Recommendation of the Budget Oversight Committee to receive the summary of responses to the Long Beach Budget Priority Survey and Long Beach Budget Challenge.
Thank you. Congratulations again. I look forward to to the service. Now we'll be moving item to 23 before we go back to the to the budget process. Thank you. Communication from Vice Mayor Lowenthal, Chair Budget Oversight Committee Recommendation to receive the summary of Responses to the Long Beach Budget Priority Survey and the Long Beach Budget Challenge. Thank you. However, motion in a second. So to turn this over to staff and have them do the report. We heard council members, thank you very much. We had the opportunity to make this presentation to the Budget Oversight Committee recently, and we're happy to do it before the Council addresses the full budget. Geoff Hall of my office will walk us through the items. Honorable Mayor and members of the city council. The Budget Priorities Survey and the budget challenge were implemented in response to the City Council's interest in obtaining resident feedback regarding their budget priorities prior to the adoption of the FY16 Budget. The survey tools went live on August 1st and the results were summarized based on the responses received as of yesterday afternoon, September 14th. It's important to note that the survey tools do not preclude multiple responses from a single individual, nor do they attempt to balance the responses from all segments of the community. For the Budget Priorities Survey participants were asked to rate 35 city services as being very important. Somewhat important, not very important or not at all important. The survey was available online and through hard copy handouts, which were distributed at community budget meetings. Hard copies were available in English, Spanish and Tagalog. 610 survey responses had been received as of September 14th. Looking at the demographics of the sample, why we did have participation from residents in each council district. The majority of residents were respondents were located in districts three, four and five. As far as age is concerned, two thirds of the respondents were 50 years or older. And for household size two person household was the predominant category. To provide a means of comparison of the results. Each response to each service was assigned a weight very important to four points. Somewhat important three points. Not very important two points and not at all important one point. The total points for each service was divided by the number of responses received for each service to obtain a weighted average. When considering the results, it is important to remember the general demographics of the respondents. The results may have been different if a scientific sampling methodology had been utilized. This slide shows the highest rated services with the line signifying the top ten. I won't take the time to read them. But I did want to to make note of the fourth item listed. Maintaining or repairing public buildings rated higher than one might one might have expected. We believe this can be attributed to the fact that more than 40% of the survey respondents submitting comments expressed a desire that the city fund infrastructure improvements at Rancho Los Alamitos and this service directly speaks to their interest. This slide shows the services in the lower half. It is interesting to note that only six of the listed services had an average weighted score under three. In other words, it could be said that services are generally viewed by the survey sample as being at least somewhat important. Again, the ranking of the services should be viewed in relation to the demographics of the sample. 321 written comments were received. As I mentioned a moment ago, the supporters of Rancho Los Alamitos were very well organized and trying to call attention to its needs. The remainder of the comments considered a wide variety of topics, big and small. They include, but are not limited to public safety parking sidewalks, traffic libraries, survey format and pensions. An updated summary of these comments have been provided to you for your future reference. The budget challenge provides the participant an opportunity to balance the city's general fund budget while deciding if existing funding levels should be changed. It is worth noting that the budget challenge was designed to be an educational tool, as well as a means for gathering public input. Participants are exposed to the complexities of balancing their interest with available budget resources. It requires a fair amount of effort to complete, and the choices may be difficult for some. For each department or group of departments, participants could choose a status quo cut by 2%, cut by 5%, increased by 2% or increased by 5%. Participants could also choose to increase revenues to enhance services without reducing services in others. Revenue options included a sales tax increase, duty increase or partial tax. 200 responses had been received as of yesterday afternoon. Only 60% of the participant participants actually completed the challenge. Many simply abandoned the budget challenge after taking a look at it or completing one or two sections. With such a small sample, the results should not be considered to be representative of the public at large. Looking at the Demographics Council districts, three and five had the largest number of participants with complete responses. And the 50 plus crowd were again the most active in the in the age categories. Several other demographic questions were asked, such as education level and homeownership. But the response rates were insufficient to warrant summarization. Looking at the results. 52% of participants increased both expenses and revenues, with revenues being sufficient to offset the expenses or and or to produce a surplus. 18% just cut expenses to create a surplus. 17% cut expenses, but also increased revenues, thereby producing a surplus. 5% opted for the status quo. 6% increased expenses but did not increase revenues. Creating a deficit. Lastly, 2% left expenses as they are, but increased revenues creating surplus. In summary, 71% of respondents increased revenues to support increased expenditures and or to increase or to create a surplus. The results by Department of Revenue type can be found in the original report. There are no significant changes to the present percentages due to the increase in the number of participants. A few comments were also received through the budget challenge. These included police and fire deeds, pensions and benefits. Budget challenge format. Increased fees. And tax increases. This concludes my report, and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have. But. Thank you. Vice President Did you have any comments? Me too. I just wanted to share that. The BBC felt it important for our colleagues in the public to hear the outcome of the budget survey and the challenge. So I want to thank staff for that thorough report. I know it's a short timeline for development and marketing to the public, but we did feel that there were lessons learned for the next year's budget cycle and we thought that we were off to a great start. So I want to thank you for your efforts and. That's it for me, and I'm happy to make the motion. Thank you, Councilman Richardson. Give me comments. Nope. Councilman Mongo. I, too, want to thank the the staff who put this together. And I want to thank the over 100 residents of the fifth District who took the time to take the survey. I see that there was a comment about how many people filled out the survey. I calculate it by counting on page four that it's actually closer to 500 participants, which is is really remarkable. And oftentimes people say that when they're happy with government, it's when they participate the least. And I think that this is a good group of individuals who really were passionate. I know I received calls in our office and they realized that these are the tough decisions. You can't abandon the budget process in the middle of the survey when you're sitting up here. So thank you to those who took the time. 52% increase in taxes. And that's surprising. I know that I'm going to continue to stand by not increasing taxes as long as we can, because I know we have a lot of needs. But increasing taxes is a rough go. And I'd love to see in the future where when someone marks the box such as increased sales tax revenue, that there could be some maybe comments that say it shows that when sales tax amounts increase, sales change or what those look like because it's never just a straight comparison, there's always equilibrium that really go into play. So I've enjoyed this and I look forward to it growing into something a little bit shorter and more robust next year so that people won't abandon the survey. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Pryce. I, too, want to thank staff for your excellent work on this. This agenda item came to you in June requesting some assistance with survey methodology, and the staff really pulled this together in a very quick time frame. And I know that with additional time, you would have had the opportunity to do more outreach. But I find survey data to be very useful. It does it answer all questions? Absolutely not. But it does provide me some insight into what the majority of my residents who are engaged are thinking and where their priorities are. And I have to say, there were very few surprises in the results that that I saw. So I thank you for putting this together. I look forward to enhancing it and making it better and disseminating it on a broader scale for next year. So thank you very much. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Thank you. And I, too, want to thank our staff for for making this information available to us. I want to thank all of the residents who attended the budget meetings and took time to give us this feedback and also want to thank the council members led by Councilmember Price for for bringing this forward and I think assisting us with this this budget process this year when we've had budget meetings in the past in my district, we've always done a survey. I never thought to do it on a citywide level. And so now that we're doing that, we have some consistency. But it also gives, you know, some of our our groups who are poor, who want to have a voice in the process, a greater voice. It gives them an opportunity to to, to to advocate for the special projects that they'd like to see in our budget and the direction that they'd like to see us go. So great job all the way around for everybody. Thank you. Thank you. We have a motion and a second. Is any public comment on the item? Seeing none. Please cast your votes. Motion carries. Thank you. Now we're going to move on to the continued hearing, which is continued hearing one, but beginning with item 15, which Vice Chair Lowenthal will walk us through the next few items and then we will take a break from the budget and then come back to it after we've gone through public comment and some other items