City Council — 2020-05-12

Okay we're live. While Mayor Johnson is joining us, we are

calling or we're back from our closed session at 6 30. No reportable action? City Attorney anything to add? Nope

the Council met in closed session to consider labor negotiations for all underrepresented employees and no reportable action was taken Thank you.

And I see Mr. Johnston's back, so I'll let him take over although- Unmute. You're on mute.

There we are.

Now you're fine.

Am I good? Okay, I'm on my phone because the computer that was delivered says I'm not connected.

Boy.

So we won't try and don't take anybody else's time. I'll work from my phone. Hope that it's not too distracting. Okay, are we back in session? I thought I heard the city attorney saying there's nothing to report out, is that correct?

Correct.

Okay so the regular session of the City Council hasn't been called to order. I'm doing so now will the clerk please call the roll?

consent calendar for short questions.

E and F did you say? D and f okay we'll do that. Are there any other changes?

Corrections I asked for, so nothing else.

Okay so the agenda is then approved as presented with the exception we're going to pull items D and F off of the consent and have that for some discussion okay. Nusha we have a motion on the balance of the consent calendar? Move to approve.

Second.

OK, moved and seconded. Is there any objection? If not, so ordered. OK, Bill you had some questions on letter D?

Yeah, which is the citizen's option for public safety funding.

Right.

And I'm going to make one observation then I'm going to relate a personal concern. There is a school resource officer in there We don't even know if school's going to be in session this fall. And I note that, you know, that's another agency. My computer just fell down. That's another agency and this is something that we can use my understanding is for focused issues. And I want to indulge everyone with just a one minute story of what I personally observed it really has concerned me And that has to do with motorcycles.

I was turned onto Ojai Avenue with a red light where people were stopped at Ojai, and I looked at my rear view mirror saw two motorcycles going into the middle over the double passing down the middle gunning their engines. As soon as it turned they dragged out peeling rubber right when an elderly person punched the signal You know, the pedestrian crossing flashing at Westridge.

I was very worried. I had a nightmare all of a sudden about thinking, oh my God, I can't get close to this person because these motorcycles aren't going to see them and they're going to go right by me. So I stopped well short of the crossing. They didn't care. They skidded to a stop in the back of me, looked on both sides then gunned it again and passed this pedestrian on both sides then did wheelies in front of the Bob Show.

And I just wonder, you know, I've seen a lot of speeding. I've seen a lot of issues with our motorcycles and this was the worst example. And I wonder if we, you know compared to a school resource officer, we need to look at some maybe some focused mitigation with respect to maybe getting a reputation of a town that strictly enforces traffic laws for motorcycles

like

that.

Is there a time element James on approving the cops?

No, I don't believe there's a time limit and I have the chief here but i'm thinking we can he and I can have that conversation and bring it back next meeting. Okay that

was really

okay yeah

I mean I could not believe they saw this lady in the crosswalk And then gunned their motorcycles on both sides that were in the middle of the crosswalk. I couldn't believe it.

Okay, if there's no objection then we're going to postpone this to give the chief and city manager an opportunity to get some answers for us on Bill's suggestion.

Yeah.

Okay,

F, oh yes Randy? I just had one quick thing. I was just reading or reading it on here what the funding source is for And maybe we look at it as how much money would this fund regarding having some type of motorcycle enforcement for ticketing in our community? Because police officers and cars are not inclined to pull over people or write tickets. They are, but they aren't a motorcycle officer I strongly support what Bill and Randy brought up.

Because every time I cross Fairview or in that area, our town seems to be a destination for motorcycles. I mean talking groups of at least 20 just a row going into the mountains coming back down running through town. I would like our town to have a reputation for enforcing traffic violations and gunning and the noise and the whole whatever we can legally do. I'm all for it. And we hear those complaints. It's right up there with dog barking, people complaining what can we do about motorcycles gunning through town?

Thank you that's all I want to say.

Okay uh item number F Bill

a real quick comment um is it would it be possible and what would be the proper mechanism to get more information about the community energy corporation a little bit more detail About what renewables they're using and contracting for, how they're generating renewables, the proportions over different kinds of renewables. Is there a way of getting more information about that? Yes,

there is and we had a request in and they were prepared to come up until we had the shutdown and now we're meeting over the air. So I just told James on the clean energy That was a clean. Yeah, the CPA group to hold on that and we get back with them. So but would we want to have a presentation using this format or should we hold a good thought and think that we're going to actually be able to be back in the council chambers at some point in the near future?

Okay, we will plan that yes Randy.

Also see I was talking to Bill about this. I remember you and I having this conversation in council chambers a couple months ago. So again yeah whenever it's whenever it's the right time to do it. That's all

okay well they're ready to do it and to help on rates in the meantime I've been trying to understand the race myself personally here at home Our friends in the utility business have got their problems and they're not necessarily, it's sort of like well why do I need to spend a whole lot of time with you talking about the other guy? Why don't you go talk to, in this case, the Clean Power Alliance. And so we've been talking with them today.

And I would like to get it to a point where if we did a public presentation, we wouldn't take an hour and then be more confused when we were done. One of the difficulties is that Edison company is trying to adapt all of this and their rate changes that I don't know if you're aware of it but they've been just jumping all over the place trying to adapt to the new reality.

Stay with them in order to give everybody an easy comparison. But it appears that's not a successful strategy, so we're gonna have to change that. So I'll get in touch with him again. I haven't forgotten about it and will get somebody to come talk to us.

Okay, and I'll go ahead and move up receiving file.

Okay, is there a second?

Second.

Okay, is that for both D and F? Yes. No, no, we are continuing- We are continuing D. Yeah, we're continuing D, you're right. Okay, there's a motion and a second. Is there any objection? If not so ordered okay we are workshop on the operating budget number two and Jane let's see what time are we you know we got another 14 minutes before it's public comment time do you want to take the public comments that would have been submitted now and then we'll just take a brief break at 8 730 to see if there are any additional ones coming in

Well, so we've asked that like most other cities we put the cut off at 5pm. So we have two comments and we don't, we wouldn't receive any additional because the cutoff was at 5 pm.

Okay well in that case is there any objection for the city manager or the city clerk whoever has the public comments to read them into the record? No objection.

are you going to do that now is that what you're asking?

I was gonna say doing it so we don't start the budget thing and then stop and start again. Perfect.

So someone's going to read the public comments out loud, is that what's happening?

Well one was requesting to do that and it was short it was from Mr McCray over the pickle court and I don't know what was the second one

The second one actually is about the budget, so we can include that then. It's from the Ojai Valley Museum-

Okay, so then that's fine. So do you want to just read Mr. McRae's letter? It's short.

Sure, so this is the public comment from Mr. McCrae. The Ojai residents that live on and near South Ventura Street would like to know what has been done to mitigate the horrific pop, pop, pop noise that pickleball players are imposing on residents. We realize their playtime has been cut down to four hours per day due to the coronavirus, but then popping noise still makes relaxing and staying in our homes impossible. Do you think it's okay to allow a few Ojai and non-Ojai residents to play a nonessential game in our neighborhood that creates an environment that makes it impossible for the neighbors to enjoy peace and quiet in their own homes? These people are having their fun and games at the expense of neighbors who are suffering from their noise and disrespect.

Let's go to the operating budget workshop, James.

Thank you. So give me one second. We have a brief PowerPoint here that I'm pulling up. So we talked last meeting about cash flow, the immediate concern. But we also mentioned at that time that way back in March, we presented a proposed budget to the Budget Committee and we had started to bring it to Council. And with the coronavirus everything is impacted so we've gone back to the Budget Committee reviewed that budget and we are presenting it today to the council I'm going to start trying to kind of talk high level. The packet has, you know, line item budget detail but we're talking about just kind of the high level where we're at this point today. At this moment what we're doing is the budget that's included in the packet is the cost of providing this year's service level And that's what you have there.

And so to get it out of the way, we project if we were to do all the same things we did this year and not make any adjustments, we would have a net loss of $946,000. And we're not proposing that we adopt that budget but we wanted to bring that back as the starting point to show if we weren't changing anything, we'd have a deficit of $946,000 Today what we want to do is go through that, review the potential reductions that can be made to balance the budget and get feedback from the City Council. We've identified reductions that we could make to try to balance the budget and so we'd get feedback and then come back at a future meeting with the revised budget And quickly, one note is next council meeting we're expecting to go through the CIP and for the first time ever the Measure C budget.

We're creating a separate fund for the measure revenues which have been slow to get started because of the circumstances but are going to make a major impact next year. With that, the March 13th budget I mentioned a couple minutes ago was this was it. We were projecting $11.5 million in revenues almost $12 million in total expenditures with the deficit of 345,000 and we had presented this and walked through it at that time Now, you know two months later the effects of the coronavirus.

We're looking at this revised proposed budget which shows let me kind of go back and forth here revenues dropping from 11.5 million to 10.37 million And we have reduced all the, we had identified some additional services in the March 13th budget. We've taken those back and filled it back to this, the current service level cost. So as it stands right now, we're projecting a $946,000 deficit.

We met with the Budget Committee on April 24th and walked through these line items closely. And I think there are a lot of good questions. One of the big questions I remember that the Budget Committee had was they felt that they were surprised by the property tax being projected to be a drop because that caught everybody off guard. The explanation for that is that it appears likely there's going to be deferrals and non-payments of property tax this year, and so that's why we had reduced that. And so we had walked through kind of at that level of detail with the Budget Committee on the April 24th meeting. They ultimately agreed to move forward with this budget as proposed at this time.

So this budget with the $946,000 deficit. What's changed from the original budget that we had projected with the $300,000 deficit is we revised it with a $1.2 million revenue drop and we reduced expenses by removing promotional opportunities, new positions that we had recommended for service enhancements We've moved some CIP projects out of the city. and we eliminated and reduced some nonessential contract. We also originally had proposed increasing our contingency to the highest level it's ever been, we've taken that back down because it's just not feasible this year under the circumstances. So the contingency we propose in this year's budget is $200,000 which is the same as last year.

And then just high-level, we're showing the revenues. Although sales tax, property tax and TOT are all expected to be impacted by the coronavirus, they're still the big three that are main sources of revenue. Obviously those three are going to depend on things starting to reopen which we started to see over the last couple days. To help lead kind of the discussion and explain what we're looking at in possible reductions to try to get back to balance with our current $945,000 deficit.

The budget committee asked us to prepare a chart showing the cost of mandatory services or items and the cost of discretionary items. And so that's what this table before you is You'll notice mandatory items are the services we provide to residents. Police services, public works, community development services, recreation, administrative staff and utilities. You'll notice those total about $9.4 million.

And so the point I think that the budget committee and I were making with that is, you know those are the things that we really have to provide. The services we have to provide and so we wanted to show the cost of just doing those now if the quote-unquote discretionary items i don't even like using that term because some of these things are things that I don't really think are discretionary, but in a year where we're having significant budget challenges they're the things we don't have to do. So I guess in that way they're discretionary. The four that are large numbers are the community organization funding which is approximately $230,000 a year Our $100,000 early payment of retiree medical which we don't have to do but it's a good practice to do.

It's the 20% transfer to TOT which is about $600,000 and then we also on top of that transfer about $115,000 to our equipment replacement fund And again, don't like to call those discretionary but there's a couple of factors one with Measure C being adopted. You know in a bad year we could, we could defer that 20% transfer because it's not the only source of tip projects now.

And for the equipment fund transfer, we actually have built up a pretty good reserve there. We have a couple hundred thousand dollars for equipment replacement so we could take a year where it's a bad year and not make that transfer and save some money on the general fund. So you'll notice on the list of discretionary items approximately $1 million, which as I mentioned we projected a $945,000 deficit. So we could balance the budget by making some reductions to discretionary items.

So what we did here is without just cutting all of those things, making reductions to those things Plus the hiring freeze of staff. We were able to identify $970,000 in potential cuts which would get the balance or the budget balanced but they are you know there's some difficult decisions in these reductions so I kind of went through some of them right now, but what this shows is the amount that they would be reduced for this year.

So like the TOT transfer looking back at the last slide is $630,000. If we reduced $510,000 from that, that could be part of the savings to get balanced. And it would hopefully be offset by measure C, which are the challenges. When do the hotels get back into business? So we have recommended budget reductions that we could do to get balanced and I guess with that, I'm happy to take any questions but essentially again what our goal today was to bring the cost of doing This year's service levels at next year's costs with next year's revenues, which would be almost a million dollar shortfall. So we'd either need to reduce some services or identify some savings here. So we've identified some savings as you see before

us. Okay James I understand your discomfort with calling the Discretionary list discretionary because it's a mixture. It is not the only item on there that's identified that is really discretionary, is the community organization funding and I assume some number out of that 631,000 that would be for capital projects that we don't have to do, that would be nice to do.

As opposed to the monies that are in there for roads, which we do have to take care of. Those are not going away. We're not building new roads or repairing the ones we have. So with time permits, we need to refine some of that to see how much we're just deferring because We're calling it what I would call a structurally unbalanced budget that is legally permitted. We could adopt it to deal with the cash flow problems we're going to experience from the shutdown.

But if we end up with lost revenues and we the next year or mid-year don't address some of these things, we've just buried them for a while and carried them forward. Which means that our reserve is not truly a discretionary reserve anymore. It's just undesignated.

Go ahead. I just had a question. Bill? James, a couple questions one comment I just want to go on record, I think deferring the OPEB payment for the time being is a no-brainer. That's my

opinion.

When we do our sales tax audit, does that cover in the past? Is there any way of tracking the sales tax with those beginning from deliveries to the city limits by the Amazon and that kind of thing in the world?

Yeah, so the report we get actually does show those. It shows the revenues received under the, I think they call it the Wayfair Act or the Wayfarer Decision. So we actually do get a report on that.

Okay, so there may be a small offset there maybe? Yeah,

yeah.

And then do we have any way of tracking whether or not under the CARES Act the county is getting any federal assistance to Is there any way to help with the sheriff's budget that ought to be shared with all the contract cities if in fact they do get that assistance?

Yeah, so we know that the county received funding. We don't have a breakdown of what their funding is for. We can see if we could find something. I can't think of a way offhand that- Well

maybe it's impossible but it just seems to be only fair that if they're allocating some The relief with the contract city.

Yeah, that's a good point Bill. How about we refer or have James put that on our budget and finance subcommittee meeting? Because there are a lot of things in that regard between now and say June 15th that we might want to discuss as to what our options are.

Okay thank you

I have a question mayor

yes Susan

James, can you explain that the point you just made about revenue from Amazon? What are you talking about?

Yeah. So for a couple of years cities did not receive sales tax for purchases made through large online companies like Amazon, Wayfair, et cetera. And there's been a change recently where we do receive sales tax now for those. So-

I didn't, somehow I missed that, that's important. Yeah, Sousa

the sales tax laws in California were based upon what they call CITUS for cash registers in the old days where everything was sold through a retailer and so where the cash register was It was a good step in the right direction. We will have a virtual cash register in our town for stuff that gets delivered by companies like Amazon.

Yeah, okay so they track it because you did through the address obviously yeah okay thank you very much yeah

okay James

So that was essentially, I guess what we're looking for is feedback on... We've identified some discretionary items. To your point, I agree the transfer to TOT, I wouldn't necessarily call discretionary but I think the reason we've identified it is that one of the points of doing what we did with, you know, with Measure C and everything was to be able to not defer maintenance and continue to make progress even in challenging years. And I think this year nobody expected the challenging year to come upon us so quick but this year will be a challenging year.

So that, you know, it's not our first recommended option but it's one that we identified.

It seems if we're keeping in good faith on the measure C that the monies that were being I would think that we would It's a no brainer if we are doing it For purposes of improving our cash flow and to get us through this tough time, it's just a question on how long that tough time lasts because I think we had a report. I don't recall the number but there are still a sizable amount of money going out the door paying for people who are in retirement, who have benefits we don't offer anybody else and they're expensive but they're vested.

So it is an obligation that we need to kind of keep under control otherwise it'll start eating up the budget in the future years.

Mayor I have a

yeah Randy

on the reduction of the community funding levels. I agree that we need to look at those and I have no problem going back to 2019 levels, I would still like the council to be able to discuss each one of them oh yeah and reconfigure who's gonna get what out of that remaining balance versus just giving everyone 2019 numbers Yeah,

that was what we intended. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear because it's a good point. So what we were planning to do is between now and the, and I think it's the June 9th meeting that if take your feedback make these reductions and come back and in particular the community funding, we'd come back with just that amount available for the council to decide who it goes to.

And then Mayor, I just had one more question again. James did you include anywhere in here any reductions in employee salaries? Or is that we're still finding at 2020 salary levels?

So we have it here the hiring freeze that we currently have in place and the challenge for us was we didn't I just want to say that we're trying to budget, you know the reduction in part time the reduction in contract the reduction and staff costs because it wasn't clear how long the shutdown would last. The hiring freeze, we know we're going to hold off on hiring any new positions. But we're trying to budget assuming we're going to have the same amount of full-time staff people next year. You know that's something we could cut but we didn't want to start by budgeting a cut to those positions.

Okay

thank you. It is the hiring freeze and it's three and a half positions that are currently unfilled out of our 28.

Okay. Is there anything else on this topic before we move along?

Don't forget about the museum, the public comment.

Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. Okay. Thank you,

Susan. The museum submitted a budget request. I don't know if I would call it a public comment. It's a couple pages with the budget request. Do we wanna read that out loud or do we want to? We can-

No, you can just record that it was submitted to be commented

on. I believe and I talked to Brian Aikens today and I believe it was just submitted as a budget request for us to consider. I told them that today we talk about setting the amount of community funding, but at the next, you know, the June 9th meeting is when we talk about who actually gets what portions of that. Perfect.

But I note it's the same amount as last year, I believe.

That's what we well, so that's the

starting point.

Yeah, this is the starting point with a million dollar deficit. So we did

the request I'm just saying to request

Yes, yes good point. So that's the the budget requested the same amount as last year in recognition of

Okay, so the clerk will just make a note in the minutes that we did receive the requests and it's been forwarded to the Budget and Finance Committee? Yep. Okay, good. Anything else if not let's move to number three the Coronavirus Report.

All right, I feel like I'm PowerPointing you to death today but I got one more.

This actually works better when you're sitting at home where you can actually read it.

Taking advantage of the opportunity so. I

think I can enlarge it.

So we wanted to give the last couple of coronavirus updates. We've kind of just said the latest things happening in Ojai, we wanted to kind of give more of an update on county wide at this point and I'll keep it brief but the statistics as of yesterday in Ventura County, we had 678 total cases with 12 new ones yesterday seems like we're averaging between about 10-25 new cases a day in the last couple weeks We have six cases currently in the 93023 zip code, which does not mean we and we told this. We've clarified with this with the county that does not mean within the city limits of Ojai cases in the 9 3023 zip code.

Aren't most of those recovered? I believe most of those are recovered yeah And there's been one new case in the last two weeks in 93023. 28 hospitalized, 11 of those currently in the ICU, 19 deaths which is obviously unfortunate and the county this morning on their at the Board of Supervisors meeting noted that there are expected to be a couple more that they're going to report in the next couple days. They said that this morning so

And everyone had a cool morbidity, right?

Yes at this point. And so the positive is number of people tested 13,700 which has really grown and they're expanding the testing capacity and I'll get to more on that in a moment but the latest that's relevant really to Ojai that we wanted to make sure to explain there's a lot of questions about it A new public health order came out on May 7th. They're calling it the Stay Well Ventura County Order.

The county has stated that their goal is shifted to safely reopening and getting in line with the state's stay at home order. Governor Newsom announced that they have these phases, and they're starting phase two. The county is in line with that and is starting phase two. And once certain criteria The governor had a meeting with his finance director. Yeah, unfortunately.

So the order on May 7th what it reopens here in the county is it allows retail businesses to reopen for curbside delivery or pickup and essentially they have listed some retail sectors but essentially they confirmed yesterday that almost all retail in the county can now reopen with curbside delivery or pickup And it also allows the manufacturing and supply chain businesses to reopen as well. They also stated, which we get a lot of questions about here in Ojai, they stated that hotels and motels are able to continue to operate. The county stated today that it doesn't need to be an essential business or you don't have to travel or stay in a hotel only for essential business which was a change from what I had heard previously so we're looking into whether that's accurate But we get a lot of questions about that from residents because obviously people are still seeing that the hotels here have some business.

James, I can tell you for what it's worth that a new order came out 15 minutes ago from the county that includes stuff that goes into effect tomorrow and it still lists specifically hotels lodging for leisure and tourism are still not permitted.

The county today had said at the Board of Supervisors that they weren't sure if there was a limitation there, but every order I've read says there is a limit not allowing leisure and tourism. So I think that was actually just incorrect. So I believe the answer to that is what Council Member Blatch just said, which is hotels and motels can operate but not for leisure and tourism.

May I ask a question about that?

Yeah.

You mean to say that when I drive by that hotel as you enter town and the parking lot is completely filled those are all people here on essential business how do you track that?

Yeah, and that's a question we've asked the county yesterday as well is how that's being tracked because we're getting a lot of questions about it. And we don't know at this point how the county is tracking that. So that's something we're looking into and seeing if they are tracking it. Mayor?

Yes, Randy. So it says your businesses must self-certify. Does that mean the essential businesses that have been open have to certify also?

Yes,

yes. So wouldn't the county and wouldn't we have access to those records as to who has self certified so that might help Susan in that answer is if that business has a certification with the county for being an essential business. Now it may not tell you how many people are actually there for that, but it would tell you are they open as an essential business?

Does that make sense or did I confuse everyone?

No, I think that makes sense. And we are currently... We had a meeting this morning to get set up to be able to access that data. Everything is happening very quick. The opening came Fridays. We met today to be able to access that data so we can check and find out if businesses have self-certified or if they're open without self-certifying. So we can look at that. We could see... We can check and see if the hotels have certified with what they have self-certified.

And James, do you know what the criteria for certification is?

So the county has some criteria available. I haven't looked at the counties because and we'll get to this in a minute. The city has started to work on or the city has put out our own checklist of self-certification so we've been focused on that. We figure for within the city limits if everybody is self-certifying with Our requirements, we're comfortable. So we've been working on that.

They have their self-certification requirements online but I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the

counties. Well, I just think it would be important for the community to understand that we have a right to require certification also and our certification could be stronger than the county's.

Yep and I have a slide on that in a couple of pages here.

Okay, James is the sheriff on patrol going by and giving the people a little nudge when they forget about the social distancing. Over the weekend when the visitors showed to name one business beacon which is right out there on the avenue that main drag normally people are pretty careful around there but boy it was a crowd and people chatting away. Yeah, I know it's a tough thing to enforce but just reminders to people particularly someone in uniform might.

As we start to reopen if we're too lax, we're gonna be in real trouble.

Yeah and we've done kind of a combination where we are currently scheduling code enforcement on the weekends to try to address that and make sure people are wearing masks which is still I'll get to this too but Ohio is still requiring, you know we've had questions about that. Ojai is requiring the face coverings so we've had code enforcement here on the weekends to try to encourage people to do it and we've talked to PD as well about when they see it to encourage the social distancing so we'll continue to do those things. Thank you.

The county and the state today, well the last couple days have laid out these as the four stages to reopen. I just wanted to kind of show because we get a lot of questions about these types of issues but we are currently in stage two And you'll notice it says gradually reopened retail manufacturing and logistics, which is what happened Friday curbside only retail.

And then it says later relaxed retail restrictions adapt and reopen schools childcare offices and limited hospitality personal services. And that continued today with the governor announcing that offices and he also said malls were going to reopen for curbside as well so So it's going to be this gradual reopening of these items. And then stage three is reopening movie theaters, religious services and personal and hospitality services. So those are the next couple of phases. Yes, Council Member Weirich?

I just want to point out something that I think is an increasing problem. That is the...and just let the community know that I certainly am very concerned about it And that's the implicit bias towards big box that is built into everything from the state all the way through the county. When they say retail curbside only, that just means except for big box. In effect, the big boxes are allowed if they happen to sell a little bit of food like Target.