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June 16, 2026 · 7:00 PM
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Segment 1
Good evening, everyone. I'm calling the meeting to order. Today is Tuesday, June 16th, 2026, and it is 6.03 p.m. Clerk, can you please start us off? Okay, calling the roll. Councilmember Kesarwani. Here. Taplin. Present. Bartlett. Here. Strega. Present. O'Fee. Here. Blackaby. Here. Munapara. Here. Humbert. Present. And Mayor Ishii. Here. Okay, all present. And Councilmember Kesarwani is participating remotely for this meeting under the Just Cause exemption in the Brown Act. A quorum of the Council is participating in person at the noticed physical meeting location. And Councilmember Kesarwani, please provide a general circumstance as to the need to appear remotely, but do not disclose any medical diagnosis or other confidential medical information. Yes, I have a child care need. Okay, and please disclose if there's any individuals 18 years of age or older present with you and their relationship to you. Nobody over 18 is here. Okay, and Councilmember Kesarwani will participate through both audio and visual technology. So we can proceed. Thank you so much. Okay, so we will move on to our ceremonial matters. And for this evening, we are honoring the life of Bertha Brown. I believe her family is here. Yes, come on up. And feel free, I know there might be some other folks here from Parks and Rec or other city staff. Feel free if you'd also like to come towards the front. Hi, welcome. So this evening, first of all, I want to say I'm sorry for your loss. And this evening we have both a proclamation and we will also be adjourning in memory on behalf of Bertha Brown. Honoring the life of Bertha Brown. Whereas for over 30 years, Bertha Brown served as a dedicated city of Berkeley employee, working with youth and teens in the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department. And whereas in 1989, Bertha started with the city as a recreation activities leader for the Young Adult Project, cultivating dance programs, talent shows and positive messaging for teens throughout Berkeley. From 2008 until her retirement in 2019, she served as the recreation coordinator at the Francis Albreyer Community Center, where she initiated the Tots Around Town and pre-kindergarten classes and successfully expanded the program with grant funding to several other parks and recreation sites in Berkeley. She also oversaw the Longfellow Summer Playground Program, the Latino Parenting Program and the Young Mothers Program. Whereas she further served her community as a member of the city's Human Welfare and Community Action Commission. And whereas through her integrity, compassion, dependability and strong work ethic, Bertha earned the respect and appreciation of colleagues, leaders, community members and teens throughout the South Berkeley community. She will be remembered for her incredible creativity, off the chart dance moves, end of summer performances with staff and pure love for the arts. And whereas Bertha Brown had a tremendous impact on the success, stability and positive spirit of the Young Adult Project and Francis Albreyer Community Center, impacting multiple generations of Berkeley teens. Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Adina Ishii, Mayor of the City of Berkeley, hereby recognize and honor Bertha Brown for her years of dedicated service to our city and express sincere gratitude for her outstanding contributions, loyalty and commitment to the Berkeley community. If you'd like to say a few words. I just want to say thank you to everyone for their warm wishes, their prayers, and just continue to keep us, the family, in your thoughts and prayers. Thank you to the City of Berkeley. I just want to say my mom loved Berkeley. She was a community member when she was working here and even after retirement. Her impact just on people has been amazing to hear the stories. I'm so honored and we thank you for honoring her for her commitment to the City of Berkeley. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your mother with us and thank you to Scott who also was the one who requested this as well. We have, during our ceremonial matters, we actually have a brief training from Chris Lynch, I believe, who's here. There you are. Feel free whenever you're ready. Okay. Well, we were going to put the presentation up, but I know you have handouts, so why don't I start. Mark, do you think you'll be able to get it? Don't know if we do have handouts. Here we go. I do have handouts. Thank you. Madam Mayor, members of the City Council, my name is Chris Lynch. I work at a law firm called Jones Hall. We regularly work with the City as bond counsel and disclosure counsel when the City undertakes bond financings. In anticipation of a June 30 Council meeting at which you'll be asked to consider and approve two bond issuances, the City Attorney asked me to come and provide some disclosure training. We have done this regularly over the years in anticipation of similar events. So my message, in a nutshell, is first, federal securities laws apply to the City when they issue bonds and also when they provide continuing disclosure related to those bonds. They also apply to other information or disclosures that are intended to reach investors, so I'll describe some of those other disclosures. Second, City staff and elected officials are expected to take reasonable steps to ensure that the City's disclosure includes all material facts, which are facts that a reasonable investor would take into consideration. And then third, the City has adopted written policies and procedures that should ensure that the City complies with federal securities laws in these contexts. Next slide, please. I'll describe briefly the key federal securities laws and then your policies and procedures. The Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were adopted after the Great Depression when widespread fraud adversely affected investors. The 1934 Act created the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the federal agency that enforces federal securities laws. And so the 33 Act, the 34 Act, and two SEC rules, 10b-5 and 15c-212, regulate your behavior when you issue bonds. Most importantly, they prohibit fraud in the offer or sale of securities. Rule 10b-5 requires that communications to investors contain all material facts and not mistake material facts. And a material fact is any fact that a reasonable investor, given the circumstances, would actually impact the decision to buy or sell your bonds. Next slide. So SEC Rule 15c-212 requires an issuer of bonds to prepare a disclosure document at the time it issues the bonds. That document's called an official statement, and it is prepared by the issuer's staff with the assistance of municipal advisors and bond counsel and disclosure counsel like us. It has to include all material facts, which are the terms of the bonds and the financial information and operating data that are relevant to that particular series of bonds. Next slide. Rule 15c-212 also requires continuing disclosure, and that continuing disclosure includes updates on an annual basis of the financial information and operating data that were in the original disclosure document and timely notice of certain events, such as rating changes, bankruptcies, defaults, draws on credit enhancement. Next slide. So as I mentioned, on June 30, the City Council will be asked to approve two official statements, one related to the issuance of general obligation bonds. Those bonds will be payable from taxes paid by taxable properties in the city, and one for an issue of tax and revenue anticipation notes. Now those notes are paid. They have a one-year maturity date, and they're paid from any unrestricted funds that the city receives in fiscal year 26-27. In the official statement for each of those bonds, the city will have an Appendix A that describes the city's general fund. Now the city has given the—sorry, the Securities and Exchange Commission has given clear guidance to what it expects elected officials and employees of the city involved in a bond issuance should do when they are faced with a decision of approving an official statement related to bonds. In 1994, Orange County declared bankruptcy. They declared bankruptcy because they had pursued an investment strategy of issuing short-term notes and investing in risky investments to achieve above-market rate of returns. They were relying on those above-market returns to balance their budget. The county board of supervisors approved official statements for those notes and never disclosed the risks associated with those risky investments. It also didn't disclose the risks associated with the county's dangerously underfunded budget. In the wake of the bankruptcy, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report that described what it expects elected officials to do. The report highlighted that the supervisors were aware of the risky investment scheme and the county's reliance on it to balance its budget, but did not do anything to ensure that that risk was disclosed to investors. And then the SEC said what elected officials should do. The SEC wrote that officials are expected to take steps appropriate under the circumstances to ensure that the disclosure includes all material facts. Now that could mean when you get the official statement for the bonds and the notes next week that you could read it word for word, but I'm not sure the SEC thinks that's realistic. They do think that if you are aware of some fact that could adversely affect the city's ability to repay those bonds or notes, that you would make sure it was disclosed in the disclosure document. The bottom line was that the SEC wrote that public officials may not authorize disclosure while recklessly disregarding facts that indicate there's a risk that the disclosure may be misleading. Next slide. So in training sessions like this, I like to include this slide because it highlights what the SEC thinks cities and other local agencies should do in order to comply with federal securities laws. First, they should adopt written disclosure policies and procedures. In 2017, the city of Berkeley adopted written policies and procedures. It established a disclosure working group that consists of the city's finance director, the accounting manager, and other members of staff that are relevant to the particular financing. The disclosure group also will consult.
Segment 2
Thank you. All right. Go ahead. Speakers on Zoom. First is Celeste Marks. Good evening. This is Dr. Stephen Alpert. During the May 19th Council meeting, Mayor Ish interrupted my public comment remarks. Information provided by the First Amendment Coalition indicates that this was a clear violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. The Ninth Circuit has ruled that prohibiting criticism of specific members of a governing body violates the First Amendment. Mayor Ish's interruption was, quote, just a reminder not to refer to individual Council members. Refer to us as a body, please. Moreover, I was not addressing Council Member Humberg, but instead clearly referring to misinformation on his website displayed on a poster. For Government Codes 54960, I forwarded a formal cease and desist letter demanding that the Council acknowledge the violations, make an unconditional commitment henceforth not to interrupt any speaker addressing statements or positions publicly made by individual Council members about other city officials. For Code 54960.1 and 5, the Council has 30 days to comply with, during an open session of a regular meeting or special meeting, or I can find, I can find the legal action. Your minute is over. Thank you. Next is Martin. Go ahead. Hello, my name is Reverend Angela Jernigan. I serve ministry in West Berkeley, and I'm here speaking tonight about the topic you'll be voting on next week in terms of the community violence intervention live free funding. This is a program that was built on a highly effective national model, and it has proven to be- Sorry, this actually is also on the agenda for later tonight, because we're going to be presenting information about it. Oh, okay. So the vote is next week. Yeah. But the agenda item is tonight? It's on the agenda. Okay. Sorry. Okay. So yeah, so folks, this public comment period is for items that are not on the agenda this evening. Okay, come on up. We saw that the agenda item, we didn't see it as an agenda item immediately, but we just wanted to echo the importance of live free's work. Yes, it's too late. You can still speak to it later, just not right now. That's all. Okay, just want to make sure. Hi, I'm assuming the reduction in force plans are not on the agenda, specifically enough to warrant later comment? I mean, it's on the budget presentation. I'll wait till then if that's- Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Are there other non-agenda public comments this evening? Okay. All right. Go ahead. Speakers on Zoom. First is Celeste Marks. Good evening. This is Dr. Stephen Alpert. During the May 19th council meeting, Mayor Yish interrupted my public comment remarks. Information provided by the First Amendment Coalition indicates that this was a clear violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. The Ninth Circuit has ruled that prohibiting criticism of specific members of a governing body violates the First Amendment. Mayor Yish's interruption was, quote, just a reminder not to refer to individual council members, refer to us as a body, please. Moreover, I was not addressing Council Member Humberg, but instead clearly referring to misinformation on his website displayed on a poster. For Government Codes 54960, I forwarded a formal cease and desist letter demanding that the council acknowledge the violations, make an unconditional commitment henceforth not to interrupt any speaker addressing statements or positions publicly made by individual council members about other city officials. For Code 54960.1 and 5, the council has 30 days to comply with during an open session of a regular meeting or special meeting, or I can find the legal action. Your minute is over. Thank you. Next is Martin. Martin should be able to unmute. Last call for Martin. Hello. Good evening. Yes. I certainly hope that the extended parking meters is not on the agenda this evening. I am Martin Kirkwood. I used to run a chamber of commerce in San Francisco. I have was quite concerned about the extended parking meter times. I have certainly seen a variety of cities doing this and seeing reduced economic activity. I certainly have seen turnover rates increase, also people avoiding areas where extended parking meters or parking times have been extended. And I was wondering out loud here if the city has looked into evening occupancy rates, turn away rates, merchant support, and what the true economic benefit is for the merchants and for the residents and people that want to shop in the area. If it's actually going to harm or if it's going to benefit the city in reaching its $5.3 million deficit. That's my comment and have a nice evening. Thank you. Okay. Next is a caller with a phone number ending in 000. We were not able to give you a paper today because Roy is out of town for a couple of weeks. Second point about the parking. Berkeley lost a lot of businesses over the decades because of parking meter. When I came to Berkeley first, the tickets were $3. Now they are 60 plus or 49, whatever it is. That was a mistake. You're reducing your income from business. As you walk around, see how many vacant spaces in Berkeley. And it is disgusting. It's really disgusting. You try to make more money from a decent place, but actually you're losing money. I mean, from a decent place, you're losing money. I will call you. Have a good night. I will call you in the next section. Okay. Thank you. Next is Della Luna. Hi. I wanted to say that the zoom maneuvering, the camera control, the audio has really been excellent for the online users. And I really wanted to just comment on that because I know it was an issue before, but it's so good now. So every speaker, we're hearing them clearly. The camera's right there. And so whoever's controlling that great work, keep it up. Thank you. We appreciate you. So we can hear and see everything as needed. That's it. Thank you, Della. Excellent partners at Berkeley Community Media. Yes. Thank you for Berkeley Community Media. Next is Makai Freeman. I'm calling to get input on the increased fines for parking. Many rely on our accessible gear, and many cannot move our vans and get a fine. Financially negatively impacted. I'm wondering if you will use an equity run and staff the handle issues where a disabled person that owns an accessible van that does not drive may incur a slowly speed that could impact on registration. Thank you so much. Thank you, Makai. Thank you. That's the last speaker. Okay. Thank you very much, everyone, for your public comments. Now I think that many of you were waiting for the consent calendar. So we will move on to the consent calendar, starting off with comments from any of my council colleagues. And please keep in mind, we have a very full agenda this evening. So if you could keep your comments brief, it would be much appreciated. Council Member Humbert. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, I will try to speed through these comments. I just have a few. As to item number 20, the Memorandum of Understanding with the Berkeley Police Association, I just want to say that I'm very pleased that we've reached accord with the Berkeley Police Association on the Labor MOU. We have the best police department in the state at minimum, and I'm thrilled that we got this done so expeditiously. Thank you to the leadership and membership of the BPA, and thank you to the city's negotiating team led by HR Director Janelle Rodriguez. Okay, thank you. Sorry, go ahead. I know I still have a couple. The Bicycle Plan Update, which is item number 29 on consent. After a lot of hard work and very good work by the members of our transportation and infrastructure commission, our city manager, Paul Budenhagen, our fire chief, David Sprague, our public works interim director, Wahid Amiri and his team, with input by neighbors and our treasured advocacy group, Walk Bike Berkeley. The bike plan is in very good shape and ready to be put into effect. This is consistent with our climate and street safety goals, and I couldn't be more pleased. We will be designing and building bike infrastructure that will serve all users, including our disabled community. We have a very large percentage of Berkeleyans who would ride bikes more if we had safer streets, and this is a big step in that direction. Thank you for that, everybody. And item 31, which is resourcery orgs, mural reveal and food driver relinquishment. I want to, and sponsored by or authored by council member Bartlett, who has offered to make me a co-sponsor, which would be very privileged to be. $250 I'd like to contribute from my discretionary DA account. And then item number 33 from council member Luna Parra, United for Health Moffitt Library Clinic. I'd like to contribute $150. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. And council member Luna Parra. Thank you. On item 29, I'm very excited to support the bike plan. I really want to thank the city manager's office, public works, advocates, the fire department for all the work that went into this. I know it's a product of immense and critical work, and I'm so grateful to everyone who participated and provided feedback. On item 31, I'd like to give $200 and I am grateful for my colleagues for supporting item 33 for the Moffitt Library Clinic, which provides necessary harm reduction in Southside. Thanks. Thank you very much. I'm going to go online to council member Blackaby. Thanks, Madam Mayor. We received a number of comments from the public and questions from the public on items three through 17. I was wondering to the city manager and finance staff, if we took, for example, just the measure GG, sorry, FF increase, which was item 10, take a second, maybe just to address.
Segment 3
Segment 4
Speak right into the mic. Good evening, Mayor Ishii, City Council members, City Clerk. As Interim Director Wahid Amiri just said, it is a standard residential preferential parking opt-in program. So this is for the south side of the 1500 block of Delaware Street. And what we did, we initially received the signatures of residents of this block. There are 11 residential addresses in total, and we obtained nine signatures. The minimum of 51% of residents have to sign the petition for opt-in, so this is 82% in favor, so it's well above that. But after that, on February 4th of this year, went twice to check the occupancy levels on that block of the street. At 11 a.m., 10 out of 12 spaces were occupied, or 83%. The same at 2.30 p.m., 10 out of 12 spaces were also occupied. And 75% is the minimum parking occupancy percentage to be eligible for an RPP opt-in, so that is also above the minimum. And here at attachment two, you can see highlighted is the block face that is opting in. We included, in addition to the 1500 block, we included 1800 California on that because their property directly abuts the block face where there will be RPP enforcement if this motion passes. And notices were mailed to affected residents and were posted on the block 14 days prior to this hearing, as well as posted out in front of the Modelscherich building on MLK. Here's the timeline of implementation. We received the completed petition on February 3rd. The next day, I went and performed the parking occupancy survey. Because this block is on Ohlone Park, we did outreach to stakeholders in Ohlone Park, informing them that this would be going before council. That includes the Friends of Ohlone Park, as well as the several soccer clubs that use the field there. And the only response we got was positive. And so here we are tonight on June 16th for the city council report. And if this measure passes, we will begin installation. We will install three RPP signs between June 30th and July 14th. And after those signs are installed, parking permit enforcement will begin. Thank you, Mayor and Council. This concludes the report. Thank you very much. You did great. Any questions from staff? Sorry, from Council? No? No questions. All right. Is there any public comment on this matter? Anyone online? I didn't see anyone. Okay, very good. Is there any comment from Councilman? Someone like to move the item? And to close the public hearing, sorry. Make the motion to close the public hearing. Second. Can we take the roll on that, please? Okay, to close the public hearing, Councilmember Kessarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Triga? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Unapara? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. All right. The motion is passed. Public hearing is closed. Public hearing is closed. Thank you, yes. All right. Does anyone want to make the actual motion? So moved. Okay, second from Councilmember Bartlett. Can we take the roll on that, please? Okay, to adopt the, to implement the residential preferential parking program on the 1500 block of Delaware Street, Councilmember Kessarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Triga? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Unapara? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Motion carries. Item has been passed. Thank you all so much for your presentation, for the work that you put in. Appreciate all of the outreach you did to the community. Thank you. So, all right. Moving on to item number 35, policy for disruption or remote participation during council meetings. Would you like to say anything about this? Sure, so just as brief introduction, the SB 707, which was adopted last year, made several new amendments and changes and added new provisions to the Brown Act, one of which is for legislative bodies that meet remotely, they must adopt a policy for how they will proceed if there is a disruption of the telephonic or internet service that allows for the remote participation by the public. And this item brings forward that policy to the council for approval. It just sort of runs down the process. If there is an outage, we announce the disruption. We call for a recess. We engage in good faith efforts to diagnose and restore the disrupted service. If we cannot restore the service after one hour, we have to try for at least one hour, the law says, then we can reconvene the meeting by action of the council or we could adjourn the meeting. So this just sort of codifies what the new state legislation requires and it's before the council for approval tonight. Thank you so much. Are there any questions about this item? Councilmember Treygub, or Vice Mayor Treygub, is that a question? It is, thank you. At the bottom of page one, there's a 5.1 subpart four. I was hoping you could clarify what this means. The meeting shall remain in recess for at least one hour or until service is restored, whichever is sooner, the at least one hour. I was hoping you could clarify. Yes, so if there is an outage and it's not restored, we have to try for at least an hour. And if it's still not able to be restored, then we can engage in the process to reconvene even if we do not have remote access restored. So you have to try for at least one hour before moving on to the reconvening portion. However, if it is restored before one hour, then you can just proceed with the meeting. Okay, thank you very much. Other questions? No? All right, is there any public comment on this item? Again, we're on item number 35, policy for disruption of remote participation during council meetings. I see nobody online or in person. All right, is, are there any comments from my council member colleagues? Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Okay. Second? Second. Okay, can you take the roll, please, Clark? Okay, to approve the policy for disruption of remote participation during council meetings, council member Kessarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Trega? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Luna-Para? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Okay, motion carries. Item has been passed. Thank you all so much for your presentation, for the work that you put in. Appreciate all of the outreach you did to the community. Thank you. So, all right. Moving on to item number 35, policy for disruption of remote participation during council meetings. Would you like to say anything about this? Sure, so just as brief introduction, the SB 707, which was adopted last year, made several new amendments and changes and added new provisions to the Brown Act, one of which is for legislative bodies that meet remotely, they must adopt a policy for how they will proceed if there is a disruption of the telephonic or internet service that allows for the remote participation by the public. And this item brings forward that policy to the council for approval. It just sort of runs down the process. If there is an outage, we announce the disruption, we call for a recess, we engage in good faith efforts to diagnose and restore the disrupted service. If we cannot restore the service after one hour, we have to try for at least one hour, the law says, then we can reconvene the meeting by action of the council or we could adjourn the meeting. So this just sort of codifies what the new state legislation requires and it's before the council for approval tonight. Thank you so much. Are there any questions about this item? Councilmember Treygub, or Vice Mayor Treygub, is that a question? It is, thank you. At the bottom of page one, there's a 5.1 subpart four. I was hoping you could clarify what this means. The meeting shall remain in recess for at least one hour or until service is restored, whichever is sooner, the at least one hour. I was hoping you could clarify. Yes, so if there is an outage and it's not restored, we have to try for at least an hour and if it's still not able to be restored, then we can engage in the process to reconvene even if we do not have remote access restored. So you have to try for at least one hour before moving on to the reconvening portion. However, if it is restored before one hour, then you can just proceed with the meeting. Okay, thank you very much. Other questions? No? All right, is there any public comment on this item? Again, we're on item number 35, policy for disruption of remote participation during council meetings. I see nobody online or in person. All right, are there any comments from my council member colleagues? Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Okay. Second? Second. Okay, can you take the roll, please, Clark? Okay, to approve the policy for disruption of remote participation during council meetings, council member Kessarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Trega? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Luna-Para? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Thank you very much to the commission, to commission staff for being here, for answering our questions, and also just for the.
Segment 5
Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Dragob? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Lunapara? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Very good. Thank you very much. Moving on to item number 38, placing a general obligation bond measure in the November 3rd, 2026 ballot for the acquisition or improvement of real property for public infrastructure and facilities. I'm going to pass it over to city manager. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I don't have a lot of comments. Our team has presented on this before, so you all have seen this. I want to thank our city attorney Brown and deputy city attorney Sam Harvey for their work putting the language together. I will note that we did also submit some red lines ups on this item that mirror the language in item 36 around the electrification. So that's also part of this bond measure. Very similar language to what you just heard on item 36. We have folks here who are available to answer questions if you have any, but we don't have any presentation. Thank you very much. Are there any questions from my council member colleagues? Okay. Is there any public comment on this item? We're on item number 38 placing a general obligation bond measure on the November 3rd, 2026 ballot for the acquisition or improvement of real property for public infrastructure and facilities. Anybody online? I do not see anybody online. It's raised for this item. All right. Let's have council member Humbert start us off with comments. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I want to thank staff and the city manager's office, the finance department, public works, parks and others for all their work preparing this bond measure. It was an Herculean task. Consistent with my friendly amendment above on item 36, I'd like to please add the following language, both as a new whereas clause in section one findings and a new bullet in section two object and purpose of bonds. And it's essentially the same language. The city council's authority to grant exceptions to the all electric construction and electrification requirements is a legislative discretionary act and neither the granting nor the denial of any such exception shall give rise to any claim or cause of action in any court. So I'd move that as a friendly amendment, move the item too. Second. Hold on a minute. I want to get a chance to hear from our council on this. I mean, of course, feel free to make the motion and all that, but we'd like to hear from our council. While our council, and when I say council, I don't mean the council, I mean our council, our attorneys are discussing this. Just folks, if you can be thinking about if you'd like to be involved with the ballot measure arguments on this item and also the next. Just think about it. If we can take like a two minute recess to discuss one thing. Would you like to see the copy of the language? No, I have it. You have it. All right, we're going to take a brief recess so that we can review the language. Thank you. Recording stopped. Okay. Don't worry, I won't say anything else. Run, Mark, run. I'm just kidding. Recording in progress. Okay, thanks everyone. We are back. So again, we are on item number 38, which is about the general obligation bond. And we just heard back from council, so if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us your recommendation, please. Yes, Madam Mayor. So our recommendation is to just strike the word legislative. So it says the city council authority to grant exceptions to the all electric construction and electrification requirement is discretionary. And then it goes on to say, and neither the granting nor the denial of any such exception shall give rise to any claim or cause of action in any court. And then in addition to that, we think that it would be advisable to add a severability clause to the bond measure language itself. And we're going to read that into the record. Great, so this will be added as new section seven. If any word, phrase, sentence, part, section, subsection, or other portion of this measure or any application thereof to any person or circumstances declared void, unconstitutional, or invalid for any reason, then such word, phrase, sentence, part, section, subsection, or other portion or the prescribed application thereof shall be severable and the remaining provisions of this measure and all applications thereof not having been declared void, unconstitutional, or invalid shall remain in full force and effect. The people of the city of Berkeley hereby declare that they would have passed this measure and each section, subsection, sentence, clause, and phrase thereof, irrespective of the fact that any one or more section, subsection, sentences, clauses, or phrases have been declared invalid or unconstitutional. Thank you, Sam, for reading that in. And thank you. I would add those to my motion. Okay, you're not going to repeat them? I'm just kidding, sorry. All right, are there any other, oh, yes, comments now? And Council Member Taplin, would you like to start? Yes, thank you very much. I wanted to thank City Admin and the departments, as well as the Mayor's Vision 2050 Refresh Task Force. I wanted to volunteer to help draft the ballot argument. Very good, thank you so much. Would anyone else like to join me? I think Council Member Tregub, you had mentioned, Vice Mayor Tregub, and oh, oh, also, oh, oh my gosh. All right, I think we can have one, two, we can have up to four, right? Okay, can I put you on the sales tax then? Because I know that Council Member Blackaby is also interested, so. Okay, so there will be Council Member Blackaby, Vice Mayor Tregub, and Council Member Taplin, and myself. Yes, but there's a word limit. Okay, thank you very much. Would someone like to make that, well, you have that motion, we had a second. We're adding on those four people. So can we take the roll, please? Oh, sorry, thank you. Public comment. Is there any public comment on item number 38, placing a general obligation bond measure on the November 3rd ballot? There's someone online. Speaker online, Steve. Go ahead. Oh, Gaston, District 6. Calling because I wanted to remind you that when you started working on projects for the bond, the inflation was 2.4%. Inflation is now 4.2%. Now that means that inflation has increased over 50%. That means it's going to be really tough for you guys to do all these projects. Because when inflation is high, construction costs escalate. This is going to stall all these projects, lead to budget overruns, and require even higher tax revenues or debt to complete. So when you vote on this tonight, you are voting knowing that inflation has gone up 50%. It could go up from 4.2%. It could go up to 6%. You have to take this into consideration. Please, Mayor and City Council. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any other public comments? That's it. Okay, thank you very much. All right, can we take the roll, please? Okay, so this is on the motion placing the general obligation bond on the November 3rd, 2026 ballot, including the amendments read in by the City Attorney and also the severability clause with the authors designated being Mayor Ishii, Councilmembers Blackaby, Tregub, and Taplin. On the motion, Councilmember Kesarwani. Yes. Taplin. Aye. Bartlett. Yes. Tregub. Aye. O'Keefe. Yes. Blackaby. Yes. Lunapara. Yes. Humbert. Yes. And Mayor Ishii. Yes. Okay, motion carries. All right, thank you all so much. We're moving on to item number 39 and then we will take a brief break. We're doing great on timing. Thank you, everyone. Item number 39 is placing a transactions and use sales general tax measure on the November 3rd, 2026 ballot. And yes, did you have anything you wanted to say on this one, Mr. City Manager? No, just that, again, thanking City Attorney Brown, Deputy City Attorney Harvey for the bond language, for the language of the measure. And also thanking staff for working on it. The leadership of Deputy City Manager White. And I'll just also give a shout out to Councilmember Kesarwani who was really pushing on this very early on when we were all thinking about it. So thank you, Councilmember, for generating the idea and staff for putting it together. Thank you very much. Are there any questions from my Council colleagues? Is there any public comments on this item? Item number 39, placing a transaction and sales use sales general tax measure on the November 3rd, 2026 ballot. I do not see any hands online. Nope. Oh, one. Isabel. Isabel Gaston. Who's listed as Steve. Yes. Hi, it's Steve here again. Isabel Gaston, District 6. I commented on this once before at the Budget and Finance Committee. And I just wanted to reiterate that this is really going to be hard for low-income folks. And Ben Bartlett, Councilmember Bartlett. Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to mention people's names. He already mentioned how people are hurting food-wise. My husband actually works at the food bank, too, and there's been an enormous uptick. And a sales tax is regressive. We all know that. And I really think you should think long and hard. This is not a good time to do this. In fact, I think it's actually quite cruel. And it's really pushing people to places that.
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That bike plan probably went through. I don't know what happened, but that doesn't look out for a lot of the other people that are disabled. I understand I'm not, you know, I'm... I'll stop the item at hand. Thank you. I'm not finished. Do I still have time? Because I can't see the freaking clock. You have 17 seconds left. Free Palestine, end the genocide, free your minds from the evil and disrespectful, rude behaviors that you demonstrate all the time. Okay. Thank you very much. Moving on to my Councilmember colleagues' comments, starting with Councilmember Blackaby online. Thanks, Madam Mayor. Thanks, Councilmember Casolani and staff for putting this together. I also want to acknowledge and thank the commenters that we heard on this item. I agree that, you know, this is a sales tax increase is a difficult kind of measure to consider. I will say that, you know, I, and I've said this a lot over the past 18, 20 months I've been on the Council, that my preference over the long term is that, you know, our revenue growth should be driven by business activity and housing growth and more productivity that's coming through the system as opposed to raising taxes, where we can. But I will say the one thing that gives me some satisfaction here that this is the right consideration is that we're matching and coming into parity with neighboring jurisdictions and the sales, we're not moving out of whack, but we're actually meeting and sort of closing the gap with other jurisdictions. So I think the distortionary effects are somewhat mitigated by that fact, because we're not going to have a sales tax that's out of line with neighbors, we're basically meeting what where neighbors are at. But like I do have concerns, you know, over time, I think we're going to be generating much more revenue when we focus on economic output and growing the economy and adding more productive people who can afford to live here. That's going to drive drive revenues in the long term. But in the short term, in terms of helping us close the deficit and adjusting the sales tax rate to be at parity, that's what's going to allow me to support this particular measure. And so I think that's where I am and I appreciate my colleagues for bringing forward so thank you. Thank you very much. Next is Council Member Humberd and then on deck is Council Member Kesarwani. Thank you, Madam Mayor, and I'd like to associate myself with the comments of Council Member Blackaby. I want to thank the City Manager, the Finance Department, and all other City staff who worked on this, and particularly thank Council Member Kesarwani who really championed it. I support placing this measure on the ballot. Thank you. Thank you very much. Council Member Kesarwani. Thank you very much, Madam Mayor. I just actually just wanted to echo the appreciation of staff for this and I know Council Member Blackaby already said this, you know, the reason why when we came up with this concept, it was actually something I talked about with our SEIU folks early on because we knew how devastating this budget would be and how deep the cuts would be. And so this is our proposal to the voters to try to mitigate some of the worst of those reductions. And this would put us in line with Albany and Oakland, you know, our neighboring jurisdictions. And I do want to acknowledge, however, that it is a tough time for a lot of folks and inflation is up and grocery prices are up and it is really hard for a lot of people. I know a lot of people are struggling just to be able to afford the basics in our community. It does give me some comfort that groceries are exempt from the sales tax. I do understand, you know, any sales tax by its nature is regressive. However, you know, given the importance of the services that we're trying to fund and the reality that this is simply going to put us on parity with our neighboring cities. You know, I think this is very much the right approach as we look to balance. And I look forward to taking the vote and, you know, thanks staff again for putting this together for us. And Councilmember Casarwani, would you like to join and be part of the ballot argument writing? Sure. Sure, I could do that. I'm also interested and I know that Councilmember O'Keefe is as well. So and Councilmember, it's your turn to speak anyway. So. Great. I just want to say briefly how much in support I am of this. And I really I didn't know Councilmember Casarwani, I didn't know this was this is your brainchild. So or at least you were advocating for it. So thank you so much. I think this is a really key measure. We really need new sources of revenue. This is a no brainer one to me. You know, I do acknowledge that it is it is a tax increase and that has effects. But honestly, I watch my dollars very carefully and I did not know that we were half a percent under the neighboring jurisdictions. And I've been asking a lot of people. This is not scientific, but I've been asking a lot of people. I haven't met a single person who was aware of that. So I feel like this is so incremental and because it brings us to parity with other jurisdictions. This has already been mentioned several times. I think this is just a really smart move and I'm happy to be putting out about it. I hope it passes. Thank you very much. Anybody else interested in joining and writing about arguments for this? We've got three, so it's okay. Okay, very good. All right. Is there a motion for this one? Oh, okay. Councilmember O'Keefe is moving to approve it. Second. Okay, can we take the role on this one, please? Okay. Madam Mayor. So due to sort of the nuances of the revenue and taxation code, we just make sure that the motion is to adopt the ordinance proposing the transactions in use tax and adopt the resolution placing the tax on the ballot. The ordinance would then appear on a subsequent consent counter consistent with ordinary second reading practice, but of course, would not go into effect until approved by the voters. That was exactly my motion, as you know. Thank you so much. Well, then second. Okay, very good. Thank you very much, Sam, for the clarification. All right, go ahead. Okay, so to adopt the resolution, placing the measure on the ballot and also the first reading of the ordinance with the authors designated as Mayor Ishii, Councilmembers Kesarwani and O'Keefe. Councilmember Kesarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Tregub? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Lunapara? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Thank you very much and thank you very much to staff. All right, so we are moving on to item 40, but we're going to take a break before then. We're going to take a 15-minute break and then we will move on to item 40A. We will start with the CIP and we will have the presentation of the budget, my budget amendments, and then on from there. So just so folks know where we're at. Thank you very much. We'll be back in 15 minutes. Recording stopped.
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context: ### Berkeley City Council meeting. Councilmembers: Rashi Kesarwani, Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Igor Tregub, Shoshana O'Keefe, Brent Blackaby, Cecilia Lunaparra, Mark Humbert. Mayor: Adena Ishii. City Manager, City Attorney, City Clerk. Streets: Shattuck, Telegraph, Durant, Bancroft, Ashby, Adeline, San Pablo, MLK Jr Way. Now the meeting of the Berkeley City Council is called to order: ### ### Berkeley City Council meeting. Councilmembers: Rashi Kesarwani, Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Igor Tregub, Shoshana O'Keefe, Brent Blackaby, Cecilia Lunaparra, Mark Humbert. Mayor: Adena Ishii. City Manager, City Attorney, City Clerk. Streets: Shattuck, Telegraph, Durant, Bancroft, Ashby, Adeline, San Pablo, MLK Jr Way. Now the meeting of the Berkeley City Council is called to order: ### ### Berkeley City Council meeting. Councilmembers: Rashi Kesarwani, Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Igor Tregub, Shoshana O'Keefe, Brent Blackaby, Cecilia Lunaparra, Mark Humbert. Mayor: Adena Ishii. City Manager, City Attorney, City Clerk. Streets: Shattuck, Telegraph, Durant, Bancroft, Ashby, Adeline, San Pablo, MLK Jr Way. Now the meeting of the Berkeley City Council is called to order: ### ### Berkeley City Council meeting. Councilmembers: Rashi Kesarwani, Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Igor Tregub, Shoshana O'Keefe, Brent Blackaby, Cecilia Lunaparra, Mark Humbert. Mayor: Adena Ishii. City Manager, City Attorney, City Clerk. Streets: Shattuck, Telegraph, Durant, Bancroft, Ashby, Adeline, San Pablo, MLK Jr Way. Now the meeting of the Berkeley City Council is called to order: ### .
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and recurring funding at $2.75 million, with total PRW special funds of $3.53 million in 28, and $7 million in 27. IT is currently funding their biannual capital budget with their IT cost allocation, which is an internal service fund. Public Works special funds total $75.6 million in 27, and $61.4 million in 28. The two highest contributors of the PW's Public Works CIP budget are the Sewer Fund and, again, Measure FF. The grants total in 27 is $5.1 million, and in 28 is $5.9 million. And I want to highlight that the $65.4 million grants slide that we just talked about earlier, the majority of those current grants have already been appropriated in prior fiscal years. Next slide, please. So the next few slides, I'm going to hand it over to my colleagues. They are going to highlight their recent capital improvement project accomplishments, as well as go over their biannual 27 and 28 CIP budget. We will hand it over to Scott Ferris first, and then Wahid Amiri, and then Kevin Fong, and Barry Jennings. Thank you. Okay. Sorry, when you turn off one, sometimes you turn off both. Is it on now? Testing. Okay, testing. Testing, one, two, three. All right. I've been told I'm too passionate about my projects, so I speak too long. So I'm going to try and be unpassionate here and just get through them so that we're not here all night. Yeah. So I'm going to start with Willard here. It's a T1-funded project. It's the most awarded CIP project the city has ever had. We've won five significant awards and a finalist for a sixth. And so this is what we can do with funding. It's an amazing project. It has been an amazing amenity for that community. Next slide, Mark. So we're going to talk briefly about our accomplishments, the rewards up there. We finished the project at Ohlone and Civic Center. Next slide. Here we're looking at some of the South Adeline projects, which we're going to cut a ribbon for, like, three or four smaller projects on Saturday at 12-15. For anybody who wants to come on out, the Milwaukee Forest is complete. The landscaping project in front of here there is complete. And the dog park should be complete tomorrow. And we've got a few other little amenities we've added in South Berkeley. So the community is really excited. Ribbon cutting, 12-15, somewhere in the landscaping area on Saturday. Next slide. Oh, and I want to just really quick, another T1-funded project. So a lot of capital improvements up at camps. Thank you. The big one was the Casadero storm damage. So we did a lot of repair, a lot of rebuilding of cabins. And you see there the stage got rebuilt and a variety of other things that a combination of contractors and my staff dealt with. We've had sports courts improvement at Echo Lake. And at both Echo and Tuolumne, we installed generators and a switch that allows us to essentially operate when the electricity goes down. We've had a lot of brownouts in both areas in the last several years. And so now when we lose electricity, we'll have the dining hall and the main hall will be able to operate. Next slide. Lots of accomplishments at the waterfront. F&D redecking. It looks beautiful, Terry. Thank you very much for that referral. South Cove West parking lot is finished and looks great, along with the east and the middle docks. So all that work has been completed this year. Next slide. So projects near completion. MLK, Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Services Facility is on its way. And a lot of the shell is complete now. They're working inside. And that project should be done in January of 2027. So we're not far. That's a $15 million T1 project. The Santa Fe right-of-way, that's largely a grant-funded project. We have $5.5 million worth of state grants on that project. And that project has started construction. We've started the remediation of the soil about two weeks ago. And we're hoping to get bids back on the above-ground improvements in the next week or two and award that and start that construction late summer, early fall. So D&E dock is almost done. We've been waiting on PG&E and the East Bay MUD. And we have dates for hookups for both of those. And so we hope to be cutting a ribbon in the marina for the dredging and the D&E dock projects sometime in July. Next slide, Mark. So here you see kind of a breakdown by fundings force for 27 and 28. We have a fair amount more money in 27, largely because we're using Parks Tax Fund Balance to finish a couple of large projects, the MLK Youth Services Center, the Tom Bates Complex, and Santa Fe right-of-way. Next slide. Oh, you go back one slide, Mark. And what you see this year in fiscal 27 and 28, you see an allocation from the camps fund. That hasn't happened since 2013. So when the Berkeley Tuolumne Camp burnt down, which was the main fund driver for the camps fund, we were operating in the red. And so we did no capital projects funded by the camps fund. And it's just now that the fund is recovering. Now the Tuolumne Camp is, this is fourth year of operation. We're very close to selling out this summer. And so we're going to spend about a million dollars of camp improvements out of the camps fund, which is new. Go ahead, Mark. Next slide. So what are we going to do in 27 and 28? In the waterfront, we're going to replace some finger docks, and we're going to try and start to move the garbage containers off the seawall and back into the parking lots or away from the ocean. We're going to start the design O-Doc parking lot. We're going to finish O and K electrical. The state's parking lot, which construction will start probably in the next month, will be redone. And we will do a kind of a maintenance project at the South Cove East parking lot. We just finished the South Cove West. We did the South Cove East about eight years ago. And in order to keep it properly maintained, we're going to seal and restripe. And we're going to redo the landscaping along the Bay Trail on the southern portion from University to Emeryville. And that $700,000 was funding I talked about earlier. And the Waterfront will happen in 27. Next slide. Okay, now I'm going to pass it off to Waheed. Thanks, Scott. Good evening, Madam Mayor, Council Members, Waheed Amirian. I'm Director of Public Works. Over the past two fiscal years, Public Works Transportation has delivered major capital projects that put adopted city plans into action. These projects support climate goals, Vision Zero, equity, and save the travel for people walking, biking, rolling, taking transit, and driving. Examples in front of you include the MLK Vision Zero hybrid quick build safety improvements, our famous Southside Complete Streets Project, Woolsey-Eaton intersection improvements, the Park Radisson Bikeway, Sacramento pedestrian safety improvements, and the recently construction initiation of the Looney Greenway safety improvements projects. The important point is that these are not isolated projects. These come from adopted plans and community direction, and they're being delivered through a coordinated capital effort. Next slide, please. Public Works Engineering also delivered critical work that residents may not always see directly, but that supports the city's core infrastructure every single day. In the fiscal year 24 and 25, street maintenance and rehabilitation projects, we completed work at citywide locations identified in our five-year paving plan totaling about 30 lane miles of street paving and about 14.5 lane miles of service ceiling. That's quite a bit. Kudos to our team members. From July 2024 to approximately June of 2026, the 50-feet sidewalk repair program completed an estimated 350 repairs, reduced some trip hazards, and improving access. The team also completed structural rehabilitation of approximately 1,600 linear feet of Strawberry Creek Culvert, protecting important underground infrastructure. While those accomplishments in mind, let's look at the proposed fiscal year 27 and 28 Public Works CIP budget in the next slide, please. Public Works is proposing a significant two-year capital investment, approximately $92 million in fiscal year 27 and about $79 million in fiscal year 28. This combined together, that's about $171 million over the next two years of the capital budget cycle. The largest funding source, as you might have picked up already, the category is sanitary sewer, Measure FF, the CIP fund, stormwater, and equipment replacement. Measure FF is especially important because it expands transportation, sidewalk, pavement, and very importantly, safety investments citywide. One important note is that the fiscal year 27 includes Measure FF revenue collected since the measure went into effect in January of this year, 2025. That's why the fiscal year 27 Measure FF amount is higher than your normal standard 12-month year, but it'll pan out, level out at the 14th year. I'll walk through the Public Works program areas, starting with sanitary sewer in the next slide, please. Sanitary sewer is one of the largest Public Works capital investments. With approximately $48 million proposed over the next two fiscal years, this work supports public health, environmental protection, system reliability, and compliance with the 2014 consent decree. The city is required to rehabilitate sewer infrastructure at a rate of approximately 4.2 miles per year based on a three-year rolling average. In fiscal years 27 and 28, the sewer rehabilitation project includes a little over $24 million in fiscal year 27 and a little over $22 million in fiscal year 28. This continues a long.
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infrastructure project will design and construct LIDs, short for low impact development improvements, triggered by the recent street rehabilitation work. The permit also requires the city to reach 100% reduction in trash discharges to the bay compared to the 2009 baseline. The city has achieved about or approximately 94%. That's a great accomplishment for our team members. Again, 94% reduction, huge. But additional trash capture facilities are needed to reach the full goal. Major efforts include the Berkeley Aquatic Park Stormwater Improvement Project, Coeur d'Alises Creek Restoration at 9th Street, Storm Drain and Trash Capture Work, Stormwater Quality Improvements, the Clean Water Program, and completion of the Stormwater Master Plan, which we're excited about. That master plan will help identify deficiencies, prioritize future capital projects, and incorporate climate adaptation strategies. Next, please. The streets program includes the city's annual street rehabilitation program, the bridge preventative maintenance, and coordination between the Measure F program. So together, these investments total more than $58 million in fiscal year 27 and 28 to improve safety, accessibility, and pavement conditions citywide. I'll keep it there. Next slide. With the core street rehabilitation program and Measure F road rehab funding combined, we are proposing more than $58 million for streets in fiscal year 27 and 28. That includes close to $38 million in the street rehab program and about $20 million in additional Measure F road rehab funding. The combined program is expected to improve about 25 center lines of streets over the next two years. The work is spread across all eight council districts and is aligned with, again, policy priorities, including equity zone, bikeways, bus routes, high injury streets, and the city's dig once policy approach. Council's 2022 commitment of an additional $8 million annually for paving made a huge difference. Before that, the city was averaging roughly about two to three center miles of paving per year. Since that investment, we have increased output to nearly 10 center miles per year over fiscal year 24 through 26. And for a pavement engineer, they will be jumping up backwards, and that's a great accomplishment. So it's in the right direction. So obviously, the data is moving in the right direction, as I mentioned. Citywide PCI improved from 55 in 2023 to about 57 at the end of 2025, but PCI 57, unfortunately, is still at-risk category, and the city has more than $300 million in deferred pavement maintenance. So we are making progress, but the work is still far from complete. Next, please. Our ever-famous transportation projects, where many of the city's adopted safety and mobility plans become real improvements on the ground. The proposed transportation CIP is approximately $25.6 million over fiscal year 27 and 28, and includes both regular transportation projects and the Measure FF safety projects. These investments prioritize making it safer for people of all ages and abilities to walk, roll, bike, take transit, and move around Berkeley in general. They include safe routes to school, bicycle boulevards, pedestrian safety improvements, traffic signal modernization, transit access, and corridor projects. The funding sources include Measure FF, obviously, the state. We have a lot of local grants, state transportation tax, MTC funding, the UC Berkeley settlement, Measure BB, and other regional and local resources. The next slide highlights examples of our transportation projects that we're proposing in the CIP. This slide highlights several projects within the proposed transportation CIP. Adeline Transportation Improvement will deliver quick-build improvements and advanced permanent design, including safety, accessibility, protected bike facilities, signal improvements, and AC Transit bus stop improvements. The Cedar Street median crossing and Cedar Street pedestrian safety crossing improvements support safer crossings along an important corridor and connect with the bike plan and the pedestrian plan priorities. Citywide Traffic Common Program provides stable funding to expand neighborhood traffic common as a whole. We have a Claremont last night. The Claremont Avenue Complete Streets Corridor Project will support the public process and design work for a major safety corridor. Ohlone Greenway improvements will widen and repave the greenway, add lighting, and improve crossing. Oxford For All will obviously advance Complete Streets design between Hearst and Bancroft. The Telegraph Multimodal Project will continue Complete Streets design from Dwight to the Oakland border, including protected bike lanes, transit improvements, pedestrian safety, and ADA upgrades. We also continue Safe Routes to School work for Washington Elementary, Berkeley High, along with the Vision Zero quick-build and action plan work that's ahead of us. Next slide, please. All right, the final slide before I stop talking. So the final Public Works category is equipment replacement and other infrastructure that Mayor Carr touched upon a little bit at the beginning. So equipment replacement includes five proposed equipment replacement projects and six other infrastructure projects. So in fiscal year 27, the vehicle replacement program is proposed at about $9.6 million, and in fiscal year 28, that goes down to about $4.9 million, close to $5 million. The equipment replacement fund is supported by monthly charges to departments for vehicles and equipment replacement. Departments are responsible for covering shortfalls when replacement costs exceed available balances. So the fiscal year 27 plan is to replace approximately 66 vehicles or pieces of equipment and add one new all-electric rear loader truck for zero waste. For 28, the numbers are about 61 replacements, including some mowers. So as a general rule, the City Public Works, whenever the market and operation allows us, we will move towards electric vehicles. With that said, that concludes the Public Works slides. I'm going to hand it over to my colleague to take over the IT slides. Thanks, Waheed. Good evening. Good evening, Madam Mayor and members of the Council. I'm Kevin Fong, Director of IT. And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, we don't have a lot of slides. But it does not mean we're not passionate. I mean, I'm so passionate, I brought help along. Tonight, I'm pleased to present some of the key IT milestones and accomplishments from the past year. So the IT team significantly strengthens the stability and security of City operations by accelerating our cloud migrations, ensuring full regulatory compliance, and replacing outdated, inefficient systems, which we're still doing. Our achievements are built upon four strategic pillars, and I'll start with the first one, better online services. To build a more resilient infrastructure, we transitioned to a cloud-first architecture. Central to this effort was the Accela cloud migration in October 2025, an achievement that eliminated on-site server failure risk and delivered an immediate 40% increase in portal performance. For context, this platform securely processes about $15 million in annual permitting and another $30 million in business licenses. For our City workforce, we collaborated with HR, payroll, audit, and the City Manager's Office to launch the Employee Access Portal on March 23rd of this year. This secure, self-service module allows over 1,500 City employees to manage their pay stubs and W-2s independently, which has already reduced HR administrative tickets by 30%. Our second pillar is stronger security and reliability driven by a rigorous, multi-layered protection strategy. First, on identity verification, we achieved a 100% City-wide compliance with our hardware-based multi-factor authentication. We kind of dubbed that as the Berkeley Two-Step, if any of you remember that, but I won't do the dance here. Second, for endpoint security, we completed a full hardware and software refresh, recently deploying Windows 11 Enterprise across all our City workstations to meet modern security standards. And third, for some employee safety, we accelerated the launch of BeWarned. This is a multi-platform internal emergency system designed specifically to notify staff of critical health and safety issues by pushing alerts instantly to all City-issued devices. Our third pillar is more reliable infrastructure, focusing on facility builds and connectivity. Our major milestone was reaching 95% City-wide facility Wi-Fi coverage, which included overcoming the complex challenges and engineering challenges of deploying on the open waters at the marina. We also successfully delivered the core technology infrastructure for the fire headquarters relocation. Despite utility permitting delays, our team engineered a temporary connection solution to ensure the department moved in completely on schedule. Additionally, we standardized our meeting room audiovisual hardware, replacing legacy systems, unified the user experience, and we directly achieved a $68,000 annual savings. Finally, pillar four, financial improvement or operational improvements, targeted the elimination of inefficient obsolete systems. To achieve regulatory compliance, we launched new technology that lets 311 securely handle credit card payments by phone in full compliance with PCI standards. It makes payments easier, improves revenue collection times, and eliminates the City's liability. For context, during a single week in May 2026, our 311 center securely processed over $37,000 in credit card payments by phone. To accelerate the modernization of our financial infrastructure, we restructured our approach to accounts receivables. We removed general billing from the scope, allowing specialized end systems to handle direct invoicing. As a result, revenue data now bypasses our legacy fund system entirely, protecting data integrity and accelerating the sunsetting of our aging mainframe infrastructure. So in summary, we established a new baseline for IT excellence by modernizing our environment and eliminating operational risk. We've successfully cleared the path to our future roadmap, including the final decommissioning of legacy systems and upcoming public safety cloud upgrades. Next slide, please. So I'm going to pass this on to Deputy Director Berry, who's going to talk about infrastructure security and the applications. Thank you, Kevin. So this slide that we're looking at summarizes information technology's proposed capital investments for FY27 and 28. These projects focus on three core areas, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business applications that support city operations and services delivered to the community. Just as the city invests in roads, facilities, and other critical public assets, we must also invest in the information technology infrastructure that supports virtually every city service today. The largest investment is in cybersecurity.
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As Maricar pointed out, even though we're doing a tremendous amount of capital over the next five years, we're not making any progress on that unfunded list. And the same thing is true in parks. We have, as things break, things wear and tear. And so as we complete projects, other ones become issues or break. Just yesterday or just Saturday, we had a small sinkhole appear in the South Cove, which we're really worried about, and hoping that the bond measure passes in November and we'll have the funds to replace the seawall, which was the genesis of that sinkhole. But throughout parks, we have a variety of unfunded needs that need to be funded so that we're not closing facilities. I think in 2015, we closed the Berkeley Pier. We closed the trellis at the Rose Garden shortly after. And fortunately, with T1 funds, we were able to reestablish that, working on the pier. But as things get older, they need to be fixed. And so we've got a community center that's not seismically safe and very small that needs to be fixed. And so our unfunded needs keep growing. And we're excited for the potential bond measure. That'll make a lot of progress. Wehe. Thanks, Scott. For Public Works, I'll keep it pretty simple. The key takeaway is that on the Public Works side, unfunded capital needs is approximately $1.8 billion. Yes, $1.8 billion. That reflects the scale of infrastructure we're responsible for maintaining, which is obviously streets, sidewalks, sewer, stormwater, transportation, facilities, fleet, and many other core assets that residents rely on every single day. So the CIP obviously is not a full solution. It's the city's best efforts to prioritize limited resources, protect essential services, prioritization, and leverage outside funding wherever we can feasibly. So with that said, I'll hand it over back to AmeriCorps. Okay, I need to eat more spinach. Can't even press that. We don't want to end this amazing presentation with a $2.2 billion unfunded need. We do just want to highlight that that is something that we need to work towards addressing. What we do as we wrap up, it is important to highlight that there's been some progress made despite the significant unfunded capital needs. We expect to see materialize in the sidewalk and pathways, streets and roads, and sewers. If you guys can read that bottom table, the streets, the sidewalks, and pathways started off the first five-year CIP with about $66 million of unfunded need. At the end of the five-year period, it's going to be about $54.7 million. Unfunded capital for streets and roads will start off at about $263.1 million. At the end of the five-year period, we're expecting to see that decrease to $167 million. And sewers starting at $138 million the five-year period. At the end of the five-year period, this is the most significant decrease. It's going to be at about $32.7 million unfunded need. This improvement is not done. It will not happen by accident. It is the result of targeted strategic solutions. We have increased our CIP fund funding for streets and roads. Measure FF revenues supporting sidewalks and pathways, streets and roads, and a completed sewer study, rate study that led to phased rate adjustments beginning in fiscal year 2016. These steps show that when we invest intentionally, we close gaps and strengthen our infrastructure. That concludes our presentation of the five-year proposal CIP, and we can now move on to discussion and questions. Thank you. Oh, next steps. So for next steps, we're here now June 16th. We're going to go over, we went over the CIP as well as the biannual budget. It's the next, I believe, the next item or third item in the agenda item 40. With June 23rd, we're hopeful that we're back here in front of you to adopt a 2027-28 budget and a five-year CIP. July 1st is the beginning of fiscal year 27. The adopted budget and balancing measure will take into effect, and the fiscal year 27 capital budget is available. Thank you. Thank you very much. I know that was a lot to present and to gather and to work on, so thank you all very much for presenting it. Last time they presented this, there was some argument about which department was most important. It was very amusing, but I say that just to say that you all are very passionate about the work you do, and you've accomplished so much. It's just really incredible, really amazing to see all the work that you've done. I really am very grateful. So I want to take questions from my council colleagues on the CIP, starting with Council Member Taplin. Oh, okay. Council Member Bakke, do you have a question? I do have a couple quick questions. I don't know how quick, actually, but relatively quick. Slide 37, if you could just pop that back up again, Marty Carr, and 38. So I know that the bottom of 37, again, we're going to invest $400 million over five years on capital projects, and our total unfunded capital needs were basically kind of flat. So basically, we're replenishing capital, but then capital needs are accumulating at the same time, and we're doing some replenishment. So we're kind of staying steady state. On the other hand, on the next slide, as you indicated, we're making significant investments in streets and sewers such that the backlog for streets and the backlog for sewers are significantly reduced. We're making good progress there. So I think my question is, so given that overall we're sort of keeping, we're kind of treading water, but we are making real progress in a couple areas, do we have a sense of where are the areas where we're getting worse? Because a few areas are getting better than some areas are getting worse, and do we have a sense of what areas those are getting worse? Does that make sense? I'll give a big picture answer, and then for specific program categories, I'll rely on my colleagues to answer. Some of them will probably be facilities because their funding source is really just the general fund or the CIP fund, which is they're at the mercy of what's available. And the annual baseline, which is not very much for facilities, I believe it is $900,000 annually for our 95 buildings that we manage, which is getting older as I sit here and talk. And do you guys want to answer specifically? Well, I'll talk regarding IT. So one of our primary responsibilities is security, and as you know, everyone owns a computer. You've got to buy a new computer every few years. So we're impacted by that, our firewalls and everything. They need to continue to be upgraded. Just the rising costs of subscription software, there's an annual escalator every year. That gets a little bit out of hand. And then we have this little thing called AI coming up, which as more of us are going to start to use it, that consumes a lot of server power and things like that. So there's going to be additional costs in that, just in the licensing and then how much we're going to use it, right? So those are the things that come to mind. Then you get the other stuff that, just like sewers, you don't think about it, but we have fiber that's underground that deteriorates. And so we need, just like we need to keep the sewers running, we need to keep those fibers in good shape. Great. Over time, I'd love to see, again, understand more of this. And if it's in the full report, I was kind of flipping through it in the full document. It may not be in the presentation, but maybe if offline someone could point me at those numbers. I am really curious. This is one of the things I've been curious about for a while. Because I know, conceptually it makes sense, we're investing, but things are atrophying at the same time. And so it's this question of how much do we actually need to be investing to be moving the needle overall and not just treading water. So I'm really heartened to see that we're investing enough in streets and we're investing enough in sewers that we're making a big dent in those. But I would just love, not now necessarily, but offline to know where things are really getting worse, because those are going to be the next attention areas in the next five-year CIP potentially. So that was one question. Second question is, if the infrastructure bond does pass, what does that do to the five-year plan? Would we re-update the plan? Maybe this question is for the city manager. Would we update the plan? What happens in the middle of the five-year CIP if the infrastructure bond passes, and how do we make decisions about that? Well, you've seen the project list for the five-year plan. So that five-year plan project list would be incorporated into the part of the CIP, and we would be looking at how do we bring those new revenues in, and obviously we'd have to hire new staff, create new contracts with people to do a lot of that work, and build that into this. So it would be a process. Okay. Okay. But we do this every five years. We wouldn't necessarily re-update the plan in year two or year three. I mean, we'll have the project list and we'll know what we're doing, and we'll come back and look at this again in the next budget cycle to set the next five-year plan from there, basically. Right. Okay. Yeah. If I could comment on that, it'll generally reduce. I mean, if the bond measure passes, we're talking about the first five years probably spending $100 million. So it's generally going to reduce, I would venture to say, somewhere our unfunded list between, you know, $100 million and $150 million. And I think.
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and you know we get constant bombardment about you know what do you recommend and honestly we don't have a recommendation right now we're working on it ourselves. So hopefully that addresses the AI concern. In terms of I think your last question was more self-service functionality right so I don't know if you were so we had credit card payments by phone processed by 311 about two years ago that wasn't PCI compliance so we had to stop doing that and the impact on the community was bad because people were complaining hey you know now you're forcing me to either mail in a payment or come in person so it took a little while but we managed to implement that that credit card payment by phone solution. We made it universal so right now 311 is using it but we're in a position where we might be able to expand it in the next year to any department because it's tied in tightly to our phone system so other departments like maybe finance for example if they want to start processing it it's a matter of configuring the phone system to direct it to that solution. Is that seamlessly integrated to online payment capability? I know RPP parking you can now do that online but I understand from constituents that not all that functionality is limited to certain. Yes so the solution we have is a universal solution it's just where we apply it to so when we decide to go to that direction we can apply this solution to RPP payments or whatever right. Okay would love to dig in a little more at a later time but moving on right now I believe you're using two systems there's clarity for planning it's being migrated to clarity but then Acela is still being used so what is the longer term plan and I guess what are the costs that we are holding while we're using two separate systems? So that is a concern of ours so yes the answer is we are using Acela. Acela supports the finance department, planning, public works right and I think some fire permitting and environmental health right so Acela supports those three departments. Planning is looking at a replacement for Acela to just replace their permitting solution so that's that $150,000 that we alluded to that because we don't know there's going to be some integration effort but either way we are going to have two systems because if clarity goes live that's just for the planning department we still need to maintain Acela for the finance department and the other departments right. So until we come up with a better master plan we're going to actually end up with two parallel systems. Okay thank you and my last question I have some brief comments but funds did I hear correctly funds migration is beginning in FY29? No no no no funds migration has been going on and it's going on now but we have two major modules which is parcel tax and land management those are the two behemoths that we still need to migrate off of funds. So right now we have sufficient funding in the IT cost allocation to address some of the smaller modules like accounts receivable and general billing and customer master but when those are completed then that's going to be around FY28-29 we still need to address those last two big modules which currently is unfunded and our 680 cost allocation doesn't have the money to pay for that right now so that's why I raised in the unfunded CIP issue. Okay thank you and I know there's more opportunity to dig in I'll just say that IT needs a dedicated funding stream and I'm looking forward to if I have the opportunity to continue this work on the council that my intention is to work with you kind of focus some of my future efforts in that direction. I firmly believe that all city departments including semi-autonomous departments I will leave it at that need to budget for and pay their fair share in terms of IT expenditures. On the CIP I really appreciate the call out to councilmember Taplin's point around sometimes CIP not always getting the visibility that it deserves I really appreciated the comprehensive nature of this presentation and we have to continue to prioritize essential infrastructure investments that keep Berkeley safe accessible and resilient repairing and improving streets and sidewalks upgrading sewer and stormwater systems and enhancing ADA accessibility throughout public spaces is immensely important and we of course live in earthquake country and so this plan also advances seismic retrofits and ongoing maintenance of city facilities along with upgrades to park and recreation amenities. As someone who has dedicated the better part of my adult life to working on climate protection and climate justice I'm really proud that the city is also expanding its commitment to climate action through projects focused on building electrification and energy efficiency and I appreciate how integrated that is along with resiliency into the plan so thank you so much. Councilmember if I can your inquiry about the North Berkeley Senior Center wall project the contract was awarded at $61,168 to as I mentioned earlier Bebro's construction and again the main point of issue there was a vehicle ran into the wall so while we are making the repairs to the location is open but I believe regarding hot food there's still an issue but once we repair everything is fully operational as I mentioned earlier the city is going for reimbursement through the reinsurance from that resident who ran into it unfortunately hope that answers your questions and inquiries. It answers part of my question. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Humbert. Madam Mayor I don't have any questions I just have comments so I can save those for later. If you would like on the CIP though you're welcome to. Oh sure yeah okay thank you. I want to thank all of you sitting up there our spectacular directors and the staff that works with you for this incredible report and all the work that you know that you do and all the work that went into it. I just want to kind of rhapsodize a little bit I really appreciate the photos of the great projects that have been completed in your presentation. The beautiful stormwater swale facilities that preserve and filter our stormwater include beautiful native grasses and plants. The photo of the recently completed Willard Clubhouse which I just I mean I'm just so still so thrilled about it. A facility that was designed as lead silver and was awarded lead gold and it's garnered incredible numbers of awards. The photos of Southside Complete Streets, the Woolsey-Eaton intersection which I think is a work of art. These are just a few of the great accomplishments recently completed by all of you and I want to say that I'm thrilled that the Fulton Woolsey Bike Boulevard improvements have been completed including the important safety crossing improvements at Shattuck and Woolsey between districts 8 and 3. I'm thrilled that we're underway with the quick build safety improvements on the Claremon Avenue corridor. They're happening right now. We're moving toward final design adoption and bids on the critical safety improvement at Zachary's Corner, Warring and Derby after an inclusive public process that included Zachary's father and grandmother. I see this report shows the work we're going to be able to do to make our streets safer and sidewalks better and safer through measure FF funds and I'm so grateful that Berkeley residents supported that by an almost super majority. In D8, I see that we'll finally get to work on the dangerous crossing at Claremon and Eaton where our D8 resident Paul Fogel was so grievously injured several years ago. This will be an FF CIP project. I see the first year of the five-year CIP plan includes an expenditure for commencing the process of designing permanent corridor improvements on Claremon Avenue. There will be substantial public outreach on this of course. I'm thrilled generally to see that we'll be spending FF monies on repairing the worst of our sidewalks and the worst of our streets and specifically some of our streets in the worst conditions with PCIs hovering in the single digits and these are things we weren't able to tackle until FF. So thanks to all of you and your staff for this report and also to every member of our staff and contractors who have done and will do the work shown in this report. Thank you. Big round of applause for all of you. Thank you. Thank you councilmember. Councilmember Bartlett. Thank you Madam Mayor. I too want to thank you all for your work. These last few years you've accomplished so much and with a very creative process, resources become challenging, constrained, found new buckets of resources, new workflows and dedicate yourselves to making our city great again if you will. And so you've done a lot of great work in my district. You named it all. I want to thank you again. And so I'm curious though as we look at sort of the next five years and you know and I want to just harken back to councilmember Vice Mayor Trigub's comments. You know it's a shame that the IT budget is not vigorous because so much of the savings are going to come from, bless you, are going to come from IT ultimately. We know this as we get better processes and more efficiencies and do more with the new tools we have. And then the other savings on the physical side, the CIP, I'm curious about the cost trajectories across these different facets of the next few years. I know they're projected to go up. They were last five years ago too. And so I'm looking at the, you know, the core, sort of the core components that are subject to inflation, inflationary pressures, the concrete, asphalt, electrical components, labor. So I'm wondering, sort of structural issues, structural techniques, structural strategies are we deploying to kind of get the cost curve? Because our buckets of money are finite. And so I'm wondering what are we looking at? Are we looking at new forms of procurement, you know, large procurement at scale? Is it new materials that last longer or new things like concrete made of hemp, things like that? You know, I'm curious as to what we're looking at to get the cost curve. I can start and I can hand it over to our, my colleagues to chime in. So unfortunately, as you mentioned, Council Member, we really don't have too much control as far as inflation. And we do have some wild cards as far as the oil prices. Hopefully they're going to come down. So there's not too much limitation that we have. And there's, we tend to keep a tight pulse as far as technology and what's trending. Obviously with GI, we look.
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organized and executed it is because it's a really, really complicated thing to manage. So I just wanted to give props to all of you and the city manager and all the people who execute. It's really, I'm very impressed. And that was my general appreciation. I have a very specific appreciation, which is for Acting Director Amiri. Thank you so much for putting McGee on the FF paving plan. It's a small, seemingly random street, but it's like, basically rocks. And the residents are very appreciative. So that's all. Thank you so much. Again, I want to give the credit to Measure FF team, transportation, engineering, and also it gave us an opportunity for what I call the 360 perspective to be able to look at all of our network where street segments that were missed for 30 years, they have an opportunity now, they all pay their taxes, this gives them an opportunity for fresh pavement and also it safeguards the road for bicyclists, pedestrians, you know, strollers, because when you're in gravel, that's not a safe means of travel path. I tried to ride a bicycle on that road, I think it would destroy the entire thing. Thank you. Council Member Kesarwani. Thank you very much, Madam Mayor. This is actually my second time getting this presentation because we did receive it at the Budget and Finance Committee as well. So I just want to thank you again for all of the detail that is presented here. And I specifically want to call out the work on streets. I know you did already, you know, talking about that $8 million general fund increase. I authored that and I just want to take us down memory lane because when I first got on the council back in 2019, 2020, we would pass our five year paving plan and our public works director at the time would tell us and he sort of glossed over it and that's not a criticism because we were always in the habit of seeing our pavement condition index decline every time we approved the five year paving plan. And the reason for that is because we were not investing enough general fund resources to actually see the pavement condition index improve. And I really zeroed in on that and recognize that as a major problem. Others did as well. You know, I don't want to take singular credit. And I really wanted to see us commit more general fund dollars to that. And we made that commitment. And I want to thank the advocates who rallied around Measure FF to draft that and collect the signatures and get it on the ballot. What that measure does, as this presentation shows, it doubles down and gives us even more resources so that people who live on McGee, that used to be District 1, it's now District 5. I'm happy to hand it over and I'm even happier to see it finally get repaved. We had Holly Street that was in similar condition and we worked to get that one repaved a couple years ago. And I did want to briefly mention that Measure FF has language in it that says if we don't continue to do the 8 million general fund commitment, that that parcel tax revenue will also go down. And I really appreciate that because I feel very confident that it has really locked in that general fund commitment. And this is really hard stuff because think about the deficit that we're in right now. If we didn't have that guarantee in FF that we cannot pull these dollars, it would have been really tempting. And that's what prior councils did, reduce the investment in capital streets that we all use every single day to close deficits. That's really a big part of why we're in the unfunded deferred maintenance of a lot of our capital. A lot of cities have this problem though. Things wear out and degrade and the costs continue to grow. So we have this problem. And so I just feel like despite the 1.8, I think you said 1.8 billion, right? Of unfunded infrastructure liability. I really think that there's a bright spot here for our streets and the sidewalks. And then we have our $300 million general obligation bond that the voters will take a look at and hopefully authorize so that we can do more. Do more of all of this work that we all benefit from as a community. So thank you again. And I'm really glad to see where we are on the streets, especially. If I can add, thanks to measure FF and the approach that we're taking between the baseline two programs, we've run some modeling and our 12 year projections, they show that our PCI as a full network throughout the city will be in the 60s. So that's a huge accomplishment. That's only 12 years. And again, that goes based on the framework that we're addressing the city complete network. So that's great. I mean, as I said, we're definitely heading in the right direction and kudos to council members who made the million dollar decision. As I said, we're still not in the 70s, but hey, we're in a great place in the 60s in 12 years. That's great. We just got to keep heading in that direction. Yes. And just quickly, Mr. Amiri, for people who don't know what 60s mean, I mean, that's a bad grade, but you know, on a test, but 60s here, because we just translate that. That's not very good, but is it like good or fair? It's very good for where we're at right now. When you think about PCI of six and when the sweeper goes by and the dust cloud comes up in a, you know, established corridor, I think, as I said, we're heading in the right direction. And again, it shows a commitment from the residents, from council to again, provide the resources so we can deliver the goods. So kudos to all of you guys. Yes. And because also, just really quickly, I know it's getting late. We have another big item to do. When you're at six, you know, in the past, we would tell you, well, we're really sorry, tough luck now because your street is in such bad condition that it would be too expensive to fully repair your street, to fully reconstruct your street. And so we need to put ourselves in a position where we're not letting things get to that point, right? That I think we have that cost curve for streets, right? Where a dollar early saves $8 later on the reconstruct. So that's why we did the 8 million. You know, we're trying to save money by maintaining. And I think that's where we're going to be. And so I'm really pleased to see that. Thank you. Moving on to Council Member Luna-Para. Thank you. I don't have any questions. I just, I really want to thank all of the people who have worked on this. And I, during the conversation, I was reminded of the origins of Measure FF and how three of us, after the failure of Measure L, came up with this idea. And it was a couple of 20-somethings that cared enough about this that started it. But it was so many people along the way that worked on the campaign, that volunteered, that voted for it. And now it's the work of our incredible staff that's going to implement it. So I just am very grateful for all of that. Thanks. Thank you so much. I just have some comments. Again, thank you all so much for your presentation. Sure. OK. I'm going to interrupt myself and open up the public hearing on the budget. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. All right. So I mean, you all know infrastructure is one of my top priorities. And I'm very proud of all the work that we've done here, especially on our T1 projects. It's already been mentioned, I guess. But New Willard Clubhouse, restrooms and lighting in Ohlone Park, Civic Center Upper Plaza, the dock repairs, and so much more has really improved the quality of life for our residents and also for our visitors. We've completed safety projects on several intersections and streets in Berkeley, working towards our complete streets goals. I see these projects every single day as I go around the city. And I hear from people in the community that they see it too. So I know that you all don't get to hear appreciation all the time, but know that the public really does appreciate your work. And we've done so much here. And I know there's a lot more to do. I know that, as Mary Carter was saying, the end of the presentation is a little bit hard because there is so much to do. And yet I know that we're really working on chipping away at this. And I really see that the next steps that we're moving forward will get us in a good spot in really making significant work of this great need. As my colleagues have also said, I'm committed to addressing funded and unfunded capital improvement needs. And I know that this will take many years to get to the point where we're adequately maintaining our infrastructure versus just crisis management, which I know is what folks feel like it is right now. We've done a really amazing job at leveraging funding. You all have done an amazing job of leveraging funding. And I want to make sure that we're continuing to do that. And that's why it's so important that we set aside funding from our general fund, and also, of course, that we are supporting this infrastructure bond that's coming up as well. Because this will really address some of our most urgent needs while also investing in capital projects that are critical to ensuring that Berkeley continues to thrive. I also just want to thank everyone for just the work that we have coming up. Because, of course, this is the plan. Once we approve it, there's work to do here. So I just want to say thank you again. Thank you to all of you. Thank you so much to your staff. Thank you to everyone who put this presentation together. It's a massive lift. And my staff and I have really spent a lot of time with it.
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Okay, thanks everyone. Thank you for your patience. All right, coming back into session. Thank you so much. I'm going to pass it over to our city manager to present us with his budget. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll be brief and then I'll hand it over to budget manager, Mark Ardupia. We have a short slide, a short deck, 10 slides, 10 minutes, you know, reaching, getting into the final lap of what's been a very long and hard budget process that we started many months ago with the idea that we would work as hard as we could to minimize the impacts of a very significant nearly 30 million dollar structural deficit on both the services and programs and impacts that are felt by residents and also on impacts to our staff. And it has been a very hard journey. We are proposing to eliminate 183 positions from the budget, including fiscal year 26 and then the two years that we're talking about tonight. And I'm proud to say that while it is deeply painful to lay off any staff, we have really focused hard on making that number as small as possible. Some people have, some people will be, will be bumping into vacant positions. So that 20 will go down to approximately 14. And of the 14, she and her team are working very hard in partnership with our labor partners who have been very good partners throughout this process on a flexible placement program whereby we've frozen hiring in most classifications and positions to preserve the opportunity for people to move into jobs that are vacant, even if they are not in the same classification in which they currently reside. As long as they meet the minimum qualifications, that is a, that will be a voluntary offer that is made to people who are in that category. And I really do want to extend my thanks to our HR director, Janelle Rodriguez and her team who have been working very hard to go through that, a tremendous amount of analysis and work to minimize to the greatest extent possible the impacts to our staff and prevent as many people as possible from losing a job. So it has been a hard period where I really want to also extend thanks to Deputy City Manager David White, who's done a tremendous, tremendous amount of work. Our budget manager, Mari Karjupi, who's done a tremendous amount of work as well as her, her small team. It's a very small team who put in a lot of hours and will continue to put in a lot of hours until we wrap this whole thing up over the next week or so here. So with that, I will turn it over to Mari Karjupi to walk through the slide deck. Thank you, Paul. My laptop's not working, so bear with me. This is just a recap of what we proposed and presented on May 19th to the full council, the proposed fiscal year 27 and 28 manual budget. Next slide, please, Mark. So the purpose of overview, the purpose of this is to have a public hearing number two on the proposed manual budget and five-year CIP, continue discussion on the proposed fiscal year 27 and 28 budget as well as the five-year CIP that you just heard. And of course, it allows for city council and public input to allow for adoption of a balanced budget scheduled on June 23rd, 2026. The short slide will cover a recap of the proposed biannual budget as well as some technical changes since May 19th. Next slide, please. Apologies for this very small font. Budget engagement timeline, this is just to show you that how we have been extremely engaged throughout this whole biannual budget development process. We started way before January 2026. I just wanted to highlight what's been happening the past six months. We've had budget and finance policy committees throughout. The very first time we presented an update of the 27-28 proposing the baseline, presenting the baseline budget, February 2026, we received a general fund revenue update from our finance director as well as an overview of revenue enhancements. We also had an overview of our fund CIP fund, which is when we proposed and shared that it does not have enough funding balance and is expecting a structural deficit. April 2026 is when it really picked up. We had a budget and finance policy committee where we had charter officers budget reduction plans, and also we had the overview of the 27-28 proposed budget balancing plan, as well as budget referrals. May 2026, a couple more budget and finance policy committee meeting. We presented the proposed annual budget. We also presented the proposed five-year CIP and a budget referral at Songstroll. On May 19th, as mentioned, we presented to the full council the 27-28 proposed budget, and here we are now in June. We've had two budget and finance policy committee meetings. On the 11th, the mayor's proposed budget and the community agency contracting overview, and tonight we're here to continue discussion on the budget, as well as we presented the five-year CIP to you, and next Tuesday is the adoption of the proposed biannual budget and the five-year CIP, as well as our fiscal year 2027 annual appropriation ordinance. Next slide, please. I just wanted to really briefly go over, I'm sure you know this already, but our fiscal context of impacts and announce, we mentioned already that we are experiencing a structural deficit and challenges not only in the general fund, which is what we have mainly focused on, but also in our special funds like parking funds, marina, and our CIP fund. There's a rise in costs in personnel, pension, health care, and our liability insurance, as well as labor negotiations, inflation, I think it went up 4.2%, which is the highest I believe since 2023, and we don't know how high it's going to go still. Our historical reliance on one-time sources, we still, our fiscal year 2026 year-end results are still pending, so we don't know how we're going to end fiscal year 26, and we just did a whole presentation in front of you about deferred maintenance and significant unfunded infrastructure needs, increased service demands and community expectations. Of course, our November 2026 ballot measures, both local and statewide that could impact our budget significantly going forward, and last but certainly not least, state federal revenue limitations, economic and political uncertainty. Next slide, please. Just want to emphasize again that when we started this budget development, the goal is a structurally balanced budget that protects core services, reduces reliance on one-time funds, and sets the foundation for long-term fiscal sustainability. We did that by first and foremost establishing our 27-28 baseline budget by using actuals plus service needs going forward. Budget balancing framework after the revenue and expenditure adjustments, the general fund deficit ranged from $31.3 million in 27 to $29.5 million in 28. Then there was an immense citywide effort to reduce 10 to 12.5% of general fund baseline budget, other fund-specific fixes that are also in structural deficit and revenue ideas. This included strategic cost shifts, non-departmental refinements, and required debt service support and parking fund stabilization. Even though we say that we want to move away from relying on one-time resources, there are strategic times where it must be done, and as long as you use it, if it's a one-time source, it must be used for a one-time need. The use of one-time resources in fiscal year 27, we have identified $12.06 million of one-time funds used to smooth out the deficits, and this is being used to sustain services in public safety, youth and adult programs in fiscal year 27 until the outcome of a potential November 2026 sales tax measure is known. Next slide, please. This was also part of the May 19th slide presentation, but the general fund budget balancing phase recap. We started off, the initial was $32.3 million in 27. With an updated revenue, it became $27.14, and as I mentioned, there's the adjustments that happened, and our total deficit before one-time use of resources in 27 was $33.3. We used $2.1 million of that to smooth out the 27 and 28, so it will be easier to develop a balanced budget. In 27, we ended with a general fund deficit after revenue and expenditure adjustment of $29.2. In 28, we started with $33.2 million deficit. After revised revenue projection, almost $25 million, and all of the changes and adjustments, we ended with $29.5. So those two bottom numbers were the numbers that we were working with when we initiated the budget balancing exercise for the whole organization. Next slide, please. Proposed revised changes, all funds revenue. So there are some technical changes that happened from the amounts that we proposed and presented on May 19th. I will not go over every single slide, every single one. There's a summary page on the next couple of slides. But overall, there's a variance of $13.7 million from the numbers from May 19th to now. In the revenue side, next slide, please. And on the all funds expenditure side, some of the technical changes that happened resulted in about an $11.6 million change from the amounts proposed on May 19th to now. And in 2028, it is $6.6 million. Next slide, please. This is a summary of the proposed all funds. So the 2027 original proposed for May 19th, the revenue was cited at $772.1 million. The 27 revised today is $785.8 million. The expenditure was $905.2 million. The revised proposed is now $916.8. In the 2028 proposed original on May 19th, the revenue was $773.4 million. The revised is $788.2. On the expenditure side is $865 million. And the revised proposed is $871.8.
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Segment 15
strategy. One is that any classification that had a person in it that was slated to be laid off was frozen for hiring, and the whole series was frozen if it had like a one, two, and a three progression up through the classification. And the goal there is that, you know, when we did this back on April 10th, that there would be hopefully some attrition, some people might retire or get a new job, or for whatever reason leave the organization, and therefore there would be an open position for someone who was on this layoff list to bump into and maintain their job. So that's one category. And our anticipation is that probably after people bump into open positions, we'll have 14 people left on that list, that layoff list. And then, as I mentioned, we've been working hard, our HR director and her team, to figure out other open jobs that they could bump into. And what this has required is for me to freeze all hiring and positions so that, again, we would have first an understanding clearly of what vacant positions exist, and we wouldn't be filling those positions until we go through the budget adoption. And then second, maybe there would be some additional attrition that would allow for vacancies to open up into which people could be placed into. That flexible placement program is part of our MOUs with our labor groups, and we work together to come to agreements that we would start figuring out who had the minimum qualifications to go into a job, even if it was a completely different job and classification from the one that they're currently in. And that cannot be effectuated until the budget is adopted, and we have certainty about which positions are vacant and which positions are filled. So it's important for us to maintain this vacancy list as it is, and then the budget gets adopted, and then we can effectuate the flexible placements for people who meet the MQs or could meet them very shortly for any job in the city. Those people would be offered those jobs, and after HR has done a significant amount of analysis to think through who might be eligible for what jobs and what jobs are open, we anticipate that somewhere between another six and seven people would be flexibly placed into one of those jobs. And again, this is voluntary, and we don't know for sure if that will happen or not, but we have worked aggressively to open up those pathways for people to remain employed with the city, even if it's not in the same job, and in some cases it would be a job that paid less, but it would be a job with benefits. And so those are the two main strategies that we've used. Why don't I just pause there and see if that makes sense, and if you have questions. We also have our HR director here if there's more detailed questions, and she could step in as well. Okay. Thank you, Mr. City Manager. So I know you were speaking city government hiring speak. The MQ is minimum qualifications. So I'm going to try to put that into layperson's terms. You know, because we have vacant positions that are not being eliminated, and on the other hand, we have some people who are on a layoff list. You know, I feel it's really important that we pause hiring people from outside our organization and give those 20 or so people an opportunity to figure out if they're qualified for vacant positions in our organization. You know, I think we should be doing that to minimize and mitigate the human impact of right-sizing our budget. And that's what the City Manager just described, that opportunity for people, if they're qualified, to be able to go into those vacant positions that remain. And so I just want to thank you, Mr. City Manager. I want to thank our Human Resources Director and the HR team because, you know, there is a lot of back and forth, I can imagine, in trying to figure all this out. And I know it can be stressful for people who are thinking about taking advantage of this opportunity. But, you know, this is something that I talked to the City Manager about and wanted to make sure that we did as an organization. So thank you, Mr. City Manager, for just explaining that. The other request that I had made at the Budget and Finance Committee was to look at a possible revenue source for eight positions in the Fire Department, five firefighters and three paramedics. Mr. City Manager, can you update us on the status of that? Yes, Council Member, we have been diligently looking at revenues. You know, our finance team last updated revenues in February, and since then there's a couple of potential revenue increases that, you know, we don't have exact projections yet for some of them, but there's a utility users tax that was, when it was initially created, was mostly generating revenue for people who had cable TV. Since a lot of people have moved from cable TV to streaming services like Netflix, et cetera, we are eligible to apply the UUT to utility users tax to those streaming services. We anticipate that will generate some additional revenue. Again, we don't have an exact figure on what that might be yet, but we are working on that. Additionally, we've been negotiating with the county and looking at ambulance transfer fees and expect that through several different ambulance transport fees we would have revenues exceeding what our projections currently are. So those are the two, I would say those are the two revenue streams that we've been most focused on and looking at. Thank you. I'm sorry, we have to actually make a motion to extend the meeting. Oh, okay. Do you want to pick a time, Madam Mayor? Yeah, let's just to be safe, 1145. Second. Can you take the roll now, please, Clerk? To extend the meeting to 1145, Council Member Kesarwani? Yes. Taplin? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Tregob? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Lunaparra? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishi? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Okay. And I'm just about done with these questions. And then finally, you know, I just wanted to briefly touch on the Mayor's amendments or proposal to fund certain priorities. You know, I want to thank the Mayor and her Brown Act Circle for those proposals. On the Housing Trust Fund allocation for small sites, Mr. White, can you brief us on what new affordable housing projects are in need of gap funding at this point, additional gap funding from the Housing Trust Fund? Can you give us a rundown of that? Sure, I'd be happy to. So in working with our Housing and Community Services team, they've done an assessment of the Housing Trust Fund portfolio. And, you know, there are a variety of projects that we believe over time will need additional funding, some of which is known today and some of which is not known just because the projects are in the process of securing funding. But we do know that the project at 1740 San Pablo likely will need anywhere from $2 million to $4 million of additional money. There are some smaller asks associated with a couple of small sites projects, one at 2321 10th Street, and another one is the Solano Avenue Cooperative. But I think more importantly, and I think what is particularly germane to the City Council is, you know, there have been over time some very substantial commitments associated with North Berkeley BART and Ashby BART Station as well. Those projects are in early stages of pre-development and moving their projects along. And so given the timeframe that it's taken for those projects to come to fruition, we certainly anticipate in an environment with rising construction costs, as you heard from our CIP presentation, rising labor costs, that for sure those projects are going to need additional funding. The amounts are to be determined. But given the constraints on our Housing Trust Fund, we naturally are concerned about adequate funding being available for them. OK, thank you very much, Mr. White. And so I'm very closely tracking projects in my district. And I had an opportunity to talk to Colleen Egan, the CEO of Insight Housing. Insight is one of the affordable housing developers on the team at North Berkeley BART. And they're doing a new building of 83 units of permanent supportive housing at the North Berkeley BART Station for formerly homeless people. She told me they submitted their Homekey Plus application today, but they are still going to need additional gap funding. And so I just want us to be mindful of these asks when we're thinking about how to allocate from the Housing Trust Fund. And I did want to just highlight 1740 San Pablo. This is the corner of San Pablo and Delaware. It is a short biking distance to North Berkeley BART. So to me, anything on San Pablo Avenue is a transit-oriented development. And that is 54 units of new affordable housing from RCD, Resources for Community Development. And they have an actual ask that's $2 million to $4 million. This is a blighted property. Sorry, you're two minutes over your time. OK, I can't see the clock. So I'm just about to wrap up. This is a blighted property, gas station slash tax service. I don't know what it is. It's fenced off. I want us to think about investments that can transform blighted properties into new homes for people. Those people aren't able to come to the Budget and Finance Committee and advocate for funding. So I am here tonight to advocate on their behalf. I am advocating for the formerly homeless people who are going to move into North Berkeley BART. I'm advocating for the low-income families who I would like to see move into 1740 San Pablo within a couple years. This project has been in the pipeline since I started on the council. So these are the trade-offs we have to decide about next Tuesday, June 23rd. Thank you very much. Thank you. Council Member Taplin had given you some of his time. So go ahead, Council Member Blackaby. Thanks,.
Segment 16
Thank you so much for that information. I'm wondering how, can you tell us what the amount of officers that are budgeted for an FY26 budget? Are you asking about the most recently adopted budget, FY26? There are 174. Okay, thank you. And if they're less hired police officers, I believe 154 is the amount right now. Does that mean that there's a surplus in the FY26 budget on the salary side? Yes, it would mean that there would be salary savings from positions that are not filled. Okay, that's helpful. And those, we could, how are those being allocated, reallocated within those salary savings? Is the chief.. The chief is on, I think she could help with some of these questions that you're asking, council member. If it's easier, we can also take this offline. I'm here if you want to ask the question again. Yeah, sorry. If they're, in FY26, are 174 officers at budget, but we only have 154 hired officers, that surplus salary savings, how is it being reallocated? So that salary savings is, we're experiencing that both in our overtime costs, the increase in our overtime costs, and some of that salary savings has also been absorbed back into the general fund for other funding. Okay. Is there, I think it'd be helpful to know where those funds are going to. I have another question around the funding that was unspent in the Edgeworth contract and rolled over in anticipation of an expansion of the FLOC contract in FY26, and I'm curious if there's a surplus in that, those funds. Chief, you're muted. Okay. Sorry, I can see you're working. Sorry, I'm working on it, sorry. Yes, there is funds that are in the public works budget right now that are held for the Edgeworth contract. Some of those are already allocated to some other Edgeworth or some other camera projects that public works had underway, but those funds are frozen as part of the council direction to do the install on the fixed cameras. Okay, thank you. So they're just sitting there right now? That's correct. Okay, thank you so much. Thanks for that information. Those are all my questions. Thank you. Other questions from council members before we move on to public comment? Okay, I will take, we will take public comment. And this, by the way, is for item 40, which includes A, B, and C. I addressed Solano Stroll in my comments, and so feel free to address this in your public comments. Come on up. Is it a one-minute clock or a two-minute clock? One-minute clock. Okay, well, thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Thomas Greger. I'm speaking on behalf of SEIU 1021 CSU-PTRLA, and our chapter is looking at eight layoffs, human beings being shown the door next month. Our chapter understands that the city needs to end its reliance on one-time monies, and we understand and agree with that. We don't think it needs to, we don't need to end that addiction cold turkey in fiscal year 27, and we're not. The plan proposed by management in mid-April earmarked $9.4 million to fund, bridge money to fund 33 positions in the hopes that the sales tax will pass in November and could pick up that bill come fiscal year 28. And I have a gentleman who is willing to cede their minute to me, if that's possible. And out of those 33 positions, 15 of them are vacant, and our chapter feels strongly that it's more important to fill, more important to fund filled positions than vacancies. Vacancies don't produce any outcomes for constituents. Vacancies don't have mortgages to pay or family expenses to cover, so we feel strongly about that, and it would only cost $1.7 million to save our chapter's eight jobs for one more year, which would not greatly increase the amount of money already being earmarked for one-time funds to save jobs, and that year could be spent more thoroughly conducting planning for an austerity plan. An example of errors we're making is the elimination of the mobility, the street mobility team is going to force calls on the more expensive police officers, and in a June 12th Daily Californian article, a department head said that was an unintended consequence. There shouldn't be unintended consequences in this plan. They should all be even the unpleasant consequences planned out. Thank you. Good evening. Benita Gold with Full Spectrum Labs and a Berkeley resident. Berkeley, San Francisco, and many other cities with a relatively high cost of living have all been experiencing a heightened pace of market rate development, but the creation of affordable housing has lagged. Our cities are seemingly well-intentioned and mission-aligned in prioritizing the needs of historically underserved residents in the context of stark income inequalities, but something is amiss since on-the-ground reality in all these cities suggests the positive impact is not there. Berkeley alone has lost over 100,000 unsubsidized, unaffordable, affordable homes since 2020, 1,000 more at risk in the next five years. More so without sufficient city resources to fund permanently affordable housing, displacement in the city is and will be inevitable. As our Joan advocates presented a task for city's allocation of 2.5 million for the small-size program in the upcoming budget, I would sincerely urge you to consider answering these questions. What kind of housing are we creating, and who will we get to live in it, and to what end? Thank you. I'm sorry, your time. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Jean Clinton. I live on Ward Street between Shattuck and Telegraph. We're one of the longtime failed and abandoned streets. We've been working diligently over the last year with City Council Member Bartlett's office, public works staff, all of the relevant council committees and citizen commissions. I want you to know we've witnessed really hard work by the public works staff to wrestle with multiple goals and objectives while embracing council priorities and policies. We're impressed by the resulting five-year CIP project plans. We're pleased to see that our street is included in the Measure FF plan for street repairs, but still three more years away. Two years ago, we were scored a 12th on the PCI index. We're probably down to single digits now. The street sweepers came by today, and we had a cloud of dust for about five minutes. I have a suggestion. I invite.. Could I have one more sentence? Thank you. I'm sorry, unless someone else gives you a minute. Sorry, you're getting a minute from James in the back. Thank you. We invite cash flow permitting. We invite the council and public works staff to consider placing the two worst blocks of Ward Street into the Carlton Street project just two blocks away, which would allow the work to occur in the first two years of the CIP. Thank you. Thank you. Do you want to get minutes from folks? Yeah, I'm going to grab these two guys right here. Do you want another one? You can have three people. Okay, so you will have four minutes total. Thank you. Good morning, Lingmo, President of the Berkeley Firefighters Association, Local 1227. We are slated for 20 positions to be eliminated. Nine of those would be restated with Station 4 if the sales tax passes, but there's another 11 positions that would be eliminated. Five firefighters, three paramedics, the fire marshal, sworn fire inspector, and a fire captain. Those five firefighters and three paramedics, those are like operational positions. We already work 56 hours a week. With the elimination of those positions, we are going to work significantly more over that, 72 and 96 hours a week on a regular basis with those positions gone. I want to thank our council members and city manager for looking for funding for those positions, including the fire marshal, sworn inspector, and the fire captain. Those are essential to the development and safety of that downtown corridor. The fire marshal and the sworn fire inspector enforces all the safety stuff that goes into all the construction of those buildings, as far as all the fire prevention fees that we collect. They handle all that stuff as well. As I looked at the budget over the last 10 years, I went back to 2016, the fire department brings in a significant amount of its own revenue. We have special use taxes that come in. We have money from the UC Berkeley Settlement Fund that comes in. When you take a look at all the special use taxes and how much it funds our department, we're probably at a third that we are self-reliant on. When you factor in our fire prevention inspection fees that go to the general fund and our ambulance transport revenue that also goes to the general fund, that's about $10 million going towards the general fund. When you factor all of that in, our net reliance on the general fund for the fire department is actually closer to only half. We're picking up half the tab. We're also being hit the hardest of all the departments in this city. I just ask you guys to please think about that and how much we bring in and how much we do for this community and how much we show up every day, every night for all the citizens of Berkeley when you're debating these cuts. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. One other thing on that. We're actually 15% less reliant on general funds today than we were 10 years ago. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Mayor and Mayor and members of the City Council. My name is Asa Nenjiye. I'm Executive Director of the Northern California Land Trust. First of all, I want to thank council members, mayor, and staff for dealing with this really difficult budget season and cycle. Second, I want to thank the council and the board for supporting the small sites program, particularly having hopefully enough funding for us to be able to move forward with projects. We're currently looking at a property actually that's really close to here in.
Segment 17
Four members of this council have endorsed a parcel tax to finance an experimental bank, and that experimental bank is intended to fund projects in Oakland, Richmond, and other cities. So there's a huge opportunity cost here because you're basically taking Berkeley funds, proposing to export them at a time when we're hearing about this human tragedy. Rather than endorsing this experimental bank, you should be opposing this measure at this time because we simply can't—we're hearing all this tragedy tonight, and you're endorsing a proposal that would take funds out of Berkeley for a purpose we don't even know is going to succeed. So please change your position from endorsement to opposition. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Kelvin Ward. Yes, good evening, Mayor, Council Members. My name is Kelvin Ward. I'm a regional organizer with Live Free California, and I support the mayor's proposed $200,000 reallocation to Live Free to close the fiscal year of 2027 funding gap. I want to thank you for investing in this work. I know this program is effective because I've led and supported community violence intervention efforts as both an organizer and advocate in many cities, and I've seen firsthand how intervention mentorship and trusted community relationships can change lives before violence occurs. This program more than pays for itself, so I respectfully ask you to support the mayor's reallocation. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next is Teresa Gonzalez. Hello there. Good evening, Madam Mayor, esteemed city council members and city manager. My name is Teresa Gonzalez, and I am the state director for Live Free California and the Berkeley Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Program with the city. I want to begin by expressing our profound gratitude to Mayor Ishii for her leadership and commitment in identifying $200,000 to close the FY27 funding gap. So, Mayor Ishii, thank you. This decision reflects exactly the kind of courageous, values-driven leadership that Berkeley deserves and has committed to, including all of city council who supported this initiative in its inception. We are respectfully asking the full council to support this funding and vote for it next week. I wanted to just remind everyone that the results of this program speak for themselves. In 2025, the second year of the pilot, we experienced zero fatal and zero non-fatal injury shootings. The first such year marking history in this pandemic. Thank you. Next is Kelly. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Just to add on to the comments about the small sites and all of the benefits for the people living them and having affordable housing, when we preserve buildings, we're also taking a sustainable action by not tearing down housing that can be saved and used for affordable housing. So, I'd like you also to keep sustainability in mind when you look at this. It's the climate-friendly thing to do. Thank you. Thanks, Kelly. Next is Bryce Miller. I care deeply about keeping our communities intact. I'm urging you to accept the HIC's recommendation to allocate $2.5 million for the Small Sites Program in the upcoming budget. Small Sites keeps affordable housing in community hands. We're in a housing crisis, and Small Sites and programs like it are some of the only programs that can actually prevent displacement before it happens. Small Sites helps people like my neighbors stay rooted here, but Small Sites is about more than just housing. It's about racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice. It protects families and our rights to stay. So, please fund Small Sites and protect Measure U1 dollars for affordable housing. Thank you. Thank you, Bryce. Okay. Next is Avery Arbaugh. Good evening, council members and mayor. My name is Avery Arbaugh, and I am chair of the Berkeley Tenants Union and head of the Berkeley Tenant Organizing Task Force. I'm here tonight to urge you to accept the HIC recommendation to allocate $2.5 million for the Small Sites Program in the upcoming budget. When Measure U1 was proposed by council and passed by Berkeley residents at the ballot box, it was passed with a promise that the funds would be used to create social and affordable housing. And by defunding Small Sites, this council would be breaking that promise, especially in this moment of federal defunding of housing programs. It is more urgent than ever to expand the stock of permanently affordable housing through the Small Sites Program. I once again urge you to accept the HIC's recommendation, and I thank you for your time. Thank you, Avery. Next is Sophia DeWitt. Good morning. Good morning. Good evening, council members and mayor. My name is Reverend Sophia DeWitt, Chief Program Officer at East Bay Housing Organizations. And as you know, we support affordable housing. And I'm here tonight to say that I'm in support of the HIC's recommendation for $2.5 million for Small Sites. In the middle of a funding reduction from the federal level, the city has to step up. And continue to fund affordable housing and keep people in their homes. And Small Sites is a program that can do this, is already doing this. If you look at examples like the California Street tenants and what they're doing with their property. Now that it. Thank you. Thank you, Sophia. Sure. Last speaker is Live Free, California. Hello, everyone. My name is Santina Gonzalez. I'm a project manager with Live Free, California. I just want to say, you know, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, Nick Jr., has documented that a single fatal shooting has Berkeley taxpayers $3.2 million. In 2024, Berkeley had three fatal and five non-fatal shootings, which combined taxpayer costs of more than $13.3 million. And in 2025, that cost was zero. At $1 million annually, the Jeep delivered a 13 to 1 return on investment and avoided taxpayer costs alone. So the program really does pay for itself. Behind every one of those numbers is a life, a family, a community that doesn't have to deal with unimaginable grief. And so we just want to say we are grateful for the fiscal year 27 commitment to Live Free, California. And we are just asking this council to take the next step, working with the mayor, the city manager, and our team to identify a sustainable million dollar baseline for 2020. Thank you so much for your comment. That's it. Okay. So it is 1135. We have 10 minutes left in this meeting. I just want to get a sense from the council member colleagues. Who else is planning to speak? So I have one, two, three, four. Okay. Folks online, are you planning on speaking or saying anything else? Okay. So we should extend until midnight just in case, I think. Can we take the roll? To extend the meeting to 12 a.m., council member Kesarwani? Yes. Taplin? Yes. Bartlett? Yes. Tregub? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Lunaparra? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay. Motion carries. I like how you said 12 a.m. just to really make sure it was clear. Okay. So council member Taplin, go ahead. Thank you and thanks everyone. I know that the ship has sailed, but I do have to preface this by saying I don't think it's wise to balance the budget on the assumption that the measure will pass. To correct course, we need to make, we need a sober and clear view into the streets before us. I applaud the mayor's work to accommodate council priorities. The prospect of layoffs, however, just doesn't sit right with me. These are people who show up day in and day out to serve the community. What I often hear from members of the public is a difficulty reconciling council's priorities and special projects with the reality of potential impacts and service disruption resulting from workforce reduction. Public safety and core city services are the heart of our work as an organization and they should be the last thing we cut. There is still work to do to retain as many critical positions as possible. I know we're not voting tonight, but I will need to see a budget that also keeps the fire department positions in place and to the extent possible makes whole the city employees whose jobs are proposed for layoffs. Lastly, we do need to adopt some kind of policy around the use of council office salary savings. I recognize that discretion is charter officer prerogative, but respectfully, it is general funds and during the budget crisis, I worry that by reverting to fiscal fiefdoms in order to support special projects, we risk inflicting inequity. Inequity, sorry, and inequality. Thank you. Council Member Vice Mayor Tregub. Thank you. I'd like to start off by also thanking the mayor with whom I had the deep honor of working on the proposed budget and just got to witness firsthand the incredible care that you put into every single line item because you know as we all do that it's not behind each of those line items are real people and real programs and real impacts. And of course, I want to express my deep gratitude to city staff and the city leadership and in particular, Paul and David and Madhukar for diligently exploring every possible option for savings, cost recovery, and revenue generation. I'm so grateful in the way in which the city administration has approached this very difficult work with transparency and maintain consistent communication with city staff, leadership, and the Berkeley community throughout. Moving on to, I just wanted to, so I certainly support the mayor's budget. I just wanted to uplift that we were able to preserve some of my key priorities or find a way to fund them through some revenue transfers. I'm looking forward to maintaining of a DBA outreach worker that last $2,000. We have a few possible pathways, one of which we might be bringing to the council in the future. On Live Free, I am 100% committed to, as I support the approach of finding a way to fund it for this coming fiscal year and then looking for any and all opportunities to.
Segment 18
Adroitly on these three points here, the fire department, small sites, live free, and then of course, our wonderful workers in other divisions and core services of the city, we need you as well, super important. And so I support anything we can do to keep you in there for another year at least to plan for the future, give you a little more time if need be. If you have to restructure, I understand that, but give somebody some time to plan for the future because people have families. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Humbert. Thank you, Madam Mayor. And I'll try to make my comments brief. I've appreciated all the things that my colleagues have said so far. I want to thank our budget manager, the city manager, the deputy city manager who's been in this so deeply, you, Mayor Ishii, the finance department, and all the department heads who put so much work into what has been a very difficult budget. I know that all of you were called upon to make some incredibly difficult decisions and have had heartbreaking, hard conversations. I also want to express my gratitude for all of our city employees who have experienced a lot of heartache and stress as a result of this budget and are still working hard to keep our city services working and moving forward. I know that it's cold comfort when you're facing increased workload, vacant positions, and absent colleagues, but please know that neither I nor anyone on this dais, I think, takes your dedication for granted. We do not. I know that we're not taking a final vote, but overall, I support the city manager's proposed budget and the mayor's suggested savings and expenditures. I want to thank the mayor for including me in her budget Brown Act circle and giving me the opportunity to share my candid opinions about the budget proposal. Ahead of final adoption, I would certainly welcome city staff, constituents, community organizations, and others to communicate to my office their ideas for revenue, savings, or other changes to the budget. There may yet be some change in the couch cushions, some coins in there, and I'd love to hear people's suggestions. So thank you again to staff, and I look forward to looking at this more and more over the coming days ahead of final adoption. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Blunaparra. Thank you. I also want to thank the city manager, the deputy city manager, and the budget team led by budget manager Tapia. Thank you so much. I also really want to thank the mayor for her very thoughtful proposal. I'm happy that we are moving toward a more sustainable, financially solvent budget moving forward by not overextending an already stressed general fund, and I believe that her proposal represents this. I have one request. I think it would be really helpful if the city manager could identify consultant studies in the queue that have not yet been encumbered and are no longer on our V to bring back to council for reconsideration. We sometimes receive studies a couple years after they were voted on that are no longer relevant or the council might not necessarily prioritize anymore, or there's no longer funding available, and it would be great to get a list of those as part of budget consideration. This has been an extremely stressful time for our city, and I think I can speak for many of us when I say that this is the hardest part of this work, and no one bears the stress more than the people who keep our city running every day. We see your work, and we are extremely grateful. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member O'Keefe. Thank you. Ms. Mayor. Mrs. Madam Mayor. This is Mrs. 1960s. Just Mrs. Mayor, not Mrs. Mayor. I've been holding on to that for a few minutes. I don't have a ton to say about this budget. I'm grateful to have been a part of the mayor's working group on the budget, so I would say this, what's being proposed reflects my wishes, and I really want to thank her and her staff for all the work they did. Most of the work, we had a lot of meetings and a lot of discussions, but they really did work hard on this. I think it actually just, it really, this budget really reflects, I actually told this to the mayor privately, I think, but I want to say it in public, too. It really reflects strong leadership, the way you really looked everywhere, really worked hard to try to accommodate as many of our requests as possible and spread it evenly around the districts. I think that's really good leadership, and I want to appreciate you for that. I also want to appreciate you and all of us, including and especially city staff. This has already been said a few times, but it's important, and I want to say it, too. This is such hard work that we, this is the work, I mean, I don't want to, I'm not trying to trash other previous councils, I wasn't there, but this is the work that's needed to be done. We need to make our budget sustainable, and that's very, very hard, and I'm really proud that we're doing it. I'm really proud to be part of this council doing this work, as painful as it is, and I just want to say, again, thank you so much for, you know, David White, you've done a huge amount of this lift, and a lot of Mike Conrad and Paul, too. Just, you've worked so hard to make this happen, and it's just, it's been awful, and it's going to keep being awful, but it's so important, and I'm just so proud of all of us. I really wanted to say that. And then lastly, I just wanted to clear up, we have this Solano Stroll item, I just wanted to give people a little context about where that is. I think we're going to take no action on that, because I think the most appropriate way to deal with that, because the mayor's already included a nice allocation for it, and in case anybody's worried about it, the numbers in the Solano Stroll item were very big, and I do want to make something, make other council members and the public aware of something, which is that because of the nature of this tight budget that we're dealing with now, we can no longer kind of be hand-wavy around the true staff costs, and that was the feedback I got from the city manager. And so this budget, or this item, includes the actual cost, including staff over time and a lot of other expenses, so it is quite expensive. It's also, I want to say, it's the largest street fair in the East Bay, and it attracts 250,000 people, which is more than twice the population of Berkeley, if you think about that. So it's a really, really big deal. It brings a lot of value to our city, to our non-profits, get to reach a lot of people, a lot of economic value, and it's just a wonderful, important cultural event celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. So I'm really grateful that we're able to not ignore it. You know, we're not funding it fully, but I have a D13 item, and the Florida Avenue Association is going to fund this, and of course Albany is also paying some. We have an Albany council member here. So I just want to say, you know, we're making it work all together, and I'm glad that it's been included in this budget, and so I'm happy to take no action on my.. Do you want to make that motion? Oh, sure. Oh, yeah, that's the only thing we have to decide on, right, because we're not voting. Okay, I will move to take no action on my full of it. Second. Solano Stroll item. Can we take the roll on that, please? Okay, on 40B to take no action, Council Member Kesarwani? Yes. Kaplan? Aye. Bartlett? Yes. Trega? Aye. O'Keefe? Yes. Blackaby? Yes. Munipara? Yes. Humbert? Yes. And Mayor Ishii? Yes. Okay, motion carries. Thank you. So I just have a few brief comments, and then we have to finish. So just want folks to understand that, yes, we were looking at council priorities, but council priorities also included focusing more on unfilled positions and not cutting staff. So please be aware that that is something that we also were looking through. As Council Member Kesarwani had stated, we also were looking over in our budget process to try to look at unfilled positions more than filled positions. And that also I want to make sure was really clear that not only has my staff been looking at revenue and other sources of revenue, because we don't believe that it's just about making cuts. We need to be finding funding in other places. And that also, of course, the city staff have been looking at that quite a lot. And I don't think we got to spend very much time on it, but just wanted to make sure that was clear. And then also just to thank, of course, our city staff again so much for all of the work that they've done to go into this budget. And thank you so much to the city manager who has really worked to help make sure that our city staff understand what's happening and where the process is. And just you are someone who really leads with so much compassion. And that is just probably, in my mind, the most important, really the most important skill, talent, ability characteristic that you should have as a leader. And I really want to thank you so much for your leadership. Yeah. Thank you. All right. And I will, I know we have to have non-agenda public comment. I just realized hopefully we have enough time for that. Is there anyone who has off-agenda public comment? One hand raised. Yeah, this will be really quick. So as Councilor Elena Parra and Mayor.