Adoption of Resolution Amending the Fiscal Year (FY) 2018-19 Budget; and Adoption of Resolution Approving Workforce Changes to the FY 2018-19 Mid-Year Budget Update in the Planning, Building and Transportation Department, Finance Department and Public Works Department; and Adoption of Resolution Amending the Alameda City Employees Association (ACEA) Salary Schedule Establishing the Classification of Combination Building Inspector I, Retitling the Combination Building Inspector Classification to Combination Building Inspector II, and Providing for Equity Adjustments to Increase the Base Pay of the Classifications of Senior Combination Building Inspector, Senior Building Code Compliance Officer, Senior Fire Code Compliance Officer, Combination Building Inspector II, and Fire/Building Code Compliance Officer Effective March 31, 2019. (Finance 2410)
It has adopted a resolution amending the fiscal year 2018 19 budget and adoption of resolution. Doing workforce changes. And then an adoption of a resolution amending the Alameda City Employees Association salary schedule. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Sorry. Good evening, Madam Mayor and council members. I'm Eleanor Dyer, finance director. And tonight we are going to discuss mid-year budget update for current fiscal year 1819. I'm going to be trying to be fairly brief, but I am going to ask to possibly hold your questions in at the end of which section we'll be able to have. We will do that. Questions and answers. Well, okay, quickly, what we're trying to accomplish today. One, provide you with an update of a general fund financial projections through the end of this fiscal year, review, pension and OPEB funding status, as well as discussed mid-year budget amendments, requests from not just general fund programs but other programs outside of the general fund action . In the end we would like to take is, as you know, there are three resolutions that we would like to ask you to approve if you agree and moving on with some of the highlights. So definitely we will start with General Fund and give you a little more details on some revenues. The revenues are still coming in fairly strong and again, part of it is our property tax are doing well, but our transfer tax is doing just as well, not as good as last year. It's actually reduced a little bit. But for this year's budget, it's actually 13% of our total budget for general fund. Last year it was only 10%. So a word of caution. It's fairly volatile revenue, more of a one time type of revenue. So when we consider how we plan on budgeting for it going forward, we just need to be cautious. Mid-Year operating expenditures request. As I mentioned, it's for general fund and other programs as well, including capital. And we'll look at CalPERS and OPEB assumptions on the revenue side. Overall, our current year revenue are projected to be at about $96 million. That includes the increase for this midyear update of about $5 million. As I mentioned before, the big part. Almost half of this $5 million is actually coming from transfer tax. And again, those were two particular parcels or two transactions that happened that amounted for those two as just kind of an update I looked at at the time , we even still currently we only have revenues for transfer tax received from the county through January. And if we compare same time period of this fiscal year, July through January versus last fiscal year, July through January of transfer tax, generally it declined in the transactions that happened more frequently, which is under $20,000. So we did have these two transactions at the higher value and we're increasing the budget for it, but they are slowing down a little. The other revenues that are presented here, a third of our budget is property taxes and anything related to property taxes, which are motor vehicle license fees as well, is a pass through tax increment from redevelopment agency. Sales tax is budgeted. AD Exactly same flat amount. You will see, however, that we do an increase on a different type of sales tax that's been recently approved as a transaction and use tax in everything else generally stayed the same. To focus a little bit on the property tax. Annual citywide growth for 1819 was 8% in prior years. Traditionally it's been in the past four years before then. It's about 6% growth. Now, this is a reminder. This is city wide. This is not general fund. General fund specific. The increase was about 7% in RDA or successor agency related areas were actually up 11%. The property tax, as I mentioned earlier, includes three different components. Our regular property tax that we collect the residual tax increment that comes in from redevelopment and then VLF. So the increase for 1819 budget is really a component of those three and the total of those is $1.1 million that we're projecting to increase the budget for the revenue compared to the mid-cycle update when it happened in June 2018 and the council back then approved at. As I mentioned, sales tax we're projecting to be flat for this year at $10.4 million. We're not projecting to make any changes at midyear for that revenue source. This particular slide is not the sales tax that we normally talk about, which is 1%. Brad Burns This is a transaction and use tax that was approved by the voters in November of 2018 and it will be effective April one. It's a little bit challenging to estimate what the revenue would be from this particular tax. Reason is it's applied differently than a sales tax, even though it's collected. At the same time, the application is a little different. For example, 1% Bradley Burns is based on the origin of the transaction, where transaction and use tax is based on where the goods are received. A good example would be cars. You will go and buy the car in a different city, for example, and you will pay the transaction and use tax that is applicable to Alameda and the city will receive that particular tax will receive it. For example, if someone comes in from out of town and decides to buy some groceries at the store, they will regardless where they live, they will pay it here. Bradley Burns as well as transaction and use tax. We decided to be a little bit more conservative in increasing the budget for 1819 for the transaction use tax and only estimating $100,000 for the period from April to June, particularly because we expect some of the vendors are going to be taking a little bit of time to figure out that they still have to collect it, even though the state will reach out and make sure provide them with the letter saying this is the new tax. Traditionally, it's been a little bit, at least from the surveys that we've heard. Other organizations, it will take time to adjust. On top of that, we don't know because we have such a large base for business to business transactions, including our consultants. We could not necessarily precisely estimate if the transaction, the use tax will be collected on those transactions again, because it's applied a little bit different and we don't necessarily know for our sales tax producers business to business if that is going to be an origin or is an actual destination here in Alameda. On a transfer tax. We kind of talked about it a little bit already. Again, we're increasing it for the two transactions that happened. And you will see that originally mid-cycle year, a little under a year ago, we've adopted it at $10.3 million. We're projecting currently 12 and a half million dollars. It's still, as I mentioned before, generates significant revenue. 13% of our budget is transfer tax. However, again, word of caution, it is a volatile revenue and more of a one time type of revenue. Program revenue adjustments. These are more specific to each individual departments that are being collected through fees or specific activities that are done by the departments. There's a few. Fire department, mutual aid. Mutual aid is your car fires where we actually send out our staff to go and assist. We are expecting a department is expecting a little over half a million dollars in reimbursements. That includes staffing, services and supplies as well as usage of some of the vehicles that they had to take out of that amount. You will also see that it's actually is offset by the overtime that they had to use in order to perform that work. Additional revenue is ambulance related fees. We're seeing that the trend, how much we've been receiving is a little higher as well as ground emergency medical transportation that's going up. Total for those to 295,000. And the other net that's listed in the attachment that actually provides a detail, but it's really is reduction in the false alarm fees for fire, $85,000, an increase of approximately $85,000 for the fire prevention revenues. So the net effect is zero, but one is up and one is down on a police. Same thing. Mutual aid. We had to send the staff over to, I believe it was Sonoma where they assisted. I believe it was also on the news. Same thing. We're increasing the revenue the department already received full amount and we do know that dollar amount, which is $85,000. One of the bigger items that we're reducing is the animal license fees. Since fees primarily we've budgeted a full amount of 150. We're not expecting to collect really anything in 1819, partially due to the staffing issues that we've had to try and get somebody on board to actually start up the program. We are expecting at this point the department has hired somebody and the person has been working on this program for quite a while and expecting to send out to Billings and actually realize the revenues for next year. There were some other miscellaneous revenue changes in the fire and police department related to overtime reimbursements and some fingerprinting fees that for net in total were about $8,000 in departmental revenues between city clerk and finance are up about 18,000. This is just a quick summary. What we budgeted in June of 18 is $5.9 million with the current revenues updates for program revenue. Specifically, we're expecting about 6.7 million. This provides you this slide, provide your full recap of just the revenues. Again, property taxes going up, transfer tax transaction, use tax franchise fees. I did not have a separate slide on it, but really reality of that is our cable is trending down mainly. You probably know that a lot of people switching from, let's say, watching cable to Hulu and things like that, and therefore we're not getting as much in terms of franchise fees. It also includes a small portion for the PGE and the bankruptcy. We receive couple of sources of revenues from PGE in one as utility user tax, which is a true pass through. So we do not expect any changes in that because all they do is they collect and disburse it to us with a franchise fees. That's one of the sources that is potential that in a bankruptcy would be a claim and therefore we may not receive it. So we're reducing it just as an estimate of $50,000 for that transfer in. You're all aware we've built our EOC in the fire station three. We had an open house for those. The construction is complete and what we are seeing is that general fund put up some money to build those particular projects and we believe we're going to be about $241,000 that we've contributed more than needed, and therefore, it's going to be returned back to the general fund purposes. So that's revenue. So before going into the expenditures, are there any questions related to the revenues? I had a question and the question. I forgot. It. So sorry. Okay. Let's see here. We can all hold that. That's fine. We'll come back to it if necessary. For the time being, I'm just going to move on. On to the expenditures. Oops. Oh, yes. The question was, you had three components to the property taxes. You had the one called the ordinary. Then you had the. And VLF. The that the VLF the VLF is is that the trade that for the VLF that we gave up, we were getting property taxes back. So that's correct. So sometime ago and I want to say in early 2000, the state took away motor vehicle fees from the cities, but instead they put them in as a property tax. So that now grows with the property tax. That increases and we collect that. Okay. So it's not VLF property tax per se. It's it's property tax actual. Yes. But VLF is kind of the place we use to explain it. Okay, great. Thank you. Any expenditures? As you will see, the biggest components is going to be public safety, police and fire. But what you also see in here was showing a trend of four years, 15, 16, 16, 17 is fairly flat. Reality is, 16, 17 actually had about $3 million in vacancy savings or labor savings. So if we were to put it in a budgetary terms, that number would have been higher. But in the actual terms, it ended up being somewhat flat compared to 15, 16, 17, 18 has a huge jump. Part of the jump is actually something I want to focus on since we put in quite a bit of money for one time type of expenditures which were capital, were put in money for jeans, 20 park license plate readers. Our ERP project, which is the financial system, so was money a one time money using a one time sources that we've invested in our infrastructure and other capital items? The big component you will see is also pension and OPEB reserve. What we call it overall from general fund would put up $16 million in 1718 and there was an accumulation of several years of money. With the Council's policy that was adopted, we'll put in 16 million in total between direct down payment with CalPERS, as well as putting some money into our OPEB and Pension 115 trust, which is in the revocable trust for those specific purposes. I can tell you that with direct paydown with CalPERS, it saved us in this current year, 18, 19, a little over $1,000,000 in our PERS payments. So thanks to the policy that Council adopted and putting up and making an effort to actually pay down those liabilities, we are realizing the savings already. Okay. So a little bit of an update on the CalPERS pension and funding status. You may have seen this last year somewhat similar. I actually included three years worth or ten years of CalPERS to show where the funding levels were and where we are now and shows both the safety plan as well as your miscellaneous plans. The safety plan is obviously the biggest issue for us for General Fund. It's all funded by General Fund. And as you can see, in 2007, we actually had in that particular plan 91% of assets to fund the full liability. In a five year period, it dropped to 73%. And then currently, this is the most current valuation we have from CalPERS, where at 59%, the state average is actually 65%, actually 69%. So we're 10% below what the overall state average for just the safety plans is. One of the reasons why is in our safety plans, we actually have more retirees than we actually have active participants. So that is driving our unfunded liability much lower compared to other agencies in California. Kate, miscellaneous plan, as you will see, ten years ago was actually overfunded. We were at 105% and then it dropped down to 89 and then 73. The average for miscellaneous plan across the entire state is 72%. So we actually within that area combined safety miscellaneous over just a five year period for unfunded liability, it actually has gone up $142 million. So if you compare the liability of 2012 versus 20 1417, it went up $142 million. I'll have a question on that, but it's fine. The general fund component and you will see on the slide we've presented is unfunded liability is 201 million. It's 100% on the safety and it's only a third of the miscellaneous. We have other programs that are outside of general fund, which also include sewer and AMP that contribute and pay for their employees. So what you see here outside of General Fund Box is city wide. General Fund specifically relates to just the general fund component. One of the things I just want to mention is and we've said that before, we did not makes any changes necessarily to our process. Part of the reason why we seen this unfunded liability is because CalPERS is changing their policies and changing their assumptions. We've always paid the bills that we paid. The CalPERS presented to us. They all been paid. But because of those changes, that's what's going on with our unfunded liabilities. And this is really for the services of employees that already happened in the past. Just as a reminder on pension and funding policy. So the policy is we have a couple of close plans. So anything unused, we froze it at 1516 balances. And anything that we do not actually spend on those pensioners goes into payment of pension. The other big component is the general fund. So 50% of available balance from a prior year. We always look at it in hindsight in a way in arrears above the 25% set reserve and was set by council. We actually committed to pension and OPEB. As you can see in prior years. We put in quite a lot of money in June of 2018. We've estimated what we thought we will be putting in for 1819 year, which was six point close to $8 million. Today we're actually presenting it to you and we're saying the actual number based on 1718 actuals is $7.9 billion. So we've done better. Partially, again, because we had either unspent services and supplies or vacancies savings that now drop to the bottom line and create a difference. In one of the attachments we presented, we are projecting our 1819 fund balance and based on that front balance, we believe it will be about three and a half million dollars that we may be able to contribute towards pension and OPEB in the 1920 year, but we won't actually appropriate those funds until the audit is completed for 1819 and then we will bring it back to council likely at mid-year again. Councilmember member previously have asked a number of times to include the account balances in both the pension and OPEB. And so this slide is actually presenting what has happened. It does not include current year appropriate current appropriation that we're asking you to approve. So as I've mentioned, direct pay down to CalPERS last year was $10.7 million. We've also contributed money into Pars, which is the one six and 115 trust. It has more money in total. The balance in that account, which includes employee contributions, is $15.6 million as of January 31st. That's the most current information we had available at the time of publishing. We have received some in the February statements and now at $16 million. Big drop was actually in October, November timeframe when the market went down. But that's the balances as of right now. And the total that the city contributed outside of the requirements by the mill use was $17 million, over $17 million. Thank you. Okay. So this is a quick recap of general fund expenditures and what we're asking council to approve. I do see that there's an error on this slide for a grand total amount. So it's $5.5 million. It's actually $10 million. That's over ten you got. So economic development, we are requesting $88,000. This amount was actually a blue approved last year in March of 2018 to allocate for homeless type of programs. The staff finally got all the programs going and now ready for payment and contracts to encumber the funds. And so we have to reappropriate those monies. Fire department net total for all the expenditures, $476,000. Again, this includes the overtime of about $318,000 for all the mutual aid. And then there's also an additional money for services and supplies that they are experiencing increases in, which includes utilities for the city clerk. That's one big amount. We have an April 9th special election. The dollar amount from the county actually ranged all the way to $740,000 and the low part was 580. What kind of went with a mid level? So we'll see what the actual number is going to come in. You'll also see that we are putting in some capital projects contributions, about $1,000,000 for that and there are several projects there we are asking to fund there. Again, one time type of money and a large component is the pension OPEB reserve contribution of $7.9 million out of the general fund. With that, I am going to take questions on expenditures and pension OPEB. As I know, Councilmember Vella had one to ask something. It's going back to page 12 of the slide on the CalPERS pension funding status. Lina, I mean, obviously you made the comment about the safety split in terms of the retirees versus the actives. What's the impact of the pepper new hires on that? Actually, as of right now in terms of safety overall. So and that includes police and fire together. We only have 25 participants that are pepper employees, so we only have 25 and we have 150 actives. So our active is 175, but we have 260 retirees. Can you give those numbers again? You said we have 25 peprah. Yes. That's the new tier. Yes. For safety, 150 classic. One for the classic. Okay. And 260 retirees. So the 175 are supporting the 260? That's correct. And how many vacancies do we have? Well, not really supporting. I am actually not aware to say how many we have specifically in each department. So I, I do not know that information right off the top of my head. We do have some department heads here that maybe will be able to assist us with that and perhaps our H.R. director. But I'm not sure if we were per se prepared for that. Thank you. Our customers is currently in fire. We have 11 sworn vacancies and one civilian vacancy. And it can fluctuate from day to day. But I think employees were at about ten vacancies. Thank you. One of the things I do want to mention, though, with the unfunded liability component for prior service, not the normal cost, which is for the current employees that are currently here working, but for the ones that are already retired. CalPERS got pretty smart over the years and so instead of actually charging it as a percentage of payroll that used to happen, they now provide a flat dollar amount. So it doesn't really matter now how many active positions we have filled. They just provide us with a dollar amount and say you need to pay it regardless. How many people are actually filling current positions? But we also only have 150 classic employees remaining in that in that division. Correct out of 175. Councilmember Desai. Councilmember Vela, are you finished? Oh, I'm sorry, I. I didn't mean to cut you off where you. So, I mean. I was just saying that we only have 150 classics kind of remaining. It's not out of 175 would be out of out of whatever plus the vacancies. Well, no, the CalPERS actually looks at it as. Only as. It would have been two years ago, because the valuation is of 2017. CalPERS is always behind. Mm hmm. So they're actually looking from two years ago, and I'm not sure what the vacancy rate would have been back then. Okay. Yeah. So then Councilmember Desai. So two points on this chart. I think the thing that really concerns me is and I heard your explanation as to what's driving the miscellaneous the increase in the read portion of the of the bar chart there, particularly for miscellaneous 2017. So I heard your explanation. I think it's it is still concerning because, you know, when you look at the miscellaneous retirement formula, I mean, is it still 2.0 at 55 or. Something for the classic? Yeah. Okay. And then and with the pepper, I believe it's 2% and 62. Yeah. So the retirement formula, I mean, from if you're, you know, penny pinching type of person, you like that retirement formula. So to see such a favorable retirement formula still resulting in an increase in the and the read portion of that bar chart, that's concerning. I mean, on the flip side, that's why I understand why, you know, the read portion on the public safety, you know, in my opinion, the retirement formula is a challenge. So that that certainly explains, you know, 50, 73% number of 59% number that you're seeing. But but it is concerning to see the red increasing edging up there on the miscellaneous. I hear that it's you know, we're at the we're at the state average or slightly above the state average of 72. It's still is because the underlying formula is from a penny pinchers perspective, the underlying retirement formula is favorable. The second point that I want to raise is, you know. Seems as though we now have a policy where some portion of the of the reserve above 25% is dedicated to OPEB and and retirement. I certainly want to find out a little bit more about that, because if I'm doing my math, you know, part of what's driving the reserve conceivably could be holding down expenses on on the vacancy side. Right. So to the extent that you have revenues coming in, but you're holding down expenses on the expenditure shy because you're not filling vacancies, well then that's going to. Wouldn't that drive up the reserves mathematically so. It would I wouldn't consider them as as holding. To be perfectly honest, I think every single department is trying to hire aggressively. Yeah. But but to the extent that they're not hiring. The reality is there is there is not actual dollars being expended. So that mathematically means that the reserve the revenue side is going to be more than the than the expenditure side. And so it's a one time, one time revenue, if you choose, because it may not repeat itself again in the next year. Year by year in, year out, certain departments I think have had unfilled positions and so, so on the expenditure. So I think you get where I'm getting at. And so if the formula then for what to do with what's, what is so-called excess reserve is then being. So there's a certain concerns there that I think we should probably talk about and certainly revisit the the math formula that results in how we divvy up the excess reserve beyond 25%. That's that's my sense, just so. Thanks. Q I'm Counselor Vice Mayor Knox White. Sorry, I honestly didn't follow. I understand that you're. You have I. Understand the math you're doing. I'm not understanding why it's an issue. It's an issue because you have revenues coming in and oh. I didn't know whether this was the time to ask questions of you, but you're asking of councilmember. From what I from what I'm looking at. You have revenues coming in, which is all good. And you also have on the expenditure side, you have staff people for whom you are, you have expenses right in their actual expenses because we're cutting people checks and they're, you know, and which is good, obviously. And we also have other expenses, not non staff related expenses. But by the same token, on the expense side, we also have all these unfilled positions. So to the extent that you have unfilled positions, you're not expending as much as perhaps you should because because the fire department is down ten, police department is down ten. So the revenue side is here and the and the and the expenditure side is here and that results in a surplus. So then the formula of the surplus then is to say some portion of that surplus then goes circles back into as into the OPEB trust. But that surplus that some portion of that surplus would not be there had we been filling the positions. So that's, that's what I'm getting at. So it might be a readjustment to the formula. That's all I'm getting at. So I'm going to chime in because I was one of the people that brought this suggestion to the council and they adopted it. And it came from attending a League of California Cities meeting that was focused on helping cities pay down their open and CalPERS liabilities. And one of the things we looked at and again, everything's relative. We've been in some strong years and so we looked at our budget and we had a lot of surplus. And I want to say it was my colleague Frank Materazzi who said, Why are we just sitting on all this surplus? But of course you want you want a safety net and you have to have your rainy day fund. But we established that 25% was a pretty good reserve. And then anything above that and sometimes it's that one time windfall from a, you know, a large property transaction. I get what you're saying, Councilmember Desai, that some of it's there because we didn't spend all the money allocated. But the point being we never can afford to lose track of the fact that we've got this growing, looming CalPERS and OPEB liability that we I, you know, feel we have a moral obligation to pay our retirees. As you know, we've contracted with them. But more seriously, when we come to the lean years and I just think we have to expect that we will hit a recession at some point there. So right now, as Ms.. Adair pointed out, we are saving on by paying down in advance our CalPERS balance. We have saved up to $1,000,000 a year. And I forget when you look over the seven. Over time. It's pretty impressive what we've saved. So that's good. But also the trust fund is important because the CalPERS money we pay directly to CalPERS, the trust fund we put in into that lockbox, but it's there when we might come to that time when our city can't afford to pay the bill that comes due for CalPERS. So we've got that rainy day fund. So I just think I think we sock it away. Well, first of all, it's a council policy because we voted on it. But I think we just keep socking away that percentage as much as we can. And and then, you know, we're prepared better prepared for that rainy day at the same time. And I've used this analogy, you can't dig out of a hole with a shovel, you know, on the one side while you're shoveling the dirt back in on the other, which just means we have to be extremely careful about whenever we're adding to that OPEB liability. But that was they just didn't see that. I'm just having money sitting in a reserve, about 25% made sense. So let me try to frame this. Why I think it's important as fast as possible to on the expenditure side, to have the right expenditures, because if you don't have the right expenditures reflecting the amount of staffing that you need, what you're saying, what you're doing is you're shortchanging the current residents from the amount of services that they need. With regard to the staffing, in an effort to put the revenues of the reserves that's generated by by the two in an effort to put the reserves towards, you know, post-employment things which you understand, understandably you have to do, but we can't systematically keep under under serving the residents. So it's getting late right now. And I think we're just rate I'm just raising concepts and I think we will flush it. Out again, immature in the form of it and miss it as well in just a minute. But I just want to say, I, I, I'm, I'm taken aback by the characterization of shortchanging our residents. Neither the police chief nor the fire chief is saying, I'm not going to hire this many more firefighters because I want a budget savings. And and we know that will go to pay down CalPERS debt year after year. They try to fill their open positions. And what happens I know, you know, talking to the police chief and fire that they've got folks coming through the academy, folks training, that's good. They come on board. But then there's these retirees that, you know, keep keep going out the door. So, Miss Vella, were you going to speak to that? I would. So my questions were really just to understand, because she had said that we have more retirees than we do actives. And to just understand that breakdown, it wasn't to suggest that essentially we're keeping our expenditures artificially low by holding open vacancies. I don't think that that's happening at all. And I think when you look at the number of vacancies that we're talking about, it's a very small percentage and they're in two departments that have a very hard time recruiting because they also have to put people through academy and they have to do background checks. It's it's it's very involved process. So it's not like you can just hire somebody off the street tomorrow and say, okay, you're a police officer or firefighter now. But, but I did you know, I do kind of want to go back to the the chart that we talked about that's on the screen. Essentially, what you're saying is that the big spikes have come from the new discount rates that CalPERS have put out because they've gotten smart about how they're billing us, essentially. And they're they're billing us. It's that flat rate that they're giving us. And it has nothing to do with the vacancies or the number of held over positions or anything. No. And partially because of they've changed their assumptions, as I mentioned, which includes discount rate. It includes how long people live. It includes all the losses that they, you know. Yes. Passing. Now, that happened in the last recession. With that, they now figure it out. Well, maybe they shouldn't invest in certain type of, you know, investments that they make. So as part of all of those changes and also over the time period that they end up amortizing their losses, their assumption changes in terms of demographics and things like that. They've shortened them partially because they're trying to be fiduciary responsible and saying in order for us to pay all of these retirees that are here, we really need to get that money, which makes an impact on all the cities or agencies that are participating with CalPERS. And in two, part of the change was because they weren't recovering as much as they were actuarially planning through percentage of payroll. They instead went in and said, okay, we know we need this number. For this year. Pay it. And that's a flat amount from starting about two years ago. And so the city has to pay a flat amount regardless how many employees you have. And unfortunately, that amount is going to continue to grow for us. Councilmember de Sok was not here last year when we did have a presentation of a bell curve when it goes to 2031, I believe, and it continues to rise. And at that point in time, we said even in a five year period between what we have paid, if we froze what we said we were going to pay CalPERS for general fund alone, an additional amount over a five year period was $35 million just within five years. So for us, that is the full wall of debt that we are trying to deal with and the cash flow that we have to assume and cover in. However, whether it's five years or 20 years in this case, in pay for those obligations and still maintain the ability for us to provide services. And so with the prepayment, we're trying to shave off that top of that bell curve so that we don't have to cut it as much in as many services. It may be possible, I don't know. I cannot tell you going 15, ten years from now what it's going to happen. But our goal is to not have that occurred. So we do have a budget and a part of it is to drive those pension costs down. And I'm just going to make a little this is a commercial to my colleagues that I and this is something I've also gotten from League of California Cities. It's important for us as council members to monitor what CalPERS is doing. They have monthly board meetings in Sacramento and where, for instance, they will decide things like what mix of types of investments are in the CalPERS portfolio. They've traditionally been very conservative and maybe they need to move away a little from that. Obviously, none of us are CalPERS board members, but, you know, people can show up, they can speak. And then last year I attended this is the first time CalPERS did a session for elected officials at its annual conference. And I was down in the desert somewhere for that. But this year the conference is in Oakland. So when we find out when I'll find out what the date is, and I would just encourage folks to show up for the the session for elected officials, because we need a better understanding of all the different ways that other cities. We're doing a lot of good things, but you can always learn what other cities are doing too. So other questions, concerns, discussion. Councilmember Day So I just want. To quickly say I didn't mean to say that the department heads are holding it down. I mean, that that's I mean, I don't know how to elegantly say it at this hour. So I just want to make sure to say that I'm not saying that. But what I am saying, though, the effect of that, though, is something to, you know, for us to really think about. It's not done on purpose. But but the effect of it is, is we have to review that. Thank you, Councilmember Odie. I'll just add my $0.02 because I was here when we adopted that policy. And I think the mayor's recollection is pretty accurate. I mean, we do get I think what Ms.. Bello was trying to mention is that, you know, as we go forward, we're going to have more employees on Peprah than we are on classics. So just by the nature of that and the lower benefits that and over time we are going to see that bell curve eventually drop. And I thought we were pretty prudent when we decided if we had an excessive amount of we use that word, excessive amount of reserves that rather than just sit there, we would actually put it to work. And by putting it to work, we've saved the million dollars a year in purrs. And we've also, you know, put it aside that when we do have a shortfall or we have an economic downturn, you know, we're able to say we can pull from this to pay some of our liability instead of cutting officers on the street or closing a fire station or any of those those options, which just are not very palatable to us. And, you know, one thing I have noticed, and I think this is the fifth year, you know, our revenues always seem to be underestimated and our expenses seem to be overestimated. So that's just a comment. Well, it's called being conservative, which is the way I would want it. But I prefer to be accurate. I mean, because I mean, I just prefer to be more accurate if we can get that way. You know what? You raise Mary Knox ways. No, no, no, no. I have no more comments on the here. 50% of 24 over 25% reserve fire operations. The mutual aid. For some reason, I thought when we go and do work for the state that is reimbursed. Sorry. This is just new guy on the council. So this $318,000 of mutual aid overtime incurred during the car and campfires, isn't that something we get reimbursed for? These are changing that because we won't get reimbursed until next fiscal year or. We are getting reimbursed hands were recognizing the revenue from mutual aid for fire. And if you look on the revenue side, we're bringing in over half a million dollars for fire specifically and $85,000 for PD in those reimbursements from the state. But not all of those reimbursements are all overtime. It includes other components to it, which includes the equipment that they take with them. Correct. So part of that 550 figure is including the overtime of the personnel that we do send. It includes vehicle charges on the vehicles, our own city vehicles that we send, and also our city's overhead rate, which is on top of that. Some reason I'm having a hard time finding the 550 in the staff report. Sorry. Okay. 12:30 a.m.. Okay. The first exhibit, if you want to just look at the numbers, the very first exhibit for the fire department. Under program revenues, you will see 550,000 and corresponding expense increase of 318. 318 is your overtime side of it. It's just i think it's prudent to actually give the department their share of overtime that they've incurred. Otherwise it will put them over budget, which is not fair because they actually are bringing in the revenue. That makes complete sense. Thank you. Just as a quick comment on CalPERS, I do want to mention that in 1718 there were 195 agencies. Obviously, Alameda was one of them that made additional contributions to CalPERS above and beyond. What were the normal required contributions for the year? And the total of those amounts across the entire state were $538 million that was contributed just to pay down those liabilities. This is a problem, obviously, across the state. It's not just Alameda, but those are the numbers that are coming out directly from CalPERS. Um, I, I think I've said I need to say about CalPERS, just that I really do want to urge colleagues to, you know, let's look at our budget through very fiscally conservative eyes, because I just feel that we're going to run into a recession not that far away and we've already got liability. That's that's unfunded. But I want to hearken back to something we talked about earlier. It was probably yesterday now, but on the the climate emergency. And so one of the things that this came up this Saturday, last Saturday, when we did our council priority setting workshop, is that I really want to see every vehicle that the city looks at purchasing for our fleet. I know there's a policy, but I want to see every decision looked at that, you know, should this be an EV. And I, I think that we just make assumptions that we have to replace, like with like but for instance, at the last council meeting, we approved a new position for fire and we approved $75,000 for a vehicle. For a. Deputy fire or the fire marshal or a deputy division chief who's going to have the fire marshal. So that's not a fire truck. It's a vehicle that this inspector or the head of this division will get around in. I don't see any reason that that couldn't be an EV because we can't declare climate emergencies on the one hand and then keep buying fossil fuel vehicles without even considering alternatives. Something for council to consider. Other comments? Questions. Otherwise. Do we want to entertain some resolutions? I'm sorry. Were you finished? Not yet. I was going. To say, you just stopped. You stopped to take our questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On that section. So this is a quick recap of the general fund. What you see in front of you in terms of adopted budget, and this is for people that prefer numbers over graphs. The graph is going to come next. We have an adopted budget adopted in June of 2018 and the operations were about $8,000. Pretty much breakeven for the year. We did make some adjustment during the year. So between July and now, council made approvals for several items, which is about $2.9 million. And then you see the mid-year column, which is what we're asking you to approve today. With all of those together, mid-year projection is what we are actually expecting through the end of the fiscal year. One of the things we try to do is pull out the one time unusual events. One of them is obviously the transfer tax from the just the two properties that were mentioned as well as pension and OPEB reserve. Those are using existing money from prior year. In this particular case, $7.9 million. And I really didn't want to show it as net impact for the year with just that amount because it's really it's not a true operations for the general fund. And so with the two operations right now, excluding that particular one time, we are under by $174,000. However, we have tried to look at to add vacancies for general fund departments, and we believe that by the end of the year we will have sufficient vacancies and maybe even more to even cover that particular deficit at this point. That's a good thing, right? Councilmember Desai So just to go back, the $7.9 million is a one time amount of that results via the the formula that was agreed upon. That's correct. Okay. All right. Each. So here's a graphic presentation of exactly what you just seen on prior slide. It shows your revenues, including one time revenues and outside of one time revenues. Same thing with expenditures. And what we're seeing is obviously we're breaking at 174, 174,000. Again, we expect to make up that number by the end of the year with the vacancy savings. That's why I say that. It's a graph that uses colors I can't see. Oh, it's fine. I can interpret it, but. Huh. For. For future graphs. The more you can use primary colors, the better. They're ugly. And. But red and green are primary colors. Okay, but are they? I think I guess it depends on the red in the green, but the yellow, blue, red. Okay. Okay, we'll look into that. Yeah. Okay. Are there any questions on the general fund projection for the year? No hearing, then move on. Okay. So at this point, we're going to talk about other programs. So outside of the general fund and they're more concise and to go over those rent stabilization well familiar program. Originally, when we put together a budget for it, as you know, we do a two year budget. The expectation was that we would be collecting $120 fee as we did in year one. However, the council adopted in the year or two, which is 1819, to collect it at $106, the revenue was never adjusted and we're just adjusting it now, but it lowers it by over half a million dollars. And the question was but was wasn't that based on a year's worth of data that. That. School showed because we needed to make the the fee commensurate with the cost of administering the program? That's correct. But our budgeted revenues were still showing higher than we would have brought in fiscal lease revenues. Originally, department did not expect or did not expect any lease revenues. This is the area of Alameda landing. And the expectation was that we were going to turn all of the buildings that are out there and warehouses over to a developer. That did not happen. We're close to that, but we're still receiving some of the lease revenues. And so the department is showing a budget that that's coming in on. Transportation Services received the grant. So they are budgeting for the grand community development. This is your building planning permits. They're experiencing higher revenue so far and so they're increasing those revenues. And then we have several other funds where we actually asking for expenditures for the Tidelands, for internal boat launch. There are some portions of that. Projects are within Tidelands areas and therefore some of the improvements that are making, we're asking Tidelands to pay for it. Park Street Corridor had that particular project had a little bit of a shortfall. And so we asking general fund sorry, not general fund gas tax to contribute to to cover that shortfall. We're showing the closed pension funds. We originally projected a certain amount and budgeted that will be left over. We actually experiencing a little bit more money because we unfortunately have some pensioners that are passing away. And so we appropriating those funds and again those are going towards pensions. We have a few internal service fund programs that we are asking for, changes in expenditures in equipment replacement, fire battalion chief vehicle that was unfortunately in the accident and we have to replace that. The second item for police taser maintenance contract in fiscal year 15, we actually moved the money to pay for it, but we omitted the appropriation for that particular contract. And so we're just correcting an error with the employment insurance where unemployment insurance we're seeing a rise in the claim payments and with h.r. Departments request because of those claims going up, we asking to increase the budget for that cable franchise equipment replacement. Again, we're dropping franchise revenue and this is specific to the 2006. It's called abbreviated as difficult act where we receive a portion of franchise fee specifically for an equipment. And as I mentioned earlier, the cable franchise revenues dropping on the general fund side. It's also dropping on the franchise side here for that particular replacement. And then we need to appropriate additional moneys for chamber timing system installation, which you all use here fairly regularly on a general liability. The Department of Risk Management is experiencing or been told that they will not receive an equity distribution for the general liability component of 60,000. Can you explain what that means? The way it was explained to me actually was during the time of the recession, the risk pool that the city's participating in for general liability. What they did is when we had to pay for our participation in their and what they did is they if they had a lot of equity, they distributed it to the cities to kind of assist with the payments to to pay for the insurance. This is the first year that they are looking at their own reserves and saying that they would like to rebuild some of their reserve, some of their equity, and therefore they are not doing that distribution. They use. Microphones. The city manager, an actuary to assist them in all of these insurance pools. Okay. Thank you. The next part is pension stabilization fund. This is where we actually make the disbursement to either CalPERS or pay the one through the 115 trust, which is with pass total would be $7.7 million. So all the reason why it's different is in here, it's actually combines everything together, general fund as well as are closed pension funds. And we're setting aside for OPEB payment half a million dollars. We have several projects. As I mentioned earlier, you've seen the some of the funds that are contributing towards projects. General Fund. Tidelands. Gas tax. So this particular slide actually shows where the monies will be spend in the internal boat launch facility specifically. We actually received a grant of almost $1.5 million. And so we're recognizing the grant as well as appropriating the money. Same thing for the climate change. It's a grant from Caltrans where recognizing the grant and also establishing the expenditures for that. And then we have two projects that are being funded by the general fund money, Shoreline Park, pathway, lighting replacement. Those are the projects that are ready to go. But we're short on funding and this is a funding that might be available at one time, money for one time type of expense. Same thing with the Alameda Point Gym for the modular restrooms. Quick question on the might of the restroom. At the gym, it sounds like a great idea is just the well, it's a capital fund. So is that just for supplying the facility? Because who takes care of the maintenance and repair and that sort of thing is that. Captain? I see Ms. Wooldridge coming up. To help people. That's just the capital cost and all maintenance would continue to be would be under recreation and parks department. Okay. So they because they've been maintaining the restrooms in the gym up until now, but they're not going to be used because they're not ADA accessible. And all that. These are in addition to. These are because to supplement their they're there to supplement. We have tournaments at the gym that are sometimes upwards of a thousand people a day. And the groups have to rent portable, portable toilets. So you have a thousand people using a whole bank of portable toilets almost every weekend during the busy season, throughout the the the fall through spring for the most part. So this has been an ongoing need and this was a a solution rather than taking on the expense of trying to renovate within the building and everything that that opens up. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Good explanation. Thank you. Are we still talking about expenditures? Whatever you like. Councilmember Odie. Okay. Sorry. I mean, there's one thing that's come up recently that we don't have a line item for. And I mean, it'd be great if we can do it tonight. If we had to do it at another meeting, that would be great. And that's making sure that the support that our public works and our safety people provide at parades and festivals. So I know there was a meeting yesterday with the police chief, among others, and I think that was one of his suggestions. So I'd like to see if there's a way we can do that. Vice spirit knocks. Knox. I guess it's a question here is I know the recommendation is to approve these changes if we have other things we'd like to talk about. And I'm thinking we have an item after this that's talking about installing something in the city that the city probably should. Is there a place? What is the process for somebody who's never come through this for me to. Or for somebody here to say, hey, you know what? Breast breastfeeding stations are $10,000 a pop. We have none anywhere in the city, but we have probably at least five or six buildings that need them, fire stations, etc.. Well, usually you would as a group make those suggestions. And if we need to incorporate them, for example, into our budget because we're so close to the two year budget at this point, we can do that. You can also request the staff to bring it as a separate item sooner, and that would be part of analysis in preparing a staff report. And if it's an adjustment that's needed for the budget. It's going to be a just a resolution that's going to be part of that particular report. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions at this time? Are there any other questions before we move on? Not right now. Okay. So the next slide is actually going to. Be I'm sorry, I can't remember, Bill. Sorry. I do hope to notes. Okay. I do have one question, which is the pool which we had talked about at previous meetings and gave directions on specifically for, um, just to cover whatever maintenance we need before May 31st. Is that noted in here or is that going to be a separate change that we do later on in the next budget? This has not been included in the mid-year budget at this point or by the time we have this report completed. There was no specific dollar amount and no specifics to that particular item. So it wasn't included. It would be depends on what the wish, I guess, of council and what the available information is either would be brought in as a separate item or will be included likely because it has to happen before June 30th would be a separate item that would be brought up. I would defer to the Parks director to let me know if that's true. Okay. Yeah. The cost is so unknown at this point that that that was the primary driver of we did why we didn't include it. And so that would come back as its own separate item for an allocation. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. I was married, actually. Oh, no, you were just me. Okay. Replacement. This actually concludes the a non general fund programs information. And I'm going to ask our retired director to come in and actually talk about workforce changes. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Mayor. City council members Nancy Brownstein or H.R. director? I'm going to. Very briefly. Talk about some of the workforce changes that are being recommended as part of this mid-year update. We are requesting two new positions, a requesting to add a permit. Technician three Right now at the permit counter, there's such a high volume that we're pulling planners to provide that support, and we'd like to hire somebody on a limited, short term basis and be able to put the planners back to planning. And then we've also asking to add a senior management analyst in finance. This position would be a non accounting analytical position that would do budgeting, budget monitoring, cost allocation policies and special projects that need to get done in that department. Question Ms.. Oh, I'm sorry. QUESTION For you, Mr. Bernstein or maybe for Mr. Thomas. Why is the permit technician position just a two year term? You can answer it. Permits are up. Yeah. So we're very busy the counter. But since we're completely fee based, you know, we were just as you were saying earlier, a little bit worried about a possible recession coming along. So that's why we were thinking, let's just do it as a two year term. See where we're at. If if permit fees are still way up. We'll keep going. If. Yeah. And, you know, it's just we didn't want to get. That's that's the reason. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Question is there. And also for this position, Andrew, we you know, one of the things that we've been talking about has been the amount of design review and kind of plan checking and plan review that goes on there. This position is is specifically to staff the counter. But are we doing an accounting of how much time we're kind of spending on on the other stuff? And do we know? Yeah, let me explain this. I think we're on the same page. We are actually. Although permit fees are up and permanent activity is up, the number of design reviews, which is our sort of bread and butter, the number is actually going down. Two years ago, three years ago, we would average about 250 design reviews a year. But we've been instituting streamlining procedures, design review exemptions so that we don't have as many of those where we can just basically check at the counter. Okay, you're exempt. Go get a building permit. You don't have to go to design review. So that's that's good. But you would what it has done is increase the workload at the counter. So those people are checking and instead of putting in a pile saying a planner will get to it in a couple of weeks, they're just doing the time right there to check to see if they qualify for that exemption. So it's less work, less money for the applicants, a little bit more work for counter staff. Thank you. Okay. Okay. We're also recommending two position upgrades an engineering office assistant in Public Works Executive Assistant. We had a study done and the work needed and the work being performed is that of an executive assistant. And then also to upgrade a transportation engineer position to supervising civil engineer due to the complexity of the transportation projects. And then we had some equity adjustments. We are having difficulty recruiting in our code enforcement building inspection areas. So we've done a salary survey. One of the things we'd like to do is add a new classification of combination building. Inspector one Retitle Our Current Combination Building Inspector Combination Building Inspector two. Gives us a. Little bit a couple of different ways to recruit for that position. And then we wanted to do equity for the other classifications within those positions. And if there are any questions otherwise, I'll turn it back over to Alina, dear. Yes. Questions, I guess, Mary. Not quite. First. This is probably a question for Liam on the public works. Transportation Engineer. Two Supervising civil engineer. Is that going to change the focus of what that person does and who gets hired in that position? Because we already have lots of conversations around, you know, just kind of. Modern transportation engineering practice. I'm just very sorry. It's getting really late. My words are escaping me worse than ever. Yeah, right. Yeah. Are we concerned that that's going to change the focus of this position at a time when we have more transportation jobs going forward? Well, only that it will improve our ability to deliver in the transportation arena. So the supervising civil position will be a licensed transportation engineer. What it is, is a higher level position who can manage more complex projects and people in a way that benefits element as transportation system. Thank you. No other questions. I'll turn it back over to Alina. This were one of the last slides that we had. And so as a wrap up for us, one, do you have any questions now that what you've heard everything? And then with that, we're going to ask we ask you to take the actions. As we've mentioned before, there are three resolutions in front of you budget resolution, workforce changes, as well as adjustment to the salary schedule. Okay, Counsel. Councilman Brody. Okay, I'll go first. I'll try to be quick, though. Thank you for all of all of your hard work. You and all of the department heads in putting this together. I know you guys are very prudent with your ask, so that's much appreciated. Just a couple of quick points. I mean, I am concerned and I think there's a difference between accuracy and conservative projection. I am concerned that, you know, for five years now, our revenues have come in significantly higher than estimated and our expenses have come in lower. And, you know, I somehow get the feeling there's like a forced. The word escapes me. Austerity. Thank you. That I mean, there are some positives to that. But, you know, I think it causes undue stress in the departments and undue stress in the community. One thing I did want to point out, I saw that the slide where we talked about the assessed value and I know you can attribute some of the increase in the assessed value to the market, but I think a lot of it can be attributed to the hard work of the people here in Alameda. And I'm thinking, you know, among others, even our police or fire, our public works in maintaining our core services and making Alameda an attractive place to live and making sure that people are willing to pay them the property values and the cost that it is to live here. So as we move forward, I want to make sure that, you know, we don't cut off our nose to spite our faces and, you know. Trying to cut those core services in a way that actually hurts us because it ends up decreasing our property values. So I hopefully, as we do future budgets, will keep that in mind because I think it's it's hypercritical to maintain our quality of life and our total assessed value to to maintain those services. I am prepared to move forward with all of these items. I would like to see something for this year for the the parade and the festivals. And I would like to see that sooner rather than later, one for this year and also to be considered in the next budget. And I would defer to the appropriate department heads, whether it's whether it's the police chief or public works or Sara Henry to figure out what the appropriate amount is. But I think that is something that I think our community needs to know is going to be taken care of and that our long term that our department heads , such as police or public works, know that they're not going to have to find ways to raise that or take that money in the future out of existing budgets. So that's my comment. I can just briefly address that. As I've been looking at the budget for the July 4th parade, we've identified available funds in the Non-Departmental contingency fund for this year's parade. So we don't need it as an additional ask on the budget. And we've already put in the request for as part of the overall request for the next two year budget cycle. And so we are looking towards both of those. Thank you very much. The comments. I'm okay, Mossville. I know one of the things that we do that we kind of do differently and I have noticed this the past couple of years is that the mid-year budget not to put more work on Melina's plate or to push it up earlier, but the mid-year budget comes several months into the year. And I think, you know, it's a little bit confusing. I mean, obviously, we need the time to to work back and everything. But I think one of the things that we as a council and that, you know, I love feedback from staff on moving forward is, you know, is it possible to me to get this report kind of done a little bit soon, you know, earlier in the year somewhere January, February, something like that, with still giving time to to give to give feedback and everything. Because I think I feel like we end up doing the mid-year budget and then like a couple of months later we're, we're back in the, in the budget cycle and I feel like it just ends up getting really compacted. So that's again, this is more just I would like to have that conversation about, you know, what that would look like and how that might impact things relative to, you know, hearing from department heads on that. And I'm ready to support the budget requests as as they've been listed. I do think that we need to kind of. Figure out the pool costs just to keep the hood open and functioning. I know that that's something that Amy is going to be diligently working on, as well as a number of other issues. But that will be coming up in in future budgets. And I think that there's you know, I think our policy that we put in place regarding the spend down or the pay down, I should say, of PERS and OPEB has been serving us well. I think there's many things that are outside of our control, but that's not one of them. And I think that we continue to to do, you know, to to help our future by continuing to do that. I would I would like to know kind of where we've we have overestimated in terms or underestimated our revenues. Um, if that's, you know, what kind of, what the trend has been where we have had those. Because I feel like every time we come here we hear that it's a, it's a one time savings, not so much on the staff vacancy side, but on maybe on the on the T on the transfer taxes and some of these other things where we've we've seen kind of a continued under projection of that. I'm not saying that we're purposefully doing that, but I would like to understand kind of where we're where we're missing the mark on those a little more. For the comments. Yeah. Councilmember Jason. I'm going to support any resolutions with regard to workforce changes. I'm going to abstain on the amendments to the budgets. For the reasons that we discussed, but also for two other reasons. One is, you know, it's just it's difficult for me to vote for a budget that's coming in negative. I recognize that what's driving the negative is that one time I recognize that. But I'm also going to abstain because, frankly, this is a two year, 24 month budget. And really I'm having only involved in the final two months. So for me it's like, well, well, it wasn't my budget, so I'm going to abstain on the budget and look forward, you know, when we start the next two year budget cycle. A couple thoughts. I, I actually appreciate the conservative projections that we've seen, both in revenue and expenditure. Ms.. Adair came to us from the city of Stockton. And, well, you know, all of us have been on the council. It's been in good times and in revenues have been coming in strong. But really, if you look back a decade, Mr. Thomas certainly remembers cutting the planning staff in half. And so none of us has a crystal ball. And we one of the things we just shouldn't, in my opinion, be so anxious to do is spend, you know, whatever excess revenues we have. I would rather have conservative estimates. I think we're just better served as a city. And again, the vacancies in public safety are not because the city council has said we're not going to fund those positions. I'm saying what belabor that. So one thing that strikes me every time I'm in the clerk's office, I think the city clerk's office is to be commended for the passport services they're doing. We have such happy customers. I run into them in the halls and these adorable families and things to me. But oh my goodness, the the environment in which you have to, you know, do the photos and everything. I have no idea what it would take to make that space better. But if there is anything I mean, and again, this is increasing revenue for our city and it's a nice service to to the public. So I would just encourage the clerk's office to think about what what might be needed, might be possible to make that space better. Ms.. Weisinger We've annexed the chambers as our second area office and conduct many of the best works in here. Long as there is no other business going. On, engage them. Okay, well, maybe, you know, in the future downstream, because I do appreciate. That that works. So. Okay, are we ready to. Vice Mayor, do you have a comment? Motion. Whatever. I'm just I'm just going to say that next time you'll know if you're going to ask for stuff in the budget, we're going to put you after an appeal. You know. Thank you. Along those lines, I really want to apologize to staff, but I just didn't see how I could make 60 members of the public wait. In all seriousness, I want to say thank you for it, for your hard work. And I'm sorry that you're also here at 110 in the morning. I am. We signed up for this a little bit more than made. And with that, I with I would like to I would like to move approval of actually if I don't know if we can do this. But of all three recommended recommended actions, second is. Well, because Councilmember Desai. That's all right. It's okay. It's okay. Okay. Can we do that? Is okay, especially at this hour. Let's do anything I can. Okay. We had a motion. We had a second. All in favor. We are approving the three resolutions. Three rate I. And opposed abstain. Okay. So we have four affirmative and one abstention. The motion, the resolutions passed. Thank you all. Go home. Drive safely. All right. But we're not done. Council, don't go anywhere. We are moving. On to seven. Oh, okay. I believe, right? Yeah, you are. Right. Thank you. Okay. City Manager Communications for me. That says it all. To the. Mayor. Members of council. I just want to take my 30 seconds and thank each of you and the previous council and really all of the employees for their kind reception, their work, their work with me to help you solve the problems in this interim period of time.