad Hess	under this reserve analysis. And really that is simply because I have $900,000 capital improvement.
01:40:39.81	Chad Hess	plug sitting in here for FY 26.
01:40:42.82	Chad Hess	Again, based upon our facilities assessment, all of this planning can change, but it is something, it is a place to start. We have to start making longer term projections and assumptions.
01:40:53.33	Chad Hess	Um,
01:40:56.10	Chad Hess	There is also attachment to which gives the parking funds 10 year projections as well as City Hall the City Hall the old City Hall fund was less significant so I wasn't going to bring that up in today's presentation but it is there is information the staff report as well as an attachment.
01:41:11.22	Chad Hess	So the next steps is really we're looking for feedback from council as to do we spend those section one $15 do we spend resources in excess of reserves instead of using those those trust assets to help close the gap.
01:41:26.81	Chad Hess	We're going to continue to refine our payroll budgets. This year I did scale back some of my budgetary slack just to accommodate
01:41:35.23	Chad Hess	the tightness that we have within the general fund.
01:41:39.08	Chad Hess	And then identify CIP projects that have available funding or meet the priorities of the community. And we are going to bring those items forward at next council meetings.
01:41:48.88	Chad Hess	We're going to continue to refine our revenue projections as more information is available.
01:41:52.88	Chad Hess	and make sure that we are being very conservative with on those revenues.
01:41:58.05	Chad Hess	Here's our budget calendar. As city manager at Zapata has said, we are coming back.
01:42:02.64	Chad Hess	at next council meeting, the next three council meetings, to be honest. So we'll be talking lots of budget.
01:42:07.80	Chad Hess	over the coming weeks.
01:42:09.59	Chad Hess	So with that, I'll go ahead and open it up for questions.
01:42:12.15	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:42:12.20	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:42:12.24	Mary Sobieski	City Manager of Sabata wanted to.
01:42:14.06	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:42:14.08	Zapata	If I can mayor and council public. Thank you very much Chad. Thank you for the work you've done with the departments and I just want to be crystal clear on a couple of things. This is the first leg of a four-step race. You know we've got three more laps to run before we adopt the budget and one of the things that's really important to note is we're not asking you tonight to make a decision on what you take from your your cash reserve or what you do with your 115 trust funds simply because with the cash reserves that's a deeper discussion in terms of what you really feel comfortable with and with the 115 trust there has been work done by prior councils and plans set and potentially direction given via resolutions that you know would govern how we approach that and if we're going to change that, we need to do some serious analysis with respect to those two funds before we come back and say, this is what we recommend, we're pointing out to you that you have money. And those accounts, there are potential uses, but we're not asking you to make a decision on using reserves tonight or your 115 trust. And I want to make that clear. Thank you.
01:42:14.11	Mary Sobieski	to.
01:42:14.28	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
01:42:14.33	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:42:14.35	Mary Sobieski	I'm sorry.
01:42:14.40	Chad Hess	Mayor and Council.
01:43:16.06	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, city manager. Are there questions for Director Hess?
01:43:21.02	Councilmember Blaustein	I can start.
01:43:22.02	Mary Sobieski	Consum member Boston.
01:43:22.03	Councilmember Blaustein	Councilmember Busty.
01:43:23.42	Councilmember Blaustein	Sure. Okay. Hi, Director Hess. Thank you very much for all of the time that you've put into a challenging and unexpected budgeting situation with regards to our insurance, which we heard about earlier this evening. When you and I met earlier this week, you talked about your overarching strategy for the budget being a real focus on de-risking. So can you just speak to that a little bit when you give these projections here and these ask for us? I noticed things like the 15% reserve and hold an MLK, the 750,000 for insurance. Can you just give a little bit more context there?
01:43:58.45	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:43:58.47	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
01:43:58.50	Chad Hess	Yeah, yeah, certainly. So as we know, risk is an issue that we have. In our budget, we do have resources allocated for that risk manager position. So that would be a position that we would fund in fiscal year 25's budget. That would be a request that we would bring forward. Actually, I think it's already on position control. Let me take that back.
01:44:18.72	Chad Hess	But it is officially funded, fully burdened within the finance department to fund that.
01:44:24.47	Chad Hess	Additional things are taking place where we look at our employee handbooks, we look at all of our policies and procedures to really
01:44:32.23	Chad Hess	make sure that they are the best practice as far as managing the risk to reduce that risk profile of the city. Ultimately, we have to bring down our insurance costs.
01:44:42.71	Chad Hess	what we are presented with by the private market is very unsustainable.
01:44:47.30	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
01:44:47.66	Councilmember Blaustein	When you're making decisions about our spend in CIP, for example, are you taking into consideration the deferred maintenance that we discussed earlier this evening and that we know is an ongoing problem?
01:44:58.59	Chad Hess	Yeah, there certainly is. And, you know, we have dollars available in the general fund for maintenance, sidewalk maintenance, road maintenance, but then there's also considerable CIP dollars that you can see on the treasurer's report that is available for infrastructure maintenance and that deferred maintenance.
01:45:14.98	Councilmember Blaustein	And obviously, while none of us would like to see our level of service decreased, are you having ongoing conversations with, or city managers, the pot of perhaps is the right person to ask about this with different departments. But in particular, I'm thinking about the spend that we would be required on CIP because deferred maintenance is so critical here about how we would fund each of those projects.
01:45:35.99	Councilmember Blaustein	Thank you.
01:45:36.02	Chad Hess	Yeah, so those CIP projects that are identified have funding sources outside of the general fund. So Measure L dollars are not part of what we discussed today. Those, even though they are a general tax, they could be used to fund operations. We have made the promise to our constituents that those dollars will be spent on infrastructure.
01:45:55.73	Chad Hess	So there are significant dollars available there to continue to fund our infrastructure improvements. We get county dollars, we get
01:46:02.87	Chad Hess	some state dollars,
01:46:04.51	Chad Hess	to continue to fund those infrastructure improvements. So regardless of what's taking place in the general fund, our CIP can continue to move forward.
01:46:12.57	Councilmember Blaustein	And can you give a little bit more justification for the increase in the amount of reserves that you're seeing in MLK if we were to make that transfer for that 15% ask, for example?
01:46:21.23	Chad Hess	Yeah, so this would actually be a reduction in cash that we hold at MLK.
01:46:26.36	Chad Hess	So we would pay back the the advance to the general fund and then we would keep a minimum amount of cash within that fund
01:46:32.62	Councilmember Blaustein	Could you put up that chart of the MLK fund? Just because I think it's really interesting, and it's a good demonstration of the next 10 years for members of the public to get a sense of what that movement of the money out of the fund would be.
01:46:43.37	Chad Hess	Oh, oh, you are.
01:46:44.31	Chad Hess	you want the
01:46:45.01	Councilmember Blaustein	the,
01:46:45.24	Chad Hess	the attachment.
01:46:46.07	Chad Hess	Let me pull that up real quick.
01:46:46.12	Councilmember Blaustein	Yes.
01:46:48.97	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:46:49.34	Chad Hess	I don't have that up.
01:46:51.01	Chad Hess	but I can get it.
01:46:58.71	Chad Hess	All right, so here is attachment one where
01:47:03.20	Chad Hess	Try to get this to fit.
01:47:05.47	Chad Hess	Excuse me.
01:47:06.74	Chad Hess	A little bit easier to do when I'm presenting remotely.
01:47:10.76	Chad Hess	All right. So one second.
01:47:16.88	Chad Hess	Little technical difficulties with the surface here.
01:47:21.03	Chad Hess	I can't get it to zoom right. All right, so, it's really small.
01:47:26.69	Chad Hess	Sorry about this.
01:47:31.38	Chad Hess	All right.
01:47:32.27	Chad Hess	So yes, as we look here, this Indian cash balance, kind of right in the middle,
01:47:38.77	Chad Hess	I think it'll show it, yeah, right there, kind of where my cursor is. There you can see that projected Indian cache balance.
01:47:44.02	Chad Hess	And that balance is decreasing for a period of time.
01:47:47.14	Chad Hess	through fiscal year 29.
01:47:49.64	Chad Hess	At fiscal year 29,
01:47:52.84	Chad Hess	you know, that cash balance starts to increase, but also, let's see here if I can scroll this over.
01:48:01.73	Chad Hess	So also one thing to note on this longer term plan in fiscal year 2030,
01:48:07.74	Chad Hess	That is the last year of our COP payments. So this is really interesting where you can see that drop
01:48:13.30	Chad Hess	in our spend.
01:48:14.83	Chad Hess	But then we're also able to increase our transfer to the general fund or other resources starting in fiscal year 2020.
01:48:23.79	Chad Hess	I'm sorry 2031.
01:48:25.70	Chad Hess	They're trying to get this
01:48:26.34	Councilmember Blaustein	So we pay back that loan in 2030. And so then our fiscal picture looks very different. It looks different.
01:48:26.52	Chad Hess	We have a great day.
01:48:30.88	Chad Hess	We have an additional $600,000 in available cash flow, $620,000 in free cash flow.
01:48:35.89	Councilmember Blaustein	And if you were to predict what the OPEB or the pension liabilities would look like and whether we could move some of the funding there. I mean, I know that Council member Hoffman and Mayor Sobieski and also former mayor with the are on a working group to look at that those 10 year projections. Yes, I just think it's important. We're having these budget conversations to think about in the context of the next 5 to 10 to 15 years.
01:48:55.30	Chad Hess	Yes, we need to look farther out now with the plan is and we see that in our model that we're building and discussing is those resources that End or the low loan payment that ends in 2030 in 2031 those are transferred over the general fund and
01:49:11.14	Chad Hess	to pay for those increasing pension costs, which are starting to peak in that exact time frame of 2031 through 2035.
01:49:20.34	Councilmember Blaustein	Okay, and let's talk about the pension costs for a minute because the 115 trust is something that you know we were very happy to be able to have that surplus to move into the 115 trust out pay down some of our pension costs. When you think about well, first of all, is that money fungible like for example, if we wanted to move it back because we were able to garner public funding for something we could do that.
01:49:41.45	Chad Hess	Yes, so the rules on the trust is we can reimburse ourselves for previously incurred pension costs. So we pay our UAL payment every July, we prepay it to take advantage of the savings. So we would write CalPERS a check for $3 million, we could turn around the very next day and take those dollars out of the Section 115 trust to reimburse ourselves.
01:50:03.93	Chad Hess	So really dollars are fungible in that degree. We pay an annual UAL payment that
01:50:09.65	Chad Hess	would create a liquidity event to pull those dollars out of the trust.
01:50:13.28	Councilmember Blaustein	And from an interest standpoint which fund is performing better for us right now the pen the section 115 trust or the general fund.
01:50:18.85	Chad Hess	Yeah, that's an interesting question. So if you look at the Treasurer's Report on page... Actually, I don't have page numbers. On the Treasurer's Report where I give the details of the portfolio...
01:50:29.66	Chad Hess	Now, you can see that the PARS trust is showing a much higher rate of return for this fiscal year. We give you the annualized rate.
01:50:38.23	Chad Hess	The treasuries that I'm purchasing are yielding around 5.1%, 5.2%.
01:50:43.45	Chad Hess	The parse trust here on this report, and it's simply because we are taking that annualized rate, it shows 7.8.
01:50:50.52	Chad Hess	But when we look at the history of that trust fund, so I've got the statement here.
01:50:57.42	Chad Hess	If we look at our three-year annualized rate of return, we're at less than 1%. In my opinion, that Parse Trust is our underperforming asset and is not as productive as it could be.
01:51:09.00	Chad Hess	if we invested in treasuries at this point.
01:51:11.41	Councilmember Blaustein	Okay, but we also have a very unpredictable macroeconomic environment, so we don't necessarily know what's going to happen. So I think we talked about this a little bit, but I would love your perspective on the long term impacts of moving the money from 115 trust into the general fund. Yeah, so if
01:51:15.88	Chad Hess	That's not necessarily.
01:51:24.86	Chad Hess	Yeah.
01:51:26.07	Chad Hess	If we pull the dollars out now, it just means there's less dollars that are earmarked.
01:51:30.16	Chad Hess	for
01:51:31.10	Chad Hess	Pensions down the road.
01:51:32.69	Chad Hess	But again, these dollars are fairly fungible. You know, we could pull dollars out of trust and they would be held within our general fund cash.
01:51:40.72	Chad Hess	Or we could spend our general fund cash this year and leave those dollars available there for subsequent years.
01:51:47.02	Chad Hess	Um,
01:51:47.98	Chad Hess	The Section 115 trust, I believe, is very beneficial when our funding status of the
01:51:53.90	Chad Hess	pension plan, the CalPERS plan,
01:51:56.43	Chad Hess	is a much higher funding status than where we are today, closer to that 90%.
01:52:01.66	Chad Hess	Um,
01:52:02.44	Chad Hess	our pension debt is one of our most expensive debts at 6.8%. So I would be as aggressive, I'd be a proponent to be as aggressive as we can at paying that down.
01:52:12.09	Councilmember Blaustein	Okay, and if you look at if we were to approve the recommendations today as provided by you and by the city manager, that would leave us with a $250,000 deficit. So the reason that I mentioned that is, oh, sorry, is that wrong?
01:52:25.22	Chad Hess	Well, so it's still going to be a deficit. We're still going to have deficit spending, but the way we present it, it would be less of a deficit in the general fund proper, the operating side of it. It's still a consumption of fund balance.
01:52:38.70	Councilmember Blaustein	So I think, I mean, I'm definitely aware, and I know my fellow council members are, that there's a significant amount of grant funding and public funding available. So to date, how much have we received?
01:52:48.24	Chad Hess	for grant funding. I don't have that available off the top of my head.
01:52:51.50	Councilmember Blaustein	Well, I know Councilmember Kellman sought out a million dollars from the state, and that was great. But the reason I bring that up is because it seems like a positive way to close the gap if it's only a quarter of a million, not to say if only, but I know that there are several available grant sources, so I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not our grant consultant is operating in the way, because I see a real opportunity there to fill that gap with some of the significant federal and state funding that's available, specifically for climate mitigation and energy projects.
01:52:54.74	Chad Hess	Yes.
01:53:10.92	Councilmember Kalman	Yeah.
01:53:23.54	Chad Hess	yeah I agree we we could do a much better job of looking for grant dollars or other people's dollars
01:53:28.70	Councilmember Blaustein	So because quarter Madera received funding for their their freeway, Nevada got funding for the highway 37 and we seem to be missing some I'm not to say that that's your fault by any stretch, but just in thinking about strategies for how we close the gap.
01:53:41.16	Chad Hess	Yeah.
01:53:41.45	Chad Hess	Thank you.
01:53:41.73	Chad Hess	Yeah, it's a it's a real opportunity that we do need to look more intentional at and apply for more grants. I would agree.
01:53:48.01	Councilmember Blaustein	Okay. Okay. I think that's it for my questions for now. Thank you. Thank you.
01:53:51.69	Chad Hess	Councilmember Vice Mayor Cox.
01:53:56.26	Chad Hess	Oh, you're muted.
01:53:57.46	Chad Hess	Muted voice, ma'am.
01:54:03.52	Vice Mayor Cox	Okay, can you hear me now?
01:54:04.61	Mary Sobieski	Yes, ma'am. We can.
01:54:06.40	Vice Mayor Cox	Okay, great.
01:54:08.26	Vice Mayor Cox	and
01:54:09.80	Vice Mayor Cox	I wanted to address a little bit further the pension trust issues that Councilmember Blaustein
01:54:17.41	Vice Mayor Cox	mentioned and I
01:54:19.62	Vice Mayor Cox	and I wanted to provide some historical perspective that
01:54:24.12	Vice Mayor Cox	Councilmember Hoffman and I have shared previously with this council.
01:54:27.97	Vice Mayor Cox	regarding, I think, important work that we undertook as a council in 2018.
01:54:33.54	Vice Mayor Cox	in which we
01:54:36.68	Vice Mayor Cox	VERY THOROUGHLY.
01:54:37.91	Vice Mayor Cox	analyze.
01:54:38.97	Vice Mayor Cox	with the assistance of our consultant at that time.
01:54:42.15	Vice Mayor Cox	what the.
01:54:43.63	Vice Mayor Cox	escalating
01:54:44.88	Vice Mayor Cox	pension obligations would be.
01:54:47.27	Vice Mayor Cox	through 2030 and how we planned
01:54:51.09	Vice Mayor Cox	to minimize
01:54:52.59	Vice Mayor Cox	their annual impact to our general funds.
01:54:56.69	Vice Mayor Cox	And so,
01:54:58.11	Vice Mayor Cox	We essentially
01:55:00.17	Vice Mayor Cox	HOOK ADOPTED A POLICY IN 2018
01:55:03.29	Vice Mayor Cox	to flatten
01:55:04.98	Vice Mayor Cox	the otherwise bell curve that we knew that we were facing.
01:55:09.06	Unknown	Bye.
01:55:09.85	Vice Mayor Cox	and
01:55:10.63	Vice Mayor Cox	The reason I raised this is because
01:55:13.75	Vice Mayor Cox	under that policy that we adopted,
01:55:17.87	Vice Mayor Cox	We did not anticipate actually withdrawing
01:55:22.21	Vice Mayor Cox	from the
01:55:23.99	Vice Mayor Cox	Um,
01:55:25.97	Vice Mayor Cox	115 Trust until
01:55:28.89	Vice Mayor Cox	the
01:55:30.41	Vice Mayor Cox	I WANT TO DO THAT.
01:55:32.16	Vice Mayor Cox	THEIR OBLIGATIONS REACH
01:55:33.83	Vice Mayor Cox	their Zenith and so that did not our plan did not
01:55:37.49	Vice Mayor Cox	contemplate,
01:55:38.73	Vice Mayor Cox	A, withdrawal.
01:55:39.86	Vice Mayor Cox	in this upcoming fiscal year. And I can share my screen and show you a couple of graphics
01:55:42.12	Cameron Razavi	and
01:55:45.53	Vice Mayor Cox	if that's helpful from staff reports
01:55:48.60	Vice Mayor Cox	that we
01:55:49.80	Vice Mayor Cox	THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE
01:55:51.23	Vice Mayor Cox	back in 2018.
01:55:53.19	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm
01:55:54.12	Vice Mayor Cox	And so
01:55:55.55	Vice Mayor Cox	it's.
01:55:56.40	Vice Mayor Cox	This council decides to go in a different direction.
01:56:00.04	Vice Mayor Cox	for some of the reasons discussed by Councilmember Blaustein and
01:56:04.95	Vice Mayor Cox	our finance director,
01:56:06.72	Vice Mayor Cox	For example, if we believe
01:56:08.77	Vice Mayor Cox	It's more advantageous to invest
01:56:12.09	Vice Mayor Cox	our general fund money in
01:56:14.60	Vice Mayor Cox	in
01:56:15.78	Vice Mayor Cox	funds that will provide
01:56:17.99	Vice Mayor Cox	better performance than the 115 trust.
01:56:21.74	Vice Mayor Cox	I'M CERTAINLY WILLING TO
01:56:25.74	Vice Mayor Cox	consider those options, but I want us to make a conscious decision
01:56:31.09	Vice Mayor Cox	to no longer follow the policy that we adopted as a council in 2018. And that policy was
01:56:37.91	Vice Mayor Cox	to
01:56:38.94	Vice Mayor Cox	I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS.
01:56:40.03	Vice Mayor Cox	contribute
01:56:41.08	Vice Mayor Cox	an initial amount for 2017-2018 fiscal year, and then
01:56:46.84	Vice Mayor Cox	contribute our annual surplus
01:56:50.04	Vice Mayor Cox	TO THE TRUST.
01:56:51.91	Vice Mayor Cox	So,
01:56:53.30	Vice Mayor Cox	which we did
01:56:54.66	Vice Mayor Cox	last year and which we weren't able to do
01:56:57.41	Vice Mayor Cox	in prior years when we didn't have a surplus.
01:57:00.60	Vice Mayor Cox	I just wanted to
01:57:02.17	Vice Mayor Cox	remind this council of that history
01:57:04.59	Vice Mayor Cox	I
01:57:05.21	Vice Mayor Cox	I had spoken with the city manager and forwarded some materials to him so that perhaps
01:57:09.23	Vice Mayor Cox	We can consider this more thoroughly over the next couple of meetings before we make a final decision, but I just wanted to
01:57:16.30	Vice Mayor Cox	remind us
01:57:18.07	Vice Mayor Cox	of the work that we did back in 2018 in an effort
01:57:22.04	Vice Mayor Cox	to minimize
01:57:23.86	Vice Mayor Cox	the potential adverse effects
01:57:25.82	Vice Mayor Cox	to our general fund.
01:57:28.08	Vice Mayor Cox	THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF
01:57:28.82	Vice Mayor Cox	the escalating pensions
01:57:30.86	Vice Mayor Cox	obligations.
01:57:32.35	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:57:34.69	Mary Sobieski	Councilmember Kellman.
01:57:35.86	Councilmember Kalman	Great, thank you. Thank you, Director Hess. And thank you for your time earlier today to go over a lot of this. So my questions are really around methodology with two subcategories, time frame and key drivers in your analysis. So you probably know that the cost of living in California is 38% higher than the national average, right? And you probably also know that CalPERS gets a COLA every year, and I think the COLA, the inflation rate this past year was 4.12%, and they get a COLA that reflects that. Okay. Yep. So... CalPERS gets a COLA every year, and I think the COLA, the inflation rate this past year was 4.12%, and they get a COLA that reflects that. Okay. Yep. So I have some concerns around using something like the MLK community participation going away as a key driver for why things get easier in the future because I don't see how we are also taking into consideration inflation, rising cost of living, cost of services, the increased pension debt. So can you help me understand that?
01:57:47.16	Cameron Razavi	Mm-hmm.
01:58:30.53	Chad Hess	Yeah, so a lot of that planning needs to take place within our long-term plan that we're developing.
01:58:36.13	Chad Hess	When we look at just this single fiscal year, it is important to look at, but it's really gonna be prevalent when we get into that longer term plan.
01:58:44.40	Chad Hess	and looking at how are we gonna fund those future UAL payments.
01:58:48.55	Chad Hess	Um,
01:58:49.45	Chad Hess	As the MLK COPs are paid off, those funds are available. And we have a couple options. We could leave them within that fund and improve that campus, or we could transfer them to the next greatest need.
01:59:01.61	Chad Hess	Um,
01:59:02.54	Chad Hess	in our planning, that need is really defeating our pension obligations.
01:59:07.23	Chad Hess	For UAL.
01:59:07.98	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, so then this is a question, but also a recommendation, which is, can you help us identify the ideal timeframe with which to evaluate budget shortfalls? So I'll give you an example. Um, over the last six months we passed four different business improvement type scenarios. One of which, um, the CDA contract relied on statements that weAT BASED ON HDL NUMBERS BUT TURNS OUT BASED ON THE MACROECONOMIC CLIMATE IT WAS JUST A REBOUND AND NOW WE'RE SMOOTHING OUT. I MEAN, YOU TELL ME IF THAT'S WHAT YOU THINK IS HAPPENING.
01:59:39.99	Chad Hess	Yeah, you know, I don't necessarily have that crystal ball, but yes, it looks like we had a great rebound right after COVID. There was pent-up demand, in my opinion. Yeah.
01:59:48.36	Chad Hess	I think we're seeing the impacts of that. We're not seeing the boom that we had right after the travel restrictions were eased. So I do believe that we're in more of a normalized period at this point where we will see slower growth.
02:00:00.90	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, and so when we talk about a normalized period, is that a three year, a five year, a ten year? Can we set some standards? I know there's probably industry practice, but you know, it's tough when we've been making decisions based on these little blips in the radar. But, and it's fine because that was just a one year decision and that's, you know, but I just for the purposes of this, I'm trying to wrap my head around a suitable timeframe.
02:00:09.86	Unknown	Thank you.
02:00:09.89	Unknown	Yeah.
02:00:10.11	Unknown	Thank you.
02:00:22.72	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:00:23.09	Chad Hess	And that's a great observation. I think as we continue to plan, we will get more structured in how we plan.
02:00:29.77	Chad Hess	So I think it's a great observation and I don't have an immediate response for that. But yeah, I think it's an important
02:00:34.34	Councilmember Kalman	But yeah, I think it's
02:00:35.88	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, thank you. And then I have a question about CalPERS. So talking about what we do with the 115 money and, you know, so one question I've always thought about is can we get a better rate of return on the investment by simply paying the money directly to CalPERS? I think at one point they were charging like a 7% interest rate of money owed to them.
02:00:52.03	Councilmember Kalman	you
02:00:52.05	Chad Hess	Yeah, so the Kelper's discount rate was 7%. They just recently lowered it to 6.8.
02:00:57.75	Chad Hess	As our UAL is out there, there is this unfunded balance, and we are being charged an interest rate of 6.8%. So in some of our analysis, one of the scenarios that I ran kind of outside of our group was paying down our outstanding pension debt
02:01:14.44	Chad Hess	early and accelerating that.
02:01:15.91	Councilmember Kalman	Because our securities are at 5.1%, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
02:01:18.10	Chad Hess	And we would get a 6.8 instant rate of return or guaranteed rate of return by paying down that pension debt directly to CalPERS.
02:01:24.72	Chad Hess	Now the
02:01:25.96	Chad Hess	as the funding approaches that 90%, that's when I think you would,
02:01:30.59	Chad Hess	kind of slow down and not overfund your pension because if you exceed 100 funded you don't get your dollars back from kelpers
02:01:37.10	Councilmember Kalman	Sure.
02:01:37.68	Chad Hess	But in my opinion, that's really where the Section 115 Trust comes in, is when we're approaching a higher funding level,
02:01:44.69	Chad Hess	put those dollars in the section 115. Right now, we're kinda hedging our bet that the market is gonna outperform the 6.8% at CalPERS.
02:01:53.72	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, so...
02:01:54.41	Chad Hess	It hasn't.
02:01:55.02	Councilmember Kalman	So thank you. My last question is since this is the first of four meetings, is there an opportunity to in your projections include I guess new revenue opportunities is how I think about them because We're trying to get you know blood from stone on this like it is what it is We can play around all we want but unless something significant happens. We're still always going to be dealing with 500k here at 500k there
02:01:59.56	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:01:59.80	Unknown	Thank you.
02:02:21.55	Unknown	you know.
02:02:21.77	Councilmember Kalman	Do you recommend that council really focus? And we've talked about a handful of times with NHA advisors and others around new revenue. But this just seems like we're just moving money around, but we're not really addressing
02:02:33.87	Councilmember Kalman	the core, which is potentially we need
02:02:36.84	Councilmember Kalman	more resilient revenue sources.
02:02:38.38	Chad Hess	Yeah, more stabilized revenue. So, you know, our current revenue mix, property tax is very stable, sales tax, business license, TOTs, that is all really dependent on tourism and travel.
02:02:48.97	Chad Hess	So there is some fluctuations in that.
02:02:52.62	Chad Hess	Um, with any chain advisors, we have looked at other revenue sources. We put out the RFP for impact fees. Um, we did get responses back and we're going to bring that forward to next meeting to issue, uh,
02:03:04.13	Chad Hess	ask for your blessing to award that contract.
02:03:07.94	Chad Hess	But yes, there are other revenue opportunities that you and I have discussed,
02:03:12.12	Chad Hess	I'll bring those forward to city manager and we can have a discussion around what is the viability of those
02:03:17.37	Chad Hess	to bring additional dollars to the table utilizing our current resources.
02:03:22.22	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, yeah, because when I think about MLK and I think about you look at the fund and it's a moment in time, but as Councilor Blaston pointed out, we have massive deferred maintenance on the MLK property. Plus we have massive vacancy. We do.
02:03:30.81	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:03:33.32	Chad Hess	We do.
02:03:33.62	Councilmember Kalman	And so I know we're only talking about the money that's coming in the door, but we're also just leaving money on the table.
02:03:38.23	Chad Hess	We are. Yeah, I would agree with that. And how can we get more of that? That wasn't a question that filling those spaces.
02:03:40.63	Councilmember Kalman	of the last of it filling those spaces.
02:03:42.62	Councilmember Kalman	An expression of feeling.
02:03:43.88	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
02:03:44.49	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:03:49.00	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:03:52.78	Councilmember Hoffman	So thank you and I understand that this is the first presentation, but
02:03:59.78	Councilmember Hoffman	with regard to giving feedback and to follow up on some of the things council member kelman talked about
02:04:04.18	Councilmember Hoffman	We have received presentations for funding and for non priority projects throughout
02:04:09.62	Councilmember Hoffman	since January 1st, certainly, and even before that. But we knew that we were having this increased risk that was coming up. And as the city manager just talked about, we knew that the...
02:04:18.80	Councilmember Hoffman	The problems with the insurance and that we were getting drop from insurance goes back to October. So That was also not part of our conversations when we're talking about what's our budget What's our budget perfect projections and how does this ask fit within that budget projection? So I would suggest amongst the council perhaps in our discussion period that we focus our agendas on things that are priorities strictly related to risk management, because that seems to be the biggest driver right now with what we're dealing with risk management in the context of infrastructure, risk management in the context of, you know, finishing our housing element,
02:04:55.99	Councilmember Hoffman	and then risk management.
02:04:57.81	Councilmember Hoffman	which goes back to infrastructure, right? With regard to these funds and the fund balances that we're talking about,
02:05:03.80	Councilmember Hoffman	um, pulling money from because those fund balances, and we decided we were going to call them business model,
02:05:09.96	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah.
02:05:10.11	Steven Woodside	Thank you.
02:05:10.22	Steven Woodside	Yeah.
02:05:10.32	Councilmember Hoffman	Instead of enterprise funds is a technical
02:05:10.55	Chad Hess	I'm just...
02:05:12.29	Chad Hess	That's probably fun.
02:05:14.38	Chad Hess	It's a Gatsby term.
02:05:15.33	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, it's a technical fiscal term that doesn't apply to some of these, the MLK fund and the parking fund and the
02:05:22.79	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
02:05:22.87	Councilmember Hoffman	What's the third one? Well, certainly the pensions, right? But all three of those things were developed over the years to address risk issues with regard to those assets. And so the risk issue with regard to the pension fund is that it's a huge fiscal risk as we move forward. And so interestingly,
02:05:41.18	Councilmember Hoffman	We've talked about this in the past,
02:05:43.34	Councilmember Hoffman	Council member or sorry, the Vice Mayor Cox and I were involved and me before that from 2016, 2018 on about how do we how do we smooth out this fiscal risk of
02:05:56.64	Councilmember Hoffman	The pension.
02:05:57.50	Councilmember Hoffman	And, but yet we always uncover, well, no one's adhering to that policy that we put forward, right? So there were certain years that we didn't invest
02:06:06.12	Councilmember Hoffman	even though there was clear policy direction from the council to do that, and the reason to do that was to smooth out those huge payments, those ballooning payments that are coming later,
02:06:14.95	Councilmember Hoffman	To your point, Chad, you and I have talked about this a lot,
02:06:17.48	Councilmember Hoffman	That's probably our biggest fiscal risk is that unfunded liability and how to attack that.
02:06:23.81	Chad Hess	Well, it's the volatility as well. You know, looking at how it swings based upon market performance.
02:06:25.31	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah.
02:06:29.21	Councilmember Hoffman	That's known like the volatility and the risk of that is known. So you can't take a one year snapshot of the pension.
02:06:31.42	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:06:32.36	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:06:35.86	Councilmember Hoffman	fund and say, okay, this year it looks okay because we know that the volatility is out there and the risk is out there.
02:06:41.19	Councilmember Hoffman	And so,
02:06:42.27	Councilmember Hoffman	You know, that has to be,
02:06:44.26	Councilmember Hoffman	very specifically discussed amongst the council, I think, about whether or not we're gonna alter the strategy
02:06:51.21	Councilmember Hoffman	as we've unknowingly altered it in the past and haven't adhered to the policy, but that's hurt the overall strategy
02:06:55.23	Cameron Razavi	without you.
02:06:57.44	Councilmember Hoffman	of smoothing out that risk later, as opposed to just selling off a bunch of property and paying off the unfunded pension liability, right? Like we could sell off five properties and just pay it off. And that's a different kind of strategy.
02:07:08.38	Councilmember Hoffman	and a different kind of risk.
02:07:09.40	Councilmember Hoffman	With regard to the MLK fund,
02:07:11.23	Councilmember Hoffman	as we talked there's deferred maintenance that's a risk there's also deferred maintenance with regard to revenue so the those those funds are set up to protect the revenue generating aspect of those specific assets when you start ignoring the revenue generating costs
02:07:31.76	Councilmember Hoffman	of those assets, then your revenue goes down, which we're also seeing with the MLK, right? Because we're not fully rented out and we have a lot of deferred maintenance.
02:07:44.71	Councilmember Hoffman	With regard to the Phil's facilities assessment, I think that's crucial before we decide what we're going to take from one of these business enterprise funds because
02:07:54.85	Councilmember Hoffman	You know, there should it's shocking, frankly, that we don't have this. I think every other business model, if you have a capital asset, you know what you're doing on an annual basis for the maintenance of that asset because that's your capital asset and that's how sometimes you make your money. And certainly that's true in this case.
02:08:10.59	Councilmember Hoffman	So,
02:08:11.56	Councilmember Hoffman	MLK high risk of not receiving a return on investment of that, but we're using the The revenue from that to pay off our COPs and some other quite large debt that we took on in the past So that's my concern about MLK the parking fund
02:08:29.48	Councilmember Hoffman	There are maintenance issues with regard to parking fund. There are, as Chad and I discussed earlier this week, one parking lot that we're getting zero revenue off of, that we have probably maybe 100 spots there. That on weekends, when those restaurants are fully operational and fully, the restaurant parking lots are full.
02:08:51.06	Councilmember Hoffman	And so the fact that we're not charging anything for parking lot five and we have no ability right now to charge for anything for parking lot five indicates to me that we need to seriously look at the parking fund, which is supposed to be for right maintenance on the parking lot. That's our revenue generate quite a large revenue generator for Sausalito.
02:09:09.11	Councilmember Hoffman	And then also maintenance that needs to be done on
02:09:11.39	Councilmember Hoffman	our parking systems throughout town, which we've talked about on our parking, you know, when we were looking at the parking committee or whatever it was, whatever we were calling it, anyway, a year ago,
02:09:21.11	Councilmember Hoffman	that there are certain areas of town that also are in the downtown corridor that either were undercharging for parking or there's no parking at all there, that are principally for people coming into town and not residents.
02:09:36.50	Councilmember Hoffman	I mean,
02:09:37.36	Councilmember Hoffman	We're giving you feedback, right?
02:09:38.97	Councilmember Hoffman	this is my feedback. And then the the other thing we also talked about earlier this week
02:09:46.34	Councilmember Hoffman	is the reserve.
02:09:48.06	Councilmember Hoffman	And so, you know, I don't recall, we've talked about a reserve a lot, right?
02:09:56.60	Councilmember Hoffman	And
02:09:59.00	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, I was surprised that it was called out specifically in our staff report as a 15% reserve, because I don't believe the council has ever stated, we talked about a lot, what's an appropriate reserve,
02:10:08.68	Councilmember Hoffman	but I don't believe the council's ever voted on that. I guess I'm glad that we have a minimal reserve, but I don't think, and you support this, that's not an appropriate
02:10:17.91	Chad Hess	No, I think 15% is low.
02:10:19.79	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah.
02:10:19.84	Chad Hess	Yeah, as far as a reserve, I think what we're holding in that fund right now is close to 50%, maybe high, but
02:10:27.16	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, so what about, you know, we had,
02:10:32.17	Councilmember Hoffman	When we had our, it was an audit, and now I can't remember what it was. It wasn't a CAFR, it was a-
02:10:37.73	Chad Hess	Yeah, so when we did our basic financial statements, our current auditor, Badawi and associates, Ahmed Badawi,
02:10:45.25	Councilmember Hoffman	MS.
02:10:46.50	Councilmember Hoffman	Right, and so we asked some questions of him of what an appropriate reserve might be and if there was an industry standard or standard among cities. His response was, no, it's specific to every city and your risk assessment.
02:10:57.98	Chad Hess	Yes, you do need to take a holistic look at your risks.
02:11:02.21	Councilmember Hoffman	So you would agree that we have a pretty high risk at this point?
02:11:06.18	Chad Hess	Yes.
02:11:06.52	Councilmember Hoffman	I mean, we just lost our insurance carrier. Yeah, so it's pretty, I mean, I don't know if we need to go into too much. So I would like to discuss that, too, is what's an appropriate reserve for us as we move forward. And I think those are all my questions for you at this point. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Thanks for your help.
02:11:07.27	Chad Hess	We just lost our insurance carrier.
02:11:20.93	Mary Sobieski	Thanks, Mr. Hoffman.
02:11:22.58	Mary Sobieski	Chad, just a question on this nice little biography thing. I don't know if you can pull that up easily just because I wasn't sure. So.
02:11:26.46	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:11:26.63	Unknown	Thank you.
02:11:29.26	Chad Hess	Yeah, I certainly could.
02:11:54.17	Mary Sobieski	So 2023, the leftmost column stack of bricks there. Yes. That was a year of surplus.
02:11:58.42	Chad Hess	Yes.
02:12:00.72	Chad Hess	Yes, this was the year that we had our million dollar surplus within the general fund.
02:12:05.19	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so and the next two columns are both projections, right? Correct, that is correct. What we've mostly been talking about today is the projection for the next fiscal year which starts in June and ends in June of next year. And that's the right most column of-
02:12:08.41	Chad Hess	Correct. That is correct.
02:12:18.00	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:12:18.11	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:12:18.15	Chad Hess	Yes, so this would be fiscal year 25.
02:12:20.73	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:12:20.75	Mary Sobieski	The middle column of squares, that's the fiscal year we're currently in, and it ends next month. Correct. So it's also a projection, but it's a projection that's just 30 days, well, 60 days away. 60 days away. So are you pretty confident in those numbers?
02:12:25.76	Chad Hess	Correct.
02:12:27.08	Unknown	Thank you.
02:12:31.90	Chad Hess	Six years, right?
02:12:35.04	Chad Hess	So this was based upon our budget. We are currently budgeted for just over a half million dollar surplus. I think revenue's a little bit softer, but our expenses are coming in below budget
02:12:46.69	Chad Hess	So yeah, I feel we're gonna end the year, fiscal year 24 with a surplus, close to that half a million dollars.
02:12:52.39	Mary Sobieski	Okay, so on this three, with these three square, columns of squares, the first two columns both represent years of surplus. And what you're saying, that's the thing you're talking about here, is largely because of the insurance issue, we are facing a deficit in the projection for the next fiscal year that we have to be mindful of. That is correct.
02:12:56.19	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:12:56.22	Unknown	was the columns of squares. The first two columns.
02:13:02.61	Unknown	Yes.
02:13:12.18	Chad Hess	That is correct.
02:13:12.76	Mary Sobieski	So that's one issue, and that's the primary. And then you're making some other recommendations about how to continue the creeping excellence in your department about reserve levels, both in the journal fund and also in the various other funds. Is that what I understand?
02:13:28.55	Chad Hess	Yes, so I am asking for the nod to go ahead and establish some minimum cash balances for MLK parking.
02:13:37.60	Chad Hess	And then also, if we are interested in bringing forth action to increase our reserves to 25% within the general fund.
02:13:45.51	Chad Hess	As Councilmember Hoffman stated, I don't believe that was a formal council action.
02:13:51.18	Chad Hess	But it could be. It certainly could be, and then it would be a committed
02:13:55.30	Chad Hess	fund balance designation.
02:13:57.19	Mary Sobieski	And to Council Member Hoffman's questions around the facility assessment and Yes. has been connected to the reserves. You know that's a comment we've talked about in our one on ones.
02:14:03.16	Chad Hess	Yes.
02:14:10.76	Mary Sobieski	Is your reserve level then a placeholder that will then be
02:14:13.96	Chad Hess	Yes, they did once that work is done. Yes. So as soon as we get that facilities assessment We're gonna have a lot more information on that deferred maintenance and as far as the health and safety Components those are things that we're gonna have to address right away And then also that that facilities assessment will help us plan. What is that required capital spend to maintain? MLK Spinnaker
02:14:15.30	Mary Sobieski	Once that work is done?
02:14:35.01	Chad Hess	Parking.
02:14:35.31	Mary Sobieski	This is what I didn't quite understand. So your recommendations in the current proposal, which we'll address, is sort of a placeholder. What you didn't say in the staff report, but I think it's your goal, is that those numbers are going to be replaced once you have a better methodology for what the minimum fund balances should be in the different accounts. Correct. That's sort of your recommendation. It wasn't actually said in writing, so I just wanted to.
02:14:54.28	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:14:55.05	Chad Hess	Correct.
02:14:58.82	Chad Hess	Your assessment is correct. It is a
02:15:03.25	Chad Hess	placeholder as we know more information as far as the what it would take to maintain or improve those spots.
02:15:10.44	Chad Hess	those those facilities, we would have to readdress our projections.
02:15:14.10	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:15:14.15	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:15:14.21	Mary Sobieski	And I too was interested in the thing, I think,
02:15:16.38	Mary Sobieski	Councilmember Kelman brought up, which is that the hurdle rate on CalPERS being 6.8% now means that while treasuries are great and they do a good return, the best ROI on your dollar is simply giving it to CalPERS now.
02:15:32.28	Chad Hess	That's our most expensive debt.
02:15:33.97	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:15:33.98	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:15:34.57	Mary Sobieski	The issue, do I understand it correctly that if you do that, that's a good use of that dollar, but it doesn't help you with the particular UAL payment the next year because that is amortized over its full 20 year. That $1 does very well, but it doesn't help you with your next year's.
02:15:34.62	Chad Hess	Um,
02:15:50.22	Chad Hess	The next year. No, there is a lag between when you would make that discretionary advance payment and when the next valuation would come out. So there would be savings down the road or a reduction in the UA down the road, but there's a lag.
02:16:07.09	Chad Hess	That's correct.
02:16:07.77	Mary Sobieski	Okay, thank you. Those are all my questions.
02:16:09.49	Chad Hess	Great questions.
02:16:10.20	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, Mayor.
02:16:10.97	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:16:11.24	Mary Sobieski	Let's take public comment now, please.
02:16:16.10	Unknown	Sorry.
02:16:18.18	Unknown	Anybody in the audience?
02:16:19.49	Unknown	I'd like to make any public comment.
02:16:20.90	Unknown	All right, seeing none in the audience, we do have Sandra Bushmaker.
02:16:30.77	Sandra Bushmaker	Hi again.
02:16:33.23	Sandra Bushmaker	Couple of things. Thank you for this presentation. This is my 30,000 foot
02:16:41.01	Sandra Bushmaker	analysis.
02:16:42.99	Sandra Bushmaker	We have got a budget deficit projected for
02:16:46.06	Sandra Bushmaker	the next fiscal year of $2 million.
02:16:49.68	Sandra Bushmaker	We need to tighten our belt.
02:16:51.84	Sandra Bushmaker	We have to stop discretionary spending.
02:16:55.20	Sandra Bushmaker	We need to focus on our priorities. We need to pay down our pension debt.
02:17:01.16	Sandra Bushmaker	And I agree with
02:17:03.50	Sandra Bushmaker	Vice Mayor Cox about the 215 trust, because I remember when that was enacted.
02:17:08.55	Sandra Bushmaker	and there was not anticipated withdrawals from that fund.
02:17:13.02	Sandra Bushmaker	We need to get insurance.
02:17:15.52	Sandra Bushmaker	We need to get our facilities assessment done.
02:17:18.56	Sandra Bushmaker	to look at deferred maintenance, current maintenance schedules, and preventive maintenance schedules.
02:17:25.00	Sandra Bushmaker	And we're going to have a presentation shortly about the geohazard mapping study that was done.
02:17:32.41	Sandra Bushmaker	And that is a health and safety issue that
02:17:34.66	Sandra Bushmaker	The council must address there are recommendations in that report that are costly and need to be addressed.
02:17:41.32	Sandra Bushmaker	So basically we're at a position we were a few years ago
02:17:45.12	Sandra Bushmaker	of having to
02:17:47.67	Sandra Bushmaker	Tighten our belts, stop discretionary spending and get our city back on track again.
02:17:55.21	Sandra Bushmaker	That's it for now, but I'm sure I'll have more later. Thank you.
02:17:59.65	Unknown	Next speaker, Babette McDougall.
02:18:15.31	Unknown	Not bad if you can unmute yourself.
02:18:21.11	Unknown	Thank you.
02:18:21.16	Unknown	Thank you.
02:18:21.22	Unknown	Mm-hmm.
02:18:29.58	Sergio	Uh,
02:18:34.29	Unknown	We have some user error.
02:18:39.08	Mary Sobieski	Is she still online?
02:18:40.39	Unknown	She's still online. Can you unmute? She has a new computer. Can you unmute her? I'm trying to, she needs to unmute herself.
02:18:41.53	Mary Sobieski	Can you unmute?
02:18:47.98	Unknown	I've already had
02:18:59.83	Mary Sobieski	No luck. And is there any other public speaker in Zoom?
02:19:02.24	Unknown	I mean, I'm not.
02:19:02.52	Cameron Razavi	you
02:19:02.59	Unknown	Thank you.
02:19:03.84	Mary Sobieski	All right, we'll have to move on. If she is able to do it, we'll take her comment during our discussion. So any discussion here? We have sort of a mixture of Q&A and discussion, but let's maybe just go down the...
02:19:18.49	Mary Sobieski	I'll start with whoever wants, Council Member Calming.
02:19:20.68	Councilmember Kalman	Yeah, so I asked my questions, and so what I want to suggest to my colleagues is we're going to keep seeing the same issue over and over again unless we really figure out
02:19:30.52	Councilmember Kalman	the methodology, the timeframe, and some new revenue sources. And I sat down with Chad today and I expressed something that I've thought about for a long time, which I was lovingly calling,
02:19:41.39	Councilmember Kalman	the revenue improvement program until I realized that was
02:19:45.81	Councilmember Kalman	r.i.p so i went with the sausalito adventure initiative which is we never talk about sausalito as an opportunity for water sports enthusiasts and trail adventurers as a way to enhance our revenue and i think that we are going to continue to have the same result in the same conversation over and over again if we don't start thinking about how we enhance our reputation particularly post-COVID all of us on the dice here have some athletic endeavor that we actually love to do that is an outdoor sport whether it's sailing or swimming or biking or running right and so but we don't talk about our community in that way and it's huge revenue opportunities for us so some ideas that I would hope that Chad starts to think about because it's not just things that are new. They are things that change the way we use our assets. So a water sports center. A water sports center where we are holding regattas, kayak regattas, all sorts of floating movies where people gather in Dunphy Park and the movie is played out on the water. I've seen this before. It's interesting. It's different. People would come to us. We have the lease for the Cask Gidley Marina coming up very soon. We could do yacht onboarding and drop off in pickups. That is a significant revenue source. We could be looking at water taxis. Council Member Blossy and I have been very passionate about that. Lots of things that we can do. I think unused value equals waste, and it doesn't get baked into our budget adequately. And so I feel like it's my fourth year on council, we have the same conversation, and we're trying to get blood from a stone, and we can't because we only have the same mix that we keep looking at. So a water support center, I also think,
02:21:23.89	Councilmember Kalman	Promoting trail connectivity and access we have access right up here on morning Sun off of Spencer Rav We have the Cavallo point area Well, how are we not talking about that on social media and all the efforts that we make and I don't need to go too deep into this Rabbit hole But I only want to paint the picture that if we apply a different lens to how we see our community Then we start to develop new revenue sources, right? I also just mentioned we've talked for a while about about Alex at Bahala came in and said, I wanna do 15 units of hotels. We know what an independent- new revenue sources, right? I also just mentioned we've talked for a while about Alex at Bahala came in and said, I wanna do 15 units of hotels. We know what an individual hotel room gives to us in terms of TOT. Why don't we go after that, include that in our projections. We know we have 20 spaces at Humboldt Street. We know what an individual parking spot is worth to the city. Why don't we measure those out and come to the council with
02:22:09.01	Councilmember Kalman	that you know the the business case for making more of our decisions um as i run down other opportunities you guys are going to laugh um lighted pickleball courts we have an unsightly piece of city-owned property sitting immediately adjacent to dunphy park we have done nothing with it for years other than store a pile of soil that pile of soil is gone we could have all sorts of opportunities there we're just not making use of our resources so more regattos more water taxis more water-based activities more understanding of who we are as a community I think will help us not have this conversation year over year because it feels like deja vu all over again so thanks for listening and if you like the idea now that I'm the new EDAC liaison with Councilmember Hoffman, thank you for doing that. I would love to be able to direct EDAC to really look at that. We had a boating show that was very successful. There have been some other endeavors like Shakespeare on the Water. So I'm talking fast because I'm excited, but those are my ideas.
02:23:11.68	Councilmember Blaustein	Great and love the enthusiasm love love outdoorsmanship and adventure.
02:23:16.80	Councilmember Blaustein	I appreciate all of that. I think in hearing what we heard earlier regarding our insurance and knowing that just after this we have a presentation on our landslide assessments, I said this previously, but I'm just going to continue to push that we really, I would love to see us look at as well as, and I can go into some of the revenue opportunities, of course, but I think we really need to consider our budget from a risk and resilience lens and think about how do we de-risk our city and how do we plan and prepare for climate change mitigation the potential macroeconomic trends that we're not prepared for just thinking about it from a 10 to 15 to 20 year perspective so that we're not making these decisions as councilmember kelman pointed out year on year in a in a panic but rather how do we ensure and consider and continue these revenue streams and de-risk at the same time. So that means making the less sexy, less fun investments in really important infrastructure and maintenance that will help us de-risk our city and keep us prioritized while considering exciting revenue opportunities like waterfront outdoorsmanship and adventure marketing and really engaging in our international destination of Sausalito I think we have a really strong relationship with our chamber for the first time in many years and we can leverage that to work closely with our business community we voted on a bid together and I think that there's a lot of potential for revenue development from there um I also think our parking fund there's there's more we can look at a couple of specific parking lots lot five and lack of revenue at lock five thanks for bringing that up councilmember Hoffman was mentioned I also think you know we have places where we have street parking along Caledonia that is not metered and that's another lost revenue opportunity given the situation that we're in we're in the process of doing a significant lease and property assessment for all of our city-owned properties as well as a facilities assessment. I think we need to look at where we can consider the costs that we're leasing for, what we are, that was still vacant and what needs to be rented out, what some of those costs and changes look like and where that might be available. And then I mentioned this and I'm just going to keep saying it and I would really like to be part of a working group that focuses on it but there is more grant funding available and if you look at other cities and towns in Marin County in the East Bay they are receiving significant funds whether it's from the direct funds and revenue refunds from the federal government because of IRA bill or whether it's from partnerships with the government with the, we need to be sitting down on a regular basis with representatives from Congressman Huffman's office to brainstorm together about what CIP projects we have that might qualify and how we can fill that gap. Because if the gap is indeed $250,000, I know that that public funding is available because I saw Councilmember Kellman get a million dollars with one opportunity. So we need to be doing better. We need to be applying for more. We need to be thinking about where it fits. Through my work with the National League of Cities, Thank you. Councilmember Kellman get a million dollars with one opportunity so we need to be doing better we need to be applying for more we need to be thinking about where it fits through my work with the National League of Cities I participated in infrastructure hub boot camps to look at some of that funding those programs are free and available to members of staff pending bandwidth because we really need to focus on deferred maintenance and how we can solve some of those problems and I think you know so I agree with all of Council Kelman's suggestions and then looking at new revenue streams and thinking about a 5 to 10 to 15 year plan from a risk and resilience lens. And again, thank you very much to Director Hess and to City Manager Zapata for your hard work on this. And we'll welcome an ongoing discussion over the next three meetings as well.
02:26:29.92	Cameron Razavi	and so.
02:26:42.25	Councilmember Blaustein	Thanks.
02:26:44.06	Mary Sobieski	Vice mayor?
02:26:46.17	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:26:46.98	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:26:47.60	Vice Mayor Cox	Am I off mute? Yes.
02:26:49.67	Vice Mayor Cox	THEIR OWNERS.
02:26:50.32	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you for all of that. I really love the creative ideas.
02:26:55.57	Vice Mayor Cox	proposed by council members
02:26:58.01	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm
02:26:59.51	Vice Mayor Cox	you know, the city manager asked us,
02:26:59.63	Cameron Razavi	you know,
02:27:02.30	Vice Mayor Cox	for revenue raising ideas.
02:27:04.96	Vice Mayor Cox	over a year ago, and we all provided him some,
02:27:09.25	Vice Mayor Cox	I recall
02:27:10.67	Vice Mayor Cox	you know, discussing a
02:27:12.74	Vice Mayor Cox	VACANCY TAX.
02:27:14.53	Vice Mayor Cox	and some other
02:27:16.66	Vice Mayor Cox	So I want to remind staff
02:27:19.66	Vice Mayor Cox	of some of those concepts.
02:27:21.81	Vice Mayor Cox	that we identified
02:27:24.05	Vice Mayor Cox	A year ago, even when we didn't think we were facing
02:27:28.12	Vice Mayor Cox	A BUDGET DEFICIT.
02:27:29.28	Vice Mayor Cox	I do want to make sure that we don't,
02:27:32.35	Vice Mayor Cox	AND I THINK THAT'S A
02:27:34.09	Vice Mayor Cox	you know, panicked.
02:27:35.78	Vice Mayor Cox	over this year's
02:27:38.39	Vice Mayor Cox	that we're going to be
02:27:39.39	Vice Mayor Cox	that.
02:27:41.33	Vice Mayor Cox	forecast because
02:27:43.39	Vice Mayor Cox	WE DO HAVE
02:27:44.89	Vice Mayor Cox	some.
02:27:46.10	Vice Mayor Cox	one time.
02:27:47.41	Vice Mayor Cox	perhaps not consistent
02:27:49.45	Vice Mayor Cox	expenses.
02:27:50.51	Vice Mayor Cox	And I think we need to give staff an opportunity to restructure our economic model.
02:27:56.33	Vice Mayor Cox	to face
02:27:57.97	Vice Mayor Cox	you know, whatever the new insurance cost reality will be
02:28:02.25	Vice Mayor Cox	moving forward.
02:28:03.45	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm grateful that we remain very strong financially.
02:28:08.50	Vice Mayor Cox	which gives us time
02:28:10.14	Vice Mayor Cox	to weather this storm. I agree with the city manager's opening comments about not
02:28:15.47	Vice Mayor Cox	even thinking about reducing services at this time or level of service at this time.
02:28:22.17	Vice Mayor Cox	I agree with
02:28:23.62	Vice Mayor Cox	the finance directors,
02:28:25.68	Vice Mayor Cox	recommendation that we
02:28:28.24	Vice Mayor Cox	repay the MLK loan in full
02:28:31.80	Vice Mayor Cox	with the caveat that we need to understand the facility survey and ensure that there's no
02:28:38.38	Vice Mayor Cox	that our
02:28:39.40	Vice Mayor Cox	that.
02:28:39.90	Vice Mayor Cox	that the MLK pro forma that has already been prepared
02:28:43.99	Vice Mayor Cox	is accurate.
02:28:45.37	Vice Mayor Cox	with respect to capital needs.
02:28:47.82	Vice Mayor Cox	for the future, including for the parking lot.
02:28:51.63	Vice Mayor Cox	I agree with a 25%
02:28:54.16	Vice Mayor Cox	RESERVE.
02:28:55.43	Vice Mayor Cox	AND I THINK THAT'S A
02:28:56.96	Vice Mayor Cox	Back in 2018, the finance director, Melanie Purcell,
02:29:01.67	Vice Mayor Cox	RAY WITHY AND I
02:29:03.17	Vice Mayor Cox	agreed to a 25%
02:29:05.65	Vice Mayor Cox	I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT.
02:29:06.33	Vice Mayor Cox	and we're not going to be able to do that.
02:29:07.92	Vice Mayor Cox	in 2018. So there is a precedent, although I don't know that that was something that was adopted
02:29:12.57	Vice Mayor Cox	by the Council
02:29:13.70	Vice Mayor Cox	That was something that we included in the budget.
02:29:16.61	Vice Mayor Cox	for that year. So
02:29:19.36	Vice Mayor Cox	That was back when we had a finance.
02:29:21.43	Vice Mayor Cox	Committee.
02:29:22.88	Vice Mayor Cox	AND I THINK WE HAVE A
02:29:23.71	Vice Mayor Cox	And so...
02:29:25.13	Vice Mayor Cox	I look forward to, and I would like to
02:29:29.09	Vice Mayor Cox	I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT.
02:29:30.44	Vice Mayor Cox	see.
02:29:31.25	Vice Mayor Cox	more information,
02:29:32.86	Vice Mayor Cox	about and how some of the options for addressing
02:29:36.72	Vice Mayor Cox	Pensions.
02:29:38.56	Vice Mayor Cox	would pencil out.
02:29:39.83	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm really worried.
02:29:41.11	Vice Mayor Cox	about drawing down on the trust as tempting as it is to get more interest
02:29:47.15	Vice Mayor Cox	on general fund
02:29:49.33	Vice Mayor Cox	on our general fund balance.
02:29:51.67	Vice Mayor Cox	AND I THINK THAT'S A
02:29:52.67	Vice Mayor Cox	because that trust was built
02:29:56.04	Vice Mayor Cox	and added to for a specific purpose
02:29:59.13	Vice Mayor Cox	which is so that we don't
02:30:01.44	Vice Mayor Cox	go bankrupt.
02:30:03.00	Vice Mayor Cox	as some cities have in the past,
02:30:05.78	Vice Mayor Cox	over pension obligations.
02:30:08.93	Vice Mayor Cox	And so I really
02:30:12.29	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm happy to hear that we may
02:30:14.98	Vice Mayor Cox	have a surplus again.
02:30:16.78	Vice Mayor Cox	NEXT YEAR.
02:30:17.98	Vice Mayor Cox	but with
02:30:19.43	Vice Mayor Cox	THE
02:30:20.53	Vice Mayor Cox	challenges facing
02:30:22.27	Vice Mayor Cox	San Francisco, our neighbor and our world.
02:30:25.78	Vice Mayor Cox	I think things remain pretty volatile at the moment.
02:30:30.18	Vice Mayor Cox	And so I hesitate.
02:30:32.54	Vice Mayor Cox	to draw down that trust.
02:30:34.30	Vice Mayor Cox	Now.
02:30:35.31	Vice Mayor Cox	when the need is not
02:30:37.54	Vice Mayor Cox	when that was not what we had planned,
02:30:39.77	Vice Mayor Cox	when the obligation has not reached
02:30:42.42	Vice Mayor Cox	has not yet reached its zenith.
02:30:44.83	Vice Mayor Cox	And when we aren't certain about what funds will be available to us,
02:30:48.46	Vice Mayor Cox	IN THE FUTURE.
02:30:49.49	Vice Mayor Cox	TO ADDRESS THOSE NEEDS.
02:30:51.56	Vice Mayor Cox	preliminary thoughts and I look forward to the ongoing
02:30:54.14	Vice Mayor Cox	dialogue regarding this.
02:30:56.37	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:30:57.91	Mary Sobieski	Got some over Hoffman.
02:31:01.60	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, just to briefly add to some of my comments that were
02:31:07.19	Councilmember Hoffman	It's included in my questions to Chad.
02:31:11.37	Councilmember Hoffman	Um,
02:31:13.33	Councilmember Hoffman	One of the first questions I had, Chad, what's our...
02:31:15.93	Councilmember Hoffman	What's our total pension cost?
02:31:17.87	Councilmember Hoffman	unfunded pension liability right now.
02:31:20.54	Councilmember Hoffman	I'm-
02:31:21.48	Councilmember Hoffman	I know it's somewhere buried in
02:31:32.77	Councilmember Hoffman	It's okay, it's like 35 million or something, right?
02:31:34.37	Chad Hess	35 million or something, right? Here, I'll give you the number. I've got it pulled up here.
02:31:36.47	Councilmember Hoffman	Total unfunded liability is $35 million. And that's not including...
02:31:42.08	Chad Hess	Yeah, you're right. It is $35 million.
02:31:43.79	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay, oh my god, that's amazing. So, yeah, okay, thank you.
02:31:43.81	Chad Hess	Thank you.
02:31:44.19	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:31:49.41	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
02:31:50.42	Councilmember Hoffman	If we wanted to pay it off, I mean, we could prepay some of the payments, right? But if we wanted to pay it all off, which is the soundest
02:31:57.93	Councilmember Hoffman	You know, we could, but that would involve us selling off some assets of the city, but it would also save us quite a large sum of money. And as you and I have discussed,
02:32:07.80	Councilmember Hoffman	on many times any any surplus should go.
02:32:10.67	Councilmember Hoffman	straight into the unfunded liability to pay that down.
02:32:14.20	Councilmember Hoffman	Anyway, that's my thought on the unfunded liability and with regard to the pension trust fund.
02:32:20.26	Councilmember Hoffman	I agree with Councilmember Cox. I think if we're going to take money out of that now,
02:32:24.83	Councilmember Hoffman	the trust fund that we set up to smooth those payments in the later,
02:32:29.88	Councilmember Hoffman	later years, we need had a full discussion about why we formed those trust funds and what the risk is in those years and why that was a strategy that was adopted by the City Council.
02:32:41.94	Councilmember Hoffman	I do think we should have and would request that as part of this process, we agendize also what's an appropriate reserve level for our general fund. Because I don't think we've done that. We've talked a lot about it among the council, but we've never actually had it on the agenda and we never actually voted on it. So I think that's an important thing going forward.
02:33:10.78	Councilmember Hoffman	And so anyway, that's it in addition to my other comments I've already made. Thank you.
02:33:15.88	Mary Sobieski	Thanks. Great discussion. I guess my comments, I need to ask you another question, Director Hess.
02:33:23.54	Mary Sobieski	The 115 Trust, it's set up and managed by a particular agency.
02:33:30.95	Chad Hess	PARS. PARS. They have a
02:33:32.04	Mary Sobieski	ours. They have a fee. They have an investment strategy. Correct. We have no discretion over how it's done. Very little. Very.
02:33:35.70	Chad Hess	Correct.
02:33:39.42	Chad Hess	Very little.
02:33:40.72	Mary Sobieski	There is no reason, tell me if I'm wrong in saying this, there's no reason you couldn't set up something called the Sausalito Pension Trust Enterprise Fund that could be funded with the same money we could have sent to the trust, but that we would have full discretion over whether to invest in T-bills or something else.
02:33:59.06	Chad Hess	Sure, we could set up a fund within our structure, our fund structure to segregate those dollars.
02:34:06.18	Chad Hess	They wouldn't have the same protections as a Section 115 trust from creditors in the event of issues. And it looks like our city manager or city attorney has some thoughts.
02:34:16.54	Chad Hess	Yeah.
02:34:16.56	Sergio	Yeah, there, the city is limited in terms of what it can invest money that it holds in his general fund and regular reserves. There are state laws that limit what kind of investment vehicles we're allowed to invest money in.
02:34:28.86	Sergio	Thank you.
02:34:29.03	Sergio	There are special rules for Section 115 trusts that deal with
02:34:34.08	Sergio	allowing us to invest in other kinds of more risky assets, given the long-term nature of those kinds of trusts.
02:34:43.04	Sergio	We can't invest in the same type of vehicles that a Section 115 trust can if they're held internally by the city.
02:34:49.79	Mary Sobieski	Thank you. That's interesting. It sounds like the 115 Trust would let us to do more risky things than we could do in a regular enterprise fund.
02:34:56.08	Unknown	It,
02:34:56.47	Unknown	Yeah.
02:34:56.60	Mary Sobieski	Yeah.
02:34:56.82	Unknown	Yeah.
02:34:56.94	Mary Sobieski	And so when you have T-bills earning 5% or more, and we're only earning 1.9% in the 115 trust, there is a question that I would love to engage with at the appropriate time. That's my feedback about whether we can still meet the principles that my colleagues, Councilmember Hoffman and Cox and my predecessors established, which was to have a well set aside pot of money to make sure we don't go bankrupt. But that we have the flexibility to actually earn better returns than we're currently getting. So that's one piece of feedback. Love the idea of other revenue streams we've been
02:35:07.05	Unknown	Yeah.
02:35:40.68	Mary Sobieski	Advocating the low hanging fruit on that I share that with the council member. Kelman, a hotel seems like a no brainer. The question is, what do we do to make that happen? Uh, a few phone calls with Alex at the old Valhalla suggests that's not a plausible low hanging alternative, unfortunately. So what's our plan B? What's our plan C? Can we actually do that? What what's the process? Can staff help with laying out a process for getting another hotel in town and a pro forma for what that would get us? Is it 10 rooms or 20 or 30? There was some talk, I don't know if it's realistic about a flow towel. Is that a realistic thing to have? That would be really key.
02:36:25.47	Mary Sobieski	I mean, I couldn't agree more with you, Council Member Kellman, about the Sausalito Adventure Initiative. I'm strongly, though, and, you know, feel free to respond if you want because I don't know if the dialogue is helpful now or later, but you have to invest some money. I mean, who's going to run that, right? It's sort of like, and I'm struggling between is government the right entity to run initiatives like that or is private business the right entity to run initiatives like that you know seeing how hard it is to get stuff done in the committee environment with the Brown Act and the decision cycle and just the way decisions are made it seems like some of those in it wonderful initiatives innovative ideas would be best executed on by private individuals a sort of business improvement development district in the Marinship, for instance, or on the waterfront. But that would require actually spending some money. So my question for my colleagues to ruminate on is,
02:37:23.15	Mary Sobieski	You see it all the time in companies where
02:37:26.27	Mary Sobieski	they cut themselves to death.
02:37:29.03	Mary Sobieski	And then you have to spend a little money to get, but you need to do it wisely on the places where you're going to get huge leverage. And spending a little money to help, for instance, do some of those waterfront initiatives you've talked about, I'd be completely in support of, even in an environment where we have this big insurance problem that we've got to also solve. So I wouldn't want to let this big insurance problem that has to be solved. It's not just a budget problem, it's an unsustainable problem that needs a solution. Take away from one of the solutions, which might be paradoxically spending some money on initiatives that generate a lot of tax revenue, whether it's a business improvement to district for the Marin ship or something associated with some of the other areas that you talked about. So, but I would love to put that out there because I know that there's of course a concern on spending any dollars I'm looking for the leverage. So I would love your response on that. Yeah. Let me just finish my.
02:38:26.68	Cameron Razavi	Yeah.
02:38:28.64	Mary Sobieski	See if there's anything else I had to say.
02:38:31.90	Mary Sobieski	I might remember later, but those would be, I guess that would be my real comment is in these kinds of times, especially, it's really important to focus on what moves the needle, not what's gesture, but what's substance, what really moves the needle. And I gotta just tip my hat to,
02:38:48.45	Mary Sobieski	all the previous city council and city council members, we've had multiple years of surpluses that were set aside dutifully. With discipline that gives us this incredible resource of $10 million in the general fund and that's not even counting the.
02:39:07.43	Mary Sobieski	$10 million or so set aside in the capital funds, right? All of today was general fund. There's a whole bunch of money set aside in a bunch of restricted funds, tidalins and otherwise that are restricted for capital spending. And that's, I don't have the exact number here, but something like $7 million plus. So there's a lot of money that's been set aside by the predecessors that gives us, I think the vice mayor said was really strong financial position and we have a,
02:39:31.89	Mary Sobieski	particular thing we have to deal with that's important, and we don't have the answer today.
02:39:37.91	Mary Sobieski	around the insurance, but kudos to the previous city councils and city staffs that have given Sussli to such financial resilience.
02:39:48.03	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you, Mayor. I do want to respond, so thank you for that.
02:39:51.97	Councilmember Kalman	I didn't bake exactly who would run what, but why I mentioned it today is because I think we need to be making the business case, and Chad and I talked about this, for policy decisions. And that needs to be a part of our financial planning. And it's funny, you started with the difference between a financial planner and an accountant, and I know that we make you blow those lines a lot, but I do think we would have a healthier ecosystem. I also am a little bit more circumspect, I think, about our financial position because I often felt like Sausalito was like a duck.
02:40:24.77	Councilmember Kalman	like very nice above the water, but under the water was
02:40:27.84	Councilmember Kalman	furiously trying to stay afloat. And I think that's backed up by the fact that we have massive deferred infrastructure at MLK. We have $18 million worth of deferred sewer infrastructure maintenance. So we may have looked good on top because we have money in a bank account, but we didn't spend it. And that's one way to look like you have money is if you don't spend it. And so I wanna make sure that we,
02:40:51.89	Councilmember Kalman	We continue that in a more balanced fashion. There was also a moment in time, right around when we were coming into office, where there was two or three years where money hadn't actually been put into the 115 trust. And in fact, when we took office, there wasn't even enough money in that account to actually cover the expenses. So that plan probably needs to have a good hard look based on missing a handful of years due to recession or whatever the reason was, but you know,
02:41:17.59	Councilmember Kalman	I don't want to be a duck anymore. I want everything to be translucent.
02:41:22.81	Mary Sobieski	Vice Mayor?
02:41:27.12	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:41:27.95	Vice Mayor Cox	I did just want to mention one more small detail about the pension 115
02:41:32.61	Vice Mayor Cox	trust which is that it is tax exempt.
02:41:34.99	Vice Mayor Cox	I don't know exactly what
02:41:38.78	Vice Mayor Cox	how that benefit translates
02:41:40.86	Vice Mayor Cox	financially to our
02:41:43.51	Vice Mayor Cox	use of it, but I wanted to remind us
02:41:46.78	Vice Mayor Cox	that that is a tax exemption.
02:41:48.98	Vice Mayor Cox	mechanisms.
02:41:51.41	Mary Sobieski	Thanks, Vice Mayor. You just have to confirm because I think that's important. It's my understanding that we don't pay tax on our T-bills, right? Chad House is giving us a thumbs up. So we don't pay tax in our other accounts either. So and yeah, and Councilman, I agree with the notion we have these and have been saying all along, we have this hidden deficit of our deferred infrastructure. We also have a hidden set of assets. I mean, we sit on dispenser fire station doing nothing with it. It's empty, it's worth millions of dollars.
02:41:51.53	Vice Mayor Cox	Thanks for listening.
02:42:29.58	Mary Sobieski	and we do nothing with it. And there are other examples around town. Councilmember Hoffman and I are completely aligned that I'd be all in support of a revolutionary sale of assets to take care of our pension liability, full stop. But can we-
02:42:44.46	Councilmember Kalman	That's one of the hidden reasons why we're doing
02:42:45.97	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:42:46.00	Councilmember Kalman	in the city.
02:42:46.08	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
02:42:46.17	Councilmember Kalman	.
02:42:46.20	Mary Sobieski	Can we? Yeah, exactly right. So let's not forget that the solution isn't just to niddle around the edges and tighten our belts without considering that we have big hidden liabilities. We're also rich with huge assets. And we have to be thoughtful about what really moves the needle in solving things and not make gestures.
02:43:12.73	Mary Sobieski	All right, let's, I guess we'll close with that. Did you want to take public comment from my back? Oh, are we not taking public comment?
02:43:14.47	Unknown	Did you want to take public comment from Babette? Oh, are we not taking public comment? Oh, from Babette. Yeah, she wasn't there. She's around now. Which is her. Are we okay with that?
02:43:18.64	Mary Sobieski	Oh.
02:43:21.08	Mary Sobieski	or
02:43:23.60	Mary Sobieski	Okay, we will take public comment from Mrs. McDougall, the only person since she had got in under the wire, and then we will take a bio break at the request of my colleagues.
02:43:33.47	Babette McDougall	Can you hear me?
02:43:34.58	Mary Sobieski	Yes, we can hear you. Please go ahead, Ms. McDougall.
02:43:37.48	Babette McDougall	All right, well, thank you. I apologize for the technical glitches. Thank you for taking my words.
02:43:43.88	Babette McDougall	So there are two things that I want to bring to mind.
02:43:47.24	Babette McDougall	One is I would really like to see more
02:43:51.49	Babette McDougall	I'm not sure.
02:43:52.01	Babette McDougall	playing on what Councilwoman Kelman had to say, I think going forward,
02:43:56.70	Babette McDougall	to sort of some sort of allocation of cost over time. I think there needs to be more concentration on the use of the TOT funds. I'm constantly surprised. Like I know that this is the first of four.
02:44:08.52	Babette McDougall	THE FAMILY.
02:44:09.16	Babette McDougall	sessions on this.
02:44:10.44	Babette McDougall	topic of the new budget, but
02:44:12.28	Babette McDougall	The TOT funds have
02:44:14.15	Babette McDougall	I'm not sure.
02:44:15.11	Babette McDougall	channel directly into the general fund. And there's been very little thought to how
02:44:19.94	Babette McDougall	any portion of it accrues back to the hospitality and visitor serving sectors over time.
02:44:25.12	Babette McDougall	And I think we really need to buff that up. You want to know how to generate funds. That BID thing is sitting out there still. I don't know where that stands, but
02:44:34.35	Babette McDougall	It seems to me that one way we can try to move the needle on that is to become more proactive in our discussions about the use of TOT, because I think this is where the breakdown between the business community, the downtown,
02:44:47.14	Babette McDougall	And
02:44:47.90	Babette McDougall	the city.
02:44:48.82	Babette McDougall	probably lies in terms of this lack of trust. So the TOT has traditionally been specifically to promote the visitor and hospitality segments. And yet in Sausalito, that hasn't been the case. So it's time for us to reassess that. Thank you.
02:45:06.72	Mary Sobieski	Thank you. Okay, we will take a five minute recess and be back at 10 minutes before 10.
02:45:07.06	Babette McDougall	of the
02:45:12.61	Mary Sobieski	Geologic Hazard Report of the City of Sausalito. Director McGowan.
02:45:22.53	Kevin McGowan	Good evening again, Mayor, members of the City Council. Bear with me for one moment. We do have a presentation this evening.
02:45:32.00	Kevin McGowan	And let me grab my notes here.
02:45:36.86	Kevin McGowan	All right, as you know, I'm Kevin McGowan, Department of Public Works, and Item 5C before you this evening is a presentation from Michael Jewett of Miller Pacific Engineering Group related to the draft geologic hazard report.
02:45:51.77	Kevin McGowan	I would also like to thank the members of the landslide task force who helped review this, as well as commenting on the report itself, and also the members of the planning commission who received this presentation earlier in April. This evening, staff is recommending that the council receive and file the report, direct staff to develop and issue a request for proposal for future geologic professional services, in other words, gathering data and putting more information into a system, direct staff to also implement remedial measures that are recommended in the report, and also returned to the council in about a year with a discussion and implementation of a hillside ordinance, if not sooner. So with that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Michael Jewett of Miller Pacific Engineering Group in order to lead us through his presentation. Thank you.
02:46:58.74	Mike Jewett	Good evening. Thank you all for having me here. Appreciate the intro, Kevin. My name is Mike Jewett. I am an engineering geologist with Miller Pacific Engineering. We're a local firm here in Marin. I've been doing this a little under 20 years.
02:47:12.67	Mike Jewett	And so I'm here to talk to you a little bit about geohazards and landslides and what we could do about them.
02:47:21.35	Mike Jewett	First off, the purpose of our study in this language comes from the task force recommendations to you several years ago. The purpose here is really
02:47:32.25	Mike Jewett	Well, twofold. One is to identify local geologic conditions, seismic assessment, hydrologic risk areas, and combine this with updated development guidelines consistent with other local agencies. Other language in that task force request, the RFP, refers to a hydrologic and geotechnical assessment of vulnerability to future mudslide disasters that cause harm to residents and property, and assess the collective contributing factors in an effort to identify early warning signs and proactive measures. In shorter terms, really the purpose here is to avoid what's shown in the photo on the right, which I'm sure you all remember as being the Sausalito Boulevard landslide from 2019. If I overheard correctly, that may have been a topic touched on in the previous risk discussion.
02:48:22.91	Mike Jewett	Our study here, I'm going to go through very quickly the components of our study and try to focus on the recommendations because I know this is a fairly thick technical report and the real purpose of the discussion here I think is for the council to understand the recommendations. The first step to our project involved some geologic mapping and creating a GIS database. Prior to this project, the most detailed maps of Sausalito, geologic maps, were made in the 1970s. They use a topographic base that was most recently updated in the 50s, so they're fairly old. There's been a lot of development since then.
02:48:58.75	Mike Jewett	We
02:49:00.98	Mike Jewett	Compiled all the existing published data, which is to say those previous old geologic maps. We used current topographic data, drone-based LiDAR data collected by MarinMap that was done in 2019. So it's a very current representation of the ground surface. We did a fair amount of field reconnaissance. Once we have all these compiled in digital format,
02:49:23.56	Mike Jewett	We go out there to cross-check what other geologists have mapped and or to modify things where we see fit.
02:49:30.93	Mike Jewett	between 1976 when that old map was made and today. I'm sure you can all name several off the top of your head. There are several landslides that occurred in that time and there's a fair amount more development in certain areas
02:49:43.81	Mike Jewett	uh...
02:49:45.09	Mike Jewett	Once we did our field reconnaissance, really it's a matter of refining and updating this digital map. This was done in GIS format, which is the same software interface that MarinMap uses, if you're familiar. It makes a really handy interactive map that can show you lots of different things all at once. This was step one. I'll move on to step two.
02:50:07.48	Mike Jewett	Once we've got the geologic map, the next step is to develop some hazard zones. And the basic process for this involves first defining some criteria, what is and is not in a landslide hazard zone. For slope instability, the components of making that determination include a landslide inventory map,
02:50:28.34	Mike Jewett	That last map I showed you had the landslides all inventoried on it, so we know where each of those are.
02:50:33.92	Mike Jewett	a map about different slope angles, how steep is the hill. That seems like a fairly straightforward contributor to instability. And then each of those colored units on the map I just showed you were assigned a different value for their strength. The interaction between slope angle and strength is really the biggest driver with instability. Along with this study, we were asked to look at liquefaction and settlement. Those are a little more straightforward in that their occurrence is limited to areas with very specific geologic conditions. Liquefaction occurs when you've got granular soils, sand and gravel, that are saturated and shaken by an earthquake. That is the only instance in which liquefaction will occur.
02:51:14.78	Mike Jewett	And settlement is limited to areas where Bay Mud, the old stinky, nasty clay that exists in the marshes. If you've ever walked in there, you know you sink right away. Same thing happens with buildings and fills and anything we put on the marsh.
02:51:30.12	Mike Jewett	that's really
02:51:31.66	Mike Jewett	limit it again to the waterfronts. Those are those are straightforward.
02:51:36.97	Mike Jewett	Um,
02:51:38.22	Mike Jewett	Hazard zone. So I'm going to start with the landslide hazard zone because that is probably the most, going to generate the most interest. The methods here are based on what the California Geologic Survey and USGS have done in lots of areas. They perform similar studies throughout the state, they just haven't got to this part of the Bay Area yet.
02:51:57.66	Mike Jewett	But we took what they've done for the city and county of San Francisco and used that as a guideline for methodology and output product.
02:52:05.54	Mike Jewett	Um,
02:52:06.82	Mike Jewett	Again, this involved performing some field reconnaissance, identifying existing landslides,
02:52:12.34	Mike Jewett	assigning strength values for each of those materials, and combining those values with the slope map.
02:52:18.67	Mike Jewett	The Fancy Software does a little math and it produces the map shown on the bottom with a range of red and yellow and green colors
02:52:27.61	Mike Jewett	That map shows relative susceptibility to landsliding, which is to say the areas in red are zones that are very highly susceptible.
02:52:37.32	Mike Jewett	One thing I should point out is it does not indicate necessarily the probability of landslides. Predicting landslides is, quite frankly, very challenging, if not impossible. But the point is to say these are the areas where
02:52:54.70	Mike Jewett	the ground conditions, the inherent geologic conditions are more conducive to instability.
02:53:02.21	Mike Jewett	Liquefaction and settlement. Like I mentioned, these are confined to areas that either are underlain by bay mud or are underlain by sand and gravel.
02:53:11.81	Councilmember Kalman	Sorry, can I have a quick question about your methodology before you go on to liquefaction?
02:53:12.48	Mike Jewett	Thank you.
02:53:17.41	Councilmember Kalman	Slide five, landslide hazard zones. So your methodology, which is the geologic survey that California uses, you do some field recon to see what's existing.
02:53:23.33	Cameron Razavi	A couple of days.
02:53:27.77	Councilmember Kalman	you look at the materials and then you plug those two things in and it makes your map.
02:53:33.54	Mike Jewett	In so many words, yes.
02:53:35.38	Councilmember Kalman	What about
02:53:37.00	Councilmember Kalman	um,
02:53:38.57	Councilmember Kalman	So tell us again how you consider historic slides. You know, I spent 10 years on the planning commission. We saw many planning documents where in construction we had slides.
02:53:47.94	Unknown	Mm-hmm.
02:53:50.10	Unknown	Mm-hmm.
02:53:51.41	Councilmember Kalman	And I know some areas, I looked briefly on your map and those areas are not highlighted on your map.
02:53:56.75	Mike Jewett	So part of this mapping was a landslide inventory, a catalog. There's a plate in that report that shows, I want to say, 59 individual landslides, and those are things that either
02:54:09.92	Mike Jewett	were documented previously, shown on somebody else's map from long ago, are things that we have worked on during the course of our time consulting with the city, are things that, um,
02:54:20.69	Mike Jewett	were, you know, documentation provided to me by the task force or things that I was able to track down
02:54:27.10	Mike Jewett	through
02:54:28.54	Mike Jewett	available published sources. It is not likely to be an exhaustive catalog. The record keeping especially
02:54:38.00	Mike Jewett	especially prior to about the mid-60s, is very, very spotty.
02:54:42.24	Mike Jewett	A lot of areas have since probably been repaired.
02:54:45.97	Mike Jewett	The way that this is set up is that any area
02:54:50.75	Mike Jewett	of existing landsliding is defaulted to the least stable zone material that has moved down the hill is going to be weaker than
02:55:00.01	Mike Jewett	its previous state, right? The weakest materials in all of Sausalito other than that Bay mud,
02:55:07.62	Mike Jewett	are probably the landslide debris deposits. They're few and far between because they get washed away very quickly, but
02:55:14.57	Mike Jewett	That's the point is they are in the least stable areas.
02:55:17.51	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, and then you combine the map of the strength value with the map of the slope angles.
02:55:21.46	Councilmember Kalman	Can you give us a relative understanding of what kind of slope angle begins to really pique your interest?
02:55:28.80	Mike Jewett	It really depends on the material that underlies it. In other words, for instance, take the cut slopes along 101 on the Waldo Great. They're near vertical. Sure. They have their own history of landsliding and stability. The notion there is that where you've got very hard basalt rock, the slope will stand at half to one or one to one. In areas that are underlain by much weaker shale or are underlain by thicker deposits of residual soil or colluvium or slide debris,
02:56:01.33	Mike Jewett	you can have movement on much shallower slopes. And so,
02:56:05.70	Mike Jewett	in a way for me to say, hey,
02:56:08.17	Mike Jewett	You know, it really matters when slopes are steeper than X.
02:56:12.22	Mike Jewett	It's a bit of a broad generalization.
02:56:15.31	Mike Jewett	I would say that in general in Sausalito, where things are shallower
02:56:21.18	Mike Jewett	we would say five to one, which is to say,
02:56:24.05	Mike Jewett	vertical, or excuse me, horizontal to vertical. So five feet this way, one feet down, that's a 20% slope.
02:56:31.59	Mike Jewett	Usually things flatter than that are pretty benign.
02:56:34.83	Mike Jewett	but there are a lot of other factors that can induce instability. In other words, even on very flat slopes, specific drainage conditions may be a factor, changes in development, putting fill at the top of the slope, cutting away the bottom, things like that.
02:56:52.06	Councilmember Kalman	We're gonna sign you up for the Click It Fix It app and ask people to report their landslides. I have a few.
02:56:57.14	Mike Jewett	I have filled that function before.
02:57:01.44	Mike Jewett	No, that's okay. And totally happy to answer any questions. Like I said, I know it's a thick technical report, so if there's questions on methods or means, by all means, let me know.
02:57:11.53	Mike Jewett	liquefaction settlement zones these are again confined to the waterfront settlement is where you've got
02:57:17.91	Mike Jewett	fill on the compressible clay and liquefaction is shaking all that loose sand that's underwater down there. In Sausalito, again, these are really in the marshlands. The effects here, you know, settlement is a long-term
02:57:33.18	Mike Jewett	a long-term impact. Areas of marineship that were filled way back in the 40s and 50s, they've been settling for a long time. Some of those areas may have undergone all the settlement they were undergo,
02:57:46.28	Mike Jewett	But...
02:57:47.07	Mike Jewett	As new development is considered, if new buildings are built or new fills are placed, that will yet induce more new settlement.
02:57:53.91	Mike Jewett	Um,
02:57:54.72	Mike Jewett	liquefaction, like I said, is only going to occur during a seismic event.
02:57:59.78	Mike Jewett	The potential effects of liquefaction would again be settlement, but instead of a uniform fashion, this would be very sporadic and differential. Photo on the left there is a good example of manholes that pop up out of the ground when they're hollow and everything around it is saturated with groundwater and shaken very hard.
02:58:23.39	Mike Jewett	All right, like I said, I'm going to try and get to the meat of this here. Conclusions. A couple of pretty broad brush conclusions. About 20% of the land area in Sausalito fell into the high landslide susceptibility zones. Those are the areas shown in red.
02:58:41.02	Mike Jewett	Um, predictably, those are mostly the really steep parts of town around Wolfback Ridge, around Hurricane Gulch and the upper part of Old Town, and above Spring Street Valley and Nevada Street Valley for the most part.
02:58:54.93	Mike Jewett	Likewise, another 20%, give or take, of the land area falls in the liquefaction or settlement hazard zones. These are essentially reflective of what would have been the natural shoreline prior to all the waterfront development.
02:59:10.43	Mike Jewett	Um,
02:59:11.47	Mike Jewett	Within these zones, and something we can touch on a little bit, risk is a slightly different calculation, but the highest risk in these areas are generally going to be associated with older structures that were designed
02:59:23.83	Mike Jewett	before...
02:59:25.64	Mike Jewett	modern, consistent building codes. The first California building code was adopted in 1979,
02:59:31.97	Mike Jewett	And as you're, I'm sure, aware, a fair
02:59:35.43	Mike Jewett	if not a majority of the development in Sausalito predates that.
02:59:42.78	Mike Jewett	Recommendations. We made you some maps, they're nice and colorful, but now what do you do with that?
02:59:50.50	Mike Jewett	Before I get off with the recommendations, a couple of clarifications. The intent here, the primary purpose really is protection of public safety.
03:00:02.16	Mike Jewett	um,
03:00:03.25	Mike Jewett	That's really what it comes down to. The secondary purpose here is really to help aid in effective and cost-efficient use of the limited resources. I just heard a big discussion about budgetary planning and deferred maintenance and capital improvements, and the idea here is that these recommendations can be used as a tool to help consider all that and assign priorities. One other thing that's not shown up there that has come up in my previous presentation, there will be some recommendations regarding policy guidelines. And one big overarching notion here is there is no
03:00:39.22	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:00:40.60	Mike Jewett	no intent or focus on
03:00:46.08	Mike Jewett	on commenting on what kind of development can occur. None of this is for the purpose of prohibiting or restricting development, is merely for the purpose of having consistent standards and having things engineered appropriately in the interest of public safety.
03:01:00.92	Mike Jewett	As far as general recommendations, developing cooperative working relationships with other critical stakeholders. You saw the extensive, the red zones on that map. They do not all lie entirely within city limits. A lot of that land is owned by Caltrans or NPS or other agencies. And having a good working relationship with them specifically for the purpose of collaborative documentation and hazard mitigation would be really beneficial. There's a brief list of them there. I am sure there are many more.
03:01:33.86	Mike Jewett	Another general recommendation is that the output of this study, not only is it a written report and some nice, fancy printed maps for the planning department and Kevin's wall, but it is also being delivered in digital GIS format. If you are familiar with MarinMap, GIS is basically a digital database on steroids. It's capable of compiling
03:01:57.06	Mike Jewett	Virtually an unlimited amount of information and allowing you to selectively View or not view or manipulate that information. It's great for everything from spatial analysis to statistics to simple map making In this case the recommendation is that the city really could see this as a living document this is really step one toward a
03:02:17.00	Mike Jewett	a bigger database, which I will recommend in a moment, but it's something that could be used for a variety of purposes.
03:02:22.81	Mike Jewett	One of which has come up is integrating this with the Sea Level Rise Task Force, since that goes hand-in-hand with settlements.
03:02:32.75	Mike Jewett	All right, now for some more concrete recommendations. One recommendation here, and this is something that is on the agenda, is to develop an infrastructure database for use by public works in prioritizing specific site evaluations. I heard some discussion about deferred maintenance. Like I said, a lot of the development here predates the 70s, if not several decades before that. Understanding
03:02:59.82	Mike Jewett	What the city owns and is required to maintain would be a good first step toward prioritizing the limited resources available to approach some of that maintenance. The idea here is that
03:03:14.65	Mike Jewett	A catalog would be made of either, you know, critical improvements in older structures, retaining walls, drainage systems, things like that. And you would start in the high hazard, high risk areas. Is there a need to catalog every little two-foot wall down here on Bridgeway? Probably not. But again, in those big bright red zones where we've got a history of slides and issues, those would be the areas to start with. Once there's a sense for where the specific sites are and how many, performing some detailed inspection, an initial inspection to confirm the catalog and get a sense for what kind of condition these things are in and what kind of risks they might present in the event that maintenance is deferred or if they are left to live out their design lives. Some specific things that really should be inventoried would be retaining walls, foundations, drainage systems, cut slopes, there's a lot of open space land that can be susceptible, and roadways. Honestly, there's a lot of streets that have been in the same place.
03:04:18.54	Mike Jewett	suffered over the years and a little bit of maintenance might improve
03:04:22.84	Mike Jewett	the outlook in terms of avoiding some of these slide issues.
03:04:27.21	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:04:30.17	Mike Jewett	I miss having my computer up here.
03:04:32.60	Mike Jewett	Performing successive inspections. The first inspection gives you a good baseline. Things change over time. Slides have appeared here since the last round of mapping was done. I'm sure all of you have watched conditions change on your own streets over the years with respect to certain things. But performing follow-up inspections in successive years will help evaluate the rate of change and also help dictate potentially some priorities
03:04:57.49	Mike Jewett	You know, using that database, once you have a sense for activity and level of risk, that really allows you to assign some priorities. And once you've identified, hey, here's the 10 sites or here's the five sites that really
03:05:12.07	Mike Jewett	you know, really could cause some harm, beginning to approach some design
03:05:18.17	Mike Jewett	That's where you could develop some conceptual options, you know, once there's a sense for what is the facility, what would a remediation or a repair need to look like,
03:05:27.31	Mike Jewett	before you blow ahead with full-scale design and planning, being able to have a sense for here's some optional, you know, at a range of performance and cost, here are some ways you could approach it, and here's what those would roughly cost. And that would allow DPW to financially plan alongside with, with,
03:05:46.64	Mike Jewett	development of repair and mitigation plans.
03:05:53.23	Mike Jewett	You know, being able to proactively approach some of these things before they're totally failed is really the underlying purpose of the database, to let you look ahead and cut it off before it's an emergency. The GI database that we provided would make a really good basis for this, a really good map on which to start that would help you get a real quick visual sense for...
03:06:15.06	Mike Jewett	you know, where are these specific facilities we own and how many fall in those high-risk areas.
03:06:21.78	Mike Jewett	Lastly, and this will play into the next slide, and this is something else that came up in the last meeting, funding. There's a lot of maintenance. There's a lot of improvements. None of this stuff is free.
03:06:33.47	Mike Jewett	could be considered through the formation of a geologic hazard abatement district or districts.
03:06:43.01	Mike Jewett	And this leads into maintaining existing improvements.
03:06:46.99	Mike Jewett	A geologic hazard abatement district, really the function is to provide some administrative and funding mechanism to maintain or to otherwise improve areas where multiple stakeholders are married to the same hazard, and that mitigating that hazard is beyond the ability of any one stakeholder.
03:07:09.13	Mike Jewett	In other words, for example, there are some areas below 101 where there are
03:07:15.81	Mike Jewett	improvements, you know, the land is owned by NPS or the land is owned by Caltrans, and their improvements are connected to city storm drain systems or otherwise impose a certain amount of runoff or a certain amount of structural load on city lands.
03:07:32.15	Mike Jewett	And
03:07:33.44	Mike Jewett	you know, being able to bring all the stakeholders to the table where they all
03:07:38.56	Mike Jewett	are faced with the same risk, but not one individual can afford to fix it and not one individual owns the land, this is one means by which you might get that done.
03:07:48.92	Mike Jewett	In terms of maintaining improvements in the liquefaction and settlement hazard zones,
03:07:53.56	Mike Jewett	Right away, liquefaction, there's nothing you can do. It happens during an earthquake. There's no way to monitor. There's no way to predict that beyond the extent to which people predict earthquakes, which is not reliable. As far as settlement, monitoring settlement, like I said, it's a long-term thing. You can periodically survey the ground surface, do it over a few years. You get a sense for how quickly things are subsiding. The reality is at this point in time, I think that sea level rise, there's going to be a lot of programs congealing where that might make more sense. But really, the landslide hazard zones are where the bulk of, I think, the maintenance here
03:08:31.09	Mike Jewett	would make sense. And the idea is that within these zones, this funding mechanism would potentially accommodate regular updates of that database year over year or every other year as the city sees fit, depending on changes in condition. Could accommodate installation of some basic monitoring equipment, if and where that's appropriate and effective, and would fund some maintenance for roadways and storm drains and other critical pieces.
03:09:00.01	Mike Jewett	As far as how to delineate this, this is the hard part, and I'm glad this isn't my thing to dictate. The hazard zone map could be used as a basis for delineating those zones if the city so chose.
03:09:16.26	Mike Jewett	One other option would be to set up this more specific database of individual sites, and rather than simply apply the susceptibility zone, would be to see if there's any major hot spots or any particular concentration of those individual sites that might warrant a slightly different zone boundary.
03:09:37.53	Mike Jewett	One other way to approach it might be to say, hey look, we're all bound to the same hazard if the landslide zone affects the one emergency route out of town.
03:09:45.78	Mike Jewett	Maybe we're all in this together.
03:09:48.11	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:09:49.71	Mike Jewett	You know, and again, actual assessments, I won't get into that too much. It's not really geotechnical, but once you developed a DPW database, had a sense for conceptual cost and conceptual repair, that's where it makes sense to think about what, you know, an actual assessment might make sense.
03:10:10.16	Mike Jewett	New development and redevelopment, and this was the part of the RFP that alluded to guidelines consistent with other agencies.
03:10:19.29	Mike Jewett	The suggestion here would be to create some kind of hazard zone development ordinance. Some of the other towns call this a hillside development ordinance. A lot of them have it worked into their general plans. The idea here is that this would require a consistent standard for engineering reports where people are proposing new development or rebuilds or significant remodels in these hazard zones. Part of the purpose would be to prevent construction phase landslides, which we've seen before.
03:10:52.92	Mike Jewett	The suggested language, there's a whole section in the report that has some very specific
03:10:58.06	Mike Jewett	language and checklist items for applicants that we'd recommend. This is all based on ordinances that are already in effect in several other jurisdictions around California.
03:11:09.38	Mike Jewett	I have not personally come across one yet in Marin, but I know that the city of San Francisco has got their own called the mayor ordinance, LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara. A lot of them have adopted stuff like this at this point.
03:11:23.49	Mike Jewett	The idea here is that
03:11:25.80	Mike Jewett	It does two things. It provides clear and consistent expectations for the report scope, both to project applicants and to the city's review staff. Before someone comes in with a report that doesn't address everything it needs to redress, they can be provided with a checklist when they come in for their pre-app meeting and say, hey, before you go spend time with an engineer, make sure they get this, here's all the things they need to address in their report.
03:11:51.33	Mike Jewett	You know, this would also ideally streamline the review process, you know, both the report prep and the review process for city staff. If reports are coming in with all the required information the first time, ideally that's fewer plan check letters going back and forth.
03:12:06.30	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:12:07.50	Mike Jewett	Again, the intent here is to reduce the risk of unexpected conditions during construction.
03:12:15.34	Mike Jewett	and ultimately intended to reduce the likelihood of adverse post-construction impacts. In other words, you wanna make sure if someone's building in these unstable zones,
03:12:25.32	Mike Jewett	that the engineering adequately considers the net effect they're going to have on the neighboring lands.
03:12:31.71	Mike Jewett	Again, I should reiterate the intent here is not to restrict development anyway. It's really only intended to enforce minimum standards for engineering
03:12:42.56	Mike Jewett	similar to the other jurisdictions around us.
03:12:52.97	Mike Jewett	One more slide.
03:13:00.21	Mike Jewett	Thank you.
03:13:00.25	Unknown	So.
03:13:00.30	Mike Jewett	Thank you.
03:13:00.92	Mike Jewett	That's all. I made it through just as well, not quite as fast as I thought.
03:13:06.37	Mike Jewett	Thank you, and I am happy to answer any questions or clarify anything you would like.
03:13:14.24	Unknown	Thank you very much.
03:13:16.02	Unknown	Any questions, please?
03:13:19.45	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you for answering my earlier questions. I'm interested in the anecdotal field study questions, and so maybe there is a way to do this on the Click It Fix It.
03:13:29.36	Councilmember Kalman	I feel like I need four hours with you because a lot of my questions are around integration of the data, who needs to see this, what's the best way to make sure that we're doing a physical facilities assessment
03:13:41.89	Councilmember Kalman	I want them to see it. I want the Sea Level Rise Task Force, or the Sea Level Rise of Vulnerability Assessment people to see it.
03:13:47.46	Councilmember Kalman	How easy is it to, I think you said it was pretty easy for this data to be integrated but like an interactive sea level rise map
03:13:54.89	Councilmember Kalman	And is it something that the members of the public can actually go online and play around
03:14:00.62	Mike Jewett	Currently, it is not. It is still in draft form. I have not been asked to deliver it as a final. Obviously, it's being delivered to the city as my client. If the city so chose, that is really the underlying intent. The impression we were given at RFP time was that we would like to ultimately integrate this with MarinMap or a similar system.
03:14:20.94	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:14:22.28	Mike Jewett	thus far,
03:14:24.11	Mike Jewett	I am not aware of any alternative arrangement, and the discussion so far have indicated that MarinMap is likely the destination for this, and so I've set this up in a way to be compatible with what they're doing.
03:14:37.04	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, and then maybe this is a question for the city attorney, and it probably is. You're suggesting that this hazard zone development ordinance would apply, but we all know that with many of the housing ordinances that we have for new construction,
03:14:51.07	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:14:51.79	Councilmember Kalman	SB 9 as an example, there is no actual review. Sergio, how would this interplay with some of the housing laws like SB 9?
03:15:01.61	Sergio	So, you know, provided that it creates objective requirements, typically you can impose them on things like SB 9. There will be some areas where they may be difficult to impose.
03:15:17.10	Sergio	Typically under the Housing Crisis Act, for example, you can adopt new standards that are not objective. Now, I do think that if you're setting forth standards for what kind of engineering standards
03:15:29.29	Sergio	what the content is of engineering reports or how detailed your engineering analysis has to be to support construction.
03:15:36.05	Sergio	I think it's unlikely you're going to be violating
03:15:39.04	Sergio	you know, some of the laws that prohibit you from downzoning or reducing density or intensity have allowed
03:15:45.08	Sergio	land uses.
03:15:47.23	Councilmember Kalman	So I heard you say objective, so is one idea perhaps to look at this in the odds process?
03:15:53.28	Sergio	Potentially, but again, I think what your consultant has just recommended is something that is not necessarily...
03:16:02.31	Sergio	affecting what kinds of development you can construct, but really it's affecting more how you go about getting approval for development in general. So it's not setting forth a
03:16:15.29	Sergio	a standard that says, well, you
03:16:17.41	Sergio	you know,
03:16:18.58	Sergio	It's not like a change in height limit or density. What it is, is it's a change in how specific and how detailed and supported your development proposal has to be by adequate geotechnical analysis. So the city has assurances that what is proposed is actually constructible in line with, you know, best engineering practices.
03:16:41.41	Sergio	So,
03:16:43.32	Sergio	Yes, you could, I think, consider it as part of your odds, but no, I don't think that you necessarily have to. It does seem like it's its own standalone item.
03:16:53.36	Unknown	Thank you.
03:16:53.38	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
03:16:53.39	Unknown	Thank you.
03:16:56.28	Mary Sobieski	I guess I just have a technical question for you in terms of monitoring. Of course. Given the state of microelectronics and mesh networks, is it possible to create an embedded mesh network of tiny sensors on a large scale, like tens of thousands of sensors, to create a real-time map of movement in the Earth?
03:17:04.55	Cameron Razavi	Mm-hmm.
03:17:19.23	Mike Jewett	it is likely within the realm of feasibility
03:17:23.95	Mike Jewett	I don't think it is probably within the realm of
03:17:29.37	Mike Jewett	immediate attainability, a couple of reasons.
03:17:32.76	Mike Jewett	One.
03:17:34.35	Mike Jewett	One is that monitoring movement
03:17:37.42	Mike Jewett	on a broad scale like that
03:17:40.98	Mike Jewett	would involve installing.
03:17:42.94	Mike Jewett	Tens of thousands of these things or or more and I imagine there'd be a very large capital expenditure The follow-up is well, what are we getting out of it? And the thing that you know, we considered some different types of monitoring systems What you're talking about sort of exists as it relates to earthquake faults Currently there are systems all over the world that monitor movement along faults. The trouble is that
03:18:06.19	Mike Jewett	the things we're worried about happen very quickly, in a matter of milliseconds or seconds sometimes. And regardless of how many sensors we have,
03:18:14.19	Mike Jewett	the net value in terms of presenting or preventing
03:18:18.10	Mike Jewett	hazards to life safety or public safety.
03:18:20.94	Mike Jewett	there's not a lot of value there. They can't provide enough warning.
03:18:24.40	Mike Jewett	And so one of the, you know,
03:18:27.52	Mike Jewett	One of the monitoring systems that's becoming a little more common and has been popularized in the last 10 years or so
03:18:34.96	Mike Jewett	particularly in Santa Barbara and Carpinteria, where they're affected by these debris flows. It rains really hard, and a bunch of mud and rocks come down the hill.
03:18:43.50	Mike Jewett	these aren't things that develop slowly over time. These are things where it rains hard enough and at some point it instantaneously hits that threshold where the soils are saturated and no longer can stay on the hill.
03:18:55.97	Mike Jewett	Um,
03:18:57.44	Mike Jewett	There are some areas down there where the source area, the part of the hill that breaks loose, is far enough from the houses that they can set up tripwires or cameras or whatever and broadcast some warnings.
03:19:10.20	Mike Jewett	In the best case, that warning may be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, depending on the distance.
03:19:16.71	Mike Jewett	In Sausalito, the trick is the source areas are very, very close to the houses.
03:19:21.32	Mary Sobieski	So you're telling me
03:19:22.06	Mary Sobieski	You're telling me that
03:19:23.97	Mary Sobieski	There is no micro movement days or weeks ahead of a slide event.
03:19:30.67	Mike Jewett	There can be in some instances,
03:19:36.83	Mike Jewett	But by and large,
03:19:38.93	Mike Jewett	my experience both in mapping the ones out there and in working on, you know, both doing emergency response when these things happen in the middle of the night and working on forensic studies.
03:19:51.29	Mike Jewett	within Sausalito,
03:19:54.16	Mike Jewett	The geologic conditions are such that most of the landslides are those fast moving debris flows.
03:19:59.91	Mary Sobieski	And the land doesn't swell, swollen with water, doesn't expand in a way that would be measurable by...
03:20:04.60	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
03:20:04.64	Mike Jewett	The soils here don't swell as much as they do in other places. The thing that would be measurable in what you're getting at, I think, is that you could potentially measure rainfall rates. The way this is normally done is there are sensors that –
03:20:21.24	Mike Jewett	measure the rainfall intensity, the duration and the rate.
03:20:26.05	Mike Jewett	And when they reach a certain threshold in terms of inches per hour,
03:20:31.21	Mike Jewett	that's when they trigger an alarm. And the idea is that that threshold is correlated to the soil's ability to absorb the water. How permeable is the soil? How quickly can it drain?
03:20:41.91	Mike Jewett	If it rains harder than it can drain, now we've got a problem.
03:20:45.52	Mike Jewett	Like I said, it's technically achievable and it's implemented in a lot of places. The trick with Sausalito is that
03:20:53.17	Mike Jewett	the amount of time you would have from when the warning is broadcast would not be enough to
03:21:00.34	Mike Jewett	do anything about it. And the fear is it would be of little value. The other issue with those is that
03:21:07.60	Mike Jewett	Oftentimes that intensity threshold is exceeded, but no slide actually occurs.
03:21:14.19	Mike Jewett	It's not guaranteed a slide will occur, it's just that theoretically that's when a slide will occur. And so they have a tendency to generate false alarms. And you'll evacuate a whole neighborhood only to find that, wait, nevermind, false alarm. So not to say it's out of consideration, but I think that if there were an interest in some kind of early warning or monitoring network system,
03:21:36.44	Mike Jewett	there's a little more thought that would go into, you know, what would be the outlay and the effort required to justify scientifically where we put these things, how we set them up,
03:21:46.21	Mike Jewett	what would be the expected value out of that?
03:21:49.60	Mary Sobieski	So a different monitoring question, which is, I don't know if you were here for our earlier discussion about risk, but there is the question about the, as you alluded to, Caltrans connects to some of our infrastructure. And if it's our infrastructure that fails, it can then become our liability for the consequences of that failure. So is there a more narrowly tailored monitoring proposal that you could practically see that would help our Department of Public Works and the city actively and in a real time assess whether all our drains are draining?
03:22:03.62	Unknown	Mm-hmm.
03:22:03.82	Cameron Razavi	Thank you.
03:22:03.84	Unknown	Thank you.
03:22:03.91	Cameron Razavi	Thank you.
03:22:26.22	Mike Jewett	I think that's really what the database suggestion is all about. Having a database where you've got a catalog of the improvements you're responsible for maintaining, and having them inspected on a regular basis in a way
03:22:41.73	Mike Jewett	is that monitoring. A lot of times,
03:22:46.05	Mike Jewett	the signs are there visually.
03:22:49.25	Mike Jewett	without the need to install instrumentation.
03:22:54.74	Mike Jewett	You know, you can tell when the wall is made of rock and has no rebar, and it's fallen over like this, it hasn't got a lot longer to live. And I think that in my experience here,
03:23:06.65	Mike Jewett	the vast majority of the issues we've responded to, both for the public agencies and working for private clients,
03:23:14.26	Mike Jewett	The majority have to do with older or failed or neglected infrastructure. The one on Sausalito Boulevard, I heard the term black swan event come up earlier.
03:23:24.20	Mike Jewett	that was a relatively unusual one, but again,
03:23:28.15	Mike Jewett	in so many ways related to
03:23:31.52	Mike Jewett	either a misunderstanding or
03:23:34.49	Mike Jewett	Um...
03:23:35.84	Mike Jewett	a lack of clarity about whose infrastructure is what and where is it.
03:23:39.93	Councilmember Kalman	Was it unusual or we just weren't, we didn't know the signs?
03:23:45.33	Mike Jewett	Nobody would have predicted that.
03:23:47.42	Councilmember Kalman	Okay.
03:23:47.47	Mike Jewett	Thank you.
03:23:47.74	Mike Jewett	Nobody would have predicted that. Not me, not any other engineering geo.
03:23:53.34	Mike Jewett	Now it will
03:23:54.22	Unknown	Look at it, it's sloping.
03:23:59.42	Mike Jewett	Now it will be at the forefront of everybody's mind.
03:24:03.92	Mike Jewett	You know, but to play devil's advocate there, that is the same condition as 60% of Marin County.
03:24:15.45	Councilmember Hoffman	But we had a previous landslide, not in that valley, but very close.
03:24:21.71	Vice Mayor Cox	Bridgeway is sloping, it's collapsing. Pay attention to Bridgeway.
03:24:21.98	Councilmember Hoffman	Wait.
03:24:28.17	Councilmember Hoffman	But my point is, in that land side, killed at least one person, maybe two, and that was in the 1970s, 1980s.
03:24:35.46	Mike Jewett	It was 1982. That was a little farther up Sausalito Boulevard there at the base of the Caltrans fill slope.
03:24:41.15	Councilmember Hoffman	So the point being that landslides are not uncommon in Sausalito and significant ones are also not uncommon.
03:24:52.79	Mary Sobieski	Any other questions? Thank you very much, sir. Can we move to public comment, please?
03:25:00.40	Mary Sobieski	Is there a public comment online?
03:25:05.20	Unknown	Sandra Bushmaker?
03:25:11.10	Sandra Bushmaker	Hi again as you probably know Council that I was on the mudslide or landslide task force along with
03:25:19.73	Sandra Bushmaker	Councilmember Hoffman.
03:25:21.70	Sandra Bushmaker	And I've been trying to lead up to this report by giving you teases for the last four or five meetings. And there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done as a result of this mapping study that was completed.
03:25:36.55	Sandra Bushmaker	I think that
03:25:39.27	Sandra Bushmaker	There's some great ideas and I just hope that you will make this a priority in your activities for the foreseeable future.
03:25:49.04	Sandra Bushmaker	because so many areas in Sausalito are in that red zone.
03:25:53.53	Sandra Bushmaker	And I think that we have been talking about a geologic hazard assessment district.
03:25:59.52	Sandra Bushmaker	for quite some time.
03:26:01.10	Sandra Bushmaker	And keep in mind that we've got a report to the City Council
03:26:05.84	Sandra Bushmaker	Uh,
03:26:06.96	Sandra Bushmaker	in 2019, that's five years ago, with these recommendations. So it's really important to get started on following through with them. Thank you.
03:26:18.32	Unknown	Steven Woodside.
03:26:25.37	Steven Woodside	Can you hear me? Yes.
03:26:32.95	Steven Woodside	Hi, I too served on the task force and
03:26:37.54	Steven Woodside	uh... want to compliment the presentation the presenters for tonight
03:26:41.89	Steven Woodside	exceptionally
03:26:43.31	Steven Woodside	I think it's very thorough and I think
03:26:45.55	Steven Woodside	very informative.
03:26:46.92	Steven Woodside	I do think we can sort of, um,
03:26:49.47	Steven Woodside	Connect the dots.
03:26:50.80	Steven Woodside	between what you've just heard about
03:26:53.55	Steven Woodside	the geology of our area.
03:26:55.66	Steven Woodside	about our budget.
03:26:57.31	Steven Woodside	about our liability concerns.
03:27:00.01	Steven Woodside	The other items that you had on your agenda tonight
03:27:03.08	Steven Woodside	because I think this points the way
03:27:05.95	Steven Woodside	to possibly at least mitigate some of the risks.
03:27:09.31	Steven Woodside	to active landslides.
03:27:11.81	Steven Woodside	by taking advantage of the possibility of a geologic hazard abatement district
03:27:17.58	Steven Woodside	or other development requirements
03:27:20.15	Steven Woodside	that would prevent, for example,
03:27:23.01	Steven Woodside	the slide or at least building, let's say, in the path of the slide that took out Susan Gordon's house.
03:27:29.41	Steven Woodside	which is one of the big cases you have
03:27:31.98	Steven Woodside	that's jeopardizing your ability to gain insurance at a reasonable cost.
03:27:36.72	Steven Woodside	So that's just one aspect of it that I would underscore.
03:27:40.04	Steven Woodside	It was certainly something I pushed hard
03:27:42.39	Steven Woodside	when working on the task force, and I think people realize
03:27:46.71	Steven Woodside	No jurisdiction has available resources to handle all of the risks of landslides, subsidence, flooding, etc., fire.
03:27:55.84	Steven Woodside	but we can do a better job now that we know
03:27:58.54	Steven Woodside	where more of the high risk areas are and pay closer attention to them.
03:28:02.65	Steven Woodside	Thank you.
03:28:05.59	Unknown	No further public comment.
03:28:07.19	Mary Sobieski	All right, we'll close public comment. Any discussion here on the dais?
03:28:13.12	Councilmember Blaustein	I'll just say I really appreciate the work of the landslide task force in suggesting this. It's long overdue, and we really appreciate the detailed report, and what we see here is obviously rather concerning. I think we are all aware of the risk, but to see that 20% of all hillsides are significantly at risk for landslide means we have to do more, and we have to do it now. So I would support the staff recommendation of moving forward with the RFP and continuing this process and also continuing to take the steps as suggested by the landslide task force to make sure we better mitigate our geologic hazards going forward.
03:28:50.71	Councilmember Kalman	I'm
03:28:52.43	Councilmember Kalman	Yeah, great presentation. I know a lot of work went into that. I'm really excited to see this and know we have this data at our hands. So thank you to Stephen and Sandra and Council Member Hoffman for their service on this task force and all the others. I endorse and say full speed ahead on the four recommended actions, and I would go even further and ask staff to think about some time frames. So for number two, a request for a proposal, I'd like to have an understanding of when that might be able to go out. For number three, the remedial measures, I mean, that's obviously going to be a big bulk of work. I'd like to see that get integrated into some of the other facilities assessment work that is ongoing right now, whether that is the physical infrastructure facilities assessment or the work by WRT for vulnerability assessment. And along the way, Chad's left, but I want him to be in the loop on all this as well so we have a cost perspective. Also, and Kevin, you mentioned this, return to council within a year, sooner. It's got to be sooner. This is such a big risk. This is literally, this landslide is one of the fundamental reasons why we have such a problem with our insurance right now. And I just don't want to set us up for that in the future. I will also just report out that you know Kathy Schaefer, Director McGowan. I've been talking to her. There is a grant. It's called the USGS Cooperative Landslide Hazard Mapping and Assessment Program Grant. We should apply for it. I'll send it to you, city manager. But Kathy's willing to help us write the grant and we would be the city. And it's for planning dollars. I think it's $10,000 to $300,000 is the range of funds that would be available. So that's not insignificant for planning and for community engagement. And then the last thing, it was embedded in my other comments, please make sure this report does get to those other ongoing groups, the facilities and infrastructure folks. I would even send it to David Parisi, who's doing significant work on our traffic and our circulation. Most of our major consultants should be aware of this work so they can coordinate theirs with and be mindful of it. So thank you.
03:31:00.58	Mary Sobieski	Vice Mayor.
03:31:08.72	Mary Sobieski	if we ask.
03:31:10.30	Councilmember Kalman	We can't hear you, Joan.
03:31:15.25	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:31:15.28	Vice Mayor Cox	Can you hear me now?
03:31:16.16	Mary Sobieski	Yes, we can.
03:31:17.86	Vice Mayor Cox	Okay.
03:31:18.50	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you so much.
03:31:19.91	Vice Mayor Cox	for the presentation. I thought it was very well done. I'm going to endorse the comments of my fellow
03:31:25.32	Vice Mayor Cox	Council member, including the additional feedback from
03:31:29.17	Vice Mayor Cox	Council member Hoffa
03:31:31.43	Vice Mayor Cox	Hillman.
03:31:32.61	Vice Mayor Cox	I,
03:31:34.18	Vice Mayor Cox	would
03:31:35.70	Vice Mayor Cox	specifically like to see us
03:31:38.59	Vice Mayor Cox	include this project in the budget discussion that we'll be having.
03:31:44.49	Vice Mayor Cox	for a
03:31:46.18	Vice Mayor Cox	three more meetings.
03:31:47.56	Vice Mayor Cox	um,
03:31:48.85	Vice Mayor Cox	I'm not sure which bucket it fits into, but I would like to see it addressed.
03:31:53.84	Vice Mayor Cox	so that we have choices.
03:31:56.05	Vice Mayor Cox	about allocating money
03:31:58.19	Vice Mayor Cox	to advance this. And I agree with Councilmember Kelman
03:32:02.13	Vice Mayor Cox	about
03:32:03.19	Vice Mayor Cox	um,
03:32:05.10	Vice Mayor Cox	about issuing a request for proposals at the earliest opportunity so that we can
03:32:11.38	Vice Mayor Cox	assess what
03:32:13.03	Vice Mayor Cox	the cost for the services we'd like to undertake.
03:32:16.15	Vice Mayor Cox	will be.
03:32:17.35	Vice Mayor Cox	uh,
03:32:17.96	Vice Mayor Cox	I remember when council member
03:32:21.06	Vice Mayor Cox	Hoffman jumped all over this after our land flight.
03:32:24.40	Vice Mayor Cox	and we'll
03:32:25.63	Vice Mayor Cox	and with Steven Woodside and many others was very active with the land
03:32:31.24	Vice Mayor Cox	slide task force.
03:32:33.30	Vice Mayor Cox	generated great
03:32:35.08	Vice Mayor Cox	work. We adopted recommendations way back then, but we haven't actually implemented
03:32:40.06	Vice Mayor Cox	and funded them. So I'm happy to see this coming back to us.
03:32:43.52	Vice Mayor Cox	for implementation.
03:32:44.91	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:32:51.47	Mary Sobieski	Any other comments? Councilmember Hoffman.
03:32:56.06	Councilmember Hoffman	So, yeah, I'm very excited that this is before us and we're moving forward. Yeah, I mean, I think we formed the slide was in February. We were able to form the task force, I think, in May, and we had our recommendations back and had the task force finished by October. So it was a great group of people, two of which are here tonight, but we were all dedicated with the staff as well and with other people that we able to came in.
03:33:28.06	Councilmember Hoffman	to get that moving in a pretty quick,
03:33:31.33	Councilmember Hoffman	succession, but then it just sort of
03:33:33.73	Councilmember Hoffman	We've had trouble getting it forward, so I'm very happy to see this today.
03:33:36.78	Councilmember Hoffman	um i endorse all four of them i think um based on the staff report that it looks like part of that what their recommendation is has already been allocated in 2021 so it looks like there was money set aside in the budget in 2021 for a capital improvement for 100 000 and then in any way we can i guess we can address this as we go forward with the budget but it looks like 100 000 already been allocated um and still in the capital improvement program, Kevin, and also $53,000 for the study.
03:34:12.69	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, I endorse all these things. The risk remains, and I think this is one of our highest risks if we look at risk factors, infrastructure, priorities. I think this is probably one of the top ones. And completely agree that it should be complementary with other efforts, but not to slow down this effort and to move forward. So thank you. Thanks for everybody for working on this.
03:34:37.46	Mary Sobieski	All right, no other comments. We will close this item.
03:34:41.36	Mary Sobieski	And seeing the hour, or is it almost 1045? So we will defer unless our next two items, yeah? So 5D and 5E, which was previously a consent item. Thanks, guys. 3F will be deferred to a future meeting, but we do have to take public comment on both of them. So we will take public comment on both items together.
03:35:07.74	Vice Mayor Cox	I've lost town mayor, but do we have to take public comment?
03:35:11.85	Mary Sobieski	That's what we're doing, yes.
03:35:14.18	Mary Sobieski	So city clerk.
03:35:16.61	Mary Sobieski	Would you kindly take public comment for items 5B or 5E?
03:35:17.45	Cameron Razavi	I'll speak publicly.
03:35:17.84	Unknown	Senator.
03:35:18.10	Cameron Razavi	Thank you.
03:35:19.40	Unknown	TODAY.
03:35:19.46	Unknown	So the sound to the
03:35:20.68	Sandra Bushmaker	Thank you.
03:35:20.73	Sandra Bushmaker	Thank you.
03:35:20.75	Unknown	Senator Bushmaker.
03:35:24.61	Sandra Bushmaker	Hi again. With regard to item 3F,
03:35:29.37	Sandra Bushmaker	I think that needs a lot more work. To me, it's an open checkbook.
03:35:33.35	Sandra Bushmaker	There's no provision about retroactivity. This is with regard to the reimbursements. I don't like the part about the
03:35:41.25	Sandra Bushmaker	other boards and commissions having the ability to get reimbursement
03:35:45.20	Sandra Bushmaker	And given our budget talks tonight, I think this item needs a lot of work in order to make it acceptable given our budget environment.
03:35:54.12	Sandra Bushmaker	Thank you.
03:35:57.57	Mary Sobieski	Any other public comment?
03:35:59.64	Unknown	No further public comment.
03:36:01.03	Mary Sobieski	All right, we'll close public comment on those two items. We'll move to...
03:36:06.06	Mary Sobieski	Uh, items not on the agenda. Uh, so this is an opportunity for members of the public to make public comment about any item not on the agenda. Uh, so city clerk.
03:36:14.92	Unknown	Yeah, we have Cameron Razavi.
03:36:21.53	Cameron Razavi	Good evening, Council Members. I'm Cameron Razavi, property owner in Sausalito. I'd like to express my concern with the state of disrepair on Locust Street and Humboldt Street area.
03:36:40.11	Cameron Razavi	we were promised repaving of the
03:36:46.25	Cameron Razavi	surface areas back in November notices were put out and subsequently canceled without really an explanation and What we ended up getting is gravel for very deep potholes cars were bottoming out regularly It's you know that area. It's an important area. It's right in City Hall's backyard. And I really don't think there is another dilapidated area such as this in the most remote parts of Sausalito.
03:37:24.12	Cameron Razavi	we used to have trash cans, and then they were removed during COVID and never replaced. We have tourists there. We have the residents. We have people that walk their dogs. Half of Sausalito population walk their dogs in the area. People that go to the park. It is public shore access. so it's an important area. It is not a remote part of Sausalito. Even if it were, it still doesn't deserve to be in this state of disrepair. In addition to that, the bulkhead also is an issue. It's seriously just deteriorating on a daily basis. More pieces of it fall into the water. Our previous public works director, whom I just saw...
03:38:23.62	Cameron Razavi	Thank you.
03:38:24.11	Cameron Razavi	Thank you.
03:38:24.21	Mary Sobieski	Thank you, sir.
03:38:24.77	Cameron Razavi	All right, thank you.
03:38:28.53	Unknown	Senator Bushmaker.
03:38:31.72	Sandra Bushmaker	I, again, this is the last time, I promise. I've been attending the Catalyst California meetings, and Pam Lee, who was the attorney for the charter cities who got a
03:38:43.52	Sandra Bushmaker	ruling by the court, here it is,
03:38:46.18	Sandra Bushmaker	Uh,
03:38:47.97	Sandra Bushmaker	holding that SB 9 was unconstitutional for
03:38:53.83	Sandra Bushmaker	charter cities.
03:38:55.46	Sandra Bushmaker	So the charter cities that were named in this litigation are now protected unless someone appeals this issue.
03:39:01.49	Sandra Bushmaker	I asked about the general law cities like Sausalito and this is something I've discussed with the council on numerous occasions in the past to to get
03:39:10.55	Sandra Bushmaker	a finger in the pie, so to speak.
03:39:12.66	Sandra Bushmaker	But the litigation for the general law cities
03:39:16.07	Sandra Bushmaker	is being appealed at the moment.
03:39:18.60	Sandra Bushmaker	And as soon as I get details, I can pass that on to you. But I think it's an opportunity...
03:39:23.31	Sandra Bushmaker	for us to be able to get out from under the state mandate
03:39:28.69	Sandra Bushmaker	if we are able to participate in this litigation.
03:39:32.28	Sandra Bushmaker	So I just wanted to bring that to your attention. There's a lot of activity going on in this area.
03:39:37.25	Sandra Bushmaker	There was a big celebration about those charter cities being able to be relieved from the onerous burden of SB 9. Thank you.
03:39:48.52	Unknown	Stephen Woodside.
03:39:52.91	Steven Woodside	um...
03:39:53.73	Steven Woodside	Actually, I'm just going to say good night. Thank you very much. I'll withhold any further comments until maybe some other time.
03:39:59.71	Steven Woodside	Thank you.
03:39:59.72	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
03:39:59.83	Steven Woodside	Thanks.
03:40:01.50	Mary Sobieski	Best kind of comment. Good night to you too, sir.
03:40:01.53	Steven Woodside	Thank you.
03:40:04.52	Mary Sobieski	All right, City Manager, no, I'm sorry, Council Member Committee reports. Any at this late hour?
03:40:11.92	Unknown	Thank you.
03:40:16.31	Mary Sobieski	Fantastic.
03:40:17.73	Steven Woodside	to make the last comment.
03:40:19.38	Mary Sobieski	Someone's unmuted.
03:40:22.54	Mary Sobieski	Who's that? Mr. Woodside, could you please mute the public online? Go right ahead, Council Member of Health.
03:40:25.88	Unknown	Yeah, we got him.
03:40:27.58	Councilmember Hoffman	Go right ahead.
03:40:28.07	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
03:40:28.31	Councilmember Hoffman	for her health.
03:40:28.70	Councilmember Hoffman	I attended the first day of the city leaders summit, I think April, I don't know, a couple weeks ago. Anyway, there were very good discussions, mainly, especially legislative updates and what to expect coming forward. The main takeaway is there's a lot of housing legislation in the pipeline that will continue to dramatically affect the way that cities can manage you know building in their cities and things to keep an eye on so that was that was the main I think takeaway from the legislative updates and I'm happy to pass those along to our staff as they actually work their way through the legislature but
03:40:53.54	Cameron Razavi	City's community.
03:41:14.77	Councilmember Hoffman	That's the summary from that.
03:41:17.36	Councilmember Hoffman	I believe this isn't a committee update, but I believe the city manager might be giving an update on the sea lion. Okay.
03:41:24.98	Councilmember Hoffman	I saw an email that came across, but one of the recommendations was that
03:41:30.12	Councilmember Hoffman	the city engaged with BCDC so that we can get permits
03:41:34.43	Councilmember Hoffman	so that we can hit our weather window, which starts May 10th and ends at the end of May. So we're waiting on feedback, I think, from BCC. But I don't want to steal the city manager's thunder, because I think that's super good
03:41:49.65	Councilmember Hoffman	And those are all I have for you.
03:41:51.33	Mary Sobieski	Anyone else? All right, city manager, would you like to...
03:41:55.49	Zapata	Give us your report. I'm going to finish the thunder. Please read right ahead. Okay. So there are four permissions we have to get. And so BCDC is outstanding and the Army Corps of Engineers is outstanding. The other two permits with the water board is fine. With fish and wildlife we're fine. But there's a short window. So I'm going to ask the mayor and council people to assist us in calling the folks we know at BCDC to kind of see if they will help expedite the work so that the foundation has been working on and raise money for it the staff has been working on it can put it in during the right timing of the tide so that's the sea lion status I want to tell you that tomorrow City Hall will be closed from 8 until noon. There's a mandatory training for active shooter, part of our disaster preparedness. So if anyone comes to City Hall tomorrow during the day, in the morning until noon, City Hall won't be closed. Also, I'd like to make an announcement that Noelle Gonzalez had her baby. So that's a wonderful thing. The baby's healthy. The mom is healthy. Ever Luna is her name. Always a moon. Thank you.
03:43:15.41	Mary Sobieski	Thank you. Future agenda items for anyone here on the dice, Council Member Kellman.
03:43:19.56	Councilmember Kalman	Yes, thank you, Mayor. I just want to confirm that my request to put the resolution designating June as Pride Month for the city of Sausalito will be on the agenda for the 21st of May.
03:43:35.71	Councilmember Kalman	Will it be on the agenda?
03:43:38.52	Mary Sobieski	Okay.
03:43:39.72	Mary Sobieski	You're asking me.
03:43:40.77	Councilmember Kalman	You're the mayor.
03:43:41.85	Mary Sobieski	Well, yeah, but...
03:43:42.83	Mary Sobieski	I don't know, Councilmember Leicemeyer?
03:43:47.54	Councilmember Kalman	I'm sure.
03:43:48.28	Mary Sobieski	Thank you for going to hear you.
03:43:53.98	Mary Sobieski	We don't hear you, Vice Mayor.
03:43:57.64	Vice Mayor Cox	All right, do you hear me now?
03:43:58.77	Mary Sobieski	We do.
03:44:01.15	Vice Mayor Cox	You hear me?
03:44:02.01	Vice Mayor Cox	Yes.
03:44:02.12	Councilmember Kalman	Yeah.
03:44:03.62	Vice Mayor Cox	Councilmember Kelman, I previously emailed you and told you that the agenda setting committee would be considering that potential agenda item at our next meeting.
03:44:13.15	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you, Vice Mayor. My question, since you have talked about it before, is to hear from the agenda setting committee whether or not you'll honor a sitting council member's request
03:44:23.97	Councilmember Kalman	to have an item placed onto the agenda,
03:44:26.92	Councilmember Kalman	that requires a time sensitivity to it, such that the
03:44:30.95	Councilmember Kalman	The rest of the council can decide the policy matter
03:44:33.76	Councilmember Kalman	rather than
03:44:34.89	Councilmember Kalman	having the agenda setting committee serve as a gatekeeper.
03:44:38.60	Vice Mayor Cox	the
03:44:39.36	Vice Mayor Cox	Agenda setting committee will place this on the agenda in some fashion at our next meeting.
03:44:44.73	Vice Mayor Cox	for consideration on consent.
03:44:46.75	Vice Mayor Cox	If the proposed consent item is not satisfactory, it can be pulled from consent as is always the case.
03:44:52.72	Councilmember Kalman	Okay, thank you, Vice Mayor. Just so the rest of the council knows, I've asked that there be a resolution designating
03:44:58.12	Councilmember Kalman	Pride Month in Sausalito for the month of June, since it is in fact Pride Month, and that resolution enabled us to raise the Pride flag here in Sausalito for the month of June. So that is the request that I've made.
03:45:13.57	Mary Sobieski	Any other future genetimes?
03:45:16.03	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:45:16.05	Mary Sobieski	Thank you.
03:45:16.08	Vice Mayor Cox	Council.
03:45:16.33	Mary Sobieski	Mayor, I have to. The vice mayor raised your hand first.
03:45:16.69	Vice Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:45:16.89	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:45:16.92	Vice Mayor Cox	Mayor, I have.
03:45:20.35	Mary Sobieski	Yes.
03:45:21.21	Vice Mayor Cox	I would like to add considerations of the
03:45:26.24	Vice Mayor Cox	pros and cons of becoming a charter city as a future agenda item.
03:45:32.16	Vice Mayor Cox	Great.
03:45:33.76	Mary Sobieski	I thought someone ever happened.
03:45:37.73	Vice Mayor Cox	If you're a mic on, Mayor, I have a hard time hearing you.
03:45:40.34	Mary Sobieski	Yes, it is, but I could speak into it more, and I called on our colleague, Councilmember Hoffman.
03:45:45.73	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you. Yeah, I would just request that in our budget discussions at some point that we have agendized the appropriate reserve number for the city as part of that discussion so that we can maybe vote on it as a council.
03:46:06.22	Councilmember Hoffman	this isn't an agenda item, it sort of is, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, can we get our slide presentations earlier? Like if we're gonna have a presentation, can we get those before? Because that focuses our discussion, so that's not really
03:46:20.68	Councilmember Hoffman	the future tonight, kind of. And just let me say and throw out that I support the charter law, charter city discussion and also the Pride Month
03:46:33.11	Councilmember Hoffman	requests.
03:46:36.74	Mary Sobieski	Any others?
03:46:38.14	Councilmember Blaustein	I also support the Pride Month request. I'd also like us to consider a project labor agreement, if we could, going forward, considering all the state requirements already in place regarding union labor. And I think it warrants a discussion.
03:46:51.08	Mary Sobieski	Anything else? All right. Public comment on 8A through, or 7 through 8B.
03:46:58.48	Mary Sobieski	everything
03:46:58.93	Mary Sobieski	All right. Close public comment. And now we will move on to adjourn. And we will adjourn in the honor of the person having a birthday on the dais. Happy birthday, Councilmember Blaustein.
03:46:59.07	Unknown	Thank you.
03:46:59.10	Unknown	Amen.
03:46:59.51	Unknown	Thank you.
03:47:07.76	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you, Chris.
03:47:08.09	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you. For those of you who stayed, there is some chocolate cake to share. Yeah, chocolate cake.
03:47:09.72	Mary Sobieski	for those.
03:47:12.60	Mary Sobieski	Yeah.
03:47:14.39	Mary Sobieski	Meeting adjourned for the birthday, Councilwoman.
03:47:17.04	Unknown	Thank you.
03:47:17.11	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:47:17.17	Unknown	Thank you.
03:47:17.53	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:47:17.63	Unknown	Thank you.
03:47:17.98	Councilmember Kalman	Thank you.
03:47:18.83	Unknown	Thank you.

City Council May 7, 2024

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City Council May 21, 2024

City Council Apr 16, 2024

Positive People for Sausalito