Recommendation to conduct a study session to receive and file a presentation and update on Citywide Fiscal Outlook and FY 23 Budget Development.
Okay, excellent. Then we will transition into our 30 session and then do some any any new business or announcements we have for the study session at the council too was good about that. We wanted to get to the agenda because we do have an important budget update and I want to begin by saying a few remarks and then turning it over to to Mr. Mode. Again, just want to broadly just really take first and foremost our financial financial management staff and our city manager who have been working on the budget every single day. I think oftentimes we view and think about the budget as something that we do during part of the year. And the truth is, is that the budget staff are working on the budget every single day of the year and faithfully. And thanks to a really strong economic recovery, we're going to start seeing some really great news, I think, tonight as it relates to how the city and the budget is doing. So I just want to thank the staff as we go into this. I'll have more remarks after the presentation, but I want to turn this over to Mr. Mordecai and the Budget team. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for that great introduction. Absolutely. We're excited to be here tonight and really talk about how things have changed over the past year and what some of the future holds for us, both in terms of budget, but also in terms of some major investments in our infrastructure. So next slide, please. So as the mayor mentioned, we've had a really strong revenue recovery. And so the bottom line you'll hear all the detail tonight is we get to announce tonight that due to strong revenue recovery, we are not having to do budget targets. We normally at this time of the year are talking about what our deficit might be, what some of the strategies are, and then how we're going to tackle that. But essentially, we've reduced our budget deficit from a projection of about $36 million a year to $12 million a year. And so we are bouncing back very well. It's still important that we remain fiscally prudent and that we're disciplined, as this council always is. And that's really what's helped get us to this point. The budget that we'll be focusing will have a big focus on infrastructure. We heard that very clear from the mayor and city council over the past a year to two years about the importance of our infrastructure and really given the charge to the city manager and to the whole staff on how to find a way to invest more in streets and roads and parks and all of the core services . And so you'll hear about that tonight as we make some announcements on how to move forward using Measure eight money and launching another five year large investment in infrastructure. And it's important to remember that our strong fiscal management has really prepared us for and for for the the actions that we're taking on our budget and and reducing those deficits. And also for so many things that we've accomplished, we have really strong financial practices. The council and the mayor have been very focused on managing our finances. And and we've had good reserves that have helped us cover our temporary shortfalls and the ability to to bounce back. And then, of course, with the Recovery Act, that has really allowed us to both respond and effectively serve the community as well as plan for existing services to continue. Next slide, please. And so quickly, I just want to we always start these presentations to talk about what's happened and keep an eye really focused on on all the accomplishments. If we listed all the accomplishments, you'd be here a long, long time. But just some highlights. We were an early leader in COVID 19, vaccine distribution. Hard to believe that was just about a year ago when nobody had the vaccine in January. And we between January, March, April really rolled out. And we're a leader in ahead of everybody else in getting out the vaccine to our community. And to date, we've done over 330,000 residents have been vaccinated. We created those incredible COVID 19 testing programs. We've now tested 800,000 people and administered 1.1 million tests. We have our booster program. It's still running and we've administered 16,000 shots. We implemented quickly the CARES Act programing and really supported basic needs and early childhood support and helped with youth development and provided food to people and nonprofits and local business support. We launched a number of programs to help our businesses and fill out forms and get help in language and through our busy care hotline, busy care, pop ups, busy outreach teams. For the first time in our history, we implemented Emergency Rental Assistance Program and helped 4000 people with past due rent and utility payments. We did our Open Streets initiatives to get our restaurants back open again and created all those temporary parklets. The Council adopted the Long Beach Recovery Act, a $250 million program, which is the size of an entire budget for some cities to really focus on recovery and been getting back to normal through city hall and city facilities getting back open again. Next slide. It's important to remember just a year ago or actually two years ago, we we've been managing the longest coordinated disaster response in our city's history with our EOC was activated since March 2020. And it's important remember that just last year we went through an enormous humanitarian effort with a family reunification effort and one of the several emergency shelters set up throughout the country to help 1583 migrant children. All were reunited with family members or sponsors, and the community came out big to raise $100,000 to make sure that they had the best amount of care while they were here in the emergency shelter. Next slide. And, of course, homelessness is on the top of everybody's minds. It is a national crisis and Long Beach has risen to that challenge. There is we've done so much. There's still more to do. Everyone acknowledges that. But just to look back on our on our successes, the Atlantic Bridge housing community is opened and was running and a site for up to 125 people experiencing homelessness. We purchased hotel room to room hotel room for transitional supported housing. We opened Project Roomkey, a 47 room Days Inn. We have permanently housed 458 people and stabilized 560 people and housing. We've served 3500 people at the mercy in 2021 total of. 33,000 total visits, averaging 132 people per day at our multi-service center. We've had 4600 enrollments in different homeless services and more than 900 outreach contacts. And we've conducted 860 homeless encampment cleanups. Next slide, please. We've continued the implementation of our Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initiative with racial equity 1 to 1 trainings, action plans and development of tools for our staff to use. Our Language Access Plan has managed more than a 500% increase in translation requests as we work to ensure information gets out to our community in the language they feel most comfortable. We've had so many different new and re-envisioned existing programs through our city parks, including the senior center and Bixby and Drake and Eldorado and Ranchos. As we look to adapt our services. We've loaned out almost 800,000 digital and physical items from our libraries, including Chromebooks and hotspots, as people can use those to get onto the Internet. And our clean team has been very, very busy out there every day collecting 2400 plus tons of litter and illegal dumped items. We've abated 1.5 million square feet of graffiti, filled 25,000 potholes, and we have an updated and relaunched our Go Long Beach app. Next slide, please. So I'm going to turn it over to Grace now that I get to talk about kind of successes. And and just you could be very proud of the work that the city team has done on your behalf and and for the direction that the mayor and Council have given us on the things to focus on in the last year. And I'll turn it over to Grace now to really talk about what some of our financial projections look like and what the future holds. Grace. Great. Thanks, Tom. Good evening, Mayor. Members of the City Council. I'll first be talking about the general fund, its trends, the outdoor forecast and budget balancing strategies for FY 23. The Star of the general fund outlook story this year really is revenue. Revenue growth projections for FY 23 have improved significantly from our previous projections for FY 23 made last year. At the time, we put the 22 budget together as discussed in the ACT by 21 year end performance report brought to City Council on February eight. Revenues in FY 21 have rebounded from the pandemic and perform better than our expectations. This has improved our projections for the future. This slide here shows a few examples of some key notable revenue streams and how they have improved from the previous projections for FY 23. And just to clarify, the graph does not show a year over year change, but is a comparison between the current FY 23 projection and last year's projection for FY 23. Our two largest revenue sources non measuring sales tax and property tax have improved 14% and 2% respectively from previous projection. In addition to users utility tax, which improved 17% based on better than budgeted performance in FY 2021, there are some revenue streams that are performing less than anticipated. This includes our transient occupancy tax, which was heavily impacted during the pandemic with travel restriction. It has steadily improved over the past year and we are showing growth in the outyear, but just at a rate that was lower than previously assumed. In terms of oil revenue, we are keeping our budgeted rate at $55 a barrel for structural purposes due to the volatile nature of this revenue source and learning from past lessons not to over rely on oil revenues for structural uses. If the price of oil continues to remain higher than the budgeted rate during the year, we will assess at the end of the year for available revenues, net of oil expenses and bring to city council additional one time funds that could be used for citywide one time purposes. Overall, the key takeaway here when talking bottom line impact on our forecast for FY 23 is that revenues have increased from our previous projections for FY 23 by 21 million. Next slide. In terms of expenditures, there are some notable trends to highlight for 23 as well. The projection related to general liability are remaining the same when compared to FY 22. As costs for settlements and judgments have decreased in recent years, the fund is still a negative funds available as previously discussed in different meeting, but looks to be on track to continue to make improvements. So at this time no additional increase to the budget are slated for FY 20. Worker's compensation costs are seeing a savings of about 1.4 million to the general fund due to a good performance and cash available in the fund as of the end of FY 21. Salary changes are increasing by 18 million over the FY 2020 budget and include negotiated cost increases for existing contracts with labor groups as well as a general inflator if there is no contract. There are also some adjustment and reallocation of budgets internally to better align actual cost of services to budget, all offset internally through reallocation of budget or by projected vacancy saving. CalPERS is particularly notable with cost increases being the lowest it has been and a $500,000 increase in the general fund for FY 23. And with the out years starting in FY 24, actually showing a decrease in cost. And I'll talk about this a little more in the next slide. Overall, the key takeaway here when talking bottom line impact on our forecast for FY 23 is that expense projections have stayed the same bottom line from our previous FY 23 projection. Expenses are growing by 22 million from the FY 22 budget. But this was essentially the same growth in expenditures we were previously anticipating. Even though the variables have been updated. I've noted some trend changes and net bottom line impact is the same as before. Excellent. As I mentioned, CalPERS is a really notable trend in this year's projection. As you can see on the graph, we have had years of very significant CalPERS cost increase. To pay down our unfunded liability. Previously we were projecting cost increases to continue straight up until around fiscal year 32, after which we were then projecting to start to see a decrease in costs. Now the projection for FY 23 is a small increase that I mentioned earlier, but then decrease over the next few years until FY 29, when we then see some small increases again to FY 23, after which FY 33 after which we see a significant decline in cost. This is the first time in years we have seen any projection that has cost decreases for CalPERS in the near future. This improvement to the trend is mainly the result of the high investment return of 21% that was experienced in 2021. And one important thing to note is that this trend may fluctuate and even change back to be cost increases depending on variables such as investment, return and CalPERS methodology. A bad investment can easily swing costs back up, but this is good news for this year and a very positive projection in the short term outlook. Next light. All right. So this brings us to our projection for FY 23. We are now projecting a shortfall of about 12 million compared to our previous shortfall of about 36 million. As you can see in the table, our projection improved from 35 million to 15 million, which is approximately 21 million improvement. This is the 21 million I referenced earlier as being the improvement in revenue. We then have about 3 million and measuring revenues that are covering eligible public safety cost increases, which I'll mention more in a later slide. This results in a 12 million shortfall situation for FY 23. It's like. In terms of the budget balancing strategy for FY 23. As Tom mentioned earlier, the plan is to use one time funds made available by the Long Beach Recovery Act to cover the shortfall for FY 23. Originally under the Long Beach Recovery Act, under the category of securing our cities, future funds were being made available to help the city's financial status with shortfalls that were being projected for FY 21 and FY 22 and the general fund and other challenged funds. However, with the strong performance of NY 21, less assistance was needed from the Long Beach Recovery Act, making 12 million now available for FY 23. This is all within our securing our city's future category and does not change or impact programs to the community under the Healthy Communities and Economic Recovery Category. This really is great news in that no general fund reduction targets will be issued to departments as we work to put together a proposed FY 23 budget. Looks like. Moving forward, it will be important to continue to do so with fiscal prudence and discipline. There are some key assumptions and uncertainties in the projections to note. We are still waiting to hear if the California Supreme Court will pick up our measure and if they do not, our structural shortfall situation worsens by 9 million in significant one time. Need to be identified to remit back to water. For the short term, however, we are working and planning to address any FY 23 gap as a result of Measure M with one time in terms of negotiation, FFA and lifeguard contracts expire in FY 22 and miscellaneous contracts expire in FY 23. We have general inflator included in our projection for when these contracts expire, but depending on the results of actual negotiations, our projections will need to be updated, which could make the shortfall larger or smaller, depending on the outcome. There are also potential future costs that may hit that are not currently factored in, as we are still looking into and estimating those items. And this outlook also assumes no future recession, which, if it were to occur, would change our numbers. Additionally, using one times to solve the F 23 shortfall covers the problem just for FY 23. The 12 million shortfall from FY 23 carries over to 524, and this increases the projected FY 24 shortfall from 9 million to 21 million. As a result, while revenues are better than anticipated. The ability to add new services at this point is not in the longer term forecast. All this being said, the youth of one time is a recommended approach. The youth of these one time funds through the Long Beach Recovery Act is intended for this very purpose of helping to address fiscal challenges as we continue to stabilize from the pandemic. Next slide. In the next few slides, I'll talk about Measure eight and our approach for other five with the extension of Measure A voted on by Long Beach residents in 2020. Measure eight revenues are slated to continue at a higher level into the out years instead of dropping to half a percent in FY 23 and then sunsetting completely at the end of F 27. In FY 23, the rate does drop from 1% to 0.75% beginning January 20, 23 through fiscal year 27 due to county measure H in order to stay within the tax rate limit. This is less than the 1% we have been receiving up until now, but still more revenue than what we had originally been anticipating starting in FY 23. I like. The potential use of measuring funds will be developed and proposed as part of the proposed 23 budget for City Council Review . It is anticipated that there will be in the range of 20 to 22 million, an unallocated measuring fund each year, beginning in FY 23 through FY 27. Measuring revenues will continue to cover past structural and other ADD that were part of previous year plan. And as Tom mentioned earlier, a significant focus will be placed on infrastructure. We are looking at issuing three potential bond issues over the next five years that would generate 50 million every two years for approximately 150 million from bond proceeds for infrastructure projects. The annual debt service would start around 3.5 million and the earlier an increase to about 12 million by fiscal year 27. Funding is also proposed to be used towards covering cost increases to maintain public safety services, including resolving the budget issue in fire department for their FY 20 reduction target and increasing and the increasing cost of doing business for police such as the crime lab. We thought. Other potential uses include the funding of Engine 17 and the out years. For the short term, the hope is that we will receive a safer grant to cover costs and are expecting to be able to continue Engine 17 service in FY 23 and beyond. And also we are looking at things like funding neighborhood safe streets, which allow the police department to quickly impact crime hotspots throughout the year. Again, this is all still being developed and will be brought to City Council as part of the proposed FY 23 budget. Flight. In terms of other funds, I wanted to highlight three thing related funds that impact the general fund, either through interdepartmental MRU or cost changes or through overhead rates will not be issued any reduction targets similar to the general fund. The Special Advertising and promotion fund. Main source of revenue is the transient occupancy tax. As noted earlier, during the general fund revenue slide, this was dramatically impacted by the pandemic. So the balance between revenues and expense in this fund is still looking to be a shortfall in FY 22. We were able to use one time funds made available through the Long Beach Recovery Act to help replenish the revenue that was lost in 21. And we are anticipating that we will need to do so again for FY 22 and possibly FY 23. In order to avoid issuing cuts, we will need to look for any one time funds made available during the year to be set aside for this purpose. For the refuge fund. There is a rate study underway as rate increases will be needed to provide for structural balance and the fund, including funds that are needed to cover cost of Greenway Collection and meet state mandates. This study and initial rate increase request is anticipated to come to City Council soon in this fiscal year. FY 22. Next slide. For the last section of this presentation, we wanted to report back on our community engagement efforts around the budget process. So for the first time in recent history, community engagement efforts were done at the beginning of the budget process with two virtual meetings that were held in January. This early engagement was in response to the Mayor and City Council's request for earlier and more robust community engagement. It also aligns with the goal of our citywide racial equity and reconciliation efforts to reach out to a broader demographic and include more community voices from across the city, particularly those who are most impacted by racial inequities and systemic racism. The budget survey was also conducted in January that we usually do in August during these community engagement efforts. We prioritize language access by having all outreach materials available in different languages and having interpretation services available at the meetings as well. Another update we made this year was to add demographic questions that we asked participants in the meeting and in the budget survey to complete. And these were questions such as ethnicity, gender and disability to start with collecting data as best as we can to better inform and track how we are doing and how we can make improvements for future engagement. This exit demographic survey was also made available in different languages. And lastly, this was not related to community engagement efforts directly, but in line with our racial equity goals. We have also requested departments to provide information on their budget proposals through an equity lens as applicable, providing information on groups that might be impacted by the budget requests. That's like. For our virtual meeting, we had a total of 141 community participants join about 44% or 62 participants completed the demographic exit survey. And the data on these slides are from those responses. So please keep in mind that this is not a statistically valid report and depended whether community members participated in doing the demographic exit survey. And we hope to continue to develop these efforts and data collection into the future. Two of those who completed the demographic exit survey. We had representation from all council districts and in terms of age, the largest age group was in the 45 to 49 age category, but we had almost equal participating people in their thirties, forties and 65. With regards to race and ethnicity. The two highest represented groups were white at 42% and Hispanic at 31%. And for gender, the respondents were majority women attendees with women at 65%. Let. For the annual budget survey, we had a total of 723 respondents. A majority of respondents did complete the demographic portion of the survey as well. And from that data, we had representation in every county, whole districts that the High Peace Council District three. At 29% of the respondents, then the highest age group was 65 to 74, age range at 20%. But it was quite even for the other age groups as well, ranging around 7 to 10%. Now slide. In terms of race, the majority of respondents were white at 53%, followed by Hispanics, 17% in terms of gender. Similar to a virtual meeting, the majority of respondents were were women at 53%. Excellent. One thing we did this year that we've never done before was to take detailed notes from the community meeting, recording both the comments made verbally from the community and those entered into the chat box feature. We then took this data and partnered with the city to code and categorize these comments to provide more data than we usually have from the meetings. Based on this, the slide provides the list of the most popular topics that came up at the virtual meeting in order of most mentioned and discussed being at number one. The top three topics were on addressing homelessness, providing sufficient affordable housing options and combating crime, and increasing the community's sense of safety. We're still analyzing this information and will be putting together a report to provide to council in a separate memo to city council. Now fight. In terms of the budget survey feedback. These are the top ten services from the survey that we conducted in January 2022, this past January, compared to last year's survey that was conducted in August 2021. This was analyzed by Andrew Cheng in the city manager's office. Two services have been replaced in the top ten of the service ranking this year. On the left hand side, the service is in green and 523 have been newly ranked into the top ten, while items in red from FY 22 have dropped out of the top ten. Since the last community budget survey, the top three services relating to infrastructure and public safety continue to be top of mind for survey respondents. Police Patrol and response make a return to the top ten services and concerns relating to addressing homelessness and mental health services remain in the top ten. Similar to our virtual meeting comic. And this year we also work with the density to take the comment, a qualitative comment submitted by the residents through the budget survey and categorize them as well. This slide shows the major theme in order, starting with the most frequently mentioned topic combating crime and investing in public safety resources and improving the community's overall sense of safety. Or most comments and you can see other items were around homelessness. Road and sidewalk maintenance. Mental health addiction. Redirecting funds from police to social services, library investments, affordable housing parks. And fostering a business friendly environment. Again, this information is being synthesized and will be provided in a separate memo to city council. Next slide. And now I will turn it back over to Tom to follow up. So thank you, Grace. So just to sum up, is, again, we don't have to take cuts this year and get you targets, which is just fantastic. We're not in a point yet where we are able to add a whole bunch of services, but it's just great knowing that we don't have to go to our departments and affect the services that people really rely on, rely on us for. We will be moving forward with good fiscal prudence and discipline, knowing that we still have some challenges. But the picture is again looking better. And again, we hear so strongly from the Council about investing into infrastructure, just really excited to be able to start working on a five year plan of infrastructure. Those three different bonds that we would do every two years and will be really working on that, getting council input on projects and then proposing that as part of the FY23 budget. And and of course, we'll be focused this year on implementing the Long Beach Recovery Act as well. So thank you for the time. We will stand by. Four questions. Thank you very much, Mr. America, and you appreciate the other presentation. I do have some some comments and just some some broader thoughts and images over to the council. And I think I have some more options to attitude at first. And then we'll go we'll go from from there for any questions or comments. Let me let me just start just broadly by saying that the economic recovery in our city is absolutely happening. And we're seeing it obviously in these numbers and we're seeing it and we're hearing from business owners we have a long way to go, but there is no question that we are seeing that impact by looking at these numbers in the budget. One, two, one note. Know broadly speaking, the fact that we recovered, particularly on the revenue piece of the release, the sales tax and other revenues coming in is absolutely a good indication of where we're headed. And I know that those numbers continue to perform well. And so we could expect our numbers to continue to even get to get even better as we move forward. I want to just share the significance of what we are looking at here. We are looking at a second year with no budget reductions that are being targeted for the city and a really critical time where the city is actually addressing and facing economic recovery. We have just a barely pulling out of this health recovery that we have been in. Things are finally better. We're feeling more hopeful. Right now, we know that small businesses are still struggling. I met with a group of small, small business owners this morning. We're hearing their stories where they're finally beginning to see folks coming back into the restaurants. They're starting to see more people on the streets. And so we know that this focus on our economic recovery and what it's doing to our budget is also really, really critical. So having this opportunity, once again, to not have to focus on cutting a street sweeper or cutting a bike patrol or adding a library services is really important, especially when you're talking about economic recovery and recovery for the whole city. So I am very heartened by the news and I'm even more excited to help put together a budget this year as we present that to the City Council, knowing that that we're not going to have to look at these deep cuts. In addition to that, I want to note that I want to commend the Council for passing the Long Beach Recovery Act last year. That framework that we put in place is actually producing really strong results right now in the community. You think just on the issue of the putting aside money to secure our city's financial future, which is when we look at what we did with furloughs and eliminating those, we rebuild our reserves. Let's not forget the first thing we did and we put all our reserves back for the next emergency, and then we set aside money to help us bridge this difficult economic time. And because we were fiscally prudent and because we didn't have to use all of those funds in the last year's cycle, we're able to take some of that money from the Recovery Act, not additional new money, and put it towards an additional bridge as we continue to recover from the from the economy. So I just want to thank staff for kind of thinking about that and using those resources, quite frankly, as intended by the president. The president I'm proposing the American rescue plan was very clear that the resources were to bridge and allow municipalities to bridge resources so that cuts wouldn't be made so people wouldn't lose jobs during the pandemic as we see the economy improve. And if things continue to improve and there's no guarantees, of course they will. But if we continue to improve, we will continue to see those deficits hopefully get reduced over time. And so that's another very, very positive sign. And I want to commend the staffer for thinking about that. In addition, I want to I just want to also just uplift that as we are in this time that we're focused on this budget, we see what's important. We have to focus on issues around safety, around infrastructure and address those. We all know that that safety is also tied to economic performance in the community as we've seen crime increase across the country in almost every major city in the last two years. We know that it's all direct. There's a direct tie to unemployment. And if people having access to good jobs in Long Beach, we went from a 6.7% unemployment rate at the start of the pandemic to 21% at the height of the pandemic. And now. And now. I'm sorry. We were I'm sorry. We were at 4.6% before the pandemic went to 21%, and now we're at 6.7. So I project there is a huge, huge economic shift that we have seen in just a matter of two and a half years to go from under 5% to hit 21, which was hired , by the way, than at any time in the Great Recession. And now we're back down to 6.7 is an enormous turnaround and comeback for the city, but doesn't mean we should be satisfied because we're not. Too many people still are underemployed and need access to jobs. But that focus and our hope will focus on this budget coming up around and supporting small businesses and workers is going to be critical to the public safety piece because we know that when people have jobs, when streets are filled, when people come back to our offices and are going back to a shop at the small business , go to the grocery, go to the restaurant. That also makes your community safe. Beyond just the investments that we make. And so I'm really proud of that work that staff has done in putting this budget and these ideas together. I also just want to note a few things that were mentioned. I want to again uplift and think to voters. Thanks to Missouri, we are going to see another historic five year plan put in place to put in more infrastructure across the city. This is enormous for us. I know all of you. The council hears all the time more investment in infrastructure. We want more investments in infrastructure. And I want to thank the council for their support. Councilman Price's work on the Infrastructure Committee. I want to thank Councilwoman Mango's work. We've heard and I've been talking about bonds and bonding for infrastructure for years, and she's been continuously an advocate for putting a bond process within the infrastructure package. And I think staff has listened. That's been supported by other members of the council. So I want to thank Councilman Mongo for for continuing to do that. And also, I think Councilman after work, as well as the Committee on our Budget and Finance work has been really stellar in getting to this place. So I think what you're seeing is a product of so many folks work and Tom and the team being be reflective of that. So I want to don't want to sugarcoat that. The challenges absolutely have those liabilities in the future. We have to look at be careful about not overspending in this in this next year. But I think we're starting to budget a really, really great place and and grateful to the people of the community for reinvesting back into the city, because we're seeing the damage back into the city and into our communities as well. So thank you for that. And I want to just personally, Maysoon, a big thank you to you for all the work that you're doing as well. This is a great start to the budget cycle. And with that, Councilmember Austin. Thank you. And I think you really summed it up well. Mr. Mayor, this is welcome news. I think it's actually the best news that I think in my nine years on the council that we we're almost ten years now that we've had to see the curve start to stabilize. The funding coming in and the revenue coming in, the projected budget deficit going down by $20 million over the course of a year. That is a lot of the use of. And I am thrilled about this infrastructure focused plan that we have. It shows that our staff is really listening to not only our constituents, but also the council as well is going to be welcome news to many of our constituents who have been really ringing that bell for the streets, alleys and. Attention to our city's crumbling infrastructure. Although we have made some great, great, great advances with our measure over the last few years, I think, you know, often times, you know, the city council, yes, we take the tough votes. You know, we set the direction for our city budget. You know, I have great colleagues on the Budget Oversight Committee and very attentive council colleagues. But to get us to this point, I think we do have to give our staff a lot of credit. We have excellent stewardship of our financial management team and excellent leadership from our city manager. So I think this is an opportunity for us to just salute them and say great work to get us to this point right now. We were also. Think of benefit significantly from the American rescue plan. Those funds were critical to getting us where we need to be. I just recall just a couple of years ago, the outlook was very, very different from our reactions to our budget outlook since the Council were were very scary. We didn't know where we were going to be. So to have that contrast, to be a leader in the city. The decision maker at this point to hear this information today, to contrast where we were a couple of years ago is is truly, truly amazing. And in the. It also shows that the economy is impacting these revenues and impacting, obviously, our state budget, but also our our bridges system. We're also just a few years ago, the outlook was very different than it is today. Of return rates, rate of returns on the pension funds are different than they were. And I think as a result, we receive from flatter and more stabilized projections of CalPERS. I want to say let's stay the course. I'm again, very, very pleased and optimistic about the outlook. This is very welcome news. And I would just say let's stay to it, stay with it. And, you know, keep our keep working to manage our budget ahead of us. I want to be talking about surplus post deficits in the next couple of years. Thank you. Count summary ringa. Thank you. And I want to thank all of. Councilmember Austin's comments. I mean, they're excellent. And we really have to give kudos to our city manager. He's built a good team. And to put it at this point, I'm very happy to see that our pensions are in the out. They are under control now. They were out of control two years ago. We were talking about the sky is falling in regards to pensions and our commitment to it. So I'm glad to see that there's going to be a somewhat of a decline in the next few years. And and we are. What question I had was about the the oil revenues that was coming in. And we're keeping it at, what, 50, 55, 81 barrel right now. So. Yes, Councilmember, our projection for our structural side of the budget is $55 a barrel. Yeah, right now I think barrel prices have gone up to about just under 100 or right around 100. So, I mean, that's in a way good for us. However, you know, with the. Impending impacts that the Russian war is going to have Russian oil respected oil deliveries in the U.S. So I'm just wondering if that's going to have any kind of significant impact in our oil revenue in the future? Any any projections on that? So Councilmember Urunga, what we'll do is we will analyze the current fiscal year, FY 22, to see what our projections for a year end may be. And if we are projecting and most likely we will projected higher revenues compared to our budgeted $55 a barrel in 20. Those additional revenues above, you know, expenditures, what's needed to cover expenditures could be included as one time or 22 year end or as part of the 23 budget as well. I want to thank you also for keeping us in line with our reserves. It's very important we saw how that really came in handy through this pandemic. And so I want to thank you also for your leadership and keeping us above water. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Councilwoman Pryce. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I appreciate all of your comments and I appreciate staff's recommendation. So a couple of things. And I know you probably covered this and I missed it. But on the survey, what was our survey population? Do you have? Did you have that in a slide and the distribution across the city? Yes, we did. Councilwoman Rice, let me get to that. So in terms of our virtual meeting, we had 141 total attendees. And this excludes city, city staff. And also we had identified 16 people who had attended both meeting and then for our budget survey. So this is the written survey or the electronic survey that people could conduct or complete even if they were not able to attend the virtual meetings. We had total survey respondents of 723. And do we have a distribution across the city? Yes. So on slide 22 or the budget survey participation, that would show how many people participated in answering across the council this year. Thank you. Yeah, it's up here on the slide. Oh, I got it. 674 people who answered the demographic exit survey where this information is pulled from. Okay. Got it. All right. So thank you for that. So when we're talking about the budget and that, you know, we don't expect to have any cuts, which is wonderful, does that mean that we're not going to reprioritize anything to address the priorities that people shared with us at the. In the budget survey because there's really no point to do the survey if we just keep the priorities the same from year to year. Right. I mean, the whole reason we do the survey is so we can shift priorities to find the things that people want funded. So what's the plan? And I guess the manager proposes his budget, but I'm assuming that there's going to have to be some shifts in the budget, too, for us to be able to meet the priorities of the residents. Something else. But yes, that will happen in this process. And then the council can take that further once the recommended budget is out as well. Okay. And I know it's still early, and I appreciate that we're having these conversations early. But one of the things that I that I've shared with the city manager privately and that that I'll I'll talk about obviously when we start having our budget oversight committee meetings is look, the community has spoken very clearly about a number of priorities. The mayor talked about infrastructure. That's clearly one. But safety and homelessness are clearly at the top of the priorities for everybody. I think any of us who's having community meetings will tell you those are the priorities. So what I would like city staff to do is be creative about next year's budget. I understand we don't have to have any cuts because we have some bridge funding that will help. But is there anything that's not essential and not an emergency that we can defer for a 3 to 5 year period of time, whether it's equipment purchases or things that are just not essential so that we can invest in the areas where our residents have indicated these are the priorities because we can't continue to st do the same thing every year in terms of budget funding and expect a different result. So I think when we're talking about safety, especially when we're talking about homelessness, I think there are some specific things that we can do if we're able to allocate, even for a 3 to 5 year period of time, some priority and resources to those efforts. And so I know we'll be talking about this a little bit more, but I just I don't want us to get in the position of this is wonderful. We don't have to have any cuts. That means everything stay status quo because the whole point of doing the surveys is for us to have to make some difficult decisions and reprioritize within the budget that we have. And I'm hope I'm looking forward to that conversation. And I and I hope that that's something that's on your. Radar as our. City manager as well. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilwoman Ciro. Thank you, Mayor. I will add to my gratitude of our mayor's leadership through this past few years, as well as our city manager and the team for just getting us to this place. I was really worried when we heard projections, so I just want to congratulate and just breathe a, you know, a breath of relief that we won't be going into a, you know, having to make these difficult cuts and really appreciate the steps that the city team is taking to just slowly inch into something that is been discussed prior to the pandemic, which is more participatory budgeting and which is where I think it's been great to be able to move into doing the community engagement meetings earlier before the budget come out. So we do hear from the part about the priorities. But I think with our online survey, I think what is most interesting is you would assume the youngest people that you would survey would be the one to fill out because of their assumed access to online, you know, being more tech savvy that we have a 24 year old being the least number of people filling out the survey. Right. So I like to explore further. I do hear what Councilmember Price is saying about, well, how are we utilizing the information from the survey to inform our budget priorities? But I think what's important is to maybe dig in a little deeper, to hear maybe a focus group of these groups on what their priorities are, and even taking a step towards thinking about what are their ideas of solutions so that maybe it's not so much about funding, but it's the strategy group and how we're utilizing the fund that's resonating in how we're addressing these issues. Right. So I think there are some different steps we could take to make sure that not only are we ensuring all members of our residents are being heard, but also hearing about what they think we could do. And we've heard about them and we've taken different steps and how we are moving towards around public safety issues to homelessness and affordable housing. You know, we're building more housing as much as we can, and we've been going through all of those various processes. So I think that it would be great if we could do a dig in a little deeper to here and really activate our youth engagement. Right. We have had kind of a youth invested in youth, this youth investment fund that was made. And how do we make sure they're part of a larger budget discussion rather than being their own separate? Right. So and also and people who, you know, I know that the survey were done in different languages, which is great, but that's where sometimes people are more in verbal conversation rather than the survey. So those are ideas and a suggestion I love to see as a grow on it now that maybe we won't worry so much about having a shortfall, but thinking more about our engagement, to hear from people, residents, business owners in the strategies we can take to ensure that we're hearing their budget priorities. So, so thank you so much. Congratulations, everybody, for making sure we don't have to have these different cover, you know, difficult conversation and cutting and but being able to think about how do we can be constructive in growing and including, you know, as many voices of our residents as possible. Thank you, Councilwoman, Councilman and D.A.. You, me, and thank you to the staff and to the Finance Committee for doing a great job. And, of course, our chairs, the Finance Committee, Councilmember Austin, for all the work that they've done on the budget. This is very, very good news. I, too, was very scared to see what was happening with the budget and stuff. And I did see a lot of things that could have gone the complete opposite way when there are things that I'd like to see. Now, if we go back to the slide where it says about how different districts responded to the survey. Please staff. Thank you. And just seems like. Continuously know we see. Maybe you can explain to me a little bit more how District One did this. Is this survey? And as far as the sponsors. Absolutely a compliment. Then they have. So this slide that you have in front of you is from our virtual meeting. So the 141 participants in our two virtual meeting, there were 62 people who chose to complete the demographic survey. And out of those people who completed the survey, we were not able to capture information on any of those. Obviously who did in 14 were from District one. And then if we go to Slide 22. The Budget survey. So this was the survey that was available, our annual budget survey. There were 700 total, 723 total survey respondents. Of those, 674 people completed the demographic questions that were part of that survey. And out of those 674 people, 47 or 6.5% were from District one. Okay. Which brings me back to the point that I do believe that you're doing a better job at not you this year, but just as a city that we're doing a better job at reaching out to the community. I know that in the past some district one would come in very low when it comes to recruiting. Members to be part of the discussion. So I really and one of my ask was that we do a little bit more intentional promoting of the, the, the sessions that we have regarding budget. So I just wanted to say thank you that I've seen the numbers increase and I hope that from what I can recall, I've seen the numbers increase and I just wanted to say thank you and set out for, you know, thank you for doing that good job in trying to reach out to especially some of the hardest reach communities and just just one. So thank you. Thank you. I think, Councilwoman. I don't see Councilman Mongo on. On. Oh, there she is. Councilman, I got to give some comments also. Yes. I want to thank the staff for an excellent presentation. I am hopeful that the CalPERS returns have been great and will continue to be great, but I don't want to get overly hopeful because when this has happened in the past and they've allowed cities to reduce their contributions. How we got to where we are now, because there wasn't enough contributions during the good times to have the leveling and the smoothing that's necessary over the bad times. So it's great news. I agree with Councilman Price, the priorities of the community that have been consistent. Our homelessness, public safety and infrastructure. And I want to start with infrastructure. We need to do more. I know we're bringing an item back that's related to my initial item related to a bond. It needs to be bigger. It needs to be more. We need to fix the sidewalks. We need to fix these streets. These people have been waiting for way too long and that the stakes of prior councils have gotten us to where we are today. But even doubling what we've contributed is just not enough. We need to do more. And so that's the first part. The second part is public safety is expensive, but public safety done right really helps a lot of other components of our city. And so we need to make sure to have a strong public safety plan in place and a multi-year strategy. And then homelessness. I think the public safety and homelessness go hand in hand. We've done so much with long term strategies of housing and things like that, but we have to have the funding available for the outreach. The outreach is just so huge, and until you have enough staff to do a lot of outreach, you don't have individuals taking the housing that's available. So thank you for the budget presentation. Thank you to my colleagues for continued fiscal prudence. I still would love to see a strategy where every year the council is brought. 10 to 15 programs that we can either reduce or cut that are not as effective. We need performance measures to show whether programs are being effective. And if something's not effective, you don't just wait until downturns in budget years to eliminate them. We need to address those on an annual basis and all of our programs should be competing to be the best and for residents to demonstrate how much they love those certain programs so that we can continue to invest in the programs that are most successful. And be sure that I think that we notice when we cut the budget a few years ago, we had certain programs that had maybe two or three participants that were other programs that needed funding of the exact same program across the city, had 40 participants. And those evaluations need to be done on an annual basis, not just on years, but we have custody. Think. Any other council comments? Case I seen on the map. My last just comment, I'll say is that I hope it's one I recognize also that I think Councilman Price is right and that obviously the budget's not developed yet. I think at the end of the day, that's a process that we're going to all begin through the city manager process, through any recommendations that I make to the council and and then through the through the BRC and of course, the whole, the community piece, which I'll be a big part I think, this year. And I just want to leave us with this. You know, the the idea that as we're as we're going to this budget cycle, we shouldn't forget what what we need to focus on at this moment. And we have to continue, if it's not focused on helping us recover and not helping not helping us focus, focusing on ensuring that we're providing all the basic services that we need to post-pandemic moving forward, that has to be the priority. And so we know right now that we are doing such a great job on that health piece. This economic recovery of supporting our small businesses is critical to our future. It will impact everything that we do in the future is that support for our workers and our small businesses and and again, that relationship with that as it relates to public safety and our support of ensuring that people are safe in our community, that we have strong programs in place. And we know, of course, that that includes everything from our parks to our libraries. And the things that keep folks and families safe and secure is all critical as well. So it can be a good budget process. And I'm glad that we'll be starting at a place where we can actually think about what investments we want to make in the budget. And with that we have a hopefully a motion and a second on this receive and file study session. Uh, can I see if there's any public comment, Madam Kirk And for the study session. If there are any members of the public, they would like to speak on this item. Please use the raise hand feature or dial star name. They Chikhlia. Your time begins now. I think you can hear me. Yes. Good evening. Okay, great measure and litigation. Uh, may. If we don't win, remit back 9 billion in. No known deficit. There's a lot of contingency generally, but there's one I wanted to kind of highlight at the beginning. The Brant price, the delivery price for oil per barrel is projected to be over $125 in April in the United States. I think it's a very good thing. And Grayson, thank you so much for the presentation and city staff for developing a really great, very detailed, thoughtful presentation, especially on keeping $55 per barrel as the structural price of oil for projections, as we're figuring out a lot of these volatilities. It's also a very good idea to use any. Overage for onetime things. It's quite possible that in addition to record oil prices, we could see 150 or even $200 per barrel. And then at that point, just, you know, there is kind of performance reviews per per annum proposed. If you were to have such a surplus of money for just one time like we had in 2013, 2014, you should use it to pay for one time things you normally wouldn't get to. Like, for instance, a study for how to replace oil and gas revenues structurally and entirely in the city. Eventually, you know, you need to do that. And, you know, I haven't yet gotten to the point of figuring out how it would be good to know how to do that and good to do it with money that we get that we normally want. I have a real concern about these potential bond issues for infrastructure funding when there so so much federal funding available. You know, if you look at the the debt service the year before the Olympics, the 12 million that wipes out, the 12 million that we've been able to kind of claw back from the sluggish recovery for this year. There's a lot of there's a lot of problems with these bond markets, especially if we have another recession or if we have an earthquake the same year before the Olympics. I would like to request either the budget survey or another budget meeting be conducted again in April prior to the May revision of the state budget. It looks like as we're developing this budget and we're looking at things not only in the rose colored equity lens, but the kind of hard headed what are the physical and structural risks perspective? It may be that maintaining natural natural gas systems and water systems in good physical condition may be the wrong way to describe what people actually care about. And then the last, last note. Ba ba ba ba ba ba. Joanne Diaz, your time begins now. Evening. Can you hear me? Yes. Good evening. My name is John Edwards, and I'm here on behalf of the People's Budget and the Language Access Coalition. I'm making an official request to extend the amount of time the community is given to respond. When asked if we would like to provide a public comment. The time we currently receive is not sufficient, especially when considering the time it takes to provide proper interpretation for a multilingual community. It would also give those who are having. Technical difficulties time to respond. I ask. That you provide a. Minimum of 20 seconds for folks to respond before declaring that there are no requests to comment. I also want to highlight the fact that I'm deeply troubled to hear about any increases to the police budget, especially after hearing the clear support to defund the police during. Both of your community budget. Sessions that I attended in January. You have to embrace what the community has already reimagined for you and what true community safety looks like. Police are not the answer to echo what Councilmember Price shared. We can't do the same thing year. After year and expect a different result. We have increased the police budget year. After year and it is clearly not the solution that our city needs and deserves. Divest from the police and reinvest in the life affirming resources for our black community and. Other. Communities of color that your constituents have been asking for year after year. Thank you. Ailsa Chang, your time begins now. Good evening, City Council. This is Alpha Tung. I'm a constituent of the new District five. I wanted to thank the previous speaker for her eloquent comments. And also note I dig a little bit deeper on the written community budget survey that had 723 respondents. Let's be clear. This community budget survey. Is entirely. Not representative of the entire city of Long Beach population. The overwhelming. Plurality of respondents for the written budget survey were white. People. Seniors and residents of District three. Now, Councilwoman Price, I totally applaud your success in promoting the budget survey. I promote. I applaud the success of District three constituents in completing the budget survey. But this is not representative of the entire city and the entire city. The majority are people of color, young people and families and making under $65,000, which is the median income. So let's just be clear. The community budget survey is not representative of the City of Long Beach as a whole. I want to uplift Councilwoman Sorrows comments in asking for a deeper community engagement, deeper investigation, and particularly activating youth who were clearly not represented in the written budget survey. So when you see comments like combating crime and investing in public safety coming out of the community budget survey, this is not so coded language for increasing policing and we have to ask ourselves who is requesting that? Once again, white people, seniors and residents of District three, not representative of the majority, people of color and majority of low income and working class city of Long Beach. Thank you. That concludes public comment. That concludes public comment on this item. Yeah, I do. We have I didn't see any other council comment, so I appreciate the comments. And I also wanted to just note, I don't think we had a motion in the second yet for let me see the file. Who's going to make that motion, Councilman Marston and a second. But Councilman is in the house. Let's do the roll call. Vote, please. District one high District two I. District three i. District four. I. District five. District five. District six. By. District seven. By. District eight, HY Motion carries seven zero. Thank you. With that, we have any other second full time period. People signed up.