City Council — 2023-06-27

Good evening. Call the order, we have a quorum. Could we have the roll call please Weston?

Good evening, I'm Valerie Freeman Arts Commissioner and thank you City Council for all you do. I'm so excited to announce that the arts grants application is now available online to download Ojai Arts Commission is accepting applications for 2024 arts grants awarded each year by the Ojai City Council in December to help ensure the vitality of the arts in the Ojai Valley.

The program funds nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists whose primary purpose is to produce or present arts and cultural programs in the city of Ojai. The art grants are made for one year, The goals of the Arts Grants Programs aims to foster artistic excellence, develop new audiences for the arts, promote cultural diversity and encourage artistic activities, community partnerships and collaboration.

Priority consideration will be given to applicants with emphasis on the Ojai Arts Commission core values. Innovation, inclusivity, impact, educational, mentorship, heritage and the environment. Funding will be capped at $5,000 per applicant and micro grants of $2,500 or less are encouraged. The application deadline is September 22nd of this year by 4 p.m., and you may mail or hand deliver the application and materials here to City Hall.

For more information, please email artgrant at ohi.gov.ca. And to download the application, you go to the city's website, and it's right there. You can't miss it. And I would like to thank fellow art commissioners and city staff for bringing the updated arts grants application to be available online. Thank you.

Thank you, Valerie much appreciated. All right, we will move on to public communication. So just a reminder to the public these are items not on the agenda and because they're not on the agenda we cannot discuss them. We appreciate your viewpoint and your participation and we can agendize those for the future. And at the end of your three minutes you'll hear a chime as a reminder that your time is up so please respect each other's time in the spirit of equity stop talking when the chime sounds.

So we'll begin with Bennett, Collette and Asher. Then we have Wayne Maynard and then we have Renee Roth.

My name is Bennett, and I live off Ojai Avenue. And fast cars come down my street all of the time. I ask for cars go slower on neighborhood streets so kids can be safe. Maybe a new speed limit or speed bumps. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Colette and I live off Ojai Avenue. And people drive really fast down my street and I think you should change the speed limit to 15. Ow! Why? Oh, sorry. Thank

you. Thank you Bennett, Colette and Asher. Much appreciated.

Can we have a question from a council member? Thank you. I don't want to let this opportunity go by. What you've brought up is one of the single most important issues for this city, what you've brought up about the speed limit. I would like to see a city-wide 25 miles per hour speed limit and lower on narrow streets. Passed time to do that by speaking out. You're probably going to save the life of Someone's life by speaking out it's so important, but you said that you lived off Ojai Avenue Can I know the name of your street that you live in on?

Fulton Street What? Fulton. Do you live on South or North Fulton? Maybe your dad can tell us. North Fulton. Okay, we're going to remember that street. We're going to look at it. Thank you.

Thank you for being here. Much appreciated. Wayne Maynard and then Renee Roth.

Good evening, Council. My name is Wayne Maynard, a resident of Ojai and I emailed you a document earlier today. You probably didn't have a chance to look at it but I'm just going to read the first few paragraphs of that so hopefully you can look at it later after the meeting. But I have strong belief that the public business needs to be done in an open and transparent manner And I see the purpose of our city commissions is to utilize the commissioner's experiences while engaging with the community to conduct public business on behalf of the city. This is best accomplished by a commission acting as a whole, where all commissioners have input on all commissioned business and that business is conducted in public view.

There's no doubt that all our city commissioners are dedicated volunteers looking out for the best interests of this city. However, I'm concerned that the Arts Commission has organized themselves in a manner that rather than acting as a whole, the commission chair has assigned each commissioner an area of responsibility that reports directly back to the chair.

Like a wheel with the chair as the center hub, the commissioner is a spoke and responsible for individual assignments. Under this organization, the Arts Commission business is no longer open and subject to public input, review, scrutiny and very susceptible to Brown Act violations. There are two recent examples that demonstrate how this process has been working.

The current budget request and a five-year plan. According to the commission's March 16th meeting minutes each of these topics were to be set as future agenda items. That never occurred. The commission without a public meeting, commission vote or public input produced a budget request that went to the city budget process and a multiple page five-year plan that was presented by the chair as a handout to City Council. The five year plan is still not easily accessible by the public.

I suspect each commissioner submitted a budget request and a five year plan proposal for their assigned areas of responsibility to the chair, who then combine the information into a commission report. That process may be convenient, streamlined and efficient perhaps but the decisions and recommendations have been made without public input or commissioned public discussion and perhaps are Brown Act violations as well.

A look at the most recent agenda from June 15th demonstrates how the Arts Commission limits public input and keeps each commissioner within their lanes of responsibility. All business is covered by commissioner updates rather than discussion items. This process allows the chair to limit discussion between commissioners because it's a report, not discussion.

The public has no opportunity to comment on business of the commission except for the public comments at the beginning of the meeting before any reports are given. Not a very open or transparent way of conducting business. And I'm out of time, but I have a recommendation that's in the email I sent you on how I think you can make revisions to solve that.

Thank you Wayne. Renee Roth?

Good evening City Council members and James wherever you are. I want to thank our Ryan Firestone as a member for eight years of the Park and Rec Committee and his recommendations in working on a plan for the Pickleball People. Thank you, thank you very much. I think that has been a big contentious issue in our community, and I would like to see some action taken on that project.

I'm also wanting to rethink a little bit, and I don't know if it was considered about Matilija. And I know the Pickleball people aren't going to support this, but that's OK. We all need to speak what we believe is good for our community. Using Matiloha Junior High, which is going to be vacant all summer long and for how many years into the future? We have no idea what those great tennis courts are going to be used for. That's an underutilized resource. Who and how can members of our community work with the school district? Wouldn't it be great to see us working together on something like this?

I also want to thank our citizen advocates for slowing down our speed limits in our town. I cannot underestimate how important this is that you came here today and spoke up about this. I personally know of four people in our community who have died while crossing the streets or as a result of crossing the streets in our town, I was recently at a brainstorming session where they brought up the city of Port Townsend, Washington. Port Townsend, Washington is a very small town, six square miles.

They changed city-wide the speed limit to 25 miles per hour, city wide on all city streets. And by the sound of things it's made a huge impact On the safety, the ride ability, the walkability of their town. I would love to see us do something bold and brave to do something for our community members and I can't think of anything better than to slow everybody down. And James, I want to say thank you.

I don't know if I'm going to have a chance to say goodbye. With a heavy heart, I'm saying goodbye. I'm really sorry to see you go. You have done an amazing job for our city. Our streets are much safer over off of Maricopa Highway across from Nordoff High School. I still have issues but you have done an amazing job for our city and I want to thank you and be the first to thank you and wish you well in Port Wainimi. Thank you, Renee.

Any comments online Weston?

No raised hands Mayor.

Okay wonderful all right we will move on to the consent calendar is there a motion to approve? I'll move to approve okay in a second

I'll second

okay all in favor All right, let's move on to the public hearing and this is item number two the fiscal year 23 24 so that's July 1st 2023 to June 30th 2024 budget adoption and salary schedule approval And thank you so much to Pam Greer our finance director and city manager James Vega for working So hard on this and you did it. They said it couldn't be done, but you did it Thank You

Thank you, Mayor. And we have a short presentation. I know we've had a few workshops so we aren't going to belabor it again. I think one of our first workshops was over an hour of us talking, so we're going to try to avoid that this meeting. So we'll pull up our PowerPoints here and I'll start just by noting yes, I am appearing virtually. California Joint Powers Insurance Authority Academy today. And at one point thought I could get out at five and drive back to Ojai for the meeting, and realized that wasn't going to work out driving from San Diego. So thanks for allowing me to participate virtually.

If at any time you can't hear me or anything, please let me know because I'm operating a little differently here. So James, can you pull up the presentation? Again we'll try to keep this brief here. Let's see... James are you going to show the...

Yeah I'm trying to get it to the beginning.

Yes James it's up on the screen in council chambers.

Okay. All right, it's not showing as a slideshow but all right let's go ahead and show it. James can you go to the second slide? James? Second slide is up. My screen is showing slide three

Yes. They're kind of numbers. Is it the one with

a budget summary general fund?

Yes.

Yeah, okay so are you guys able to see it just not me I guess.

Now it's correct yeah that's good James.

Okay there we go okay All right, so somehow I'm not the one having technical difficulty which surprises me. I thought I would be the one struggling. Okay we'll just make it work. It's not quite working but... So this year for our budget we've gone through this several times so nothing should be very surprising. The last time we presented it there was a It was sort of the first round of review. And I think the summary that you're going to see in the next couple slides is that revenues recovered after COVID, which was good news but they've been flat since and as we all know just like our home budgets costs keep going up expenses keep going up everything gets more expensive so it's good that we've recovered but every year that our revenue stay flat and their costs go up It means more and more of a squeeze on our budget.

So this year, on the first round of the budget review we came to Council and we showed basically a $200,000 deficit. And we noted some areas where we could make some reductions that wouldn't impact our services to get to a balanced budget and we've gone back after that discussion with council and we've made those changes. So, we are presenting a balanced $14.9 million dollar budget 14.9 million in revenues and 14. 9 million in expenditures As you can see, the chart shows sort of the trend that during COVID our revenues had dropped significantly down to about the $10 million range. They recovered right after COVID to 14.8 million but they've Actually kind of flatlined there. I think one of the challenges we've talked about, just being realistic about Ojai is that we don't have unlimited capacity in Ojai.

So other than the roadblock opening up potentially at the end of this budget year, there's not more capacity opening up to really cause revenues to increase. So I think that our revenues will be fairly flat moving forward with just probably a bump when the Roblar opens up. And so what that means is it's good news in a way because our budget's recovered and it's fairly strong, but the challenge is we have to now figure out how to keep our costs within those revenues because the revenues probably aren't going to go up in coming years or not significantly.

The other just a couple of key points, the general fund. This is the general fund budget. The general fund is the fund that's used to fund our core administrative and operational tasks. The two biggest costs that the city has in any given year are staffing costs and our police contract. So providing the staff to do our public works projects, to staff our community development department and then like I said the police contract between those two chunks that's about 2 thirds of our budget about $10 million so we have the money to do the basic things we need. We just have to be careful and disciplined to stay within our budget The last bullet point on this slide shows Measure C. Measure C is not in the general fund, so it's a $3 million restricted fund outside of the general fund but that is the hotel tax increase that is going to allow us to do our paving and our environmental projects.

So again, that was adopted in 2020 We've gotten through COVID, we're seeing the impact it has and we'll talk about the streets a little later in this presentation to show what impact it will have in the future years. Next slide James.

Okay.

Are you, are you able to hear me? Everything went blank on my screen for a minute there. Yes we are good. Okay okay so the next slide shows the tax revenue trends again just kind of reiterating what I said earlier and this trend i thought was helpful in showing uh tax revenues make up most of our revenues particularly the hotel tax Ojai is kind of unique in that way there's I think we're the only city in the county where hotel tax makes up a majority of our revenue.

And this chart shows that, a couple key points one is it shows that recovery after COVID and the spike but then if you look from 21 to 24 every revenue is just a flat line And so we recovered coming out of COVID, but there's not unlimited growth potential. And so for us it just like I said the reminder that you know I think for a while we thought well our revenues are going up so fast they're just gonna keep going up and the reality is they've gone up and we're at capacity and these are the cities likely about the revenue level moving forward Things like property tax don't change very quick and sales tax and hotel tax are more volatile, but I think they're about maxed out. And the thing that we have to be careful of is more likely a recession where they would drop rather than expecting an increase.

So all just kind of general principles for us to keep in mind and why we budget conservatively Careful and built up our reserve fund in Ojai because of that situation. Can you move to the fourth slide, James? So we wanted to show some of the major expenses when people look at our budget and say, well where does $15 million go? Like how did we spend all that money. And so we wanted to walk through some of the basic expenses of what's paid for in the general fund.

Major expenses include our staffing which are budgeted at $5.8 million this year. Police services budgeted at 3.4 million dollars Utilities are a couple hundred thousand dollars. And then one thing we've focused on increasing year over year over years, our maintenance budgets. I think when I arrived in Ojai, we pretty frequently used to talk about fixing things like the slides at the park and we'd say there wasn't money to do it. And so we've really put an emphasis in trying to make sure we have the money to maintain our streets, our facilities and our parks And so those are increased in our budget to about a half million dollars this year, up from $280,000 a couple of years ago.

And then just a side note that doesn't include the paving project which is actually paid for from other funds and so this is additional maintenance on top of street paving and then there's transfers to our capital improvement projects equipment and vehicle replacement funds And at $775,000 and recreation programming is about $187,000. So just these expenses alone total about $10.9 million more than two thirds of our general fund budget.

And so you can see very quickly how... You start with a pot of about $15 million and with just these core services, a lot of that funding is taken up And the next slide shows a couple of other costs. One thing we talked about earlier, and I appreciate Council Member Ruhl's comments because yeah the point I was trying to make was not being critical of the HPC's requests it is just trying to remind everybody that every time an item comes on that we have not planned for there's only one pot of money right now that those things can come from And that's the contingencies budget. This year it's included in the budget at $400,000 and last year we had the highest ever contingency budget at $550,000 partially because we knew that there were some litigation issues and things like that coming up that we weren't sure about so we didn't have them as separate line items in the budget But we ended up using up almost all of that budget.

And so next year, we will have a lower budget for that category and we will have to be careful not to overspend. I think that HPC item was a pretty good example. Of whenever we get a request and we've gotten several in the last couple months. We got a request for funding from a community group, for example. And on its own they all look great and they all look like great things and they're all they all have benefits to the community.

And so you want to support them all but the reality is we have a limited pot of money. And so we have to every time one of those comes in, And we're trying to figure out which one is the true request with the other requests and which ones are the true priorities. And so that was the point I was trying to make with the HPC item, and it's just something that will have to... Well, we should be going through that exercise whenever a request comes in.

But in this year's budget there is a contingency budget of $400,000. And there are some items coming up The other item, other notable items in the budget, the attorney services budget. We have under-budgeted that over the last couple years and with some of those same laws still pending we increased the budget just to match the real costs so that we're not constantly overspending our budget and so that's been increased from $296,000 to $398,000 in this budget We've also included the Ojai Museum's funding in the budget, $60,000. The Arts Commission funding in the budget, $46,300. And as one note on that, Commissioner Freeman's comments about the Arts Commission budget So by approving the budget tonight, the funding is available. But if the council has concerns about a particular item those we could note those and we could not actually spend that funding yet so I've heard and saw some of the comments with some concerns about that request and so we don't have to necessarily solve that tonight And then last, the community funding which is always a hot topic around the budget.

We've received several requests we have some other costs that we are sort of finding about or that we're getting ready to prepare and bring to the council so it's not funded as a separate line item but it's proposed to be included as part of the contingency budget What we anticipate is bringing an item back to council that would have sort of all the things we expect to have to pay for from the contingency budget, along with the community funding requests. And then the council would decide which ones to prioritize this year and which ones not to. And so in the budget it's not a separate, it's not funded as a separate line item but it's proposed to be included in the contingencies budget.

Next slide James. And so we went through this when we went through the presentation. We wanted to explain a little bit about after that first $11 million that goes to just paying for our police costs and our staff costs, and keeping the lights on literally paying utilities and things like that. You know how does the city budget? What priorities are helping guide the budget development?

I wanted to just kind of reiterate them because it answers, I think a lot of the questions when somebody says why did you fund this but not this? We started with these priorities and the first priority was catching up on deferred maintenance. Um, the we started this last year and we prioritize it again this year. Uh there were so many items that were deferred because that's the easy way to solve a budget crunch whenever there is a downturn in the economy you say we won't cut our trees this year. We won't maintain our parks to the level we used to maintain them will cancel sidewalk maintenance will cancel these things and so those always Historically in Ojai because there wasn't extra funding, those things were always deferred. There was always a reason not to get to them.

We've tried to turn that around and as a matter of fact I'm at the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority Academy and we were talking today about the fact that when you defer maintenance It means that the repairs eventually cost more because instead of maintaining things, you just have to replace things. And we've talked about that with the council but they also at this academy brought up another point that even though we knew it, we just haven't thought about as much lately. But the point that when maintenance gets deferred Accidents happen and people get hurt, and people damage their cars on potholes or people have tree branches fall onto their property. And then that leads to claims which costs more money than the maintenance would have cost.

And at the end of that, the city ends up paying out claims and the problem still isn't fixed. So there's a lot of reasons why we should not defer the maintenance. I think it's sort of the easy thing to always just get into that habit but we're trying really hard to reverse that habit. And one of the key ones is our paving. We have $3 million paving projects launching now, we're actually Planning right now that the actual paving will start immediately after the 4th of July, essentially July 5th.

Not immediately after the parade but on July 5th and so we'd start paving then on a $3 million project and this budget also includes starting the next round of paving in this fiscal year which we expect to be about another $2 million And I've said this before, but because we've deferred over the years, we're about $15 million behind in paving. And, um. The city had a 10 year plan to pave where at the end of the plan we had worse quality streets than we did at the start of it.

And that's the cycle that we're just finishing and so what we're working on right now and public works and I are planning A five year plan where at the end of the plan, we actually have higher quality streets. And in fact, uh, we're working with the analysts right now on it, but it looks like if we fund it the level that it's proposed in this budget that by the end of five years, we potentially would have the highest quality streets in the county And I would guess we're amongst the lowest at this point. There's a paving score, we're in the 50s right now close to falling under 50 with the five-year plan we're going to propose the council we'd be in the 80s on this pavement score out of 100 so So but again, it's just important to prioritize because when we want to do something else and we want to cut something from the streets, you typically don't have anybody speaking for the streets compared to maybe other organizations and things.

But it is something that if you don't do it, it impacts everybody in the community and leads to claims and things that then end up taking your budget and you end up spending more money in the long run. And so catching up on deferred maintenance was one of the top priorities that we focused on. Every maintenance related fund, we tried to increase to have better maintenance of all our facilities and I think people are seeing that in the real world too now. We just replaced some of the slides at the park that I think in the past would have had to have lasted a few more years and so next slide please James The three other big priorities we focused on was continuing to pay down, but more aggressively paying down our unfunded pension and OPEB liability.

So we just talked about that the city probably has about $15 million in deferred maintenance on streets, probably more than $15 million in deferred maintenance on streets. But we also have $10 million in unfunded pension and benefits liability. That impacts the city in a couple ways, we pay a large half a million dollars towards an unfunded pension liability this year and each year. And we pay another $400,000 towards the unfunding retiree medical liability. In our budget, and so almost a million dollars a year. And that's just to stay even. And so what we proposed in the budget for the second year in a row was pre-paying those two categories so that over time it's essentially like a mortgage is if you prepay it over time, you're paying less than the long run.

You're paying less quote unquote interest And so we focused on that in the budget. And so between streets and pension liability, that's about 25. That's the city's outstanding liability and it's about $25 million. So we've always said we're fortunate that we don't have loans and things like that here in Ojai but we do have Um, and then we're going to look at things that have been deferred that we need to start catching up on. And so those are two of the big priorities.

Uh, third was staffing. So the staffing costs, um, or we were proposing investing in staff. We talked about this previously, but one of the key things was realizing our public works crew members were getting paid less in the city than they are in the agencies that, uh, Sanitary district, et cetera. And so we proposed increasing their salaries to be competitive so that we can keep our maintenance team which is again it's part of that everything working together having more money to do maintenance and having good people with experience to be able to then do that.

So we have that and then we had a couple of key positions such as adding an associate planner position So that we have institutional knowledge in the planning department, which has been the hardest department to keep institutional knowledge over the years. So staffing was another priority and then fourth building reserves, which we have made a priority in the last couple of years and we did a really good job of it Council should be congratulated. We met the reserve goal for the first time ever, the City had a reserve goal for 20 years that it never meant and never really had a plan to meet.

But we've now done it and that was done by making hard decisions and tightening our belts And so we've done the hard work. But I think with the potential recession looming and some of these cost pressures and things, we're proposing in this year's budget to keep trying to build reserves. And the way that shows up in the budget is the cannabis transfer tax, the $270,000, or I'm sorry, the cannabis tax revenue, the 270 thousand dollars that we were expecting. We show that going immediately to the reserve to try to keep building the reserve.

And so that's also included in the budget for this year. Next slide, please James and so we've gone through the budget, the general fund budget pretty heavy. The CIP we had scheduled but we didn't really get to go through it but I'm going to try to make it very simple. But essentially we have a couple of slides here and one is talking about the projects that we did this year And those include things like the solar panel and micro grid installation at City Hall, the Kent Hall refurbishment and reopening for community meetings. The Pergola and City Hall trellis repairs, the start of electrifying, electrification of the city facilities, the paving program getting restarted. And as I mentioned starting probably next week is what we're expecting.

And then the ATP project continuing and other key recreation facility repairs. And so this year we, next slide please James. We were able to start doing more Measure C is allowing us to have funding to do some of these things. So we started to show these things And then some of them take some time to get started. The paving, for example had to be bid out and so that is starting next week but we are being very aggressive trying to catch up on all those items that we've been trying to get done. Next slide please James And so for next year, we're being even more aggressive. We actually are planning for a $7 million capital improvement project program for next year.

The big chunk of that though is the ATP which is estimated at about 3.4 million dollars um for uh in the budget and then paving is two million dollars so those two are the biggest highest priorities about 5.4 million of the seven million dollars but we are trying to also include money funding for emission reduction projects climate mitigation projects wildfire mitigation Parks, facilities, parking lot repaves and stormwater drainage projects. And so we are trying to make sure we're hitting all the priorities that the council's established over the years and with a fairly aggressive program of $7 million.

I said this previously but in the budget before Measure C, we would be fortunate if we had a million dollars to do projects And so with Measure C and especially now since it's built up for a couple of years, we actually have money to do some really significant projects. And we can actually afford to do those things. And then the last slide will show the projects that we have planned for this year. As I mentioned, paving $2 million ATP 3.2 million those are the two big ones but there's some others the Sarasota Park playground and equipment. We have 240,000 budgeted to start that project 745,000 to what is categorized as emission reduction but the biggest chunk is starting to convert to an electric trolley It's more of our, maybe should have been categorized as our climate related projects.

And then we have $125,000 in repairs. We've continued to make repairs to Kent Hall and that space and then the other buildings at the city hall campus. $200,000 budgeted towards painting and fixing the roof at the arcade which is a big project And then we have a lot of little miscellaneous projects that total about another $500,000. So all in $7.38 million capital improvement project budget and we're able to afford that thanks to the measure C and a couple of grants that we've gotten.

And so essentially it's an aggressive CIP plan where we start to catch up on some of those items that had been deferred like paving And so with that, we recommend that the council hold the public hearing, complete the budget review and adopt the budget in the salary schedule which implements the items that we've just discussed.

Thank you James much appreciated great progress it's really good to see questions from Council?

Yeah okay Is it is so are there any do you foresee any expenses when we finally work out having responsibility for Soule Park? It was that mentioned somewhere.

So there's a couple of things. We have the funding for the agreement built into the budget, noting that the agreement is still being reviewed by the Parks and Rec Commission and we still aren't sure what the Parks and Rec Commission is going to recommend on that. So we had funding for the agreement built in. The second thing was, we took the capital improvement projects to the Parks and Rec Commission and we asked them with the amount of funding that we have available what's the priority to you?

And so they did a really good job of working through their CIP for the next five years of what projects they think we should do each year. And they did put in funding to potentially build pickleball courts, but a couple years down the line I think in years three and four of their CIP, they had in years one and two it was Sir Zody Park and the Libbey Park bathrooms, I think where there are two top priorities And so there's funding in a couple different ways in the budget for potential pickleball projects. OK,