Governing Body Special Meeting
Thu, May 14, 2026 · Governing Body
https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/1471

== Executive Summary ==
The Governing Body convened a Special Meeting to conduct comprehensive budget hearings for Fiscal Year 2027, reviewing departmental presentations, proposed expenditures, and strategic initiatives. Key discussions included the Tourism Department's marketing strategies, the IT Department's significant budget increase for infrastructure and cybersecurity, and the Public Utilities Department's efforts in water management and carbon neutrality. The meeting also delved into the Community Services Department's plans for libraries, recreation, and senior services, as well as critical staffing and funding needs for Emergency Management, Fire, and Police Departments.  A major theme throughout the discussions was the city's ongoing challenge with staffing vacancies across departments and the impact of sunsetting ARPA funds on various community programs.

Significant attention was given to the city's infrastructure, including parks maintenance, capital improvement planning, and the airport's development. The Planning and Land Use Department's budget, staffing, and efforts to streamline the permitting process and reform affordable housing policies were also thoroughly examined. The newly formed Department of Economic Development and Creative Industries presented its vision for aligning economic growth with arts and culture. Councilors raised numerous questions regarding budget allocations, operational efficiencies, and the long-term sustainability of city services, emphasizing the need for strategic planning, improved communication, and a focus on internal workforce development over external contracting.

== Key Decisions ==
- The agenda for the Governing Body Special Meeting was approved unanimously.

== Motions & Votes ==
- The agenda was approved unanimously.

== Public Comment ==
Councilor Faulkner emphasized the importance of mindfulness, kindness, and respect during the meeting. Councilor Casset submitted questions regarding the tourism budget, which were addressed by the Tourism Director. A councilor questioned whether increased police presence should replace, rather than supplement, existing downtown security. A councilor emphasized the importance of marketing in Spanish and expanding the perception of Santa Fe beyond the historic district. A councilor highlighted the need to consider what young people want to do in the city. Councilor Castro-Cisneros asked about IT department facilities and the budget for their move. Councilor Cathet emphasized the importance of making detailed budget hearing questions and answers public for constituents. A councilor expressed concern about the accuracy and trustworthiness of AI tools. A councilor, identifying as a former Linux sysadmin, inquired about exploring open-source software alternatives due to rising Microsoft costs. Councilor Faulkner questioned the mechanism for transferring funds from capital improvements to operations. Councilor Cass expressed concerns about the long-term reliance on contracts for utility billing and the significant costs incurred over the years. Councilor Fagali inquired about the city's efforts towards carbon neutrality and the current carbon footprint. Councilor Castro sought clarification on the reasons for the wastewater budget reduction and the department's strategy for addressing staffing vacancies. Councilor Cass expressed satisfaction that BDD would remain well-supported despite the staffing transfer. Councilor Fagulli expressed interest in pursuing discussions about opening libraries on Sundays. Councilor Casset emphasized the critical need for expanded and affordable summer childcare, offering to assist with related initiatives. Councilor Bamonte highlighted community concerns about pool closures and the need for facility repairs. A councilor expressed concern about the underfunding of homelessness initiatives. The Mayor emphasized the importance of the new Youth and Family Services positions as a 'very good investment.' The Mayor highlighted the ongoing challenge of underfunded community services. Councilor Castro emphasized the need to supplement volunteers with staff and consider asking for more positions in the future. Councilor Chavis expressed strong concerns that expanding facilities in any department, especially Community Services, is premature given current staffing shortages and vacancies. A councilor expressed concern about low budget percentages for libraries, senior services, and youth/family services, advocating for strategic investment in existing successful models like the library. Councilor Chavez lauded Director Morgan's work in Emergency Management, highlighting its essential, preventative nature and the need for more support. Councilor Cassutt questioned the reclassification of the second EMD position to an Assistant Director. Councilor Cassutt emphasized the need for updates on hiring challenges for the emergency management position and suggested considering contracts if filling the role becomes difficult. Councilor Castro raised questions about the department's structure and potential union implications, inquired about future equipment needs, grant funding, wildfire mitigation efforts, and the role of pallet shelters in emergency response. Councilor Cassett expressed appreciation for the Fire Department's presence and the information provided. Councilor Cassett raised concerns and sought clarification on several budget and operational details. Councilor Castro highlighted the importance of the Life Extension contract for firefighter health. Councilor Casset emphasized the critical importance of the mental health support contract for firefighters. Councilor Casset praised the Police Department's progress in staffing levels since 2020. Councilor Chavez highlighted that while the Police Department is 'fully staffed' based on old budgets, the actual need has grown exponentially. DC Valdez noted that a 2018 assessment indicated a need for approximately 205 police officers. The Mayor highlighted the Public Safety Committee's interest in technology due to its potential impact on safety and workload. A counselor emphasized that fully staffing departments is crucial for retention and preventing overwork. Councilor Chavis advocated for a program to engage youth teams in parks maintenance. Councilor Gamonte emphasized ensuring service levels do not decrease during the transition from contracted to in-house parks staff. Councilor Cassid expressed full support for the new parks crew, highlighted historical understaffing in parks, and sought detailed information on contract reductions. Councilor Casset proposed an amendment to reallocate $200,000 from contracts to the parks team. Mayor explained the rationale behind reducing contracts to strategically force the building of internal staff capacity. Councilor Castro supported organized labor and workforce development, suggesting that some contracts could be retained. A councilor noted receiving many questions about the MRC expansion from constituents. A councilor mentioned sports moms reaching out about using school fields. A councilor suggested painting bike symbols in bike lanes as a cost-effective way to increase visibility. Councilor Cassette expressed appreciation for the move towards a holistic capital budgeting process. Councilor Cassette also highlighted the importance of integrating existing master plans into future capital planning. Councilor Castro emphasized the importance of funding for smaller projects like pedestrian bridges and the Frenchy Field barn. A councilor highlighted the importance of functional park restrooms for families and livability. The Mayor clarified that porta-potties are budgeted for and available in parks. A councilor expressed support for maintaining parks maintenance contracts until staffing levels are fully met. Councilor Faulkner expressed a preference for moving away from contractors but acknowledged their necessity for specialized services. Councilor Cassutt clarified her proposal for the Parks Department. Councilor Castro raised concerns about the rhetoric in public ads for the airport access road and the high price tag. Councilor Cassutt expressed concerns about the safety and accessibility of long-term parking at the airport. Councilor Faulkner highlighted the significant economic development potential of the Jaguar extension project. A council member suggested that microphones should be in the budget. Councilor Fagali raised concerns about the historic division's response times and constituent complaints regarding permits. Councilor Faulkner emphasized the importance of the land use department to the community. Councilor Faulkner's anecdote about emergency vehicle access issues due to narrow streets in Tierra Contenta highlighted the real-world impact of land use decisions. Director Chavez's detailed explanation of the challenges in training and retaining affordable housing staff underscored the complexity of the field. The consensus among council members and directors that many city fees are outdated and do not adequately cover costs. Councilor Casset expressed frustration with the current affordable housing model, stating, 'I feel like we just need to blow up Chapter 26 at this point.' Director Chavez agreed that Chapter 26 needs significant improvement. Councilor Garcia highlighted permitting delays as the 'number one issue' heard from constituents and contractors. Councilor Garcia emphasized the permitting process as a major concern for builders. Councilor Barrett highlighted the overwhelming nature of affordable housing challenges and the need for a holistic approach. The MRA Director noted collaboration with Las Cruces and Albuquerque MRAs. Councilor Bamonte expressed concern about TIF's potential for gentrification. Mayor provided detailed explanation of the city's proactive measures to prevent gentrification. Director Nelson (Economic Development and Creative Industries) introduced the new department, emphasized its mission. Councilor Kesset praised the Economic Development team for their innovative work. Councilor Castro echoed praise for the department and sought clarification on the utilization of the councilor's Arts and Culture funding. Counselors expressed appreciation for the Arts and Culture department's community initiatives and the staff's hard work. An announcement was made for 'Bike to Work Day'.

== Topics ==
- Tourism Marketing Strategy
- Route 66 Centennial
- Greer Garson Theater
- Arts and Culture Funding
- Convention Center Staffing
- Economic Development Initiatives
- Creative Hub
- Public Art Collection
- City Murals Program
- Fourth of July Celebration

== Full Transcript ==
Did you call the invocation? I'd like to call today's special governing body meeting to order. We will start off with the Pledge of Allegiance being led by Councilor Bamante, a salute to the New Mexico flag by Councilor Casset, and invocation remembrances by Councilor Faulkner. Please stand as you are able.

I would just like to say that let's be mindful of one another. These meetings can be stressful and they're long, and a lot of people are put on the spot. Remember that we're all here to do the work of the people, and try to be kind to one another and respectful of one another, and I think we'll get through this.

Any other remembrance? Let's just take a moment to remember those and think of those in our community. Indeed. Thank you, everybody. Madam City Clerk, can we get a roll call, please?

Yes, Mayor. Councilor Barrett, here. Councilor Bamante, here.

Councilor Casset, here. Councilor Castro, she's here. Councilor Faulkner, here. Councilor Faggali, here.

Mayor Garcia, present.

Mayor, you have a quorum.

Great. Next up is approval of the agenda. Are there any changes from staff?

No changes from staff, Mayor.

Okay. Any changes from committee or the governing body?

Motion to approve.

Second.

We got a motion and a second. Any discussion or none? All those in favor say aye. Opposed. Motion passes. Next up, we have the next item on the agenda, Madam City Clerk.

Next item on the agenda is the Fiscal Year 2027 Operating Budget Hearings. Mayor, I'd like to invoke the 10-minute rule.

Okay. First, so we're going to go at this, and I'll hand it over to the City Manager and Deputy City Manager to lead the proceedings and presentation portion.

Good morning. Thank you, everyone, for being here. First up, we have our tourism team, but before we hand it over to them, I do want to just once again thank all of the staff, our budget team in the back. They're available to help answer detailed questions as we move through these hearings. If there's anything that the department itself can't answer, I do want to just point out that we've been sending you a lot of emails. We have 28 pages so far of Q&As. Thank you to the councilors who've been sending those in. We just received a few more this morning and we'll work on getting those out, but you should have that in your email.

We also have here a bike rack, is what we're calling it. So if there's policy questions or things that come up that we want to look into later that maybe aren't germane specifically to today's discussion, we want to make sure that we're capturing them here. So we'll do that. We've also been sending out the performance dashboards, the scorecards with data through Fiscal Year 26, third quarter. So you'll see those in your emails as well. Oh, we sent out the templates. Sorry, we sent out in four different batches because they were large documents. We had requests for detailed information about the budget. So those came out in four separate emails. So you'll see those from last night as well if you want to delve into the details.

We'll start with tourism. Randy, it's all yours. We have a little bit of time, but we're trying to stick to this division. I'll keep reminding all of you, we have about 30 minutes for tourism for Q&A.

Well, thank you. My name is Randy Randall. I'm the Tourism Director for the city. With me is Melanie Moore, the Director of Operations for the Community Convention Center, and Jordan Gunther, the Director of Marketing for the City of Santa Fe. Our other director, David Carr, is out of town, so he couldn't join us today. It's a pleasure to be here, and I love being first. This is good.

You all have the budget book, and you can read our accomplishments and our mission statement. I think to highlight a few things, the fact that Santa Fe was ranked number one by the reader poll of Travel and Leisure Magazine last year is probably the most significant event that happened for us in tourism. And the new reader poll will come out. It'll be announced on July 7th, and I'm extremely optimistic that we will continue to be strong in that poll, and hopefully we'll remain right on top of the poll. We're also number two for the small city destinations in the Condé Nast Traveler poll, which frankly is losing a little bit of juice compared to the Travel and Leisure poll. So we're at the top of the right one.

The $27 million worth of earned media coverage for 2025 is significant. Earned media is what we gain through our public relations effort. And so it's the value of editorial that's in major publications and a lot of websites and travel things that people go to that would cost us $27 million if we were to purchase the exposure we get through that public relations effort. Occupancy rates have been strong. It's about 17.5 million. It looks like the bullet on top of page 109 repeated and suggested that it was $18 million. It's going to be about 17.5 million this year. Not sure why I put that in twice. Maybe I was hopeful when I flipped the page. But it's down a little bit from where we were last year, which was a record year. And the rest, I think you can read through.

Major points in our budget this year, we'll be moving our advertising commitment from about $4.1 million to about $5.1 million, a $1 million increase in our paid advertising budget. We also are will be adding, we requested to add one additional FTE, one person, which would be an Assistant Operations Manager for the Convention Center. Right now, our team, we've got a Director of Operations and Operations Manager. Then we go right to three or four leads now, four leads, and about eight convention specialists who are the, we do all the setup and the tear down. By having the Assistant Operations Manager, it'll let us, it'll allow us to give more coverage and more support to the ops team, particularly when events are happening. Decisions need to be made when we get some setup, and at the last minute someone comes in and said, "Gee, instead of the tables here, we need tables over there. We need this done. We need that done." And our convention specialists are not, shouldn't be left to make some of those decisions. We need to have a management or lead type person on site whenever we've got functions going, and this will allow us a lot more coverage. So that's the purpose of that position. And I would stand for questions, and I actually have a few. Should we, would you like me to, Councilor Casset? Thank you for sending these. I do appreciate them. She asked about the difference between those two bullets on page 108, 109, and I hope I've clarified that.

Second question is very appropriate. What is the marketing strategy this year given uncertainty in the economy, cost of airfare, cost of gas? Have we seen shifts where people are visiting from? Do we shift our marketing to more heavily target those areas or continue to broaden and widen? Really good points, and I think this again speaks to the importance of our budget seeing a 20% increase in the paid media. We get about 80% of our visitation in Santa Fe comes from the regional market. So that would be Colorado, Arizona, Southern California, well, all of California, Texas, Texas, Texas, and Oklahoma are the major source for about 80% of our business. And so we will heavy up the marketing in those areas. And you don't see our marketing as much as, for example, the state marketing program. You go to a lot of the airports, you see the big displays that they do. That's awareness advertising. That's to try to make sure people know that New Mexico exists. You need a big budget to focus on it like that. We do very targeted advertising that falls underneath that awareness. And so our mission is to not just tell them about that Santa Fe exists, but to suggest why they should come here and give them good reasons for coming. So that's what we'll do with our advertising.

I think we would be down more in lodgers tax based on what I hear from other destinations had we not gotten that recognition by Travel and Leisure. It's made a huge difference, and people want to come and find out why this place is number one in the country. The other thing we've got Route 66 Centennial going on right now. You can see I left you a little pin up there that Jordan designed. By the way, he deserves some credit for that. So, I hope you like it. If you don't, tell Jordan. But Route 66 is expected to bring quite a few people through. As you know, we were only on Route 66 Santa Fe for the first 11 years. Why the pin says the original Route 66. We're celebrating the original. What's the point of doing today's Route 66? The nostalgia is the original, and that's what we're promoting. We've got a couple of billboards down on I-40 as you come in to tell people when they need to make the turn to come up to Santa Fe to follow Route 66 coming from either direction. And banners are up, as you know, you approved some banners to go up in town that'll help people find their way through Route 66. And there'll be some road decals going down shortly that will again highlight Route 66. We think that the benefit of Route 66 will accrue primarily to the limited service product out on Cerrillos Road because people are staying for just a night, maybe two, but their main reason is to do Route 66 and they want to see Santa Fe. It's not to come and enjoy everything Santa Fe has to offer. So, we think that that it'll help those properties. And in fact, year to date, they're about, about flat to where they were last year. We're not really seeing any impact from Route 66 yet. A little bit, but not a lot.

Rich, can I have a follow-up on Route 66 real fast?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I actually, I'm just looking up at the route now. Has there been a coordinated effort around other communities that are on Route 66? And how are we potentially utilizing that group effort to, you know, have people take a road trip this summer along the entire Route 66 or parts of it?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, very good question. And in fact, it was a coordinated effort by the state to handle it statewide. And the eight states have actually had a commission created that New Mexico participates in to ensure that there's coordination amongst the eight states. The cost of gas is going to cut into it a little bit. I think some people will say, "I was going to do that. I won't." I think there's going to be some residual value from Route 66 over the next few years because people, if they don't do it this year, when the price of gas goes down, they're going to say, "Wow, I want to do it now." The one thing I was going to mention was last year's occupancy drop was all on Cerrillos Road. It was all the limited service product because the economy has frightened the more cost-conscious traveler, and that's why Las Vegas is down significantly. Las Vegas, Nevada, not the real Las Vegas here in New Mexico. So, I think that the fact that Route 66 is going to benefit our limited service product on Cerrillos Road is a real advantage because it's something that we couldn't have done without it. So, I don't really perceive much of a shift in how we'll be marketing Santa Fe. I think the most important point is that we're going to intensify the marketing for Santa Fe by a 20% effort.

Do we always provide funding for the Fourth of July? The answer is no. This will be the first year. It's because it's the 250th celebration, and the funding from Lodgers Tax will go to fund the drone show, which is a very expensive addition to the Fourth of July, but a very meaningful addition to help make the 250th celebration more significant. We have been able to get, since the budget book came out, a commitment of $50,000 from the county. So, it will reduce what we have to put in from Lodgers Tax. We're still trying to communicate with the state about the importance of them participating in the drone show that's celebrating in their state capitals. So, the interim city manager is working hard on that one for me. I spoke to the assistant operations manager, counselor. Was that adequate, or do you have any further questions on that?

That's adequate. Thank you.

Thank you. Second-floor terrace renovation. If you've been up on the second outdoor terrace of the second floor of the convention center, you enter it, and if you come in from the building, part of it is covered, part of it uncovered, and then you make a right turn and walk down towards the elevators, the bell tower elevators. It's got a big planter in it and a whole lot of planters and a huge amount of wasted space. I have no idea. I think they expected it to be kind of a little garden up there. But we need space for people to meet and dine, indoors and outdoors, more than we need a garden up on the second floor. So, we're going to tear all that out. We're going to have about a 2,000-square-foot covered space, open on the sides, but with nice chandeliers and all in it. We're also going to be installing a stairway to go from the courtyard up to the second floor. Right now, to get from the courtyard to the second floor, you'd have to go inside, up the elevator, or climb the stairways and then come out. This will have a connection between the two so that if we have an outdoor event, they could be upstairs and downstairs using it. So, I think it makes a lot of sense. It's about a $3 million, two-and-a-half to $3 million renovation. But we do have those funds that we have saved up in our capitals over a couple of years as we've been planning this, and we expect to be in construction this winter. We're right now going before Historic for approvals of the modifications.

How is the tourism department supporting the homeless efforts? And then you speak to the security. What we're doing from the homeless standpoint is we've got, we're coordinating the private security that frankly is trying to mitigate the impact of the homeless in the historic district where most of our visitation is. Right now, there is not enough funds to extend that out on the Cerrillos Road corridor or where the Meow Wolf, the Midtown area there. But we do know that the, um, Randy...

Urban, just so we make sure we're staying on track. Let's refer the questions to the actual budget, not overall policy programmatic.

Perfect. We're here for the next two days to talk about the budget. So, if there are initiatives that you want to work on outside of the budget, let's have those conversations. If it's directly reflected in the budget, we'll do it now.

So, we have a half a million dollars in our budget that will go to supporting about 50% of the current effort with security in the downtown area. And why a 288% increase in supplies? Supplies, as it's listed in the budget book, includes software. There's a $515,000 increase in our software budget to provide the NUMO software, which supports the short-term rentals and Lodgers Tax collections, and also will help to put short-term rentals that aren't licensed out of business. So, it's $515,000 for that and another $100,000 for a piece of software called Mind Trip, which we'll be adding to our website that gives it an AI capability, and Placer AI, which is a piece of software that we can use to better measure the attendance at events and the movement of tourism throughout the city. Last year, we were able to fill the position of the data and research analyst, and so this software will support that person's efforts. I believe those were your questions, and I'd stand for any others.

You, Councilor Bamonte.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just had one question about travel because it's hard to tease that out of here. Have you determined whether it's been more beneficial for overseas trips, because I know we just approved a big one, or are you focusing your efforts this year more on continental United States?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, very good question. We are totally focused on domestic travel. We are doing the one trip to London in conjunction with a state effort to try to expand into that area. It will be our second mission with the state. If we don't start seeing some improvement from it, it'll probably be our last mission. But it is to build international tour business coming into Santa Fe. Okay. Thank you. That's all I have, Mr. Mayor. Councilor Casture.

Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Director, and the team for being here. As you can imagine, we work very closely with you, in particular with downtown vendors, and we recently had a meeting with some of them. You did mention the security team downtown. Could you give us a little bit more on what that contract looks like, what we should be receiving from that vendor, and what's going to look like in the future, please?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, right now it's about a $1 million a year expenditure. And in this next year, we anticipate there'll be an increased police presence in the downtown area, which will allow us to cut back on the scope of that contract to what I hope will be just nighttime hours when more of the issues seem to be happening with people misbehaving. And so, we're hopeful that we'll be able to reduce that total contract to about a half a million dollars with the increased police presence during the day and just use what's in my budget.

I guess I have a comment just of caution. In that meeting, we did hear that folks would like to see more of a police presence, but that didn't mean that they wanted to see less security presence. I think that the supplement was to increase both visibility and presence downtown, not sort of to supplement. So, I would just say that maybe we take a look at what the needs are, not only downtown, but in the areas where we have economic development and businesses in general. You spoke a little bit about the Cerrillos Road Corridor. It had some security in that area for a while, but that has since stopped. Is that correct?

Councilor, I was not involved with any security on Cerrillos Road.

Now, do you consider, because there are so many hotels, the Cerrillos Corridor, and I do hear that it has reduced. Is that considered a tourist destination? Is that a tourist area?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, it is definitely part of our tourism. It's not a tourism destination. It is definitely 50% of our hotel rooms are on Cerrillos Road. So, it's definitely part of where tourism is, but it is not the destination. It feeds then the destination, which is truly the downtown historic area.

Thank you so much. And it sounds like that's a little bit of work for us to do to revitalize some of these areas. So, thank you so much. I also have, and this is not the first time we've talked about this, a little concern about our neighbors to the south and making sure that we are also marketing our city in Spanish language. I was actually trying to get some interpretation for today's hearings, which is a little difficult, but we're working on it. I imagine you are working on it as well. We are, and I continue to want to create a flyer, a brochure, if you will, that will help people expand their vision of Santa Fe beyond just the historic district. And now we've got the Meow Wolf area, and we'd like to carry them on down and have people experience the Southside and what it offers as well. I think it's especially important for the repeat visitor who comes to Santa Fe. We enjoy between a 60 and 70% repeat visitation in Santa Fe, which means that for every 10 people who are here, six or seven of them have already been here before, and they're coming back to not only enjoy what they did the last time, but expand their experience. And I think that's something we can definitely do. We just really need some help from some unidentified resources to help us put that brochure together because it has to be done properly. It has to be done well. It can't leave out things, but it can't be so comprehensive that it doesn't look like it would be an exciting opportunity.

I would just suggest we maybe lean on our marketing contract a little bit to see if they might help us with that. And I am running close to my time, so I do just want to ask a little bit about Midtown. We heard a lot about MADA last night and the possibility of supporting artists, both to be here temporarily and as a tourist destination, but also to have a space where they can create. Is there anything that tourism can do or is looking to do in the Midtown area?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, I definitely think the ability for our visitors to visit a complex with working artists would be an exciting thing for them. But again, they want to participate. So, to the extent that that facility will allow visitors to not just see what they're doing, but maybe be part of that experience, I think will strengthen it and make it more valuable to our efforts to bring more visitors into town. But I think other cities that have these kind of complexes, they're very popular, and I think it would be a great addition for us here if it's done well.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and as we heard from those folks last night, we want to make this city a place for folks of all ages. So, as we look at some of our retiree community, we also want to look at what young people want to do in the city. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor. And we have over the last few years moved the average age of our visitor from 59 down to between 53 and 54. So, we're moving in that direction, but not so rapidly that we lose the value of that older base that has got the bucks and loves to come here. Any other questions? Sure. Councilor T.

Thank you so much, Mayor. You had mentioned, I know occupancy rates are a big piece of how we evaluate how our tourism is doing and our advertising. I know we often talk about heads in beds, and you mentioned that our occupancy rates are currently better than you've heard from comparable cities. Where are we with our occupancy rates, and how does it compare to the last couple years, as well as how do short-term rentals? I mean, that gets more challenging to track, is my understanding, and of course, NUMO is going to help us. But so, I guess a bit of a double-edged question there. How are occupancy rates doing, and then how do we pull in short-term rentals?

Sure, Mr. Mayor, Councilor, thank you. It's really a combination of occupancy rates and average rate. So, it's not only are they here, but how much they're paying when they are here. And that's called RevPAR.

But we have seen occupancy is lower than it was post-pandemic. It's about citywide, about 68%. Downtown is 72%. Cerrillos Road is about 64%. The average rate, however, post-pandemic surged 35% downtown and 30% on Cerrillos Road in the first full year after the pandemic. So lodgers tax is the equivalent of RevPAR, that combination of rate and occupancy. Occupancy tax pre-pandemic, the highest was $12.5 million, and it's now in the $18 million range. So that shows what the average rate has done. Average rate is more profitable for hotels, but we're now seeing a bit of a rebuild on the occupancy. Last year, downtown was actually up by two points to get to that 72. They went from 70 to 72, but Cerrillos Road dropped almost five points, as I said, which is why the city as a whole was down just a little bit. But because of the difference, the rate downtown is a little bit more on average, double. It's almost two and a half times what the average rate is on Cerrillos Road. So short-term rentals, they're fairly flat. We're very hopeful, and it's in its first full year now of using the NUMO software. After a few more months, hopefully, we'll have a review to see what the real results of that have been. It's a very expensive piece of software that if it doesn't generate either increased revenues in the legal short-term rentals or a lot of cost savings to the city, it couldn't continue to be justified at the level it's implemented now. Right now, it's implemented at a full usage of their software, and there's a partial usage, which is an option we could drop back to without losing all of our benefits, but it would require more work on the part of the city.

Thank you so much, Randy. I really appreciate it. And thank you all for being here.

Our pleasure.

Any other questions?

Well, sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Councilor.

Sorry, Director, would you give us a little bit of an update on the outdoor recreation strategy and how we're trying to attract people to our outdoor spaces? Our strategy on outdoor recreation is to market what we have and make sure that people create an awareness for people that are both considering coming to Santa Fe to have it be part of their experience, or once they're here, to learn what great opportunities are available to them. We are not getting involved in any development of outdoor. Our job is to inventory what's there, be kept aware of new improvements. We print now, for example, the hiking map that used to be printed, and we couldn't find anybody to print it anymore, so we do it. And that's a very popular map. And the beauty is a lot of our outdoor recreation and outdoor adventures are not overly strenuous. And so it's available, and it's something that a lot of our people can use. Some of our hikes I call strolls, and so they're really good for us. But our job is to inventory and market.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I just want to remind everyone that we have a very diverse group of folks that visit the city and the state. So thank you so much for your work. No further questions.

Yeah, I was going to say in the same vein of recreation, because now I didn't know, now that we're like a recognized trail town, if that was part of your thought about promoting biking or now that we're recognized.

Yeah, Mr. Mayor, Councilor, definitely. I mean, biking is definitely something that can be done here. We've got a group coming in. Is he here now or last week? It was an e-bike website that promotes advancements in e-bikes. And so they were up on the trails filming this thing, and it will feature the trails in and around Santa Fe for the next year as the people go to see the new products that are coming out with e-bikes demonstrated. These are more aggressive e-bikes than you see just riding around on the street. Not too many of our trails allow e-bikes right now, but it's still a big up-and-coming thing. So for us to be on the cutting edge of some of these kinds of things is really helpful to those. I hope I answered your questions.

Well, thank you, Team Tourism. We appreciate the update.

Thank you. Thank you. It's our pleasure.

Mr. City Manager, who would he have next on?

Okay. Thank you, Tourism. We appreciate it. We'll let you know if you're coming back. If you want to swing in real quick, and then as Public Works, you'll start after it. Public Utilities, sorry. Good morning. My name is Eric Candelaria. I'm the IT Director here. First of all, thanks for having us come and kind of talk about what our budget is for the new fiscal year. I'm not going to talk about the 3D printed mic stand. So we ran out of microphone stands, and I have a couple of 3D printers, so I printed a couple of stands for us. So, yeah, we try to be the jack of all trades. But thanks for having us today. We're excited to talk about our budget and our proposed initiatives as we begin the new fiscal year. As you can see from the budget book, we did have a budget increase, about $8.8 million from last year. A lot of that is for computer services, hardware, infrastructure that we need to kind of replace as the life cycle throughout its tenure life. But probably one of the biggest ones is our transition from our Broadcom VM environment to a different cloud solution that will allow us to virtualize our environment. Our current infrastructure with VMware, Broadcom purchased VMware. We anticipate a pretty significant increase in licensing. And so now this money that is allotted to us is going to allow us to move off of VMware into another platform that we've already identified and have been testing for over the last eight months. And so we'll begin that transition starting in July. That's really one of the biggest focus areas that internally our team is going to really focus on.

You know, part of our strategic goals are to enhance our end-user customer support. We implemented an ITSM, which is an Information Technology Service Management tool. It's a service desk, but it also has other tools that will help us gauge and monitor what our performance is. It allows us to track resources and tie them to tickets. So if we identify a specific machine as having constant issues, those things will pop up in the system. We can identify those more quickly. It will also give us the ability to kind of track issues before they become problems and then help identify those issues if they are problems. So if we have multiple inquiries about a network issue, all those tickets will be identified, alerted our service desk manager, and then he'll work with the appropriate infrastructure team to ensure, like, hey, we have a problem. We've seen a number of tickets that come in, so we'll be able to see things on a trending up or down aspect into the system.

Another piece that we're trying to really do is emphasize business process re-engineering, trying to streamline efficiency within the departments. And it's really working with them to understand what their current workflows are, what their pain points are, and then working together with them to see how we can mitigate a lot of those issues. We've done it with one department as of now, which is the Land Use team. We really intend to really spread more with the rest of the departments to ensure that we're being more proactive in engaging our, who we call our stakeholders, which are the departments who serve the constituents. We can identify pain points, work with them how to streamline workflow, will be able to allow them to provide the services that they need to the constituents. Currently, we have 45 FTEs. We have six vacancies, but each of those are advertised as we speak. We are going to be bringing on a new enterprise applications manager next month, so we're really excited about that. Within our team, we've been really avid in moving forward in promoting our team members within, giving them opportunities to do that. With that, we're going to be working with our HR team this year to kind of give our job descriptions and add more, I guess, actually add more job descriptions so we can provide a career path for our IT team. You know, there's really three jumps that we currently have. There should be three jumps for each position that we have, so that way they have an opportunity to grow. We were able to successfully do that this last year, or this fiscal year, with our project managers. You know, we had some very good candidates but weren't able to offer them what they were expecting. And that's kind of the competent class ratio for project managers across the city. So we worked with our HR department and were able to develop an IT project manager so we can kind of remain in the game with the current other IT project managers in the state.

Another part of our budget increase is due to basically software increases throughout the year. So every year we anticipate about a 20% increase for most of our software services. So that's everything from Adobe to our ERP contracts to our Microsoft licensing. Every year those costs continue to go up. And so we're just using that to maintain and keep the status quo. I think, you know, based on that, we talked a little bit about our strategic goal for injury support services, enhancing our service desk system so we can provide knowledge bases for end users so they can get quick responses for small issues and trying to resolve our first call resolution as people call in. We still continue to increase our cybersecurity within our infrastructure, maintaining our SEAM, which is our cybersecurity aspect of it. We continually go to try to enhance our phishing capabilities. We see quite a bit of phishing attempts that come throughout the city. And so we just work really hard to ensure that we're maintaining those aspects of it. Currently, we block roughly about 80% of all emails that come to the city. Those are all phishing attempts, spam emails. And so it's a valiant effort by our security team who catch those phishing emails quickly and then pull them out of mailboxes or let us know whether or not they're acceptable. So we would like to develop some sort of a public relations thing where, you know, instead of call before you dig, think twice before you click, kind of thing. So we're working with our teams to do something like that to not only inform our end users but also our constituents out there to be aware of those things. Part of our budget increase that also included an opportunity for us to do more penetration testing for cybersecurity so that we can maintain our security posture where we think it's the most advantageous. Other than that, I don't have any.

Any questions from the governing body? Councilor Faulkner.

You have a lot of FTEs that you're creating, like positions that you're going to have full-time positions. How many of those are going to be frozen, and if they are, for how long?

Currently, we have zero positions that are frozen. Each one of them is actually active, and the open positions are actually posted so that we can get them filled. So, I'll just go down the line.

Councilor Castro-Cisneros: Really quickly, I don't see anything in terms of your building or facilities. Is that something that is in a future budget? How are we doing on facilities?

So, most of our, so we are moving to Market Station. We were planning on moving June 8th, but since Tuesday afternoon, that time schedule has changed due to some building issues, supplies really. So, we're looking at a mid-July target date for us to move to Market Station.

And I'm assuming you won't need any budgetary support for that move. Is that why we're not seeing that here?

Yep. Those are all from this last fiscal year.

Perfect. Thank you so much. No further questions.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much, Dr. Kendall, for being here. This is actually kind of a bit more of a general question because I sent these in. Thank you. Very thorough answers. I really appreciate that. Part of the challenge, though, as well, is that with budget hearings, some of these conversations are important for the public to be seeing. So, with these questions that are coming out, because it is, it's a really wonderful deep dive into a lot of the processes and a lot of things that we're funding. Are we going to somehow make these public so that, I obviously want to be really respectful of everybody's time, but I also know that these conversations are important not just for us, but for the population at large. Okay. So, yes, we'll figure that out.

Thank you, Councilor Cathet. So, we might want to maybe just collect the additional answers to the questions that you sent this morning and then update this document, which is the one that I passed out, and then we could put it online.

Okay. Is that okay?

Yeah, I just think that it is helpful, you know, because a lot of times, questions that we have, our constituents may have as well, and I want to make sure that they have access to them. But I recognize that we are in a condensed schedule and we are trying that out now. So,

Yeah, Councilor, I'll just reiterate what the Finance Director and Deputy City Manager says. We'll get this done and maybe by tomorrow, if that works for everybody, we can put it out midday tomorrow. Gee, will that work for you and we'll get it out. So, yeah, I think we're compiling the last bit of data that you've sent me today. So, let's do that and then we'll

Yeah, it's all public and we don't

Wonderful. Thank you. Just kind of information. Sorry. Go ahead. I just wanted to mention that Director Candelari and I are working on having a presentation at Quality of Life, and we would love to include you in that preparation. More than happy to. Well, that actually kind of does bring me to my bike rack question, but it is also related to some of our budgetary potential expenditures, which is the AI policy. And it does look like there has been an AI policy developed, something we can talk about in detail later. It has not yet been approved by the City Manager. However, I am hearing about, I mean, we just heard about something in tourism, and I think there's been some mention of AI technologies that other departments are interested in using. And have you reviewed those yet? Are we budgeting for something that we don't know if it's going to meet our policy? And I really think exploring that as part of that Quality of Life presentation will be really interesting and important because there's a lot with AI. Some of it very helpful, some of it not so much. Some of it great, some of it kind of dangerous. So, I that that's kind of a, I guess, a question for the both of you that, you know, I understand there's some proposals for some AI coming in. Our policy has not yet been approved. What is that process going to look like? And, you know, if those things don't fit, how are we going to work with departments to make sure that they're still getting the tools that they really need or would like, actually? I mean, we haven't had them for a while. So,

Yeah, thank you for that question, Councilor. So, I think anything that, as we move forward with AI, is always going to have impacts. I think putting this policy together is basically giving them guidelines as they use AI. You know, one of the biggest hurdles that we have is the fact that we do have folks who just use AI, the free version. We know, based on those types of things, what type of data they can't enter, what type of data they shouldn't enter. And so, we're really looking to form, and we were just talking about this in a previous meeting, having a bunch of IT liaisons in each of the departments who are going to help it test applications, to test new changes. And part of that is going to be an AI group, a focus group that's going to use AI and how they're going to leverage AI. The other part of it is the cost. So, there is a cost that's associated with like Co-pilot or ChatGPT, and the cost is really so we can ensure where that data sits, where that data goes, that it's not used to train other AI models. So, there's a whole lot of other impacts by using a free version of AI out there than one that is paid for. But again, the issue is cost. And so, we have to define like who's going to use it, who's capable of using it. And so, software applications, you know, as we move forward, and another one of our initiatives is data governance. Part of that data governance is data certification, and that's really aligning our data. So, we know what all our data is. So, when we use AI tools, we're using our data and not the. And so, all that really is going to take place in those in those forms. When people present software that has AI tools in them, they do go through our e-review process. We review it from a security perspective, a compliance perspective, and see how they leverage that data, whether they retain the data. You know, but it's going to be more helpful once we get an AI policy in place so we can really provide that framework.

Okay, wonderful. Thank you. So, I look forward to learning more. And, you know, you mentioned security compliance. Do we pull accuracy into that to make sure, you know, that, you know, how trustworthy is this tool? We know that it's a tool. It is not a replacement at, you know, so. Okay. Wonderful. Well, thank you. I look forward to the presentation of Quality of Life. And thank you for answering all these questions ahead of time. Appreciate it and thanks for all your work and to your team.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director. I was happy to hear about this business process. Does this budget reflect having enough FTEs to make sure that it's involved with conversations regarding software upgrades, software replacements from the get-go, like when other departments are looking at a new software package, want to make sure that you have policies in place and the people available to look at the long overall organizational impact throughout the city?

I would, I would say thank you for that question, Councilor. I, we do have the resources. Of course, we can always use more resources, of course, but we do have those resources that can help facilitate a lot of those. We have an internal EPMO. You know, we have strong systems analysts throughout our department that handle our enterprise applications. And we have the backing behind the city leadership that's going to allow us to be more, I guess, aggressive in terms of trying to streamline software purchases, infrastructure increases. I think another part of that is introducing IT governance. So, it is not making those business decisions. I think one of the questions we had dealt with, you know, if there was an impasse between IT and the business, so to speak, who resolves that? And my, and my approach is it shouldn't be making any business decision. We're looking at software based on, you know, compliance, security, scalability, those types of things. And then if it does come to where there are issues with scalability or maintenance, those then go to our IT governance team. So, we've asked our Deputy City Manager to be the chair of that governance. And they're going to streamline, you know, make sure all the resources are in that room so we can talk about, you know, is this fiscally responsible to spend this amount of money? Is there resources enough to complete this project and what's the importance and the prioritization of each of these projects? So, like anything else, right? So, you have three projects up above and a new one comes in. Okay, which one are we removing from the board if if that's the case? So, I think implementing IT governance is going to help streamline that. And it works in conjunction with our e-review project intake.

Okay. Thank you, Director. And then just because I was a Linux sysadmin for so many years, I have to ask this. With Microsoft costs going up consistently, what sort of back-end solutions are you looking at in terms of having open-source software or cheaper operating systems to manage, or is that something you're even looking at at this time?

I think myself and our IT architect would probably love that idea. But I don't think we would have the internal resources to manage that at this point. But it's something that we talk about jokingly.

I am open for that conversation when you, if you're ready to have it. And then just because I'm a geek, what are you switching from? You're moving from VMware to which platform?

Hyper-V. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Thank you, Director. Thank you, Mayor.

Councilor Bert: Yeah, I just had a question just about the increase. It says the FY27 budget increased by 8.8 million or 58.7% from the FY26 budget. And I know you have some stuff in here, includes 2 million for computer and network hardware. And then I was just looking over at the summary by division. It looked like infrastructure services went up by 91%. Just what, what, could you break that down a little bit?

Yeah. So that, so thank you, Councilor. So that is mainly for our service contracts. As we talked about earlier, the Microsoft licensing, Ricoh licensing, all those service contracts that we have to provide the tools for our, our stakeholders to provide the services to their

Is that typical, like for that, it goes up that much per?

Well, I think because it, and I think maybe Andy can answer that a little better than I could, why it went up so much. But if I'm not mistaken, the previous year they moved some money around. And so this year we kind of got it back. And he, he, it is about the Broadcom and the penetration testing that we talked about as well.

Any other? Councilor Castro-Cisneros: Thank you. Talking about data, it is very expensive and difficult for us to house our own data. And I know that we recently purchased some equipment, and because of security, we're very concerned about housing our own data. Do you have enough in your budget to buy all the equipment that you will need long-term to house this data?

Great question, Councilor. At this point, I would say we, we do. We are going to see a little bit of an increase in archiving video data for our police department and legal. We saw that increase more than what we anticipated originally. But we're working with those departments to help facilitate that too.

To offset costs. Yes.

Thank you. No further questions. Any other questions?

Sure. Councilor Biter: So, some of the departments prefer to use a different software, the Munis.

And so for the bike rack, I think that that's something we need to resolve because some of the software that Land Use would use or maybe Public Works isn't exactly Munis, isn't the best for those. And so, can we, I'd like to see how we can make these departments more compatible with the software.

I agree. Any other questions?

Let's finish counselors about that conversation. We are getting some a little more detail. I will just say it. OpenGov. We are working on that. I've given direction to the interim finance director. I've also given direction to Land Use to get me a little more detail about how it works. We're also asking other cities. We found I think one city in New York that uses Tyler Munis and OpenGov. So I'm going to get with their finance director and I'm going to get with our IT director in the next week and see if we can have a conversation and see how it's working with their things. So, I had that conversation with Land Use yesterday. So yes, we are working towards that and we will make a decision soon on how we're proceeding forward specifically with OpenGov and Land Use case and we'll put that in the parking lot.

Yeah. So I would just, just to be clear, the complication isn't necessarily our staff. It is more that these two softwares are proprietary and they don't, they're competitors. They don't want to share information, I guess, is what I've anyway.

And it's, well, I think as mentioned, Eric, or as Eric mentioned earlier, it's all IT governance process we're going to be implementing. And we all want our team to have the best tools possible, but we have to take many factors into consideration to determine what is the best tool for us. And so, that example provided is just an opportunity for us to further stress why a strong IT governance model needs to be implemented. And so, with Eric's guidance, we're going to be doing that.

And I will add that with IT governance, that conversation that Counselor Faulkner just asked about would have occurred at that point. Yep. Okay. Any other questions? Do we need to get another easel for you?

Yeah. I don't know what that is there.

Well, Eric, thank you.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Eric. I appreciate that.

Thank you. Thank you, Evan.

Okay, you're out. Public Utilities is up. Jesse, wherever you want to sit. And if you'd like to bring your team, you can bring them or they can just be on standby. Good morning. Thank you for your time and review of the Public Utilities Department FY27 operating budget. As a reminder, the Utilities Department is made up of three enterprise funds whose operations and capital spending, am I on here? Are funded primarily by rates paid for water. Test, test, test. As a reminder, the Utilities Department is made up of three enterprise funds whose operations and capital spending are funded primarily by rates paid for water, wastewater. Go out again. Test. No. All right. And solid waste and recycling services provided to city residents by the department.

I tried this. I'm on my third try here. Okay. Try again. Okay. I don't hear. Well, I'm just going to go. Stop me if you don't hear me. There are also two internal services divisions funded by the enterprise funds. These are the Utility Billing and Administrative Services Division and the newly organized Conservation and Sustainability Division. Overall, the Public Utilities Department budget request represents a 0.3% reduction from last year's budget due primarily to a 16% reduction in the requested budget for wastewater and 11% reduction in the budget request for Utility Billing and Administrative Services. As both of these divisions scale back on large spending as a result of discrete projects that are winding down, the Environmental Services Division budget increased by 1.2% and the Water Division's budget increased by 10%. Though that amount is misleading because 90% of that change is a result of moving money from the capital improvements budget to the operations budget. Big picture, the activities that this budget will support from each division's perspective are as follows. In water and wastewater, we're making significant capital investments by recent rate increases to ensure reliable long-term future operations. ESD is focused on fleet renewal and construction of a new operations building. Utility Billing and Administrative Services is focused on transitioning before the end of the calendar year to the advanced billing software platform and improvements to customer service. Finally, our newest division, Conservation and Sustainability, is focused on standing up a new division from pieces previously in two different divisions and are now a standalone group moving into a renovated building all their own. With that, I will stand for questions. Counselor Faulkner,

So you said 90% of the increase was because you transferred money from the capital improvements into operations. What mechanism did you use to do that? Because generally you can't use, you can't use capital for programs and programmatic money for capital.

Mayor Garcia, Counselor Faulkner, thank you for the question. We essentially just increased the operations budget and in the subsequent capital improvements budget, we won't ask for money related to those activities. And essentially the direction we're going is if we can't define it as a project, we're going to move it to operations. Whereas if it's a specific project, we're going to keep it in capital. And so this was essentially ongoing work that we do on either maintaining or adding new PRVs, which are pressure reducing valves throughout the water system.

Any other questions? Counselor, Counselor Cass.

Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Director Ro, for being here. I asked about it in my fun little packet of questions, but let's talk about utility billing because it comes up a lot. We have large contracts for it. I understand that those contracts are shifting a little bit as the project moves forward and I am making a lot of noise. So you have to, okay, great. You're ready. If you can just give me a little bit more information. I'm seeing two and a half million for contracts for this. I can't count how many millions of dollars we've spent. Maybe you could over since I've been here and before on this project. So, where are we? I know you mentioned that you hope this is an overestimate. Me too. And is, I mean, is there a point that we're ever contract-free on this system or is there always going to be some reliance on a contract for some portion of utility billing?

Mayor Garcia, Counselor Cassid, that's a great question. There always will be some amount of spending to advance billing. And so, of the 2.5 that you've identified, 1.5 is for advanced billing, the actual vendor, that's down from 1.7, but it's still higher than we'll pay in the long run because we're continuing to do implementation for that product. So essentially everything that we wanted in phase one was frozen and then we have a whole big wish list or almost need list associated with sort of the second phase of implementation. And one of the important ones to call out on that is a new water rate structure. So when we scoped all the work, the water rate structure was two tiers. Then we asked to implement a third tier. We couldn't do it this year because of this transition, but we want to have it in place for next year. So, that's an example of a big, you know, an additional upgrade that occurs after we've already gone live. And we still are on target to go live with advanced in October.

Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. You guys are fortunate that Counselor Lindell's not here for this because she'd be pissed.

Let me also mention that the other 1 million is for ITT Connect and that's down from 2.5 million last year. So this is something we're, we are winding it down. But we do want to make sure we have the resources necessary to assure that it's successful after 10 years of trying to do this.

Yeah, thank you. I do appreciate that and I would agree that making sure that this is a successful transition is crucial. It, you know, definitely was a much longer timeline than I think any of us anticipated. So, I look forward to these contracts coming down to what we think their standard level will be over the years. And other than that, thank you so much for going through and for answering these in advance. I appreciate it.

Hello. I was just wanting to ask a question about the Complete Streets Division. I know we're planning on like, oh my gosh. I'm sorry. Just kidding. That was going to be easy.

That rewind. Pretend that never happened.

Faggali.

Director Ro, it says in here that we are transforming into a carbon neutral city. Can you talk about our efforts for that? And it says that we have an estimated, the city's current carbon footprint. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Mayor Garcia, Counselor Fagali, yes, I'm going to say that this is aspirational and that at times in the past, we have made the policy goal that at some point, and I think there's a date certain and actually I don't have that in front of me right now, we would achieve carbon neutrality. But I want to, I sort of think of it as an unfunded mandate. And now we are creating the structure hopefully to start to at least embrace what it would mean. And so in this new Conservation and Sustainability Division, which incorporates water conservation and the efforts in sustainability that had been part of ESD and pulls them together because there's a lot of aligned mission. The first step is essentially identifying what our carbon footprint is and reaching out for low-hanging fruit to reduce that. And so those activities are already underway. But I would say that we don't yet have sort of a formal plan on how much it would cost us to get there and how we would do it and how long it would take. But we now do have the pieces in place to start taking a look at this, again, I'll call it an unfunded mandate, and really see what it would take for us to get there so that we can bring that back to the policy board that ultimately tasked us with it.

Thanks. That was my question.

Any other, Counselor Castro?

Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Director. I have, I'm impressed with a reduction in a budget and something that is so important in the city and we've made so many changes. Knowing that this is not your entire budget and that some of the capital money that you're using for large projects is coming from a different source, will you explain to me a little bit what's happening in wastewater treatment? Why we see the reduction? You did a little bit. What are some of those projects that are winding down?

Mayor Garcia, Counselor Castro, I'm going to list a few of the big numbers and as a start and then, Manny Morales is here from wastewater and he can probably put a finer point on what some of the things we are winding down. I will say that from my perspective, as we became aware of problems with compliance at the wastewater treatment plant, we shifted and we did invest significantly in many different efforts and those efforts were successful and now we've largely stabilized the treatment facility and so we're winding some of that stuff back. Specifically, we're reducing the budget there about over $2 million in repair and maintenance of buildings and structures. We had had large one-time requests for those things. We have a new, we have a new administrative building there that was seen in previous budgets.

It's not there anymore. A $1.8 million reduction in repair and maintenance of system equipment. And hopefully, Mr. Fromm also will be able to speak to some of the pieces within this $1.7 million reduction in equipment and machinery. So, you know, those between the three that I just listed, we're up in the five, six million dollar reductions, and largely because we really had increased our budget to get our arms around the problem, and now we're scaling it back. And pass over the one that works. You have minor points on that, and not too much, we can defer it.

A lot of that budget was put towards replacing pumps and motors that were failing. Now that we have those replaced, we are back in compliance. So that will reduce the amount that we're using for this next year.

Perfect. So then just for my brain, I'm sorry, words are difficult for me sometimes. It's not really a project, they're more one-time expenditures, is what I'm hearing. Is that correct?

Yes, a lot of that was, yes.

Okay, perfect.

Just trying to get our facility back into compliance again.

Wonderful. Now, talking about staffing, we did see an increase, right? Enhanced staffing levels. Thank you so much. We still have an 18% vacancy. Is it because we have frozen positions, or are we having trouble recruiting? Why do we have that 18% vacancy, and how can we help?

I think we have made some good steps. We don't have any frozen positions. We do sort of budget them, and we've made a few different efforts. Especially, the utilities operator position that crosses divisions in the entire department, to me, has been very successful. It's raised compensation, especially at wastewater and TND, to levels that were only being experienced in water and BDD. So we're seeing at those facilities, we're seeing them staff up on that particular ladder. So, I think it represents a successful initiative. And I think there's always going to be some vacancy, but I think you're going to see us start to chip away at it because that represented a large number of the vacancies that we have. So, once we start to staff up, then we can look more carefully at, okay, now we're getting closer to fully staffed. Which ones of these vacancies do we actually need? And maybe there are some that we won't. But I think before we actually were able to start to gain the level of staffing we needed, we weren't asking some of these other questions about, you know, we were just trying to fill whatever we could. I think you're going to start to see, I feel we're on the right path, and we're going to be able to chip away at this. So, thank you for asking what you can do to help. I think the governing body has been very supportive of the ideas we've had in the past, and as we come up with other places where we need your help, then we'll reach out.

Thank you so much. And just a quick comment to follow up on Councilor Fagali. I know that we have some energy being produced both at the wastewater treatment and in our dams. I don't know if you want to touch on that in terms of the net neutral or carbon neutrality.

Sure. Right now, we do produce quite a bit of renewable energy from solar, and most of those solar panels are next to large pump stations or areas where we use a lot of electricity. We also do generate a little bit of hydroelectricity at one turbine near the tank next to Crystal Ray Church. With the Nicholls Dam improvements, we are going to be in a position where we could at some point invest in a turbine and generate hydroelectricity from releases from Nicholls. That's exciting for us, but we haven't done the cost-benefit analysis yet of is it worth that investment? With the San Chama return flow project, similarly, there will be opportunities to generate hydroelectricity to capture some of the energy that we lose as we return water to the Rio Grande. We have largely saturated the renewables we need next to those pumps with solar, but at some point, we will have hydro sitting there again ready to invest in if the cost-benefit analysis makes sense for us. And then finally, I will say at wastewater, there is natural gas being generated, and to date, we're almost there on turning that natural gas into electricity for the grid. Hopefully, in the next year, we'll finally be able to flip the switch on that. There has been a lot of frustrating and discouraging delays associated with contractors and us and regulators. There's blame to go around, but we're still working on it. And so that's another significant potential source of renewable energy associated with our operations.

Thank you so much. No further questions.

Councilor Cass: Thank you so much, Mayor. Councilor Castro triggered a couple more questions for me. So we talked about, in the overall budget, there's a 50% decrease in repairs and maintenance. Sounds like we talked about wastewater. Where does the rest of that decrease come from? It's about another million in change, if you can call hundreds of thousands of dollars change. I guess in a municipal budget, you can.

Thank you for that question. And I did dig into this a little bit this morning, and I'm not sure which versions of the answers you're looking at. So I did mention about a $4 million reduction in wastewater, and that's as far as I look. So, if you're seeing more than a $4 million reduction, I'll have to dig into the budget to see where that's coming from.

Oh, yeah. I'm looking at the repairs and maintenance. It looks like there's approximately a $2.7 million reduction. You said that about a million of that was coming, or a million and a bit was coming from wastewater. So, about another million and a bit coming from somewhere else.

Well, so I'm seeing, and again, something that I guess I'll explain is that each of the departments, of course, has five divisions. Each of the divisions has four or five sections. Those section supervisors understand about 10 to 20 lines in the budget really well.

Okay.

And then the division directors, that means they understand probably 50 of them pretty well. And then the department director probably understands about 250 of them, not that well. And then, of course, we can't expect you to look at, for whoever requested the budget template, it's a great thing to request. And I'm sure when you saw it, you're like, "Oh, there's a thousand lines on that for each division. How are you going to go through that?" So budget wraps it all up into these nice sort of summaries, which is the only way I would want to look at it if I were in your position. But the only way that we look at it is on these lines. And so it's hard for us when we see this roll up to know kind of which pieces got rolled up. So when I look through this, I found $4 million of reductions in wastewater just in things called repair and maintenance.

And if you're seeing less than that in the total reduction, that means it increased somewhere else. Right now, we can dig all that out, but it takes a minute.

I think the valid point is that there were some big ones, and the rest of it is a bunch of other small, regular, everyday, nothing out of the ordinary that has been added up and rolled into this.

Correct.

Okay. Then this may be the same, but insurance is increasing by about 52%. Where are we seeing an increase in our insurance needs for the department?

Okay, that one I just got from Andy, and so I'm going to read his response, and then he can put a finer point on it if need be. So this, my understanding is this was due to large damage claims in ESD for about half a million dollars, and wastewater for another half a million dollars, and claims incurred in the prior year are assessed to the departments where the claim is attributed in the following year. So, this is also an area where I'm going to say we haven't done a good job of understanding at an operations level or a collections level or an ESD drivers level, what are the claims, the magnitude of the claims, and how they were processed and what happened to them. So, from my level, I would like to know, oh, we spent half a million dollars on a claim. What was it?

Yeah.

Do we need to, how do we prevent that? How do we take $200,000 a year and put it into some prevention so that we're not paying $500,000 a year in claims? That's a loop that I know Deputy City Manager Phillips has become aware of and is trying to help us close, but we haven't to this point done as good a job as I would want to do on making sure we're closing that.

Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. And that's helpful to hear, and good to know that that is something that we'll be looking at, and hopefully next year we'll see a decrease instead of an increase, which is always a fun thing to see in insurance. My last question, with positions, it says FY26 when FTE transferred, it's a contracts admin moved from BDD to utility customer service. So has that transition already occurred?

Yes.

And how's BDD being supported? We exchanged positions. We moved a union position one way, and we moved a non-union position the other way.

So something was moved to BDD, right?

Okay. I'm not seeing, I don't believe I'm seeing that here. Let me get back to you on the specifics of that exchange because it was a, it was a union position going one way and a non-union position going the other way because each of those supported the two entities in question.

Okay. But my underlying point is that BDD is still supported at the same level as it was before.

In fact, I think at a greater level because they took a higher position. I think it was a non-union position that went to BDD and a union position that came back to utility billing.

Got it. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. My BDD hat is happy to hear that. Thank you.

Any other questions?

Okay. Well, thank you, Director Roach and team.

Appreciate that. Who's next?

We're going to go with Dandy Emory and her team. And just, Councilor, so you know, we're doing really good, so you can ask more questions if you'd like. We have about an hour. Councilor Chavez is still in her meeting. So, I just, we got to keep going. I can't, I thought I was trying to stall a little bit, but it's not happening.

Point of information. Finance chair, is that okay? Can I ask questions?

Thank you.

No, I've just, I just promised the city manager I would help do the lift on keeping us on track. So, I'm like the DAS police, I guess. So happy to be doing it.

More questions over here, you guys. Harsh, harsh timing. Two weeks in. Hello. Okay. Good morning. My name is Sandy Emory. I am the Community Services Department Director. I'm really excited to be here today because this is probably one of the few presentations where you, Councilor and Mayor, will hear about a department that really creates and can proudly say our work creates joy, community connection, and safety. This budget reflects the city's strong commitment to social equity, quality services, and quality services for all Santa Feans. I believe the services provided by this department are critical for the present and future of our community. The four divisions, Youth and Family Services, Senior Services, Libraries, and Recreation, are engaged with our community from birth through the golden years and everything in between.

They are masters of innovation, creative budgeting, and our models of community care throughout the state. Our recreation facilities, including the Teen Center, are Northstar models for the state, and you will see that this budget really is reflective of the need to preserve and maintain them. Our librarians are just amazing and true innovators. They create programs with everything they can imagine that serve the whole community. Youth and Family Services provides a continuum of care and collaboration across the whole spectrum of the social determinants of health, and our Senior Services provides nutrition, engagement, and transportation for our elders in their golden years. So our KPIs are awesome, but they really can't even begin to touch the scope of the really wonderful and impactful work that is done by this department. So we have a lot to cover. With that, I will stand for questions because I know there are a lot.

>> Councilor Fagulli: Thank you. Thanks for being here. Sorry it's so early in your tenure, but maybe that's good. We'll learn together.

>> Nothing like a trial by fire.

>> Councilor Fagulli: So I have a few questions. We'll start with the libraries. We have three libraries, which is great, and they're lovely, and none of them are open on Sundays. Is that something that you are looking at? Is that something we can work towards? What would it take to get there?

>> So our Margaret has done an amazing job of doing a really comprehensive modeling around that. It would take a significant resource investment in order to get that going. We're happy to have a working group on that to see where there could be options in the future. This budget is not reflective of being open on Sundays, but if Council would like to work toward that in the future, let's start having discussions on it now.

>> Councilor Fagulli: Okay, thank you. I would love to have that discussion if maybe we could put that on the bike rack for later. Then my other questions are about the micro-community. We'll start with that one. We've been working on this Richards Avenue micro-community for a while. Do you have a status on that? Is there funding for it? How is that going?

>> It's going. I'm going to actually invite Leah Salivary, the Youth and Family Services Division Director, to answer a little bit more comprehensively, but just the high notes: there is operations funding reserved for that program once it gets started. We have the pallets in hand. We are working with our District 4 councilors to get a good neighbor agreement going and on a couple of things there. We're working on some kind of emerging community needs that we can support the Richards Avenue micro-community in. So it's in progress. There are a lot of moving parts related to it. Lee, if you want to just give a brief kind of whatever I missed because I know I did.

>> Oh gosh, it's fine. Good morning. Yeah, happy to provide some additional context there. As Sandy mentioned, the Richard...

>> Turn the wired on. There you go.

>> We'll try again. As Sandy mentioned, we are on track to open the Richards Avenue community in the next couple months. We actually, as of today, had our pre-application meeting. So that's a critical next step for us to then receive our conditional use permit. Then from there, once that permit is approved and we get our utilities as well, then we're on track to do construction and open the site as soon as possible. So what we're trying to do as a team and as a citywide goal is make sure that we can expedite that process and to the extent that we can sort of shorten the timeframe for the permitting that's needed, we're able to deploy funds and really get folks inside as soon as possible. So that is a strategic goal, and we're working with councilors to help make that all possible.

>> Councilor Fagulli: Okay. So you are going to Board of Adjustment for a condition, or is that all administrative for the conditional use permit?

>> No, this is through our city land use.

>> Councilor Fagulli: Okay. So you're not having to go to the public, like to the Board Planning Commission or Board of Adjustment. Is it all administrative?

>> It's all administrative. We are going to have a series of community meetings as well for the general public. We've had a couple already. We're planning additional ones in the near future, as well as a good neighbor agreement.

>> Councilor Fagulli: Okay, thank you. That's it for me, Mayor. Thank you.

>> Mayor: Okay, Councilor Casset, then Councilor Bamonte.

>> Councilor Casset: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you all for being here. So a couple questions. I'm going through the answers you already provided. Again, thank you so much for that. I do have a couple of follow-ups. Following up on the library and opening up Sundays, I know you said it's not in the budget. Do we have an estimate for what that would cost? Say we were to not impact services at all at any of the other libraries, what that would cost, or have we explored closing one of the libraries one day, like on a Monday, to open up another one on Sunday? So that might be a bit of a bike rack unless you happen to have the number on hand for what it would cost to just open up one of the branches on Sunday.

>> It would cost about $150,000 to $200,000.

>> Councilor Casset: Okay, thank you. Then following up, and I would agree, I would love to meet to have this discussion. I know I mentioned it in these questions. I will never miss a time to say it, but really looking at county cost sharing with the libraries, I think is something that we desperately need to do. I think that they have a lot of their constituents who are also like, "Hey, we'd like library on Sunday." So I mean, I do think that there's a real opportunity here for us to meet the goals and needs that we have. So adding to that bike rack piece, I suppose. Some questions around recreation and childcare. One thing you mentioned here is that in order to open up another site for the summer, that we could add money to Youth and Family Services again. What is that, or no? I mean, that's, I think you were saying that that's where it would have to go, is Youth and Family. What would it take to open up another site next summer?

>> Yes. And just the delineation, we have youth programs which are operated out of recreation, and we have Youth and Family Services as a different division. Okay. And so youth programs and Teen Center programs are within the recreation budget. So just...

>> Councilor Casset: Thank you. Yeah.

>> I don't have the exact number for opening another site. I do know the costs kind of fluctuate, especially with the cost of food, staffing, things like that, but the program manager, Melissa Butos, does have... She is administratively sound. So if she had the budget to stand up another site, I have 100% confidence that she could.

>> Councilor Casset: Yes, that's why I'm always wondering what would that budget look like. Then I know again, this is a bit of a bike rack conversation as well. I mentioned here contracting, getting some of the state funding for childcare. It makes sense that the aftercare program is considered more of a wreck program. I know that there's a lot of site specifications. However, the summer program happens in the schools, and I would be shocked if the schools are not meeting those standards given that they are getting some of the funding with their pre-K programming. I really want to take a look at how we could take advantage of that in some way, shape, or form. Aftercare is always a hard part, but summer is just brutal for families. Thank you again to whoever made the decision to allow city folks to have an early application there. I really appreciate that. That helps me a lot. But it is, it's a really, it's just such a valuable program. I think how we take a look at opening up funding. This is also maybe not as popular of a thing to say, but the high end of that spectrum, you're really not paying that much, and especially considering what we're used to paying. So looking at some of the different ways that we might be able to fund and serve more kids. I still see almost every day on Facebook, on the Raising Santa Fe parent page, somebody concerned about summer because they don't have care, it's too expensive, etc., etc., etc. So whatever we might be able to do, and even if we have to, if we have the potential for a mid-year budget change for next summer, conversations with the schools, whatever needs to happen to expand summer care, please, I am a dog with a bone on this topic, so please utilize me here.

>> I think we're highly aligned in that spectrum, and City Manager can attest to the fact that this is actually one of my goals in coming into this position. It is a more than significant need in the community. The way that the ECED is currently structured, their reimbursement program, as you saw in my answer, there's a lot around that, but that is one of my goals. But I think there are some other ways that we can explore getting CACFP funding to subsidize some of the funds that we outlay for food, nutrition for youth. I think there are things that we can do. And it is a process. Getting childcare certified through ECCD is no small undertaking. It will, the administrative load in getting it started is incredibly significant. Also, the administrative load in billing and getting that reimbursement funding is also significant. So I would welcome and I'm happy to have as many conversations as we can have as a city to figure out how we can best align with the state's priorities. That's 100% one of my priorities in this position.

>> Councilor Casset: Well, wonderful. I look forward to having those conversations with you because this is one of my passion projects, and I am happy to help any way that I can. I'll yield the floor for a moment. I need to go through my giant pile of questions and see if there's more. Thank you.

>> Mayor: Councilor Bamonte.

>> Councilor Bamonte: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director. You knew this was coming. Pools. I see something in here for repairs and maintenance, but what number are we looking at for actual repair of pools and equipment cost? Where is that in here? Because we get a lot of calls about why is the pool closed, when it, etc. So if we could get somebody to speak to facility repairs and what we're looking at to keep our pools running.

>> So as I said in my brief intro, all of our facilities are aging, rapidly aging. That was discussed last night at length, I think, too. We do not have a final budget number for the Salvador Perez pool at this time because of a few things. One, in aging facilities, when one thing goes down, another thing goes down, and then you are also faced with a situation where often codes and regulations have changed since the pool and its machinery was installed. So with the Salvador Perez pool, there are funds set aside in facilities for ongoing maintenance, but what we need a greater understanding of, and that we're working toward, is what the full cost of that replacement can be and what the city's capacity is to be able to staff our facilities full-time. So as you can see in the budget, there are significant vacancies in the recreation division.

Tom is doing a great job at filling those vacancies right now. He's come on board and hit the ground running. So, we're hoping to really move that forward. There is a national lifeguard shortage, which is critical in operating a pool facility, but as far as an actual number to get it going, we don't have that yet. We're still doing the work on that and we're working really hard to make sure it's going. We know that with Sal P down for the summer, we're extra sure that Centennial Pool is going to be able to open on time and be staffed. So, we're doing the best we can with the resources we have currently available and really trying to identify how, again, as I said in my introduction, our city facilities are of regional and state importance. The Sal Perez Pool is one specifically because it is a 25-yard pool. You can have a swim meet there if we need to. The GC is an Olympic size, but there are very few of those facilities in the state. So, we're really working with our state and county partners and fortifying those relationships so that we can have the support that we need for our facilities. If you have questions, we can put them on the bike rack or if Tom has anything to add to what I've said.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, Director. I just felt I had to bring that.

Oh, please, please do. Yes. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Mayor. But just to follow up on the councilor's question in regards to the funding, where is it going to come from? Is it in this budget? Can we clarify all of that?

We don't have funding in this current budget. This budget was written before we identified the challenges at that particular pool.

Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I just wanted to make sure we got the councilor's question answered.

Councilor B: Okay, I'm in the right department this time. I know I am. Here we go. I know we talked earlier about the cut to youth and families, and that was ARPA funding that went away, but what did that money go to, and is that going to be hard to make it up elsewhere?

Yes and no. So, the Youth and Family Services was a big force in distributing this ARPA funding. The division manager, who was, sorry, the division director and department director, who were overseeing the funding at the time, really put a lot of care and intention into what those contracts looked like. So, I have been managing the bulk of them for the last year and a half. So, I can talk at length about it, but intentionally, most contracts were smaller over many years so that organizations, maybe we could build organizational capacity as far as extending the programs long-term. There are some programs that were heavily funded by ARPA that are potentially at risk for not being able to continue at the capacity that ARPA has allowed them to. One wonderful success story in that is the funding partnerships that the Youth and Family Services Division had with Santa Fe Community College for the ApprenDay program. And that was in the questions somewhere in a different department. I think the ApprenDay program is a great success story in that they've actually been able to identify congressionally directed spending to support that program in FY27, and they're actually able to expand. We want to think about them in FY28, and I'll be rooting for that along with Councilor Cassidy, I think. But so that is a success story. So, it is a big change for these ARPA funds to be sunsetting, and we are really working through what that means for our partners as best as we can with the limited resources that we have available.

Great. Thanks. Yeah, I'm so excited about ApprenDay being those top concern childcare, going back and forth about that. Super important. Also looking at the millions of dollars that we support our community services, our health and human services, or our social services, like all the shelters, LifeLink, Food Depot. I know we talked in quality of life, we had LifeLink here, and I know there was a lot of ARPA funding going to them. Are we working with our community partners to find alternative sources of funding because some of these funding sources have dried up? Is that, and then like more of a long-term plan of how some of these are funded, like depending on these revenues?

I think there are a couple of answers to that question. The first is that we really work hard with our contracted organizations to be of service to them. One thing that I have told our contractors is that we're not philanthropists. We're city staff, and we want to be able to help you, and we need all of the information that you can give us to help advocate for more funding. It's a regular occurrence that we're asked for letters of support in funding applications and things like that. And so we provide that support when we can, particularly for the Human Services Committee and the Children and Youth Committee. We work with Aspen Solutions for data evaluation. And so we're actually also providing an additional level of TA to funded organizations. As far as what that looks like in order to be able to continue supporting organizations that were heavily funded through ARPA, I think the answer is that we're doing the best we can with the limited resources that we have available, and we also understand that that's a poor answer for our community. I just, in understanding what the funding landscape looks like for nonprofits in particular at this juncture.

Thanks. That's a great answer. Now, I know we've all been talking about it, and also Councilor Faulkner has been talking about getting a working group together for homelessness. And I know we have the summit at the end of June, just future planning for funding because we know it's underfunded. We know we're only at half capacity. We know there's the pallet shelters coming down the line. This is, this is all going to help, but like the long-term of the planning and funding because we know we've kind of been only funding, it seems like at maybe half capacity, and what we need to do forward thinking. Of course, we all know that, but just saying that out loud. Yeah. Thank you.

Any other question?

Thank you so much. I found my giant list here. A couple questions on just some of the lump sums. So, I'm seeing $10 million for various contracted services. I know that some of those are going to be smaller. I was hoping to get a list of maybe some of the larger contracted services. I know this is a big part of community services that there's a lot of contracting going on. So, what are some of those bigger contracts that we're discussing here when we're looking at $10 million?

So, I believe I sent a list. So, it's actually $9.9 million total. It was a round up. And so those contracts are everything from the list sent for like the Human Services Committee. The Children and Youth Commission is in the middle of an RFP process right now. So, those contracts cannot be discussed at this moment. And so it's $9.9 million with contracts ranging from larger housing and homelessness pots of funds to also multi-year and innovation funding from $20,000 to $85,000 a year for various organizations. And that is something. So, the external funding part, that's anywhere from, I want to say, 85 community contracts. And also, there that also includes utilities because it's the same type of liability account and contracts for landscaping, B&D, all of the function pieces. So, I'm happy to send the full list of what.

I'm guessing it's somewhere if I. I maybe have not had a chance to because we're getting a lot of things in. So, I apologize. I haven't had a chance to read everything that we've received before we talk to people. So, I apologize if these are things that you've already answered. I just have not had a.

I'm happy to answer them again. Andrew was.

Oh, go ahead and forward this to the councilors right now. And then you also have all the details in the templates.

Right. And I haven't had a chance to look at those yet either. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. And then a couple, just areas that I highlighted that were kind of big shifts in the budget. So, I'm seeing $1.7 million in community services administration as an increase, about 116.9%. What is that attributed to?

That is related to a grant received in this fiscal year from the Department of Workforce Solutions for shelter operations.

Ah, yes, I know the one. Thank you. Appreciate that. And then we talked about youth and family. We talked about contracts, and then a couple things on the positions. I know that there is the two program managers, one data reporting and policy development manager. I think this is all going into youth and family. Am I correct?

Correct.

And can you just explain a little bit more about what that is actually going to bring in terms of operations of the division? What can the community expect by adding these positions in?

Right. So, historically, the Youth and Family Services Division has had one program manager assigned to all of the city's responses to homelessness and housing challenges. So, what this, what this addition of staff does, and it was authorized, I believe, in the last fiscal year, and has taken some time to fill the positions, is that we have now a data manager, just recently hired, who is really pulling all, as I think anyone knows, we have tons of data in the state, and it's all coming from different sources. So, that data manager is working to bring all of that information into a dashboard that's accessible for us so that we can use it for decision-making. So, that is one of the positions. Then there are two more program management positions directed specifically toward homelessness and housing initiatives to really support that work. So, each contract for homelessness or housing, or each initiative in that, is kind of its own body of work almost. And so to have previously have one person assigned to it was wild. And in order to right-size what we're doing for the workload, those positions were added as support.

Okay. Wonderful. Wonderful. Glad to hear more.

I just wanted to expand on what Sandy already articulated a little bit more and kind of give you a bit of a granular sense of what those two positions are going to be working on day-to-day. So, as mentioned, our data reporting manager, she recently got access to HMIS. She's going to be tracking the by-names count. And as you all know, we have 280 shelter beds system-wide and a growing count of homelessness. So, the most recent count as of April was 578. So, we currently have 298 beds as a gap. And we've seen actually just since January, a 15% increase in homelessness city-wide. So, it's quite significant. Some of that can be attributed to things like weather and climate. As the weather warms up, more people are leaving shelters and coming outside. However, just really getting a good grasp of not only the current snapshot of homelessness, but the trends moving forward and again, making data-informed decisions. So, her role is going to be really critical for convening all of our providers and also doing program evaluation because to date, you know, we do have a lot of oversight, but we haven't necessarily had a streamlined framework for how we're sort of assessing the yield of all of our nonprofit providers and partners across the system.

So she's jumping into a lot of that work. The second program manager who we just hired, his background is in emergency management. So he's going to be our lead for efforts like Code Blue and also a newer effort that we're moving forward with to sort of scale Code Blue out. So we're doing a comprehensive encampment management policy and operations across the entire city. So working with ARU park rangers as well as our contracted service providers who do outreach and really bringing that work to the next level.

As part of trying to scale all of the work that we're doing, particularly around homelessness, we are also looking for grant funding. So one of the things that we recently did is put forward a congressional directed spending request with Senator Heinrich for $1.8 million that would help us scale that body of work around encampment management and response so we can make sure that we're getting people off of the streets and into shelter and housing as soon as possible. So some really critical work that's happening and we greatly appreciate the addition of those two staff.

Mayor: Wonderful. Thank you so much for that information. I think that's really helpful and sounds like a very good investment on the part of the city. I'm actually glad you brought up grants. A little bit of a sidetrack. One thing that I was talking with city manager and deputy city manager about is looking for some additional funds for an on-call grant writer contract. I know I've had conversations with Sandy, with you, with many, primarily in community services, economic development, etc., about wanting to apply for grants and not having the capacity to do so. So that's one thing that I would like to hear more from the departments around what that support would look like, as well as, you know, we've had the conversations around once we get a grant, we actually have to spend it out and manage it. So how that coordination could work. So another bike rack topic, but things that I do want to be exploring is how we're going after this funding because as we can see, a lot of this is stuff that we contract out. We often get this one-time funding and then we're looking for ways to continue to fill those gaps. So I would love to hear from you all about how we might make an investment like grant writing in the city and move that forward. So thank you for clicking that back in my memory.

Sorry. Yes, and I would just plug Youth and Family Services in that Youth and Family Services has done a great job over the last three years of really diversifying its funding portfolio. So they're receiving federal pass-through grants, state funding. There are several different funding sources that actually contribute to the Youth and Family Services portfolio. Our senior services also is a really great example of how we're moving that work along. Manuel has done a great job of partnering with the state on a lot of initiatives to really get really great support for our seniors. So this department is working hard on that because, as I think comes up almost at every council meeting, this work, while I'm lucky enough to speak to you all about the joy and connection that it creates, is also always underfunded. So we recognize that and we're very lucky in this department that we have a lot of passionate staff. Our frontline staff all the way up to our management staff are passionate about making this community safe, healthy, and whole.

So yeah, thank you for that. And that's always been very apparent in all of the work and all of the dedication. I mean, it really just is such an incredible group of individuals doing the really, I mean, again, this is my world, so it's not easy. As I always say, nobody goes into public health for the money or for the stress levels. You don't get either good things of either of those. So last question. There's a Transit 3 driver listed. If I am recalling, were those one of the, so I'm sorry, this one's frozen, correct? So I'm sorry. One was frozen and one was frozen. Okay, never mind then. That answered my question. I'm good. All right. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Castro.

Councilor Castro: Okay. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director, and thank you to the staff. Yes, I have several questions. I think that I will try to do an overview of sort of where I'm coming from. I don't see anything regarding a second senior center or the need for another facility. And I know that we've had discussions of a multi-generational space. Director, I don't know if I'm putting you on the spot. Where are we with some of these projects that we have heard about that the community wants but maybe hadn't had funding allocated in the past?

So I'll let Manuel expand on that, but we do have three senior centers. We have one that we own and then two others.

Mayor, Councilors. So we do have a, we did have a project going forward for the looking at our new senior center for the city of Santa Fe. We got to a certain point and we have a report on it. So now we're going to go through and finish, go through in our further CIPs to finish requesting funding for that additional senior center.

Councilor Castro: Okay, perfect. So that project is still happening. It's just on CIP list, so we're not seeing it here, right?

I'll have to, I'll have to apply for it through the CIP for senior services through ALTSD and the state of New Mexico.

Councilor Castro: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And just as informational for ourselves and for the community, will you give us a little bit update on the updates to the current senior center?

So the current senior center, we finished our expansion this last fiscal year. We have, we're still, you know, we have over 300 seniors that attend every day for congregate lunch activities, home-delivered meals. We have 450 people in our home-delivered meals program. You know, so we've had seniors pass through our doors and take part in activities about 80,000 these first three, these first quarters, first three quarters of the year. So we're serving a lot of seniors in the city of Santa Fe.

Councilor Castro: And I imagine that's why we are looking to increase our volunteer hours by 20%.

Correct. Yes, we definitely, our volunteers are imperative to keeping our senior centers going. Seniors, they volunteer not only in our senior centers, but they also volunteer at sites throughout Santa Fe. So we have 50 different volunteer sites through our Retired Senior Volunteer Program that we have about 250 volunteers volunteer for, and it's in addition to our Senior Companion Program, Foster Grandparents, and Care Companion Programs also.

Councilor Castro: Thank you so very much. And I think that, though I think it's really important that we engage our community members. One thing I want to remember is that we need to supplement that with staff. So in the future, if we need to be asking for more positions, I would encourage that. Thank you so very much. And I think I might be picking on Miss Neil. I'm going to talk some library stuff. Thank you so much, Director. We've had a lot of conversations and we will continue to around facilities, and I know that we, there's a large need in libraries for support around facilities. I would like an update on where we are with the downtown location, but also in general, the need for facilities in the future and how we can support that in this budget, but also in future budgets.

Thank you, Councilor. Mayor, we are in the process of finishing up a project for Main Library, the interior assessment study, which is a companion piece to the exterior assessment study that we did two years ago. We've already done public comment and right now they're in the drafting phase, the architects are. So we're hopeful that within the next six months, we'll have kind of a basic idea of what we would like to do and how we're going to phase it in because we're very cognizant of the fact that funding isn't always available. So we were looking at phases so that we could improve things gradually over time. When it comes to other facilities, Southside and La Farge both need some help. We are getting new parking lots and ADA fixes at Southside. So we're very happy about that to see that going through because it's going to improve just flow in the parking lot at Southside can be a little chaotic when they have like Depot and story time and everything happening at the same time. So fixing the parking situation there and at La Farge is going to be within the next six months an important part of what we're working on.

Councilor Castro: And are we including Foggesson in our sort of portfolio? Is that something that we're going to be dealing with in the future?

That is a future issue. I believe that that's capital project, not operational budget yet. So funding for the library would come in this type of budget. We've got to get it up to speed and utilize capital resources to get us to where we need to go. Then we work with the team to staff it. So but that is, that is working. So we are working on the capital side to get Foggesson to where we need to be.

Councilor Castro: And the reason I ask is I'm a little worried that La Farge and Foggesson are different sizes of facilities. So we might need more staff for a larger facility. But again, that will come to have because that is.

We're, we're one thing I want to bring to folks' attention. La Farge is not our building. La Farge is not our land. And so we need to have a discussion on, and by no means has there been a decision made. I want to reiterate, no decision has been made in regards to the future of La Farge once we get Foggesson up and running. So it's not a, we open up Foggesson and La Farge closes down. That's, that's, there's been no determination made at this moment. And just to add to the work group that we kind of kicked off with, Margaret has done an exceptional job of modeling what all of these things will look like. So I think as, as part of looking forward and looking also into the immediate future, I think you will find that the library division has just done a really exceptional job of doing the work. I think you've all been invited to the strategic planning sessions this coming week. So do stop by to hear what the, what the public are saying.

Councilor Castro: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And libraries are very important to me because they are these third spaces where we do create community for folks. That being said, there can be some security issues. We have, and earlier today we were talking with tourism about the downtown security. Is there a need for more support around security at the downtown location, but in all locations?

We should always have a security on site when we're open because although things don't happen often, like really serious issues, when they do, we do need people on site. Right now we work with Condor Security. They've been having some issues with retaining employees. So we have gone without guards at the different locations just kind of throughout the whole fiscal year because they don't have enough staff. So sometimes we handle it ourselves, sometimes we call the police, or sometimes a security guard is there and they can handle it. But we do always need to have at least one security guard in every facility when we're open to the public.

Councilor Castro: Thank you so much. And I just, I understand that we as a city government need to support each other in our departments. And so if we could work with tourism, that would be great. But if not, we need to be seeing that in these operational budgets in the future.

So thank you so much, and no further questions.

Councilor Chavis: Welcome. Thank you. It's been a morning for me, so I apologize ahead of time for the entire day. I mostly just have comments. I'm trying to word this, be mindful. I just think it's very important that we're all aware that expanding in any way in most of our departments is just out of the question right now because we're not where we need to be with what we have. And I know people want more, but they probably want more because we're kind of deficient in what we have despite our best efforts. We have amazing people doing a high demand of, like, there's a high demand. They're doing that work, but they're not equipped with all the resources they have to be truly successful and meet the need of Santa Fe.

I can't even imagine having other facilities within this department because the ones that we have right now aren't completely staffed and probably aren't resourced like they should be resourced. I would like conversations more so to be around and have them be ongoing. I'm really excited about age-friendly. I know that it keeps looking at like a senior services lens, but it's not just senior services. It hits this department completely and multiple departments. And I look forward to that work really guiding what we do around budget next fiscal year, right? We kind of got started with it late, so we're not there yet. But there's a lot of wants that can be addressed with what we have if we are more creative around funding within what we have. And I would want those conversations to guide that work.

But it worries me when we talk about building additional facilities, like, how are we going to staff those? We can't. We have turnover. We have vacancies that probably have been vacant for years. So, are we just going to open another, you know, failed facility? And I'm not saying that in a negative way against staff because our staff is working really hard with what they got on minimal, with minimal staff. But opening additional facilities is going to set up our staff for failure, and I am not okay with that. I think as a governing body, we need to start having work sessions about how expansion is actually going to hurt our services in every single department, specifically this one, because this is what we care about the most, right? Like, there's no lifeguards. Pools are closed. We need another, we need more senior services. We need, there's a huge need nationally in this area. But we can't just keep building a building that isn't actually meeting the need because we don't have the workforce to actually get it done.

So I really want to take this year with the age-friendly work and us putting our heads together about how do we take what we got and make it functional to its full capacity for the success of our community members, but also for the success of our staff. I will tell you, in multiple departments, the reason why we probably have turnover is for this very reason. There's an unimaginable amount of work on our staff members right now that why would they stay? So I just, I just want to be very cautious about, and I know we talk about expansion, and like it's not using this funding, it's coming later. I don't see how we could be ready for it within the next five years, in my opinion. And how could we be ready for additional facilities within this department even within the next five years that we, we're not, we can't even staff what we have. So I just, I just wanted to put that on the radar. I want us to really keep this budget in mind as we do the age-friendly work and as we increase services around our community voice. And I'd love to have this conversation, like, what do you guys need to make what we have work and successful to make it appealing to work there and not stressful? Like, this is work of love, right? But we're taking that love away because we're creating really hardworking environments because we don't have the staff, and we don't have the resources, and we don't have the money to give more. So, how do we bring that love for this work back by being more mindful about how we try to grow to compensate a lack of need when really the lack of need is due to our current structure and the lack of resources? So, I just wanted to put that. I would look forward to continuing that conversation. I think it needs to be an ongoing work session amongst governing body members. But yeah, this whole want for more, want for more, want for more, and I'm like, can we figure out how to fix what's broken right now?

I do have one question just because I want to emphasize how hard the job is in this, in our facilities right now for community services. It says to reduce the staff vacancy rate to below 10%. What is the percentage of vacancies right now?

For the department or each division?

Just the whole department, or you could do each division, whichever works or is easiest to recall.

In the budget book, I believe it's 24 for recreation, 24 over 26 for recreation. It is less than 10 for libraries, two, two vac, 2% for libraries. Also under 10% for senior services, and youth and family services is misstated in that, in the budget book because there are new hires that have just been made, and that percentage, particularly for youth and family services, because it's a very small staff, is a little misleading.

So that, in itself, tells us where our need is, right? And it's a focus on what we have right now. I want to say we have a model that works, which is libraries, and we have been saying this for years since I've been on council, is libraries is doing something. I want to say it's because government can't function alone, and we need to have partners. And so we have a lot of partners within library doing the work within library, right? They're having, they're facilitating programming, they're doing all of these things. So there's a model that works there that I think we have to dive into and see how we can duplicate that model in other areas within the city. But I just, so it's mostly comments. I just really feel like we have to be strategic on how to make what we have successful and how to keep the amazing staff we have on board here. Like, we can't keep losing team members because we're creating an impossible job for them. So, if we can, and I think a lot of people up here are interested in that conversation, is really work closely specifically with this work on how we equip it to actually meet the needs with what we have before we think of what's coming in the future. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Councilor. Any other questions?

Okay, not seeing any. How would you like to proceed, Mr. City Manager?

Mr. Mayor, thank you guys very much. I would like to give you guys a 15-minute break. We can grab us some, a sandwich, and then we can start with emergency management. We'll go first. Kyle, you'll start at, we'll shoot for 12:31. Will that work for everybody? Okay. Doing well. Doing well. Okay, let's go ahead and reconvene. We are going to start off the public safety session. First up, emergency management. Director Morgan, the floor is yours.

Testing. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, City Manager, and members of the governing body. My name is Kyle Morgan, the Director of Emergency Management for the City of Santa Fe. Before I start, I want to thank finance and budget staff for all of their help navigating this budget process for my first time as a director this year. They were supremely helpful. And I want to thank you all, Mr. Mayor, Council, City Manager Moya, for your policy and budgetary support of this critical public safety function. Your support makes Santa Fe a safer, more resilient place to live, work, and visit. Emergency management coordinates with internal, external, private industry, and community partners to build disaster preparedness, mitigate known hazards, and facilitate a coordinated response and recovery when critical incidents do occur. We take an all-hazards approach, building coordination, warning, and response capabilities that work across the full spectrum of risks that Santa Fe faces, from wildfire and floods to human-caused incidents and infrastructure challenges. We do this through a continuous intentional cycle of planning, organizing, equipping, training, exercising, and evaluation.

Going to walk through FY26 accomplishments by KPI. Looking at our first KPI, we updated our comprehensive portfolio of emergency management plans, including threat and hazard identification and risk assessments, stakeholder preparedness reviews, and emergency operations frameworks. We began a comprehensive hazard mitigation plan revision and initiated new continuity of operations and resource management plans. Looking at KPI number two, we deployed Ready Santa Fe, a GIS-based platform that allows first responders to show constituents where incidents are occurring in real time. This system was designed with scalability in mind and is the same system we will utilize for providing public information during evacuations or other complex incidents. We also developed a year-round preparedness campaign with communications, which has resulted in roughly three times our historical average annual Alert Santa Fe subscriber growth, new subscriber growth, I should say. Looking at KPI number three, emergency management led a significant increase in training and exercise activity, consisting of both standalone events and escalating series of trainings related to all-hazards incident support model coordination and wildfire response. Taken as a whole, these covered every, every national incident management system function, every FEMA community lifeline, and involved every single city department, as well as many partner agencies and organizations.

I have two highlights I'd like to call out specifically. Number one, emergency management served as the lead planner and evaluator of a full-scale exercise at the Santa Fe Regional Airport two months ago. This both satisfied an FAA regulatory requirement to keep our airport open and operational, as well as provided City of Santa Fe first responders, mutual aid partners, regional healthcare systems with the opportunity to test their emergency response capabilities in a realistic environment. Number two, the Code Blue Resilience Initiative is a strategic partnership with community services and the youth and family services division that uses actual humanitarian relief operations as an entry point to building all-hazards emergency management capabilities throughout the city. It was expanded this year after a lengthy fall training and exercise series on the incident support model, which is the coordination model that our emergency operations center uses. The results were measurably better than in years past.

Looking at FY27, we're thrilled to reestablish the number two position in the department. The reworked job description and clear oversight of citywide internal preparedness functions. This allows the director to focus on executive-level coordination, interagency and mutual aid coordination, advanced technology integration and strategy, grants and financial administration, and overall program direction. Our goals for FY27 are directly aligned with both the governing body's priorities related to public safety, efficiency, and data-driven decision-making, as well as the community budget workshop sessions' high ranking of emergency management. We will develop a robust multi-year citywide preparedness plan outlining priority areas, objectives, and strategies across planning, organizational equipment, technology, training, and exercise needs. We will conduct an emergency management accreditation program audit. EMAP, as it's called, defines what a mature, competent, and modern emergency management program looks like.

Our findings from that audit will roll into that same citywide preparedness plan with a strategic goal of working towards accreditation eligibility by FY30. We will finalize the hazard mitigation, continuity, and resource management plans. We will continue enhancing public information and warning capabilities through Ready Santa Fe improvements and continued coordination with the Communications Division. We will work with ITT and specialized consultant support to develop a virtual Emergency Operations Center, which will enable faster coordination during rapidly unfolding no-notice incidents. We will continue to develop the resilience initiative with Youth and Family Services and look for additional ways to offer concrete services to our community while building community-wide disaster preparedness capabilities. We will continue to ensure fiscal responsibility by managing all currently active and any new federal grants received. With that, I'm happy to take any questions.

Mayor: Thank you, Director Moore. Any questions from governing body members? Councilor Chavez.

Councilor Chavez: Director, I mostly have comments. I think that a lot of people don't understand how important your work is and how it's been a one-man show a lot of times. I know you collaborate a lot. You do this. I'm so glad that we're going to see more positions, more support. This work can save our city and our community members if put in a situation that we've seen happen across the nation. So it's such essential work, so preventative. It will save large amounts of lives, but because it's not actively happening, I don't think that you get that emphasis of importance that you should get with your work. So I just want to give that to you now. A lot of it has been on you alone, and so I just appreciate your work, and I like that we see it growing because it's what will keep us safe and our community members safe with really real situations that can occur. So I just want to thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Cassutt.

Councilor Cassutt: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much for being here. As Councilor Chavez pointed out, you really held this department steady for a very long time and very happy to have you step into the director role. I did have some questions about the reclass to an assistant director. It's a few things, and as I'm reading, I understand the need to perform the duties. It feels a little strange to have a two-person department with a director and assistant director and nobody that they're directing. So I'm trying to understand why a director and not a program manager, or a senior program manager. I understand that it's a really high level. I also am curious about Councilor Cashaw can actually speak to the conversation around supervisory roles and what that means in the city. I'll let you speak to that; you have more information there. So, can you talk a little bit more about, I understand a project coordinator, that's probably not meeting the descriptions, but if we're talking like a program manager, a senior program manager as opposed to an AD, yeah, just trying to square that.

Director Moore: Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassutt, thank you. Happy to talk about that. So, first and foremost, this is actually just an administrative correction. The previous Emergency Management Coordinator job description did refer to it as the Deputy Director. So this fixes that, makes that the job title, and then consistent with salary and benefits. That's the administrative answer, right? Operationally, this does a couple of things. Number one, it mirrors police and fire in having a succession plan in case of a director departing for any reason. And we see that right now, right? We're about to have interim chiefs present on both departments' behalf, and there's been no gap in service. The reworked job description provides a much clearer responsibility over city-wide internal preparedness functions, which allows the director to focus on external coordination, executive group coordination, mutual aid coordination, advanced technology, and hazard mitigation programs, as well as overall program administration. It's also pretty consistent with other departments throughout the country. You know, there are probably some places that do have a senior program manager over emergency management, but typically the org charts that I've seen go director, some sort of deputy title, then it moves down into coordinators and specialists. Happy to answer any other questions.

Councilor Cassutt: Yeah, thank you. That's helpful. Interesting that there were some discrepancies in the job titles before. That's never fun to deal with. And I did see that, you know, the contracts that are being cut were essentially contracts that were in place simply because one of the positions was vacant. And that makes perfect sense that now we're restaffing. Will those contracts be in place until somebody is hired so that you do have that support?

Director Moore: They will not. But this job, because the available budget already exists to fund this at a very low end of the salary range, the position is actually posted currently. The budget enhancement that is being requested exists to fund this at a more competitive rate to make this equitable with similar positions at, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management or other local emergency management programs throughout the state.

Councilor Cassutt: Okay. I would just say, you know, keep us up to date in terms of hiring if this does become a challenge because some, I mean, some of these positions we get lucky, we hire people right away. Some of these positions are vacant for a really long time. What I would not want to happen is that you then take on so much more work while we're busy trying to hire this position. And if we're not getting an adequate candidate right away, I think making sure that the work continues, even if it's not in the ideal method by which we'd like it to continue, is always important. I know that there's always a lot of conversation on this about contracts, and people don't like contracts, but when we can't hire people, sometimes they're necessary. So, I that would be what I would urge, that if there's a challenge with getting that position filled, that that'd be helpful. Councilor Cashaw, we'll likely follow up on this, but I had, I guess, some more of the bike rack questions around some of the findings for the, hold on, where are they? The exercises and like looking at how prepared we are and where are the gaps, and that does speak a bit more to some of you spelled it out a bit in here, but where the city needs to really be focusing to make sure that we are prepared for anything, especially wildfire, if we're honest, like that's, you know, one of our higher risks. We've seen flooding in the rest of the state after fire. So, I'm hoping to get a presentation on a debrief of all of these. I know that that's not what we're doing here today. So, I would just really appreciate either governing body, Quality of Life, wherever that might be, to really understand where are we in terms of emergency preparedness. As you mentioned, when it talked about staffing, you're looking at multiple fiscal years and hoping to build out. It would be great for us to understand, you know, as we're looking into the future, what are some of the things that might be on the horizon for this department. I think emergency management has been, I mean, I know it's been here the entire time that I have, but I mean, it's really just been the last couple of years where, and I know a lot of this is due to your work, where we've finally been getting a lot of reports and information and seeing these drills and getting a sense of what is going on. So I'd really like a deep dive into that and for us to start doing some strategic planning around that, and that meaning what's it going to mean for budgeting processes later. Other than that, you answered my questions. I do really, really appreciate that. I know communication is a really big thing and how we get this information out. Yeah, I'll yield the floor. Thank you.

Director Moore: Thank you. And yes, very happy to do that at a presentation and/or study session.

Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Castro.

Councilor Castro: Thank you so much. Appreciate it, Mayor. And thank you so much, Director. I do have a couple of follow-up questions in regards to the structure of the department. I, and this might be a city manager, deputy city manager question actually. Are we going to be in trouble or are we causing any issues with union representation because we don't have anyone that a supervisor is supervising? Are we in communication? Is this potentially signaling to us that we're expanding this department?

Director Moore: I'm not sure if I can answer that from an HR or union perspective. What I can say is that the inherent nature of emergency management as a coordinating entity frequently involves, yes, not necessarily supervising our own staff, but supervising activations, initiatives, and projects. So, I think that's one way to look at it, how I look at it.

Councilor Castro: Yeah. And I would just caution us that there's some language in our negotiating documents that might need to be worked on based on some of this structural change. I do know that you had previously been with the department, and so you have a lot of history on how we're developing. I just want to know a little bit more about some of our modeling events, some of our emergency management equipment that we are currently looking at, and also we had some bars for equipment last year. Is there other needs that the department has that we're going to be seeing in the future?

Director Moore: So, going back to the beginning of my speech, this is an iterative process, right? Preparedness is something that we build. It's a thing in motion. So there are always needs that we identify over the course of these trainings, exercises, and evaluations. So yes, we will absolutely be coming back to ask for money for specialized consultant support for key pieces of equipment that are either new or replacing something that has already been exhausted. One high point in this budget request is a small but notable enhancement to our operating expenses budget. This enables us to replace exhausted materials in real time, such as sheltering supplies during the winter when we run Code Blue. It also lets us, if there are small little things, either pieces of equipment or trainings that other people need to go to that we identify after an exercise, we can close those gaps quickly. Big stuff, of course, will need to come back to governing body for requests and approval. And then additionally, you know, we have always lived off of grants for the most part. It's why our budget's so jumpy if you're looking back at our multi-year stuff. We still have a healthy grant portfolio. I don't know what that looks like heading into the future with everything going on at FEMA. But we will also continue to seek out grant funding to close these gaps as it is available.

Councilor Castro: And that was my next question. I mean, we have a significant reduction in grant funding. I think that's why potentially we're losing FEMA dollars. Is that what this reduction is?

Director Moore: It's partially. I mean, there is one grant that we typically receive annually that hasn't come in yet, but actually, I would just say that what you're seeing in the budget book, the highlights, those are grant revenues that are in emergency management budget proper. Most of our grant portfolio right now is actually related to hazard mitigation projects and lives in Public Works budget.

So, while we are rolling over, we are confidently rolling over $385,000. That number may increase. It depends on what we actually draw down in Q4 from our open grants. And then there's another over $2 million in public works for hazard mitigation projects citywide.

And as we've noted all day today, we do work with different departments and budgets do complement each other. I want to know a little bit of how we're working with private entities, in particular in the watershed, around fire mitigation, if you want to touch on that. And also if there is going to be a need for space. So you touched on Code Blue, and we're currently filling some of the spaces we had used for Code.

Absolutely. I can't speak necessarily to the watershed specifically, since that's managed in coordination between the Water Department and the United States Forest Service. Director Roach will know much better answers than I do about that specifically. We have enhanced our ability to detect wildfires in the watershed. One of the one-time funding projects that you all graciously authorized last year was a wildfire detection camera that is up. We're still doing a little bit of tweaking, but that is expected to be operational for real in the next two to three weeks. And in addition to that, there are several, two competing different wildfire detection camera systems in this part of the state. One through a company called Pano AI. Those were purchased by PNM and MNERD, and City of Santa Fe Emergency Management, Fire Department, Wildland staff, as well as our counterparts in the county and the state, all have access to those feeds. There is also a publicly visible system through Alert West that has two separate camera feeds of the upper watershed and the foothills.

So just to reiterate, we have plenty of eyes in the upper watershed. Folks should know that we are constantly monitoring for forest fires in that area. Correct?

That is correct. Thank you, Councilor.

Thank you. We, and I know this is also not in your wheelhouse, so feel free to say you don't know. We've heard a lot about emergency shelters and pallet shelters going up. What is your interaction with that department and how can we potentially help speed up that process?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Castro, thank you. We work super closely with Youth and Family Services specifically on Code Blue and related resiliency measures. In terms of pallet shelters, I see them as an extremely valuable asset for emergency response, should we ever be in a position where we need to suddenly shelter a lot of people in a non-congregate setting, whether those people are experiencing homelessness or suddenly lost a home. So we're happy to support them, but day-to-day do not work on the pallet shelter project.

But if we were to have an emergency situation, you could deploy those through your office, I imagine.

We could absolutely coordinate getting those deployed. We talked about that extensively in some of our EOC training series. We've got people in Public Works and Public Utilities that are well-equipped to set those kinds of things up, and they've got all the heavy equipment to move them around. It's just a matter of having permission on where to put them.

So, just to bring it back to the budget, we wouldn't need to look at any contracts for putting those up. We can do that all in-house.

I believe so, yes.

Well, no further questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor. Any other questions?

Not seeing any. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you. Next up, we've got Fire. Thank you, Carl. Floor is yours, Chief.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor and members of the committee or the council. We're glad to be here today. We appreciate this opportunity to come and speak of our budget and to go over a few things that have changed this year and a few things we're working on. One of our missions here is to provide prompt emergency services to the city, safeguard everyone's home, lives, property, and everything they have. And we do that through a lot of our programs that we run, and we do that through quick emergency response to everywhere in the city and some of the surrounding county areas too. Some of the programs we run are fire EMS rescue, Hazmat, fire prevention, community risk reduction, internal fleet maintenance, internal health and safety, alternative response, EMS oversight, special events, honor guard, tactical paramedic program, and drone operations is new and up and coming. And so some of those things that we do help us meet those missions. And some of the highlights I would like to speak of that we've been able to accomplish is reclassing our fleet mechanics, our heavy equipment mechanics, to fire apparatus technicians. And that's a recent accomplishment. That will provide them competitive salary benefits to others that have their same technical level of expertise when it comes to fire apparatus and ambulances, which takes a lot more certifications to accomplish. We'll hopefully be able to see not as much turnover in that part of our division within our department and be able to create a ladder for them to climb and a tiered process for them to have promotional opportunities.

Some of the other highlights in our budget for this upcoming year is $220,000 that we've been able to acquire, mainly for our ambulance services. This is going to really help sustain that part of our department. It is going to provide the supplies that our ambulances need to continue to operate. Historically, over the years, we run out of funds in that account within about six months, and then we're pulling in grant funds to help supplement that money. And so that is a huge accomplishment we see. It helps pay for IV supplies, oxygen tubing, just critical equipment that we need on every single call, on every patient we see. And so that was really big for us. We have, if you look at the budget, and everyone's pretty much seen it, we have a $5 million increase this year. And that was a question I had when we presented budget the first time. We came with about a million dollar increase, and then we got about $220,000. So I was like, where did this $5 million come from? So, with the help of our budget team that are helping me understand all of this, this $5 million increase comes mainly from our grant funding into our 221 account, and it's about $2.5 million that goes into there. We have $1.8 million that goes toward PCG, which is Public Consulting Group. This is the group that helps us keep our ambulance supplemental payment program running and helps those funds continue to come into the city. As of now, we're sitting in the positive with the money that we've put out to help this program run with what we're bringing into the city. And those funds go directly into the general fund. We have another about a million and a half going into our FTE and the link to our P and our other contracts that renew every year. And so hopefully that explains some of that $5 million and where that's coming from. And so if we have questions on that, we can dive a little bit deeper. But with that, we will stand for any questions. Any questions from governing body members? Councilor Cassett.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you both so much for being here. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for these questions. I appreciate that. A couple things that I wanted to try to get more information on. So that you put in in goals about emergency call, and I had asked what is categorized as emergency call, and I understand that the budget is not dependent on such things, but I just so I understand some of your goals that you've listed here. What is considered an emergency call? What is considered a non-emergency call? I know that we have, you know, emergency and non-emergency for what I tell people to call. And then how do you guys, of the 22,000 that had been reported last night from the union around response calls, I'm just curious how that breaks down and if you guys have that information.

Yes, Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassett. Emergency calls versus non-emergency calls is what we're looking at in our goal is response times to critical incidents and to structure fires, to multi-company responses when we need all of Station 3, all of Station 1, all of Station 4 to kind of respond to a major incident. That's what we're looking at. And so we want those kind of emergency calls to have a certain response time. We want to be able to make it out the door within two minutes and on scene within between six and eight minutes, right? So we want to be able to have a timely response to those emergencies, which will help protect life and property, right? Especially life. When we're looking at fires, seconds matter when it comes to response. Fire moves through things very quickly. If you look at a plane accident and a fire's in there, it only 90 seconds for a fire to penetrate the main cabin area, right? So it's extremely important that we have a quick response to all these areas. The same thing with any medical emergency, minutes matter. And so we want to keep those as low as possible. And so emergency calls versus non-emergency calls would be things that we're headed to that are very critical and those that we're running lights and sirens to versus not running lights and sirens to is probably the easiest way to explain it.

Okay, got it. And do you have a breakdown of what, I mean, I know you guys are seeing a lot of emergency calls. I hear the sirens all the time. So, but what those look like in terms of the various responses? And then I know part of what brought this question up for me is when I was looking at PD's, you know, they have a very like level one, level two, level three and specific call response times for each. Do you not differentiate those?

So we do have, we have an alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo. And so that, it, we still try to maintain the same standard of response for those. Where it changes is our travel time from the time we go in route to a call from the time we arrive. If we're not going emergency traffic, it's not going to matter as much. We may get stopped at multiple stoplights. Got it. And things like that, right? So it may take a little bit longer to respond. Especially if we're going from one area of town to another. If Station 1 has to go down, Station 1 is right here at Fort Marcy. If they have to go down to Santa Place Mall, it's going to take them a little bit longer to get there. And that would be because all the other units might be busy and they might be our last one available. So that standard changes when they're going across town.

Got it. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. The other question that I'd love some more information either now or in the future is the legislative outlay facilities improvement funds, and you said that they're almost done being spent. I know they've been reallocated from when we had originally gotten them. So I'm curious where they have gone, what's happening, what still needs to occur there for those spending. And let's actually not, we'll talk about other expansion issues later, but in terms of what that's looking like for facilities, what's being spent out and if you need to send me a list later, that's fine. But also, what are we needing in terms of additional facility upgrades? Is that something that is being contemplated right now?

Because I know when we initially had these conversations, it was like, great, this will get us to a certain place, but there's still some needs there.

Absolutely. Yes. We had allocated $3.9 million for facility improvements, and that money has been, we're vigorously trying to spend that money. We have a certain amount of time to spend it in, and so we're really working hard to get all of that gone. As of right now, we have most of that money tied up in facility improvements, only leaving us about a half a million dollars left over right now. And so that money is going to Station 7 improvements. We've changed all their windows out. We fixed a lot of their internal issues that they've had there. We're putting AC units in and getting rid of the swamp coolers. Station 1 has had a lot of improvements. We're looking at windows there, redoing the stucco, putting a baseball net up so we don't have holes in the stucco and birds nesting in there anymore. So that's kind of exciting for those guys. We have our Station 5 improvement at our training division down there, which is a huge, huge project. The training division is kind of the lifeblood of our department. That's where a lot of people end up, and we spend a lot of time down there with our continuing education hours and stuff like that. And so it's a much-needed facility there. So, a lot of money is going into there. We're trying to get to every single station. We have improvements at Station 3 in their kitchen area. They have 10 guys that live there, and they have a kitchen space that's just a little bit larger than this table, and they're all trying to prep and cook. And so it's going to be an expansion there as well. We have a planned expansion at Station 4, providing more bunk space for those that are living there. We'll see how much money, how the money stretches out. One of the big areas that we are looking for the future that we'll probably need to find more money for is Station 9 and the expansion on the south side of town. We're in desperate need of a station down there to be able to provide better services to that side of town. We have a lot of building going on down there. There are a lot of apartment complexes. We have the hospital that's right down there, and for us to provide the adequate fire protection to all this area, we need another fire unit down there and another ambulance to help cover that part of town a little bit more, a little bit better than what we're currently doing.

Yeah, that was, I know I remember those conversations around Station 2, which I believe is where this money originally had been planned, and then we've had some shifting there. So is Station 9 an existing station, or is that, that you would, that would be needed to expand, or is it an establishment of a new kind of like station?

Station 9 is an existing station. This station is there and operating. We share half of the station with PD. So they have a few offices in there that they use. We've been in communication with them to have a smooth transition and help them find a space also for these other officers that are working out of there. We know how tight city facilities are, and so we're trying to work together pretty closely. But this would be a perfect location for an operational fire station. From what all our data shows us, it sits right at Cerrillos and Airport Road. It's good access to all the major thoroughfares through that area. We also have a wildland division that works out of there. And so we'd need to upgrade this station to make it a 24/7 livable kind of station. There are no bunk areas, and it just needs a few updates. Right now, it houses them 8 to 5 for the most part, Monday through Friday.

Got it. Thank you. I appreciate that. And then my last question, just it's, you know, it's been one of the things that we've brought up in public a bit about the Community Health and Safety Director, as you stated in here that that funding still sits in fire, and there will be discussion as to what to do with it in the future. So has it not been allocated out? Is that what I understood? Position is still within the fire department position listing. We hope to evaluate this in the coming months.

Yeah. So it still sits as a Community Health and Safety Director title. We would need to reclass this to Assistant Chief 3 and to rehire.

Okay.

Yeah. So, wonderful.

But that takes time, right? We have timelines that we have to fit with HR, and so we hope to be able to hit those as soon as we can.

Wonderful. Glad to hear it. Very, very, I know that's been a point of contention, and happy we can resolve that one. Oh, the other thing, just, there was conversation around a community, there was a community risk assessment, community health assessment, something. Hold on, let me find it. Mentioned it at the beginning, the citywide community risk assessment. So I would love to get a presentation on what the findings of that were, and also I'm curious if there's overlap between how this aligns with, you know, assessments and emergency management, community services, and probably PD. So, for the future, that would be wonderful to get some conversation around.

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassutt, we did that assessment, we did that publicly three and a half years ago.

It's that one.

That one.

All right. You have not done a new one. So that one was, that one, I think it was three years ago we did the risk assessment. If you would like,

Okay.

What we need to do is we, so ahead, go ahead and ask your question, then I'll try to.

Just, I'm reading what the budget book says, "Over the past year, achieved and maintained the highest level of community risk reduction by completing an updated citywide community risk assessment." So it sounded like it was.

We haven't started one yet. So we need to update the one that we finished three and a half years ago because after two years, we are already out of compliance. So we need to start over.

Okay. So this has not happened.

Not happened. Okay. So we.

Never mind. I don't need a presentation on. I think, I think in the next, it took us last time a year to do it. So I, I think in the beginning of the fiscal year, I think Scott should start doing another one.

Wonderful.

Because it will evaluate our new needs. It'll evaluate where we should put a station if that's the best location. It evaluated that three and a half years ago, and that's how it led my direction to add an extra ambulance.

Yeah.

And added that brush truck in Station 7. So it kind of gives us, it's not we're pushing it to you or you counselors pushing it to us. It's looking at a broad spectrum and saying this is an outside company evaluating what we do.

Right. And do you guys have the funding for that then in your budget, or not yet? Something to discuss later.

Not yet. But we still, we have grant funds that we use for some of these things like that if we can get certain approvals through those that are funding us.

Okay.

So that's what we'll look at there.

Okay. Sounds good. Just a note though, that page 51 is a little misleading in the budget book for what has happened and what needs to happen. So I don't think we make edits to it, but okay. Wonderful. Thank you. Sure. Councilor Castro,

Thank you so much. I know that we're all going through a lot of information, and I don't want to bombard us. I just would like for our information and the public. Could you talk a little bit about some of our contracts because I know that we've been trying to move things internally, but we have a lot of contracts that we can't do internally and are really valuable. Life Extension might be the first.

Life Extension. Yes, Lifecan. Life Extension. Lifecan is a contract that we have that does all our annual physicals. These, it's an expensive contract, and this absolutely saves the lives of our firefighters. Even since we put it in place, we found cancer in multiple personnel, and they've been able to get that taken care of before it's become an issue. Even this year, we have found cancer in one of individuals, and the type of cancer that he had was stated that if it wasn't caught during this annual physical that we provided, that it would have gone unnoticed until he started showing symptoms of this cancer, then he would have had about six months to live because by that time it moves to your lungs and it moves to other areas of your body. And so this contract that we have with Life Extension is absolutely one of probably the best decisions that we've made as a city and a department to be able to keep the lives of our firefighters healthy and strong.

And just as a follow-up, why would we be so concerned about cancer in firefighters?

Yes, we're exposed to a lot of different things, and cancer in firefighters is a lot, we're at a lot higher risk than the general public and general other jobs, right? We work with different kinds of foams that are cancerous. We see building fires and the things that are burning, these plastics and all these different things are very highly carcinogenic, and we're exposed to that on a regular basis. Even our gear carries some minute number of carcinogens that we're exposed to on a regular basis. And so we have a pretty comprehensive carcinogen plan within our department that reduces that risk the best we can. We have clean cab concepts. We, some of our facility improvements that we're working on, is help to reduce that risk as well, provide certain safe spaces within the station apart from our apparatus bays and where we keep our gear. And so everything, a lot of things that we do is to help reduce that risk the best we can.

Thank you so much. And a little bit of a smaller contract, but I'm going to talk to Assistant Chief Rizzo for a second. Training is very expensive and takes a lot of resources and effort. Can you tell me a little bit about how we're spending our money around?

Well, the training division budget is specifically for training. We do a lot of in-house promotional courses. It's a case-by-case basis where they have to apply for outside training, and a lot of times we are denying people outside training for that reason. Probably one of the more expensive ones is for our rescue technicians because it's built into the contract. They have to have specialized rope rescue technician training, and a lot of times we have to send people out of state for that. Any other specific questions with training?

No more. I was thinking of if there were suggestions on how we could better utilize our resources around training, for example, if we had somebody in-house that could do that training, or if it's not enough, so it's better for us to send out of state.

Well, we work, yeah, we work at the community college, which we get a discounted rate on for our EMS courses, and we send paramedic students to them. I think we're probably doing the best we can over there. We do a lot of, like I said, the training staff teaches the majority of all the promotional classes, all the academies, which takes like a full year to hire and then train them. So I think we're doing the best we can with that.

And I think that, I mean, it's a very costly process, sorry, City Manager, to step on your toes, to put somebody through this training program, right? And we're putting folks through a certification that they can use anywhere here.

Correct.

Yeah. One of the things we've thought about too is wanting to create a contract for people who go to paramedic school so that they can't just get a certificate and leave. But I think that there are some obstacles around that. That's one of the things we've considered.

Thank you so much. Anything to add, Chief?

Yes. Our training is, like I said, almost the lifeblood of our department. Every training that our guys go to, they come back and we send them through the train the trainer. So these specialized courses that they take, they can come back and start training other members here. So that helps really save that cost for training.

Thank you so much. I think the department has done great in how to dedicate its resources both to their staff and also retention. We did hear some difficulties in some of the departments and I think we're going to work on that. So thank you very much and no further questions.

**Councilor Anorante:** Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief. Just want to clarify some of the training too. A lot of the training that you do is actually required due to state licensure, right? Such as paramedic license. A lot of that's continuing education type courses that you're required to give so they can maintain their licenses. Is that correct?

That is correct. We not only have the EMS required trainings, but we also meet the standard of 228 hours of fire training a year per employee, which is extremely difficult for a lot of departments to hit, and we can see many around the state that don't hit that number. That helps us maintain a high ISO number to that one or two standard. Currently, our department sits at ISO2, and we have goals to get to 01, and we'll do the best we can to try to hit that.

Okay. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Mayor.

**Councilor Casset:** Thank you so much. Councilor Castro reminded me that in addition to contracts for physical, and I haven't looked at the contract list, sorry, there's a lot of information, I can't read it all. You guys have in the past, and I hope still do, have a contract for mental health support for your staff. Obviously, you guys see some of the most traumatic situations. We've had some really impactful presentations and conversations over the years, both from former Councilor Reta, obviously former Fire Chief Reetta brought this forward to really make sure that those supports were still there. Is that still funded within the department so that that mental health component is there? And I know that there's been conversations around trying to figure out how to allow for some more downtime, some more processing time either between calls or between shifts, and I would just love to hear more about how you're supporting staff in that way.

Absolutely. Yes, we still maintain that contract. It's with PSPG. We consider that a priority with our staff. We get to see how much it's been utilized and how we best can use that contract to the advantage of our employees. One of the things that we offer on any critical incident, they can respond immediately to our station, to our department, and debrief our firefighters right after the incident. We have partners within the Metro Albuquerque area and us. We have a peer support team within our own department. When we've had things happen, we've brought in outside team members from peer support from Albuquerque Fire, Rio Rancho Fire. We've had people come from Grants and Farmington to help our guys out with some of this stress debrief and some of the things that they go through. This contract is important to us, and it's something that we wish to maintain always going forward.

Wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate it, and please do always come forward and ask for it every single year because it's incredibly crucial. Thank you. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you.

Next up, we've got Police Chief Grener. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Councilors. We sit before you to go over our budget and understand that our main goals are operational readiness and improved efficiency. We can stand for any questions. Are there any questions or comments from governing body members? Councilor Castro.

**Councilor Castro:** Just, yes, questions. We had some from downtown vendors about vacancies. How many vacancies do we currently have just for the public?

Six. We have six vacancies.

Thank you so much. That was it.

But we do have five officers. Next week we have four cadets and one lateral.

So we have one vacancy.

As of next week, we will have one vacancy.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

I have one more. We heard from the bike team specifically. How can we support the bike team and how do we use our Swiss Army knife in the police department?

That's a very good question, Councilor. Thank you, Mr. Commander, Councilor Castro. So, as much as they hate being called the Swiss Army knife, no, that's okay. It's a running joke within the police department for a long time, but they are extremely proactive. Right now, because of some internal issues we've had, we can't necessarily fully staff that position right or those positions right now, despite our low vacancy rate. As soon as some of the internal issues get worked out, we shouldn't have a problem getting them fully staffed, and we're looking forward to hopefully having them fully staffed by mid-summer. So, it just depends.

Wonderful. That'd be greatly appreciated. No further questions.

**Councilor Casset:** Thank you, Mayor. I want to go back to vacancy rates, and it's really exciting to see where you all have come in my time because I think when I showed up in 2020, it was dire. It was, I mean, it was really, really challenging. This was, there was a lot of conversation, and I just really appreciate all the work that you all have done, that former Chief Joy has done to staff up this department. And I guess we've given you some good pay raises there. So, good job us too. But I would like to hear a little bit more because I think this is really important for the community to understand. One, what has this meant for you all in terms of being fully staffed? What is the impact on how you're able to serve the community? What are you able to do in the department? As well as, you know, we've had a lot of conversation around if we have the right level of staffing or the right level of positions dedicated to police. And one of the problems has been that we've been so understaffed that we weren't able to make that assessment. So now that we are getting to these staffing levels that are not 100% but pretty darn close, what are you all seeing in terms of needs for being able to serve the community and that you are expected to?

I'm going to let DC Valdez answer that. He is quite honestly the biggest driving force with him and his staff on why our vacancies are down so low. I'll let him address that then.

DC Valdez, I apologize. Lots of kudos to you because you're always amazing. So, please go.

Thank you, Councilor, Mr. Mayor. So, with our vacancies, and again, going back to 2018, we had a ton of vacancies, and we were looking at ways to fill those vacancies. The way we got to our goal today is through partnerships with the council in the buy-in, the supports, making sure that our officers are being compensated, that they were getting competitive pay. A big message we share too is showing that they're appreciated, and that has not fallen on deaf ears. I've heard from folks that have ran into leaders on this council that they've had interactions and they're like, "Hey, it was great." They said, "Thank you." And that means the world to them with these numbers. These are staffing numbers that were budgeted probably about 2008. So, the city has grown quite a bit since 2008. We have a population growth of approximately 30,000 residents. We've also annexed quite a bit of property on the south side. In addition to that, the city has just grown both in people that live here and also businesses that are here in Santa Fe. And our staffing has not increased to account for that type of growth. So now that we have more staff based on our budgeted amount, it's a good opportunity for us to do a staffing analysis. I would recommend by an outside company to let us know what is going to be the ideal staffing office that we would need to provide a high level of service to our community. One thing that's important though, we've made a lot of strides with recruitment and retention. Now it's the responsibility of everyone that's here today to make sure that we retain a lot of our officers. There are a lot of drivers. Some of our officers have been through some challenging times in the law enforcement profession. They've served 20 years plus, and they've seen some of the again darkest days where their profession was under extreme criticism, and some were under attack even here in our community, and we just got to let them know that for one, they're appreciated, the work they do is meaningful, and it makes a difference. And if we can do that, that's part one. One thing we learned with our recruitment and retention efforts is you can't just do that for the police officer. Their families have to know it and see it too. You have to be genuine in that. You have to have some legitimacy, and that's make sure they are well-equipped, they're well-trained, and they're appreciated. They're all human beings. Some are part of the community that have kids and spouses that work here. Others, they spend two hours on the road to come and serve this community because they believe in this. And it's important that, you know, for us, we don't see them any different. They're all public servants making a difference. They can really help us with again improving safety in our community. Now that we have staffing numbers up, that means that we can add staff to the bike team, to the traffic unit, which we know has been a big point of concern with members of our community with issues related to unsafe driving, with our detective bureau to make sure they have people that can bring justice to those that would otherwise not be brought to justice. And with the staffing numbers, it's been a huge night and day comparison from when I started here back in 2018. So again, the support that's been given by leadership has been amazing. That's been huge. The work of our recruiters has been nothing short of amazing. The numbers that they've maintained right now have been the lowest vacancy rates our department has seen in over 20 years. That's been unheard of. We have a historic vacancy rate of 15. But our field training officers and everyone else that's out there contributing to that, it's been a huge team effort, and we really have to make a lot of, you know, continue to build upon that success, see where it goes from here, and just find out what is that perfect number. How many police officers do we want in our community? We also diversified our workforce by including non-police officer positions such as crime scene technicians, crime analysts, and additional support staff so we can get police officers back to the field. The same premise is utilized for the automated speed enforcement program that will also allow non-sworn personnel to review and validate if a violation occurred or not. So we've been really creative in those areas. I'm thinking it's going to be a model that other agencies in our state will look at and maybe consider, but we're in a way better place than we were eight years ago.

A lot of folks that were in these seats here and a lot of folks in our organization, they all can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. I can't say it's just one group. It's truly been a team effort.

Mayor: Thank you so much, DC. I appreciate that. And a very important fact that we really haven't, these were levels that were budgeted in 2008. So again, similar to fire, it sounds like something to look at for potential funding for this year is to be doing those assessments around those levels. My only other question is more just a point of education. I always try to find areas of jargon. One of the goals is around discovery. I live with a prosecutor, and so the word discovery means a lot to me. Can you explain to the public when you're talking about 100% timely discovery what that means and why that matters?

Um, yes, Counselor, absolutely. So, discovery is a mechanism that happens when charges are filed in a court, whether it be municipal court, magistrate court, or district court. And what discovery is, is it ensures due process for people that are accused of a crime. Often times they're either charged or arrested, and that gives them enough time to review what the state's case is going to be or what their strategy may be as well. Items that are included in discovery are body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, interviews that are conducted, any evidence that is identified, collected, or submitted to the lab, police reports, and then other records related to the officers being dispatched to a call or a store receipt if there's a theft. And those items, they establish if there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime. So that's what discovery is in the grand scheme of things.

The way it works for us is we are on very tight timelines. Recently, they enacted the case management order, which requires us to turn over discovery within seven days of us filing charges. So there are very tight time constraints. One thing that has been helpful for us is through our evidence project and the updating of all of our processes through technology. Our processes are built in there, so it streamlines it. Is it perfect? We're not quite there yet, but we're pretty close. So the City of Santa Fe is in a very good position because with our Axon ecosystem, everything is already in that database, and it feeds over to the First Judicial District and also the Law Office of the Public Defender. And they also have an Axon product which is called Justice. So that allows a case file to go to those attorneys. If there is a partner attorney that is not associated with the DA's office or the Public Defender's office, we can also send them a link so they can have all the discovery material for their case available.

But it's important for us to have those timelines met because if we don't meet those timelines, then justice may not be served, or someone's due process may be delayed if they're accused of a crime. And so it's really important for us to make sure we have those mechanisms in place with the additional advent of technology and how it's being utilized not only for law enforcement but also for first responders, by retailers, and even by the general consumers. There is so much data that has to be provided to attorneys so they can put their case together. That is essential that we have a system like Axon to be able to facilitate that. So technology is a really big thing that we're looking at. But with all this digital data, that is more workload on our investigators and our police officers that they have to go through. They have to analyze, and they have to make sure that whatever is there is, here's what it is, or if they're looking through a video for an investigation, if there's not enough information there to move forward with the case, they can rule it out and then move on. But technology is being a really big driver in the area of discovery.

The other big challenge that was posed to us was a seven-day turnaround, and we're working to get that stuff going. I believe it was last budget, we were supported by adding an additional four administrative staff to our record section to help with discovery. We have two in place right now that have been trained since December. They're still getting proficient with the process. We have one staff member that's amazing that was the only one doing discovery for a long time. She's training them. So right now, we're kind of doing the handoff. We're still working to fill the other two positions. But we have a lot of triggers in place and open communication with attorneys if we do need to escalate the delivery of those documents as well. But the way of doing them by hand, carrying them, putting them in the ring binder, those are days of the past. With few exceptions, we don't do that. Most of it is going to be digital evidence that is being derived from our system or is imported to our system from a third-party database, such as, let's say, someone provides a receipt from a store. But that's what's made it much easier for us to meet those timelines.

Mayor: Yeah, thank you so much, DC. And you led right into the point around some of the technology, some of the staff that has had to be invested in in order for us to get there. So thank you so much. I am way over time, but thank you both, and I really appreciate it. Thanks, Mayor. Any other governing body members? Mr. Chavez.

Mr. Chavez: I just have a comment. I want to thank you for bringing up the staffing because we are fully staffed, but we are not fully staffed. Our need has grown exponentially. And so we hear a lot from the public that they can't tell that we're fully staffed. And it's not because of anything that police is not doing. It's because the need has just grown that much. I imagine that if we do an assessment, the recommended staffing is going to show a huge shortage for the need we have right now in Santa Fe. So I just want to say kudos to your team for working with a 2008 staff structure for a need that has outgrown it. I'm very curious to see how much we've outgrown that staffing. Yes. Counselor Chavez. So, just based on our numbers and what we looked at in 2018, we saw that we needed approximately 205 police officers based on the workload in 2018. That was based on actual data from the call volume. It wasn't a population comparison. It's how many calls, how long are they taking, how many staff members we need to complete that workload. The city's grown quite a bit since 2018. So that's going to be somewhere between 205 to 215. As of today, we are budgeted for 169 police officers. So that is a number that we need to look at.

One thing I would ask, I know we would like to tackle this, but in moderation, please. Again, we work very hard to fill 40 vacancies. It took us a long time. So if I get them 10 at a time, I already have folks that are interested. They know they're going on a waitlist. Our police department right now is of huge interest for employment for people that want to get into law enforcement, and a lot of that is because of our staff and the way that they share their experience with it. So although I appreciate a lot of support, in moderation is good, and I think hopefully for the budget, it will work out really good. But I see if we have 10 at a time, it'll make it easy for us to get those numbers, and once we've filled and get them settled in, then we onboard 10 more. But that would help our staff that although they're fully staffed per budget, the work still continues, and they're still going from call to call.

Mayor: I imagine if we use an outside person or outside entity to do the contracting, they probably have a rollout of how to grow that staff, I would hope, in a productive way that doesn't cause strain on the department. I was just going to ask really fast, quickly, if you can just summarize briefly some of the technology that you guys are bringing into the department. The innovation around that because that will, especially as we grow it and solidify the process and those systems, will help with the workload that we currently have amongst our community right now.

Absolutely, Counselor. So right now, we have approved two contracts. One is for ShotSpotter, which will help us identify where reports of gunshots are coming in. From the presentations provided previously, we're seeing that there's a large number, I think it's somewhere about 70 to 80% that go unreported. This will help us with evidence collection once we get those notifications to go get those casings and to send them off to the lab to be analyzed and matched to a gun and possibly an offender. The second one is going to be our automated traffic enforcement, which will have speed and sound. My team is working on this very quickly. We're hoping to have a go-live date by August of this year that'll help us with improving safety on our roads and augment the efforts of our people in the field.

There are other solutions that we're looking at, and it's expansion of technologies through our Axon ecosystem. One of them that we're working through right now that we're seeking funding on, and we have been working with counselors on and the fire department, is drone as a first responder. That will really help us with getting response times down so we have eyes on emergency situations, gathering evidence, and that may be something that could possibly reduce the number of sworn staff we may need to provide resources to address the workload. We're also looking at other technologies through Axon as well that will help us with officer safety and make them more proficient. One is a language translator that can translate languages from across the globe. So it'll help in an emergency situation if someone needs help with that. I can go on for days. So, after the hearing, if you're interested, I have a ton of things, but a lot of other things we're looking at is expanding the resources that Axon currently provides, mainly around drone as a first responder. And the big thing with that is providing time and distance between our first responders and a dangerous situation, but also getting a first-eye view on what's going on so they have better information and can have better outcomes when responding to these situations.

Mayor: Thank you. Yeah. With the technology both in fire and in police, it's been a very hot topic with the Public Safety Committee just because of the potential impact it could have on safety and just on their workload. But it is going to take additional funding as we build those systems so that they're successful and we're taking advantage of them to their full capacity. So just put a note in that to keep an eye out on how they are growing those growing tech within both fire and police and how we could better support it. So thank you.

Thank you, Counselor. Any other comments, questions?

Mayor: Sure. Sorry.

Sorry. Some follow-up questions. I'm going to ask things I asked other departments that related to you just for fairness. Data collection. We are going to be collecting a lot of data, and we have to store it. You have a relationship with it that you're supporting each other in that. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?

Yes, Counselor Coster. So a lot of our systems that we use currently that collect data, we have Axon, our entire ecosystem. We own all the data with that. That is on a secured cloud that is cloud-based storage.

So, we don't have a drive that's here. We coordinate all of our technology stuff through IT, so they know what they need to maintain or what is part of that service agreement that we have. The same thing is going to also apply for the automated speed and sound enforcement program. That data is also our property. It cannot be shared unless we explicitly give permission, and that is not our intention. We're to use it for the program, and that was insight that was provided and direction, frankly, from councilors.

Same thing is going to apply to ShotSpotter. That's going to be cloud-based. That data is going to be offsite. To be completely honest, we're trying to get away from an actual physical server on site because there's a lot of risk with that. So, we've gone with secure, government-level, cloud-based storage solutions.

**Speaker:** Wonderful. And I know, just to supplement that, we've also put personnel on those teams to sort of coordinate some of the sound cameras and things. So, that is additional resources to those programs, right?

**Speaker:** So, with those programs, the ShotSpotter is going to be integrated into the workflow with our dispatch center. We're going to give our officers all training on that, so that will not have an impact. The initial launch is being conducted by my team. Captain Barnett is spearheading that effort for the automated speed and sound. We're going to be conducting the reviews with our current staff, and that's going to be our public safety aids. We want to show the benefits of this program. One thing we will likely ask for next year is additional staffing to help with running that program. So, we are going to have a little bit of an impact this year. Once we get the ball rolling, then we can see what it looks like and then come back with some good numbers and data to say, "Here's what the staffing model should look like." And that's being spearheaded by Lieutenant Rodriguez. So, my team's very busy right now with the technology stuff. Our focus is to make sure that our operations folks can focus on their mission, providing services, being in the field, conducting investigations, running traffic, and conducting enforcement operations. We're trying to have a minimal interruption to what they're doing right now, and once we give them the solution, then we're hoping it's going to augment their efforts as well.

**Speaker:** Well, and then my last line of questioning is going to be around training. Great questions about how we need to, it's all DC Valdez. We want to analyze how much staff we need. Also, I'm interested in knowing the cost benefit of laterals because I know that we're really leaning on laterals to sort of fill some of these positions. Are we getting, how do I want to put this? Do we need to do supplemental training when we get some of these lateral folks into our department?

**Speaker:** Yes, Counselor. So, one thing we do is anyone that joins our department, if they are an entry-level police officer, they go through a consistent type of training. We make sure that they know what the values of our department are, what our policies are, and our expectations. When we get laterals, they have the same type of training when they get onboarded. The only abbreviation part of it is when it gets to fieldwork. At that point, in most cases, they have experience in that type of fieldwork, which is consistent with state law, and maybe they learn about similar ordinances that they may have had at their previous place of employment. However, there are some exceptions. Sometimes we get laterals that are from smaller agencies. And if that's the case, then they go through a traditional program or field training, which is the full field training program, so they can have an opportunity to get that experience and be proficient.

But with our training, one thing that we see is very valuable is the investment you make in training and the time that you put in. That's where you get your benefits. Because if you have a well-trained force and they're confident in what they do, that reduces liability, that provides a high level of service. And that again brings down the frustration with our staff where they know what they're supposed to do and how to do it, which is really, really amazing. When we look at our staffing models, it takes into those training times that we need to maintain that high level of proficiency. So, when we look at those models of how many staff members we need to be able to provide this high level of service, it takes in the call volume, it takes in attendance, it takes in training requirement hours, all those things, and that's where we get that number from. And any organization that runs those numbers, they're all a similar formula, and they would give us that same number. So, that is something we do take into account so we can continue to provide that high level of training.

**Speaker:** Wonderful. So, it sounds like even though we're not really saving too much cost, we're still getting a high level of training across the board, but we still have to do a lot of training whether it's a lateral or a brand new officer. Is that what I'm hearing?

**Speaker:** Wonderful. So, thank you very much for all of your work. I think, as I've mentioned with other departments, what's going to be great for retention is if we get more folks on staff, we don't overwork people. We fully staff all of our departments. So, thank you. And no further questions.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Counselor. Any other questions? Body members, not seeing any. Thank you, Chief Grundler. Thank you, Deputy Chief Valdez. Appreciate the time, and please stay safe out there.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for your questions, Councilors, and hope the rest of your day goes quick. Okay, next up we have our Public Works team. Mayor, I just want to say I'm going to have to step out in about 10 minutes for my son's doctor's appointment this afternoon.

**Speaker:** Given that, do you have any immediate questions that you want to ask the Public Works team? Okay. Director Bernett, the floor is yours. You're good.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Councilors, I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity to present the proposed Public Works Department FY27 budget. As you've probably seen, our budget is about $80.5 million. This makes Public Works one of the city's largest operating departments and reflects the scale and importance of the services we provide every day. This includes streets, sidewalks, traffic infrastructure, parks, open space, trails, medians, facilities, transit, parking, the municipal recreation complex, Midtown, the railyard, and major capital project support. These are not just individual service areas. They are major public assets and systems that require coordinated daily operations, long-term maintenance planning, and clear city stewardship.

I'm going to cover a few of our budget highlights briefly. First, across the department, the budget funds approximately 341 positions. Public Works is really made up of a highly diverse, very skilled, and exceptional workforce. Our budget includes about $2.8 million for the professional operations contract at Marty Sanchez Links, which supports continued operation of one of our city's major recreation assets. The budget also includes about $981,000 for contracted security services at various city facilities, reflecting our department's role in maintaining not just functional buildings and spaces, but safe ones as well.

For complete streets, the budget includes about $1.8 million for contracted traffic engineering and maintenance services, supporting traffic operations, transportation safety in the city street network. This also includes a new $100,000 allocation for bicycle improvements and maintenance throughout the city, which supports the city's broader goals around mobility, safety, and multimodal transportation. The budget includes $400,000 for the Facilities Management Division to begin managing facilities landscapes, something that hasn't been done for a number of years. This budget creates a $1.5 million facility maintenance and repair fund, which gives facilities a reliable funding source to begin systematically planning and executing work around addressing critical facility needs, emergency repairs, and deferred maintenance.

Finally, the budget includes an increase of approximately $720,000 for a new seven-position parks crew, including the new equipment needed to get that crew off the ground. I think the intention here is to begin lessening our department's dependence on contracted labor and bring more of this work in-house. Overall, in FY27, our focus is going to be using these resources responsibly to improve basic services, strengthen maintenance and asset management, support safe and reliable transportation systems, maintain parks and public spaces, meet our compliance obligations, and continue moving our department towards a more coordinated and proactive operating model. And with that, again, thank you very much. Me and my team are all here to answer questions, and over to you.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Director Bernett. I'm going to defer to Councilor Chavis just because she has to depart here shortly.

**Speaker:** Thank you for all your work. A huge, a massive amount of work. I really just want to collaborate on parks a little bit. We had our tours, which was really amazing. And I just, I want to put this out there, and I said that I'd follow up. I want us to really look at how we could involve community, especially our youth teams, in helping our Parks Division maintain parks. We need to build, and I think we could build like a program, right? Like a program working with Community Services on how do we build a relationship and a type of program where all of the teams we serve within our parks, because there's so many teams, families, kids, and start building leadership within them and taking care of what serves them. Because we talk about park maintenance. We would be able to take a lot multiple times a month if we would build a program where we could lean on youth to start doing this community work and giving back. Talk about building capacity, and like, this is what serves you. So, how do you serve your community, right? They're giving back so it could be used by other individuals within our community. I really think it would go far, and I really think that a lot of our coaches and youth programs, youth teams, would step up to the plate and be very excited about it. I think it's huge with coaches to build leadership within their teams, and this would be a perfect opportunity, and I think it would be a program that could be built and mimicked in other places if we could build something like this. But I look around and I see the potential, and like really putting their hands in it and having them form something that serves them best would be a great way for us to try to take some of the work off of our Parks Division and the maintenance that comes with that. So, I would really want to explore an opportunity like that with you at some point. I just wanted to plant that seed. I feel like it could be a free way for us to maintain parks while building leaders in our community and creating opportunities for our community members, especially our youth, to find purpose and to give back. Thank you.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Councilor. Any other comments? Councilor Gamonte.

**Speaker:** Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Directors. Just a couple of questions that came up. So, I just want to make sure because I fully applaud trying to bring those contracting positions in-house.

Those contracts will remain in effect while that hiring process goes on. Is that correct?

Mayor: Counselor, yes, we're going to have contracts in the beginning of the spring, I mean, beginning now. Our goal is to staff these positions by October or November of this year and then make the transition next spring.

Okay. Thank you, Director. I just want to make sure that service to the public doesn't go down while we're waiting essentially. And then the other thing, Director McDonald, we briefly touched on this at the Paint the Plaza, but I just kind of for the benefit of all, because I can't see anywhere in here, things for items such as equipment for playground equipment. We have a lot of parks where that playground equipment needs to be replaced. So what is our process for that?

Mayor: Counselor Busamante, our current process is that we have a budget allocation of about $200,000 that we use to purchase parts and equipment that is needed in repair. We tend to go to our ICIP and grants to replace entire units or playgrounds. Right now we have five critical playgrounds that we believe need to be replaced. And so those are on our capital plan which you'll see later this summer.

Okay, Director. Thank you. That's all there. Thank you.

Thank you, Counselor.

Counselor: Thanks so much, Mr. Mayor. Thank you all for being here. I know I sent some questions. As long as we're on parks, let's stay there. So I do want to talk about the conversation with the contract reduction and what that is going to look like. I am in full support of a new crew and a full crew. I think that the quality of our parks is something that we have heard a lot about and people feeling that we are not meeting the quality that they had experienced 20 years ago, which makes sense given the fact that we had fewer parks and more crew 20 years ago. And so how we start to, similar to that conversation around police where we were operating off of 2008 levels, we have a similar situation in parks where we actually have a reduction in parks teams and then we have added parks and I think added responsibilities because we added trails. When we did the reorg, did we add medians at that point to the parks team? But we did. It's been, there's been a little bit of some transitions there. If you have more information on that, that'd be great.

Mayor: Yes, when we came over to it, it was a, when we split from recreation, recreation went on its own and parks and open space went on its own. We haven't added more trails, but we added the river and watershed section because the greenway spaces are often along our trails and on our river. So the care of those facilities are also very important. We've also added the ranger team since I've been on board. That's been a wonderfully contributing piece of our program. And I think that's about the two that we added.

Okay. All right. Thank you. And we have added those. That's wonderful to hear and the ranger has been really important with some of the unexpected components that we've had to deal with in our parks over the last couple of years. What I want to understand is with the proposal to reduce contracts, add in a new crew, can you give me some information on what this means for, as you said, you know, contracts will stay in place until crew are staffed up? What does this mean in terms of level of service that we're able to provide? What contracts are potentially going to be reduced? I know that there, it's not a specific contract that has to be reduced is my understanding, but what this is going to look like. And then also when we added in the larger contract to take over medians, what was the intention is that it was going to free up a crew to basically be what I call the SWAT team. You guys call them the pack team. But essentially it's a crew that is able to quickly respond to constituent concerns because obviously, you know, we've seen the schedules of the maintenance that our parks crews have to take on. There's not really a lot of time to address issues that come up unexpectedly. Things that we should expect to come up unexpectedly. So that crew got put in place there. So can you give me some information on what we are expect, what we can expect with this transition?

Mayor: Counselor Cassid, there's a lot of questions there, so I'll kind of go through them all. If I missed them, I apologize. Yes. So in terms of contracts that are going to change, we are asked to reduce $200,000 to help support the seven-man crew or seven-person crew that we're getting ready to bring on. Those contracts, we're looking at the median crew as well as the encampment crew. Those are our largest contracts and that leaves us some opportunity to have that coverage that we talked about because we have, you know, contracts that will cover as we transition. So those are the ones we've identified. I think you also asked about the pack crew. We will keep the pack crew. The pack crew was a pilot project that we came forward with last budget cycle and it's been wonderfully successful. The purpose of the pack crew is to alleviate the stress on all the other crews. Okay. So when we get CRM, and I might get too detailed, so I apologize. You can reel me in, but when we get complaints or concerns or requests, we are trying to categorize them and deal with them more quickly. And so the pack crew really picks up those things that are immediate that they can fix, and/or a public safety, and/or they will work toward more complex projects. So a regular crew would be doing their schedule, their regular schedule in the parks and they don't have to stop to try to do something more complex. They can call the pack crew and the pack crew can, you know, take the longer amount of time to do it or if they're really busy and they for whatever reason can't deal with a situation that's a public health and safety, we'll deploy them to get that. So it's been, I think, hugely successful and the reason I believe we will be making that 2.5 for 50% of our parks at the end of this fiscal year. And this is a stretch goal really for us. I mean, 50% is hard and I always set the bar really high, but we're working really hard and my team has been just fantastic, really up for the challenge. So, but this piece is very important to us to keep that in place. So that kind of gives us a nice flow with our work because one of the things that I've learned being in parks is some of our failures in the past have been that people have been diverted from going through their scheduled maintenance. So they get pulled off to do something that they weren't anticipating and then they, we get more complaints because they didn't finish their cycle. So we're really trying to stay focused on getting our scheduled work done and then the pack crew comes in and helps on these kind of more immediate needs. So that's kind of the function of that. We do intend on trying to keep that and that's in our plan right now. I forgot the last one. Level, level of service as this transition. I know we had a 2.5 for 50% of the parks by the end of FY26. How is this looking for with, you know, this current plan with FY27?

So right now, we still believe that we're going to be done this fiscal year. I think we're at about 34% right now. So 26 of our 77 parks are at 2.5. Again, I set a stretch goal. We're going to make it though. So that's where we're at. I think that the important thing to note is that this coming year, we set our goal at 2.52 because with the transition, you know, training people, moving things around, I didn't want to stretch it too far. So, so when we make the 2.5, I didn't go up in our requests because I think it's going to be a little bit of transition and there may be some gaps that come up while people are training, you know, that type of thing, but we believe we're going to be there and we're excited to make it wonderful. And you guys have worked, I mean, incredibly hard and as Counselor Chavez mentioned, we got to do a tour. I think everybody, you know, had the offer of a tour and just it really is amazing to see what this parks team does. I have a potential amendment that I would like to make, but I don't want the staff to go through trying to figure out if this amendment is possible unless this is something that people would be interested in, which is that I do want to add that additional crew. I think that's incredibly important. I think how we build out the parks team is crucial. However, at least for this year and then we can reassess next year, I would want to keep contracts whole. In looking at the median contract, a few things that I understand to be true is that this is, we frequently have to pay overtime because of the, there's weird hours. Correct. It's like 4:00 a.m. midnight. It's been traditionally harder to hire because it is weird hours. And from my understanding, you know, from just some of the things I've looked at with how cities deal with things like medians. And we've been doing a lot of work to try to make our medians, you know, less, less resource intensive, which we need to continue to do. And hopefully at some point we're getting to a place where as we invest in upgrading our medians that we're not needing as much service on the medians. But it's also one of our, it's kind of one of those higher liability jobs, which is why some, some communities are more frequent to contract them out. I want to make sure that we continue to deliver on parks the way that the community has been asking for it and however that means with expanding services to parks. So my goal would be to find the $200,000 in contracts so that that is available for the parks team as needed. And so that they can really focus on getting that new crew in place, doing the training, continuing to meet those level of services potentially. Well, let's, let's stick with that 50, but really solidly hitting that 50%. And then, you know, assessing what that workflow looks like. I'm really excited that that PAT crew is still there. That was something I was really concerned about disappearing. So having that there, but again, this, you know, takes staff digging through and I just wanted to gain the temperature of the governing body if that's something that you all would be interested in exploring because I'm not going to bring forward an amendment for a political show if it's not going to pass and make staff do a whole bunch of work for it. So that's kind of my question, I guess, to my colleagues at this time if this is something you'd want to explore.

Before Counselor Caster, I'll go to you. And the reason why we're reducing contracts is it's, it's a leveling off. If we continue to have contracts fully funded while we're working to build capacity, we're going to continue to become reliant on contracts. And when you reduce contract availability, meanwhile increasing staff support, we're essentially forcing by resource availability to ensure that staffing is there. Now we, as, as mentioned before, we are providing contract resources because it is a process. Now, if we do find ourselves in a predicament where we do need the resources, we can always, whether it's through the staff salary savings that are for the positions that are being proposed or other avenues, the money is there.

It's all about the strategy of working to build the workforce. So I'm open to what the governing body wants to do, but this is the philosophy around us leveling back this way. The money is there. So if we need it and the staff is not there, we can pull from the staff saving salaries to pay for this contract. That was the rationale. You've got to start to shift, and this is the process of shifting. It's going to be tough, I'll admit that right now. It's going to be tough, but we have to make the shift. This is what the public has asked for. This is a major platform of mine when I ran for this role: to shift away from contracts and build back staff capacity. If we still continue to become reliant and fund contracts, we're never forcing ourselves to build that capacity. So, just to give some rationale around the thought in the budget development process.

**Councilor Castro:** Thank you. And just to follow up, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilor Casset. I think this is a very important conversation. I'm glad it came up. I want to be fully transparent that I support organized labor and I support workforce development inside the city. My line of questioning earlier is for that reason. I want to make sure that we have a good structure and we have a good base of employees. That being said, there are some things that are very specific, and I would hope that if we did retain some of these contracts, we could use them in a way that supplements what we already have and supports our crews. I'll just put something out there, like maybe a plumber. We do a lot of contracts for irrigation because we might not have enough work all year round for irrigation. So we could use some of these contracts in a very specific way that isn't necessarily replicating work that we do internally, but is supporting this and all the crews that we have in the work that they're already doing.

To Councilor Casset's point, to Councilor Travis's point, we have been working at a deficit in all areas around the city for a very long time. Our staff is doing the work of two, three people almost all across the board. So we do need to grow our capacity. Keeping a level of service that is current, I think we all know is not what the community wants. We want to increase our level of service. So that means that we need to increase our level of resources and support for those departments. So I think I would personally feel very comfortable with keeping that money if we used it in a way that was supplementary and was not replacing things that we could have internally.

I have some concern with facilities in parks, and I think maybe this is for Director Brunette. How, for example, do we support the playgrounds and the spaces that we have in parks as a governing body? Because these budgets are separate, how do we best advocate for these city spaces and city use spaces?

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor, thank you. It's a great question. The best way for, I think, us as a collective team to advocate for improvements on any facility, a group of facilities, be they regular city buildings or in parks, is to ensure that we have a very clear strategic capital plan identifying what our needs are, and that we're communicating clearly upwards here in the budget cycle and at those critical points throughout the fiscal year when opportunities for adjustments to budgets become available. But I think really everything starts with good asset management, good kind of long, mid, and short-term planning, and then presenting the needs appropriately to the governing body and Mayor and leadership to do our best to get those needs met.

**Councilor Castro:** Thank you so much. And I don't want to stray too far from the question because I want to give other councilors the opportunity to respond to Councilor Casset. Is this capital improvement fund the beginning of how we support that? Do we need to go further?

**Director Brunette:** Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor, Councilor, another great question. And yes, this is exactly the intention behind the creation of this fund balance. And I don't want to speak for leadership, but my understanding is that there are, I think, three distinct funds that are being created. One specific to facilities, I believe one will be specific to fleet, and another will be a general capital improvements fund balance. And then as departments, divisions, sections, whoever, come up with a plan or list of needs, those can be brought forward to leadership. We can work through weighing the cost-benefit of everything that gets proposed and determining what gets tackled in any given fiscal year.

**Councilor Castro:** Well, thank you so much. I will just take the opportunity to advocate for more pedestrian and bike infrastructure. Thank you so much.

**Mayor:** Thank you, Councilor. Anybody else? I didn't know if we were staying with Councilor Casset's topic. I mean, I have other questions too. I didn't, I mean, you started. I don't know. I was just going to follow that up. Is there money right now in that capital fund? I know we talked about playgrounds, and I do receive a lot of, we do receive a lot of emails about broken structures. Is there money right now, are there capital funds right now to fix up for those replacements?

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor, another great question. Thank you. This is actually a new model for the city. In the past, we really relied on what we collectively referred to as one-time funding to address needs like this. And this year, we're shifting to a, Andy's here. I don't know if I'm stealing his thunder, but I think we're shifting to a more kind of strategic and planned approach. This will be the first time these funds are in existence. They're part of the budget packets. So the answer is no, but should everything go well, it sounds like they will be.

**Andy:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor, no denigration to Sam because he does not necessarily know all the little details of this. So it's not his fault. What he's saying is essentially correct. This particular tranche of funding has not existed yet, but what it is is simply unallocated revenue in the 365 or half percent capital GRT fund. So that is where we have traditionally funded capital projects, debt service, capital maintenance in the past. The difference this year is we are leaving a fair amount of money in that fund that we could later put into capital projects, but it is not specifically put into any line like whip construction or design where it could be spent yet. It is simply sitting in there in unallocated revenue ready to be put to bike trails or, you know, another giant sinkhole opening up or zombie apocalypse, whatever might come along. So, and again, Sam didn't necessarily know that little bit of nuance. So what he's saying is essentially correct. It's just to give you the actual details of how it's working.

**Councilor:** Yeah, that's helpful because I know we were talking too about earlier, like the pool, like Salvador Perez is closing, and are we going to need a new pool, or is it just going to be the fixes for that because the community does reach out a lot about those issues? And then I know that Councilor Castro was just saying about bike infrastructure. Just to bounce back for a second, that $100,000 for that infrastructure, is that coming out of that complete streets division?

**Director Brunette:** Yes, Mr. Mayor, Councilor, it is being added this year for the first time to the complete streets division, and this is related to a resolution that came out of the BPAC committee and is the first step towards providing more funding specific to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

**Councilor:** Awesome. That's really exciting. One more thing, and then sorry, I'll go back to you. Sorry, I don't want you to feel ignored over there. Just about the MRC. I think it's just because I coach Northern soccer and I'm always there. I always get a ton of questions about the MRC expansion. I know that's all kinds of funding. I know we're privately funded, and we put money into it, and I think it's fully funded, right? And it's in the design phase. No, it's not fully funded. Okay. And then what does that look like right now as far as timelines and the rollout of that, and how much more funding we need? Thanks.

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor Barrett, we are going to be coming to you shortly with an update on that. We're about at 30% design. There was an ordinance in which it's required that you guys give input on whether or not we do artificial turf or natural turf on the fields. And so we'll be giving you an update on that. But it's progressing nicely, and we've had outstanding community input. A huge success with our bilingual outreach. I'm really pleased with the community outreach that's happened. So stay tuned. We're going to be back soon at council. I also wanted to mention Phil Luhan is our new MRC business manager. I don't know if all of you know him. I think you do, but he's here today too. And that has really helped us out there at the MRC as well. So we're excited about that.

**Councilor:** Thanks. One more quick question was, do we work with Santa Fe Public Schools? Do we have any kind of MOU? I mean, I know we have our summer program, and we use their facilities, but do we work with them ever, like as far as their fields and their facilities when we need that? Is there any kind of relationship there?

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor Barrett, we do have a few MOU agreements, like at Wood Gormley, and I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the school, but over off of Wessia, there's a school right there. It used to be Magro, and now it's something else. I think it's vacant, but we've taken over that open space, doing some management there. There are a few that those are the two that we mainly do.

**Councilor:** So I've had a lot of, like, sports moms reach out to me too about, can we use this field? Do we work with them? How could we work with them sometimes when we can't get out on certain fields if we were ever able to work with, like, the school districts in that way? Thanks.

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor Barrett, there is a person that you can speak with at the Santa Fe Public Schools, and they have their own permit process. But at those two locations, those are open, and we can permit those.

**Councilor:** Thanks.

**Mayor:** Back to Councilor Cassador.

**Councilor Vagali:** Thank you. Councilor Casset, to your question, I don't think I would be in favor of keeping that funding if we're transitioning to a new crew. I think it makes sense to transition into that in-house. And with that, I have another in-house question, which is, are we going to hire a traffic engineer someday?

**Director Brunette:** Mr. Mayor, Councilor Fagali, thank you very much. Yes, myself and Marcos Escobel, our interim complete streets director, have actually been working on a minor reorganization of the streets division. It includes having to slightly modify the job descriptions for the two engineer positions. Incomplete streets currently, reclassifications have been frozen until July 1st. And so we have our changes ready to go, and we're just waiting for the ability to process those changes to open back up. We'll execute those and then intend to begin a process of working aggressively to staff back up. In addition, I think not specific to the engineering positions, but I do want to note that generally in the Public Works Department, staffing levels are an issue.

We're starting conversations with HR to perform another rapid hire, try and start filling ranks, but yes, it's high on our list of priorities. Some technical issues are holding us back. We've definitely got our eyes on it.

Great. Thank you. Also, in Complete Streets, we mentioned the bike and pedestrian infrastructure money. Can you talk about what that can be used for, what you're anticipating it being used for?

For that, I am going to ask Director Esabel to come up and share some of his information with you.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Counselor. Yes, the allocation for the bicycle pedestrian is designed or intended mostly for the maintenance of the bicycle facilities. We will be in conversations with BPAC and the bike community to try and figure out the best route for using that. Initially, my thoughts for that are as we're integrating more thermal striping and our biking plans on the road rehabilitations that we're doing, we need to start to align our maintenance division's abilities to maintain in-house that type of striping. In doing that, one of the first steps would be for us to purchase a walk-behind thermal striping machine so we can maintain smaller aspects of the roadway striping. So that would be one of the intentions of utilizing the funds to start with, and that will be in discussion to see if that's the best route. We want to kind of work together to make sure, but it is going to be a maintenance issue specifically we try and address with those.

Yeah, that's great. And it's great that you're anticipating working with BPAC and some of the other bike groups. I have seen in other cities where when there is a bike lane, because I know a lot of times here you're like, "Is that a bike lane? Is that a shoulder?" They paint the bike symbol in the bike lane every like 100 feet, which seems like a really, I don't know how expensive that is, but it seems like a very cheap way to make it more visible that it is a bike lane and not a shoulder. So, just throwing that out there as a potential option.

And then, moving on to transit, I heard we might be getting some new routes and a rebrand potentially. Is that in this budget?

Mr. Mayor, Counselor, let me invite our transit team up to talk about that with you. Thank you.

Great question, Mr. Mayor, Council. Yeah, thank you so much for that question. We went before the governing body and City Council prior and spoke with the Mayor. We're strategically pivoting due to the nationwide lack of CDLs. So our goal is to pivot and procure smaller vehicles and run more routes, opening up some of the ones that are on the on-demand service and run them more frequently with those non-CDL drivers. We've worked with HR to align our staff, and come July, we'll work again with doing some more because we did it on a smaller scale and had great success. So, we're hoping with that success that it proves worthy to do it a little more throughout the city. And with that, I think that brand recognition is definitely necessary. A lot of the, say, the downtown circular shuttle that we have, people don't really understand that logo anymore, and there needs to be a little more continuity throughout all of it. We have a different variety of bus stops. We have a different variety of locations. We have a variety of services. And I think if we get brand recognition, that would help the public perceive where those locations are and what service they're actually enrolling in. So, for instance, the bus fares for the large buses are a certain amount, and the Santa Fe pickup is free. And so to have something that identifies that path of travel, but also the specific service you're utilizing and what your cost potential might be.

Thanks. Anything else?

I did include a request for a rebranding project. I don't believe that it was funded in FY27, but I will look at our fund balance soon and will be looking at that in FY27.

Thank you. That was all for me.

Thank you, Counselor. Any other comments, questions? Counselor Faulkner, then Counselor Cass.

Yeah. I so, could I get a briefing on how we're working the Marty Sanchez Golf Course? What's the budget? I know we have a consultant. I just could use a little refresher course.

Absolutely, Counselor. One moment. So, Mr. Mayor, Counselor, and Director McDonald, Counselor Faulkner's question is, could you provide a high-level briefing on Marty Sanchez and the operations out there? I believe cost and management.

If they, how much they spend on water, are they paying for water? How much we're paying for the contract, if there are any additional services that we're paying for.

Mr. Mayor, Counselor Faulkner, I might just ask Bill Luhan to come down. I'm sure he'd be okay for those questions. Our contract is 2 million. Let me put my glasses on here.

Good afternoon. Hello, Mr. Mayor, the Counselor. I would love to answer some of those questions for you. We have a management company, Troon, also known as Indigo Sports. They have a yearly allocation in our contracts for 2.779 million. That's what the contract allocation is for. They've yet, in my experience, yet to expend all of that amount, but that is the starting totals of what we began with. In terms of water, they do not pay for water. The water utility stays here with the city. In terms of expenses that they take on, they take on the expenses of the day-to-day operating of the golf course. So that would exclude things of a capital nature or things of our water lines.

Mr. Mayor, Counselor Faulkner, we do pay for water, effluent though. So we don't pay for water, but we do pay for effluent. I believe it's close to a million dollars, but I'm honestly don't know. I have to get back the number for you. We can follow up offline. Thank you.

Counselor Casset.

Thank you, Mayor. I did want to jump back to capital, the capital budgeting concept and the capital plan concept. So, one thing that we've been talking about for a couple years now is this capital asset management system. I see this in here as one of the FY27 goals. I believe that talks about expanded use of asset management tools. So, I'm curious where we are with that. Do we have all of the software that is needed? Is it just a matter of implementing it? Because it's something I know I've been eager to get online ASAP.

Yeah, Mr. Mayor, Counselor Casset, thank you. Great question again. So, in Public Works, we have a few different capital asset management systems. The Facilities Management Division maintains an asset database for probably about, I think, 12 to 15 years now. That's known as Asset Planner. It is a well-utilized system. It's both, it incorporates asset management, capital planning, and a work order system. Again, it is well used, but it is not exhaustive. It doesn't include every city facility, and something the Facilities Management Division is doing is working with other teams like the asset management team to try and incorporate more facilities into that database. So, working well could be improved in scope at the same time.

And excuse me, I'm fairly new to this, but the Parks Division, Complete Streets Division, in conjunction with the Public Utilities Department, has purchased and has been building out what was formally Cartograph, now is a module inside of OpenGov, for their own asset management and work order system platform. My understanding is that that is still currently in development. The work order system is partially functional and should be complete by the end of fiscal year 27. And I believe the asset database portion of the platform will also be functional. But the important thing to note there is there's a very exhaustive list of assets that will need to be uploaded into the system for it to function. And so one of the kind of forks in the road as we get closer to implementation of the asset side is determining, will that be work done by staff in-house, or would it be something we would look at outsourcing to a contractor to help us start cataloging and getting that data into our database? I think the former is probably, the former is probably going to take us more time, and the latter is going to be more expensive for the city. So once we're closer to implementation, I think we'll be at an inflection point where we make that decision. And Director McDonald, is that pretty accurate? All right, I think we're good.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. But I know that's been a lot of conversation, and this might be for Deputy City Manager, I'm not sure. But are we going to undertake a separate capital budgeting process later in the year? And are we going to start being, I mean, because again, this is part of like, how do we track these things? How do we track the maintenance pieces? How do we track the giant, the small upgrades versus the giant replacements of things, or understanding what we have for new building?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the governing body, Counselor Cassette. Yeah, we've had some great conversations about the need to really look more holistically at our capital needs throughout the city and ensure that we are not only understanding the status of all of those buildings, streets, everything that we should be taking care of, but what those anticipated preventive maintenance costs are as well. So, I think to answer your question, yes, it's going to be a more holistic process. I don't know exactly what it looks like. I'm hoping there's going to be some study sessions with the council. Sam and his team have done a great job of really trying to ascertain where we are with these various module or software modules that he spoke about. I think there's more work to do there. But it is something that I would really like to do for the city because I do think that we've been focusing a lot on our ICIP, and that is not the whole picture of our capital needs and maintenance as you've pointed out earlier. So, yes, at the direction of the Mayor and the City Manager, I would like to definitely engage further in that effort.

Yeah, wonderful. I appreciate that. It's, we definitely need to do it, and it's been a request for a while. So happy to hear that it's finally getting done. So, thank you all for putting that in motion. And when we do that, I want to make sure that we're incorporating things like MO has, I don't know how many plans. I know I've seen them. There's a bike and trail master plan, there's the Carlos Ray Safety Corridor, there's a safety. All of these different plans that we've been putting on shelves for years that are great ideas. Really how we synthesize them and understand them and understand what we can do and start to prioritize taking off pieces of these would be wonderful. So, look forward to that. With that, one more question for you, Melissa. I'm sorry, but I've been getting some questions about it given that it's budget season. Swan Park water play feature. Where are we in terms of timeline? How's the funding there? And then I've also, in terms of any other park projects that we've had in the queue, where we're looking for FY27. So for me, obviously Herb Martinez, both the recent funding, as well as I know there was a tot lot discussion at some point. PBLO still, there's been conversations about someday being a phase two.

So for me, Swan, Herb, and PBLO are my three park questions specifically. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassett, we are going to be finished by the end of the fiscal year with our Swan Park design. We're right now crunching those numbers, so I can't give you an exact number. What I will say is that it's likely most of the upfront costs are going to be the infrastructure. We have a lot of infrastructure needs. We have about 3.4 million in our reserves from the legislative capital outlay, and it's going to be significantly more than that, but you'll get an update on that very shortly. But it's beautiful. Our plans look great, and we're going to be coming up to brief people very, very soon on that.

The PBLO has, I believe, completed their thing. Let me see. I think most of that is complete. Herb Martinez is probably going to be in design next year. We just got the money, or we just got an allocation from the legislature. It usually will come in around September, so then we'll kick off that. Let's see. Are there other parks that you, what other parks did you mention? We have a lot of park projects going on.

I mentioned those three, but I would just, I mean, if you can email those park projects at some point, that would be really great to see. And just a clarification with PBLO. I know that when we did the ribbon cutting with the new playground, there were some conversations around some benches, some trees, potentially exploring if swings were a possibility. So, I know that that was kind of, yes, thank you for, you triggered my memory. Thank you so much. We are going to be putting in the swings, and that'll be complete in this fiscal year by June 30th. So, the swings are coming.

Yeah, that's very exciting. Thank you so much. Really, that great park. Really appreciate that. And then, yeah, if you could send over the rest of those park projects, that'd be wonderful. And I look forward to hearing about Swan. And thank you all so much.

The other one I think you're probably wondering about is the Tot Plaza, Resalano Park, Resalano Park, and that one is going to be done by the fiscal year, too. I mean, it's almost done, and we're going to be having a ribbon cutting soon. A lot of people are really excited about that. So, that's coming.

That is wonderful. Thank you so much. Very excited for District 4. We're doing a great job with some of those parks. So, thank you so much.

Councilor Castro: Following up, thank you so much, Director McDonald, for Marcy Park and the updates with the shading and the potential bridge.

Okay, Marcy has so many exciting things going on right now. It's almost endless. So, we are ahead of schedule. We have weird things with electronics. It's always like this for me. I don't know what's going on. Sorry. Hello. Okay, you can hear me. Okay. So, we have a lot going on at that park. The shade, we're ahead of schedule. So, we are probably going to have three phases of planting trees. We've completed phase one. The trees are for the most part healthy. We have a few trees over by the pickleball that have frost damage, but we're giving them lots of TLC. So, if people are worried about it, don't worry. They're going to come back. We also have walls going up right now all along the parking lot. If you go over there now, you'll see a lot of construction that will be done by June 30th as well. We've done a lot of transplanting in that construction process, so that's good. Our allocation from the state legislature is coming along great. We have our culvert probably about 80% designed. It's really designed, but it's in review and quality control. So, that crossing will be available to potentially do installation this year coming up in 2027, and the shade structures associated with it. We're going back to the public a little more. We've got some ADA work going on. I think that's a good recap. Is there something in particular you want to know?

No, I know folks are a little concerned about the bridge in particular. We're not, that is not approved. We're still in sort of a feedback phase from the community. Is that correct? On the, on the things that are, the shade structures right now, the engineering is being closed to be done. So, that's like kind of the, the harder part to do, and then the shade structures and the kind of fun stuff. Yes, that's coming back.

The bridge specifically?

That is a bridge. Yeah, it's a bridge. It's a culvert bridge. Sorry. Oh, okay.

Yeah, sorry. It's a, it's a bridge that, it's a culvert that acts like a bridge.

Wonderful. So, we're not really expanding a bridge. We're creating a culvert.

Yeah. Yeah. I do have some questions also about Frenchy Field. I know that I'm looking to give it a little bit more love, and that is capital improvement money that we're looking for because it's the barn that needs some support. Is that correct? Is there anywhere else that we can sort of pull again back to this? Where do we get infrastructure money? How do we support parks and the usability of the parks? Mr. Mayor, Councilor Castro, we, yes, the barn has been unplanned for quite some time. It's on our ICIP list. The price has gone up to about 160, I believe, or 150 at the time that we put it on. I think it was at about 100. It's a wonderful barn, and it is loved by everybody. I'd love to get some funds to improve it. You know, we have looked at grants. Our capital team, you know, we're always looking for grants as Sam can attest to. Structures and maintenance are sometimes hard to get grants for. People don't like to fund those things, but it's a wonderful barn, and I'd love to see it, and we've got it on the ICIP. Thank you. And I hate to be talking about such small projects. I feel like I'm getting in the weeds. This is very District 1 focused, but things like these pedestrian bridges, like the barn, it's very, very important that we build up this fund for improvements. So, I just want to underline that.

I am going to go a little bit to transit now, but thank you so much, McDonald. Transit is very, very important in the city of Santa Fe, and I see Director Neilson back there, and I'm going to plug that I'm trying to work with economic development to potentially get us more free bus passes for downtown. But something that we didn't really, I didn't know about before I was working at the city is that city employees get free transit. Is that correct?

That's correct.

What other users are we supplying free buses to? How can we better utilize some of the programs that you have?

Yeah, we like to consider ourselves very low barrier. So, of course, written into our policies and procedure, never embarrass anybody, never make anybody feel ashamed. So, you know, operators can make a matter-of-fact decision in the moment and decide if that individual may serve a different purpose getting them there, and if they're, you know, indigent or happen to forget the wallet, you know, whatever the circumstance. On top of that, we are free to 18 years and younger. We are free to veterans. We are free to anybody who has an active school ID. So, even if they're at Santa Fe Community College and after retirement decided to take a class, they now qualify with that. We are also working with Santa Fe Community College. So, when I went to college at UNM, they had a sticker program on the back of your school ID. They would give you a different color sticker every year that had a specific logo. And that in turn got me discounted fare utilizing public transit in Albuquerque. So, we, you know, I remember it, and it was very pivotal to my success over there, and we kind of initiated that here. So, we're in the works with Santa Fe Community College and their Dean of Students and provide that stickering on active passes because there's not really a way to navigate if somebody, they don't have a date typically on their student IDs, and so there's not really a way to distinguish if they're still enrolled and kind of taking advantage of the circs. We also provide, we created a pilot portal program specific to Royal Tesa micro community as well as Place, and we allowed those individuals to enroll in that program. I, I, I believe Michelle Williams and Nick at Lifelink, they specifically delegated who's in charge of that portal. So, it's one individual, probably their assistant or so, and they set up, they're set up as a passenger of ours in that portal, and they have some turnover with their success, and so they're able to enroll whomever is under their purview those free rides, and that's incorporated into our program.

That was my next question. So, how, and maybe this is for you, Gabby. How are we able to afford these free programs? What is the revenue source for Santa Fe Trails? How are we funding this?

So, we bring in about, I want to say, do you hear me? We bring in about 230,000 in fare with route and fare transit line. The other source of funding is our FTA formula for shipment funding, about 2.2 million a year for operating, and then we also get funded by NMDOT as a pass for our section funding, which is, that's for fare transit also for micro. They have recently started providing funding for operating, so we do have a request in for effort in to pay for the micro.

Wonderful. You know, equipment is always really important and is very expensive, but the recurring costs of supporting our workers is going to be a totally different conversation. So, anything that we can do to make sure that you're fully staffed, like every other department we're going to talk to today, we don't want to overwork your staff and have you lose people because it's too stressful. It does seem that we're making some adjustments in the microtransit. I know that we're building in some new technologies. Please check in with it before we get new technologies. I know that's been a little bit of a difficulty, and we don't want any hiccups, and I think, no, go right ahead. The last year's, okay, sorry. Do you, do you want me to repeat that?

No, thank you so much. I think we have it on, on, and we heard you, but if there are other questions, we can follow up. I know that Santa Fe Trails, the point I was trying to make, is fairly fully funded on its own. Very little GRT is being allocated to this program, so we don't see it a lot in our book, but you are doing a lot of amazing things. So, thank you so very much. No further questions for me, Mayor.

Thank you, Councilor. Any other folks? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Councilor Burr.

Sorry, I was going to go back to parks again for a second. Do we know if any of that capital funding that's coming up, is, is there any talk of it going to bathrooms? I know there's always discussions on functional bathrooms at parks because facilities, just because I know there's not many at our parks. It's a, it's a concern I've heard about. I've thought about, and I know I'm so excited for this extra parks crew because I know it's like we were talking about it with ARU last night, like this holistic thing going on. And I know right now, like with who can maintain and, and, you know, who is in charge of all this, because I'm thinking about, I know like park rangers, they have to deal with homelessness, so they can't be around maintaining parks. Like, you know, there's all these moving parts going on about why we can't have open bathrooms or, you know, bathrooms in the majority of our parks. So, I didn't know if there was any thought about that and moving funds around. So, if we could open bathrooms, like, you know, I know probably a lot of them need like a lot of maintenance and repair and capital funds to make them functional.

And then again, who would be maintaining them? And then if they could be open from 8 to 5 or something, when most people would use them during summer hours or something like that. Thanks.

Mayor, Counselor, thank you. I can speak to this generally. At the moment, I'm not aware of any plans to build or staff any restrooms in parks. You're absolutely right, it's a very challenging dynamic for us. I think the Water Street restrooms are a good example of a compromise we were able to come to several years ago, where we designed public restroom facilities, but it has a tourism window so that it's actually staffed for the hours that the restrooms are open. Because unattended restrooms become an attractive nuisance and become very difficult to maintain. As an example of that, we do have public restrooms in the Railyard Park and facilities. The facilities division maintains those, and the operation of those is done in conjunction with the Railyard Stewards, who we contract with for work in the Railyard Park, kind of opening and closing those. And we often have to keep them closed when there aren't people there to supervise, because just a lot of damage and misuse takes place that creates a, they become more difficult to maintain. So, I think as Director McDonald is working on plans for new parks, perhaps there's interest in building ranger stations that are staffed with attendant restrooms, but I don't believe there's currently plans to do that anywhere. I might be misspeaking a little bit.

Mr. Mayor, Counselor Barrett, we are making some plans for Swan Park to have a ranger station because we have to have a restroom and a changing room associated with the splash pad. So there's requirements to have a building. So we are incorporating a ranger station in the MRC project as well. So when we come back, you'll hear about that. The very important thing though to understand, all the things that I agree 100% with what Director Sam said, is that there's a lot going on. I agree 100% with what he's saying. They're very challenging. And what we do in our current restrooms, so we have a lot of restrooms, but we don't open them except when we have planned events or when we work with sports teams or people like that. We'll open them on occasion because of the liability and the destruction that occurs. And I get this question all the time, just like you. It's a huge staffing requirement. And so partnering up with something like a ranger team and a substation makes a lot of sense because then you have the person there doing their work, locking it, unlocking it, that type of thing. And I'm really excited about this connection that we're making. I actually have an appointment with Sam next week to talk about it. So, but I think it's a really a new direction that we could explore because we have existing staff. But when I come forward with these projects, I'm bringing forward all the options and what they cost, and you all are going to have to decide how you want to deal with it.

Oh, I appreciate that because when we were all running, all these questions like, are we a family-friendly city? And these are like livability questions for me too. Like, it's something free to do in the summer. You can go to the park, but you're at the park with a three-year-old and they always have to go to the bathroom. I mean, you know, and you do what you got to do. It's like Mother Nature, you know, you're going to go behind the tree. But like, it would be so nice to have, you know, I just like, it's a huge livability issue for me, you know? So, I'm glad we're thinking about that, especially with the splash pad too. I mean, it's so exciting. I know we've been talking about it for so long. Again, it's like so hot here in the summer and some of the pools closed down. So, it's just if you're on a budget and you have a family, a place with like a splash pad and a bathroom, I mean, that's going to like make your whole summer right there. So, thinking about family-friendly and all those things.

Director McDonald, just to clarify, we do have resources budgeted for porta-potties. Although they're not flushable toilets and running water, there are porta-potties at parks.

Yes, Mr. Mayor. I also want to say there's more porta-potties than ever since I came in. I've expanded that program because people are upset about it. But yes, we have plenty of porta-potties and people always want more. So yeah, I mean, the difference of cost is tremendous. And so I think when you look at our Parks Master Plan, they talk about restrooms in regional parks and that makes sense if we have staffing. But yes, Mr. Mayor, thank you for bringing that up. That's very true.

Any other questions?

Sure. Just a little bit more on park rangers, please. There's been some shifts in the program, or has there, maybe I'm misinformed. Has there been any shifts in the program for park rangers?

Mr. Mayor, Counselor Castro, you're asking me if there's any shifts in the program. Yes, we have hired a new Park Ranger Superintendent, Daniel Alt. We're very excited about that. He used to be a park ranger and then he went to work for our River and Watershed section. And when the position became available, he hopped right in and he has picked up without any delay. I mean, it's really been great. And we also have a number of positions that are currently in the process of being staffed. We have a person who was away for a year on military leave and he's coming back. So, that's exciting. So, yes, there's a lot of great shifts. We also have a junior ranger program that we're kicking off before the end of the year and that's funded through the K-Linda grant. Unfortunately, we were one of the flagship recipients of that grant and that grant isn't going to be funded next year, which is really sad, but we're a huge success. We got this whole junior ranger program going and Daniel Alt is very excited about it and there's a lot of great things happening with the Ranger team.

Thank you. Yeah, I know that we had had a little bit of trouble with retention, so we're starting up again. Did we do any refining to the job description?

We did modify the Park Superintendent one previously, but not recently. Haven't modified anything? No.

So, are we still asking park rangers to remove encampments?

Are we still asking for what?

Park rangers to remove encampments.

Yes. Yes, they do. They, our park rangers do some of the pickup of the encampments and they also manage our contracted crews that do the larger cleanups and they also work with our park crews to clean up things. Yes.

I think that's all for now. I have lots of questions about the plaza, but we're going to have a study session about that. So,

Any other questions or comments?

I was just going to go back. I am supportive of keeping the contract just until we are, like, have hired up that whole crew. I just think you guys just do a lot. You do so much. It seems like you could probably use the extra support until we're fully staffed up with everything you guys have to maintain. It seems like, you know, with a lot of the city departments, you're running, you know, at not half capacity, but you know, at a lowered capacity than what we need. So I am in support of that.

So, Counselor, just to clarify, we're not reducing services. The proposal is to keep the services, work to build up staff, draw back services. So, as I mentioned earlier, if we find ourselves in the predicament where we're not building up staff capacity as we had hoped and planned, we will have the staff savings here that can then be moved over to support the contract to be put in that position. What I don't want to do is fund what would not need it and then that money goes elsewhere. It's bad budgeting in my opinion. We have the money there. We just can move it over if it's ultimately needed.

Mr. Mayor, Counselor, one thing that I would just throw out for consideration in regards to this, the bulk of the money used for contracts and parks remains in place this fiscal year. The $200,000 reduction is relatively minor. And one thing that I think would be worthy to consider would be to wait and see how the situation plays out and then as we approach the mid-year budget, revisit the issue, see if Parks has been successful in onboarding staff, see where contract balances are at that point and revisit the issue. I don't think it's something necessarily essential at the outset, but of course I would like to defer to leadership on this, but just wanted to provide that input that I think we start in a solid place and have time to assess, plan, and react appropriately.

Okay, I'll take your word for it. You're the, you are the expert in your area and you oversee it every day and I don't. So, thank you for saying that.

Mr. Faulkner. Yeah, I was just, I'm along those same lines, Director. I was, my thought is is that some of the concerns that we may have as counselors about making this switch is probably going to be something that we could manage during the implementation process. Like there's always an opportunity to come in and amend and do something with an amendment or another a piece of legislation or a bar or whatever it is. But I do think I like the idea of moving away from contractors, but I actually am in the middle on this one because I do think we need contractors for some of the services we have. Much like Counselor Castro said that there's some services we just don't need to have a full-time person doing them because they're specialized event or or one-off. And so I would be curious to watch the situation and see if it looks like we're in trouble then we can always come back and do something later and not necessarily right now. Thank you, Counselor.

Sure, Andy.

Mr. Mayor, Counselor Barrett, and Faulkner, there is just one bit of nuance I want to add to Sam's point. Not only is this a relatively small part of the overall Parks Department budget, the reduction of $200,000 did not zero out the contracts for vegetation management or homeless encampment cleanups completely. They were originally requested of $480,000. This $200,000 reduction brought them to $280,000. So, not trying to sway one way or another, but just so you know, this was not a complete negation of the contracts for these two items. It was just a reduction to those two contracts. There is still money for those contracts in the budget. It's just reduced.

Thank you. Thank you for the clarification. Anything else? Counselor Cassid.

Thank you, Mayor. I apologize. I maybe have misspoken as to my intention. My intention was to add a new parks crew and to have them go to parks maintenance because we have 77 developed parks and hear that we're not getting to them enough. And so what I was wanting to do with keeping contracts whole is is really keep in a contracts crew for medians, keep in a contracts crew for assisting with cleanup so that an additional crew would really be going towards regular park maintenance. So I apologize if I did misspeak and and my idea was, hey, let's see what happens this year and understanding what it would look like with another crew in there and then being able to assess job duties. So, you know, if I'm, we really do need to move on. So, if that is something that people are interested in, you know, feel free to to let you know, CM and Deputy CM know if they feel like there's interest, they'll talk to me about that.

But I'm gathering that there's not. But that was my thought, is that Parks is understaffed. Parks has been understaffed for the better part of a decade and a half. And so I am all for adding another Parks crew, but my thought is that we are not at a place where it is simply replacing in-house with contracts. It was really about how do we actually expand capacity. So, I apologize that it sounded, I maybe misspoke a little bit about what I was thinking. But that was my thought, was to add another Parks crew, keep all contracts, and then reassess after we had another full crew going to see what happened. So, yeah, that's all. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. Thank you, Councilor.

Mayor: Yeah.

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassutt, sorry, I'm losing my train of thought there. I do just want to say very quickly that the $200,000 reduction compared to the addition of $720,000, we do end up at a net positive inside of the Parks division in this fiscal year. And so, not to try and dismiss your point, but just to support what you're saying and reassure you that the plan will benefit. So, I think we may be talking about the same thing from different directions a little bit.

Thank you, Director. All right. Well, if there's any other questions, we do got to move on. So, I apologize, but if...

Thank you all very much. We might call you back to the table, so be ready. Let's go to move on to our airport team. Mr. Mayor and Councilors, thank you very much. I had two goals, and that was to make the mic work right away and not sound so aggressive when I'm talking to you folks. So, I failed one of them already. So, thank you for having us here and looking at our proposed budget. It is a little higher than it was last year. And I was going to run through the items that we have proposed and why they increase, but instead of talking about dump trucks and terminal baggage claims and stuff like that, I kind of wanted to bring up some of the reason why we're asking for that and some of the things over the last year or so of what my team, we've noticed. That's getting out there in the community and letting the public know what we actually do at the airport and maybe that it actually exists. We've had an open door policy for the last year or so. Had a lot of people that I never thought I would meet come in and just, they're interested in building hangers. They're interested in property. You know, I met a gentleman on a bike the other day and I had no idea there's a big bike race coming up here in Santa Fe shortly and showed him what the facility had as far as bike storage, what we were proposing with 599. And then, you know, just people coming in from Florida wanting to move to Santa Fe and interested in airport space. So, my goal is and to continue doing it and to drive revenue is to keep advertising. Personally, we really overextended our marketing budget last year. Basically ran out. We had a few billboards and some radio ads, but I really think the face-to-face contact is making a huge difference in the airport and the way it's perceived. I'll open it if you have any questions.

Thank you, Director. Any questions, Councilor? And then I'll...

I have a question about this proposed airport access road that I guess goes to Jaguar Drive. Do we need another road? And also, are people, I mean, I guess people are coming from the south, but I don't know. It's, you're right off 599. Why do we need a road off of Jaguar?

So, the road, I guess, has been discussed way before my time. I've recently seen drawings and designs for it. We've had a couple of public meetings. The public meetings have been very well received. The public wants a different route to the airport, one that's more visual, one with easier access. Here recently, we've had FedEx and the pods and Amazon cargo facilities build up on that road. I was, I planned to be here at 11:00 today. I was actually a few minutes late because of the pods and the Amazon traffic. Eventually that road's going to need to be replaced. I'd like to have a better access road that cuts the time from the freeway off. Something that's cleaner. Something that we could have, you know, actual utilities like gas and hotels and restaurants. There's amazing, if I didn't even know it was out there, but if you Google 599 access road to the Santa Fe airport, there are tons of fabulous like utopias and designs out there. I think it's really a good revenue generation. The majority of that property is ours. And I think, you know, until we get a bigger terminal, we need to look at non-aeronautical revenue to keep growing this airport.

Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Castro.

Along the same vein, I will use the opportunity, this is more of a comment and I have some questions coming up. I had some concern from community members around the rhetoric that was in those ads for the community input session. I would just ask that you coordinate more with our PR team in the future so we can avoid any mishaps with how we're presenting our position. I do have some concern with the price tag of that road. It is very, very expensive. What are we looking at? And I know that this is not part of this budget, so we can always talk about this later, but it is very expensive. I can give a brief description on that. I didn't really come prepared to talk about the money and what's involved. I know right now we had money from the state that was granted for design. That's already in the process. We've already had two public meetings on that. It's moving forward. The next one, I believe, is going to be in August and then hopefully one after that. But I think it's needed. The way the, and I'll speak in my terms, that earth around that area and the dirt. There's a lot of removal, a lot of inspections that are going to be needed and we want something that we can actually grow into. A lot of the design work is one lane each way, but we are building it for future if we need to expand to a two-lane or something like that. And I want, like I said earlier, I want it to be a community airport, not just for travel, but for community centers, for people that are flying in and can actually hold meetings there. I want it to be something that people are proud of when, you know, they come to pick up their relatives or friends or, you know, people that are considering moving here. So, we'll have to look at the, I don't have a price tag on it. I know it's going to be fairly expensive, but I think we have support of the community and the state and the city to move forward with it when that time comes.

Thank you. So, yeah, if you could just give us a report, I think that'd be great. We're all very interested in the project.

And Councilor, just one quick note, since we're on the road. It is a priority for some of our state delegation members. So, it might not rise to the top of our level, but it's risen to the top priority level of some of our delegation members, and we're not going to tell them, "No, don't fund this road."

As long as we get support, I'm glad to hear that it's not all going to come out of our funds. As long as it's a collaborative effort and maybe state DOT can be part of the conversation since we're looking at the highway and 599. I would recommend we go to MPO, Metropolitan Planning Organization, where we all come together around some of these issues and just see if they have any input.

Thank you, Council Castro. Actually, we have those folks involved and moving forward. I would love to see all of you at our next public meeting.

Thank you so much.

It goes extremely well and like I said, it's well received. And people have some great ideas for the way it should look and what we should have there and again, I'm trying to slow my pace down because I'm excited about it. So,

Well, and I know that other Councilors have gone to some of those meetings in particular. I defer to folks who are in that district. So, we talk about it. I just know that there's some anxiety in the community. So, I want to make sure that we're as clear and transparent as we can and that folks know that not all of these funds are going to come from us. I will move on to what's actually in the book, though. I have some of the deliverables and I'm really excited about the accomplishments are expansions within the terminal. How are we deciding on who these vendors are? Are these going out to RFP? How are we sort of interacting with what is happening at the airport right now? So, I'm not familiar with Wolf and Mermaid in that process and direct that to James Gardinho, but the current vendors that are coming in that has all gone out to RFP and chosen. We actually for the gift shop had a huge turnout, way more. There was probably eight different vendors there that were interested in it. And we basically, it came down to, can you do Santa Fe product, 90% some number like that, and then obviously the rest is going to be pillows and aspirin and some stomach medication.

Wonderful. And as an airport user, it is a wonderful space. I encourage everyone. It's always been great. Very efficient. So, thank you so much. I know we've had some issues with security that we've overcome. You did an amazing job with that.

Thank you.

I just feel that we could support you a little bit more in promoting it. Definitely. Maybe we need to work with, I see Johanna again, economic development on letting folks know big events that might be affecting your service.

Correct. And thank you. That's another, so I actually had a lot of time to brainstorm back there when I was listening to everybody else and your help with these promotions. Like there's even a Los Alamos festival coming up that brings in thousands of people and we're in the process of getting, you know, the Santa Fe airport as the main destination for that. And that might entail needing help with shuttles running back and forth from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, even if it's just temporary. I know there's a that happens with Zozobra, and I've seen it in Albuquerque with the balloon fiesta. That might be something we have to do. I wasn't aware that we had that big of a, thank you. And we did hear from the fire department today about some of the toxic chemicals that you're dealing with and that's mostly on their end. Is there anything that we can do in terms of PO or support for staff in terms of environmental issues? I think those are all my questions. If there's anything else you guys would like to highlight about the airport, feel free. But thank you again so very much.

Councilor Cassutt.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you all for being here. A couple questions. And here you said you submitted and received approval for a passenger facility charge, which will generate more revenue. Can you give me some more information about what this is and why it generates revenue? Oh, try again. PFC. So, we collect a small fee from every ticket. That money is transferred through the airlines to us. We have a person that collects that and that money will eventually end up in whatever project we have going on. The benefit of a PFC, not only the money and the support that it provides to our projects, is that it has a line item in there for personnel. So, we could actually use some of that money to bring in another person, not only to manage the PFC, but to help us with contracts if we needed to.

Some leases, things like that. The downside to it, but I really think it's a benefit, is we don't have ongoing projects and shovel-ready projects, and that money has to stop. So we have to keep moving forward to continue getting that money. Obviously, we've got to keep moving forward, push forward.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to have a problem with that right now. So that's...

We're trying.

I think we'll be good. I hate... I see the phase of the next phase of the airport. Oh, pardon, sorry. Yes, make one point of clarification: the PFCs have not yet been approved. So we are taking it to the Airport Advisory Board. We've submitted the application to FAA, but we also want to make sure that it goes to the Airport Advisory Board for approval, and then it'll come to you all for approval of those charges as well. Just to clarify.

Got it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Cassett.

Real quick, that has been a long work in process, and we are the only airport that I'm aware of that are not charging those. Okay.

So, we're taking advantage of the situation there.

It's good for everyone.

Wonderful. Well, thank you. And as I was saying, it looks like we're going to the next phase of the airport terminal expansion project. So, a lot of dollars coming in there. There is mention of completing the improvements to the paid parking facilities, which I know has been a long time coming. I haven't flown out in a while to pick somebody up, but in the past, there was a challenge with long-term parking and having to walk up a very dark area at night, and there being a lot of gravel, and there wasn't a shuttle to get people to their cars. Especially, I had flown in by myself at like 10:30 p.m. at night or something. Maybe it was 8:30. They're all the same to me after 7, apparently. But it wasn't very comfortable as a woman by myself dragging my suitcase to this parking lot. How are we doing on the safety, the lighting, the paving, how easy it is for people to walk there? Is there a shuttle and being able to actually access long-term parking?

Councilor Cassid, thank you. Obviously, that's a huge concern for everyone. We do have lighting now that is scheduled, so that entire lot...

Jinx myself with the mic. We do try and keep that very lit at night. And there are areas that are dark, but those aren't ready for parking yet. I can give you an estimated number, but right now we're looking at between 600 and 700 parking spots that are available. A lot of them are real close. We have opened up a VIP special area up front, which has taken off like I wish I had about 100 more of those spaces. So, that's been a good one. We do have security 24/7 now. So, there is always someone there.

Wonderful.

To assist with you. Okay.

Yep, that was my question. Okay, got it. Wonderful. That sounds great. Oh, mic's off again. Apparently, they didn't get to hear about your innovative...

About this one. Oh, that was a...

And then the paving. We are still in the process of getting more paved lot. Right now, we're taking advantage of a lot of work that's being done on the ramp and our apron area. We actually use the asphalt that comes from there to make the millings for this extra area. So, you're not necessarily parking in dirt and getting stuck or getting, you know, you come back and your car is surrounded by mud. We actually use those millings to level everything out and make it a kind of a soft landing pad for you when you get to your vehicle.

Okay. All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you for that. I'm...

You're welcome.

Happy to. I'll let you know next time I fly in and out.

Thank you, Councilor.

Maybe a one out. And then last, the baggage handling improvements. Is that baggage handling for staff putting it onto the plane, or is it the pickup carousel?

So, I noticed there were some questions on there, and we don't... we're not in charge of the bag handling, but we do provide the equipment for that. And that consists of our cute little bag claim area that we have. We need some improvements to that, and the governor's made some really good suggestions covering that. We're also covering a lot of the areas in the waiting up front. So, it's not just bag claim. It'll be making sure that everybody's not only their person but their bags and everything are out of the weather.

My mic is off now. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Any other questions? Oh, sorry, Councilor Faulkner.

It's okay. I just... I've done a tour of the airport. Anyone who has not done it, you should go do it. There's way more happening out there than you would think. Just a little comment about the Jaguar extension. Well, kind of a question that also has some significant economic development potential, right? In that there are businesses that want to come in. If I'm remembering from the...

Yes, Councilor. Like I said, I was really surprised when I tried to get some images out in that area, how many people are really interested in developing it. We are in contact with the previous person that put the road in and that surrounding area, working with them hopefully. And then, you know, just seeing... a couple weeks ago I attended an economic development conference, and I was one of the speakers there, and surprisingly enough, no one knew that was happening. So I got the word out to another 50, 60 individuals about that happening, and they're excited to see and, you know, suck up as much property as they can.

Yeah, we already have FedEx out there, or Amazon's out there. So, we have Cargo, we have Amazon, FedEx, and we have the Pod Center. They're on different property than what belongs to us. We're more focused on that road that runs from the main terminal. It's right, it's west of the cell phone lot, the APD training facility, and it'll head south towards that intersection there.

Yeah. Yeah, I just... and I'm... I think Councilor... I don't speak for Councilor Garcia, but we talk a lot about these things. I think both of us are a little excited about the possibility of more job creation on the Southside, especially that part of the Southside. And so, yeah, it's just... it's more than just making a nice entrance to the airport. There are a lot of other things that are going to be happening there if it's successful. And congratulations on managing the airport. I think you do a fantastic job.

Thank you, Councilor.

Any other questions?

Thank you, airport team.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, everyone.

Okay, just want to do a quick time check. We've got two other departments.

Three.

Three.

Uh oh, yeah, three. Planning and Land Use, Midtown, as well as Economic Development Creative Industries. So, just wanted to check in with folks. Is half an hour sufficient for each of these? Should we shift and move some of these? I'm happy to extend tonight, but we've got on here we would end at five. So, I'm open to discussion from the body. Not extensive, just so we're not spending a half hour discussing this, but... Okay. Okay. So, go into that time. I'm happy to follow the lead of the body.

Yeah, I think if we're mindful of time, we could probably finish by five. My concern of moving it to tomorrow is that then we push that 12:00 further as well.

Okay. Well, we pulled one of the...

To today. Yeah.

Yeah, we pulled one of those today. So that there's time. Just want to make sure we're giving folks time. So if we want to try to get through it and then as we get closer to that time checks, but okay. Thank you. Okay. Well then, Director Lboy and team, the floor is yours. We were just stalling for you to get set up. What's up? Is microphones in the budget? Are they in the budget?

No, Mike.

I would like to make an amendment then.

All right. So we have a robust crowd of people in Planning and Land Use, and Maggie Moore is the Deputy Director for print planning, long-range planning, business licensing, short-term rentals, code enforcement, and historic preservation. Thank you. And then we have Tom Graham here, who is Deputy Director of our development branch, which includes building permitting, as well, you know, as inspections and engineering, the terrain management. They also have a little bit of code enforcement also in inspections as well, relative to zoning types of items. And then we also have online Fabiola Chavez, who is a Director for Affordable Housing. And so, we're super excited about having affordable housing as part of our team. As I've been walking through the hallways and seeing the interface between the two divisions, or three, I should say, but especially with current planning and development review, we've had a lot of alignment together. And so as we proceed through development review, we can really discuss how affordable housing and, you know, workforce housing and the like, the whole picture really fits together. And in our affordable housing division, we are reclassifying one position to Contracts Administrator from a Senior Planner position, because we're all one group. The long-range planning team can cover that planning function for affordable housing, and we truly need to, and I think Director Chavez has really pointed out to us, we need to look at the financials, and we really need to be mindful of that. We also are requesting an additional Project Manager to be part of that team that is not going to have an impact on the general fund. It's going to be funded through outside funding. There's partly CDBG and other funding as well. So, through the trust fund. So, that is sort of the overall approach to our affordable housing division is really retooling and making sure that that planning and land use side of things can really support the affordable housing efforts. And then with reference to planning, we've had three positions that were very hard to hire positions that were frozen last year. And that was a Construction Inspector Supervisor, as well as the Engineer, and as well as a Construction Inspector and a Plans Examiner. So, so there's a Plans Examiner, too. We have been really adamant about training our folks so they can move up. We in fact just recently had a promotion, and we have had over the past year several of our staff gain additional certifications. So for instance, our Construction Inspector, Kevin Smith, took his exam and now he's a supervisor. We've been able to move him up, and we've had other moves within the department based on these certifications. So that's maybe a piece that we didn't focus on as much before, but we've really seen great results in that investment of money and time for our staff, and also creates a career ladder in our department. And that's another thing that we really worked with historic, I'm sorry, with Human Resources to create those career ladders because we really do want to keep our people. They're really good people. They work very hard, but, you know, I had to go away in order to get a promotion because there people, there wasn't that career ladder for me over time since the 90s. So, yeah, that's a long time. So anyway, and then we are... we had a wish list, a very big wish list, and of course that's just not in the realm of reality, but, you know, I am always of the opinion, well, the worst thing you can do is say no. So, one of our initiatives is we really want to build up our short-term rental division. With the new software, we have discovered a lot of non-compliance, about 150 to 180 non-compliant short-term rentals, number of nights that are being rented per, which also has an impact.

Our code is such that it can only run one time every week, every seven days. We're finding through the software that there's a lot of non-compliance with that, and of course, that is the source of a lot of our complaints. So we do need a more robust division. It's right now a division of one, and we are highlighting what we need to do to be more progressive instead of just playing whack-a-mole and being responsive based on complaints.

The other thing is our long-range planning division, which we have one and a half people dedicated to long-range planning. We in long-range planning are managing several projects, and that would be the general plan update as well as the land development code update, also the follow-up on the land development code phase one. There are a lot of scrivener's errors and things that we need to clean up as part of that and also prepare for phase two. That group also staffs the subcommittees of the Planning Commission: one for the land development code update, as well as one for the general plan update. The Planning Commission is thoroughly engaged, and we're grateful for it, but it takes time. So, we really are trying to put our best effort forward.

As part of the financial picture, with vacancy savings, we were able to get a consultant for a fee study. We got three quotes, and our fees haven't been raised since 2021. A lot has happened since 2021; costs have gone up as well since 2021. Some initial conversations with a consultant revealed that our fees aren't structured well, and we're not charging enough. Having worked at other jurisdictions, I know that our fees are very cheap. As a result, right now, from our fees, we bring in $11.6 million a year. I think if we were to, over time—and we're looking at making increases progressive over time, not just one bulk increase—we could be gaining many more, at least $5 million more in fee revenue over the next three years or so. So that is yet to be seen, and we will have a presentation for you.

The other thing that Assistant Director Moore, Deputy Director Moore, is doing is the development manual. She's fully engaged on that, as well as both deputy directors being really involved with the OpenGov transition. We've done a lot of configuration. There's been a lot of effort, and I would say actual ownership by all of our divisions because they've been actively involved in the programming of OpenGov. So what the development manual has done, as well as the exercise we did with ITT in understanding our current processes, is we've realized our flaws, and we have them, and we own them, and we can do things better. So working with Bohan and Houston on the development manual and then pulling together all the adjacent work as part of that, we are making changes to our processes right now. We're implementing that right now.

One example would be with our civil engineering team. Right now, for an infrastructure permit, it has to go through building permits, and then there has to be this very linear process that happens. What we want to do is actually have that civil engineering and current planning team issue those permits within a couple of days. So once the final CI construction drawings, the civil engineering drawings, are reported, then the next day they would be issued a permit for their infrastructure. So that cuts down approximately four weeks. That's an implementation that can happen right away. So we don't have that yet in OpenGov, but we could jump right into it or retool if we have to. But those are critical exercises that we have done that hopefully will result in a lot of change in the coming year and making our lives easier and, more importantly, the lives of the public easier as they go through our development review processes. Is there anything else that you all want to add?

**Mayor:** That was a lot.

**Director Lamboy:** So, but I think that's, we're happy to stand for questions. Questions or comments from governing body members?

**Councilor Fagali:** I can start. Thank you. Thank you, Director Lamboy. I have questions, but yes. So, just sort of starting with, I'm not sure where in the budget these things are, but like the land use development code and the, you mentioned the green building code, the general plan, like what, what do they, like partly they come under salaries, partly they come under, I don't know, other things. How, how are they in the budget? Are they mostly in-house? Are they mostly contract in terms of cost?

**Director Lamboy:** Costs are through contracts, Mayor Councilor, and that's, so last year we had approximately $770,000 in contracts, and from the one-time funding at the end of the year, and actually there was an earlier one-time funding allocation through the last administration, we were able to get some extra money for that. But there's a lot of staff time that goes into it as well. So we really try to find balance and be as efficient as we can with those projects.

**Councilor Fagali:** Okay. And so looking at the change in the expenditures, the enforcement is way up, like 6,700%. And inspections is down. Are those not related things, or they are related things?

**Director Lamboy:** The reason is because our enforcement division wasn't sort of separated out previously, and so it was part of our inspections team. And so there's the, and the short-term rentals were sort of put into the enforcement team as well. So I think it's just that, that moving around of staff that caused that.

**Councilor Fagali:** So, the short-term rental is now enforcement?

**Director Lamboy:** Short-term rentals is its own subgroup within our code enforcement division.

**Councilor Fagali:** Okay. Can you repeat what you said about the positions changing with affordable housing? You said,

**Director Lamboy:** Sure. Sure. So we, as a part of the reorganization that Mayor Garcia implemented with the agreement of the, or consensus of the governing body, the affordable housing division used to be part of the Office of Economic Development. And certainly there is definitely a relationship with economic development, and we want to maintain those strong ties, but affordable housing has been moved over. And so Fabola Chavez is at, is at the same level as our two deputy directors here. But she's listed as a director because that's, that's what her role is for that particular programming.

**Councilor Fagali:** You said something about planners covering for some?

**Director Lamboy:** Oh, yes. Yes.

**Councilor Fagali:** Yeah. Can you just explain that again?

**Director Lamboy:** Yes. Mayor Councilor Fagali, the senior planner that was part of the affordable housing division has been retooled to be a contracts administrator, which is one range lower, because we do have that long-range planning capacity in planning and land use at large. And so our long-range planners will help with, probably in our implementation plan, we'll be calling for an affordable housing plan or a long-range affordable housing strategy. And so that would be covered by our team.

**Councilor Fagali:** Great. Okay. Can you talk about staffing in the historic division? I get a lot of complaints from my constituents about permits taking months or people never responding to them. So I'm, and I don't know how many people are in that division and how well staffed it is. Can you speak to that?

**Director Lamboy:** Yes, Mayor Councilor Fagali, we have, I believe, five in that division plus one inspector. And so the caseload is high. Like I mentioned previously at a different meeting, there were approximately 535 administrative approvals last year, 120 cases that went to the H board. And part of each case that goes to the H board and some of the administrative approvals, you have to go out to the site to understand the scope of the project, meet with the applicant, and the like. So there's a lot of hours dedicated to that as well as to the archaeological review committee. So it is a lot for that team. It's a, it's a grind. But we are working based on this work we've been doing with the development manual as well as a review of our processes. And one of the things we're going to do, like what was done with escarpment re-roof permits recently, is that we're going to put a set of conditions on every permit, and we're not going to require administrative approval for re-roof permits. And that's a substantial sum. Plus, that's, you know, one of our pain points. That's where we get complaints.

**Councilor Fagali:** Stock going the same color is what I hear all the time.

**Deputy Director:** And I'll just, Director Lamboy, if you don't mind, I'll just add that she mentioned the five positions total within that division. And we have three vacancies right now. So that's not helping our response time, but we are certainly aware of those issues and trying to do our best to hire new staff, get them trained up as soon as possible. And Heather and I are doing the work too, as much as we can.

**Councilor Fagali:** And are there vacancies in the, in the planning side also?

**Deputy Director:** Yes, we still, we have one senior planner vacancy in the current planning division. Yeah.

**Councilor Fagali:** Out of how many?

**Deputy Director:** There are two planner positions in the current planning division and five, no, four senior planners. Yeah.

**Deputy Director:** And then we have the, the long-range planner is also kind of in that realm.

**Councilor Fagali:** Thank you. That's for me this round. Thanks.

**Director Lamboy:** And I would just like to add that one of the, the preservation team or our, our planner tech, she actually got a promotion. So that's the reason for one of the vacancies.

**Councilor Faulkner:** I feel like land use is probably one of the most important departments that we have in the city. I didn't realize how much land use has an impact on the community until I became a planning commissioner and realized like sometimes the smallest decision. And I always tell this story. I live on a street where in Tierra Contenta where the city agreed to allow them to shrink the streets down to like 20 feet wide, and you would think that doesn't matter. They did it so they could increase density. And this was long before any of us were a part of decision-making. Emergency vehicles cannot get down that street when everybody's home, like in the evenings or at night, and they have to stop the truck and then run down the street with the gurney and run back out. It's happened at least, I don't know how many times. It happens a couple times a year. So land use is really important. I have some questions around the, the boards, like the Planning Commission and the HDRB in particular. How much does it cost and what's the staffing cost to man those boards?

**Director Lamboy:** Mayor Councilor, with reference to the amount of funding, time or,

**Councilor Faulkner:** Of funding, like and time, I would say both.

**Director Lamboy:** Sure. I would have to get back to you on the specific cost. I would say it's a third, well, yeah, about a third of our funding for the department in terms of employee costs.

**Councilor Faulkner:** That's close enough. All right. That's the only question I had. Thank you.

**Councilor Castro:** Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Directors, for being here. I will probably be brief because I spend way too much time in your offices, and I just want to thank you so much for all your support and your help. There is a little bit of hesitation that I have with the new restructuring and affordable housing. How's it going? How can we better support? I know that we have the two positions. Obviously, we need to beef up that department. That's a huge priority and task for the city of Santa Fe. How can we support you?

**Director Lamboy:** Mayor Councilor Castro, I believe Aola Chavez is online, and maybe she can speak to that, and then I'll add something if necessary.

Mayor Garcia, members of the governing body, thank you, Elma Castro counselors, for asking that question. It has been pretty daunting for me in particular because, as you know, the prior director was gone for about 18 months before I joined. There's really not a mechanism in place to teach people how to develop and how to be affordable housing experts. So, there's only on-the-job training for that type of skill set. It's taken a while. It's going to continue to be a while to train and get people up to speed on how compliance-heavy affordable housing is. We have to comply with HUD regulations that are very daunting. So, we're doing our best to create standard operating procedures and to really ramp up and get to the next generation of potential employees and their learning capacity.

So, we're starting to think about how this next generation is going to fill these roles once we're gone, right? How are we going to meet their needs? How are we going to train them? We have to create videos because that's what they're used to. We have to have training modules, things like that. So, I'm already starting to think about that. It's a real concern for me for the next generation. I want to be able to bring people on that are really innovative and wanting to make things better.

Mayor: And Counselor Castro, you saw one of them last night, Christina Browning, who is a rock star. We have a lot of really strong candidates as we're interviewing for those positions. Fabula Chavez brings a unique skill set to the position, and she's discovered the need to dot the I's, cross the T's, especially when it comes to federal programs like CDBG. So, her vision is going to really help to advance that division much more.

Thank you so much. And as we heard, I think some of the challenges are with capacity and funding. And one of the challenges we run into is that we are not really able to tax or create as many fees as we might if we didn't have the restrictions at the state level. Is there anything that we can do, I guess this is for you, Director Chavez, creatively to get more resources to you, either from city general funds, fees, taxes, or grants?

Absolutely. There is so much need. The low-income housing tax credit gaps have increased dramatically. So, what was once maybe 89 cents to the dollar is now 80 cents to the dollar. So, those gaps have widened even more. So, more capital injection is definitely needed. Another thing that I think would be beneficial for our department is probably revamping Chapter 24 and kind of making it a more fee-generated program, right? Because the other day I met with an apartment complex that had 24 units that were low income, and we have to audit those on an annual basis. Well, they should be paying us a compliance fee to do that so that we can audit and make sure that these clients are income-qualified correctly because this is a for-profit developer. Somebody still needs to go out there and audit to make sure that the people they're saying are income-certified are truly low to moderate or, you know, whatever the AMI set aside is.

Wonderful. Well, thank you. And so my last comment will be, and I think I will defer to my colleague who has some similar questions, that there's many of us on the dais that are interested in the idea of code enforcement and how we best do that, and I think that your departments are really the key to some of that. So, we will be reaching out to you in the future. Thank you. This may be like a bike rack thing, but what I mean, just briefly, what kinds of fees do you think you could increase if it was allowable with state, in the face of some other state regulations and policies? Like, what would be some spaces? Because this is something that I'm working on. I'm trying to do aggressive driving. I've tried, I'm thinking about doing in a couple other spaces so that our departments aren't so heavily dependent on GRT. Maybe we'll always need GRT, but maybe we can offset and have some emergency funds like what the administration is trying to accomplish. So, just off the top of your head, are there a couple of things, a couple spaces where you think we could increase our fees because we're finding that we haven't touched them since the 80s?

Mayor: Counselor Faulkner, the fees that we charge for our development review right now are incredibly low, as well as our building permit fees. The construction valuations we don't really audit, and so there could be opportunities for a more mindful approach to that to make sure we're getting the right amount of fees. Our business licensing, for instance, an out-of-state business license costs $10. There's a lot of fees that we don't even recover the amount of time that we spend on that, like a certificate of performance or compliance, which is like a certificate of occupancy. So, there are inspections by the fire department as well as by our inspections team to make sure that the, and our zoning team, to make sure that everything is good to open for the business. And so those types of things really need to be analyzed. The 2021 update was truly just a quick study of other jurisdictions and what fees they were charging and not a look at completely restructuring the schedule so that it's comparable with other jurisdictions. And so that's why we're actually getting some professionals involved so we can be thoughtful and maybe have a broader range of experience relative to the structures as well.

Thank you. That's all I had.

Counselor Faulkner, if I can just add to your question. We can add some fees into some of the auditing requirements that we have to do on an annual basis for our for-profit and nonprofit developers. So, we can add an annual fee for review of their financials, their audited financials, to ensure that these entities are solvent for years to come, right? Because if we're injecting capital, we need to ensure that they're solvent, not just for today, but for the future, for however long the affordability restriction is on the property, and that's usually up to 30 years. So, we have to watch, we have to be mindful of that. We have to start auditing those types of financial documents. Another thing that we could also do is the homeownership program. So, the homeownership program, we don't have affordability restrictions on that. We have to start doing that, right? We want our clients to stay in place and build the equity on the property as long as they possibly can, but then if they do leave, we should be receiving a part of that equity, not all, but some of it back into our fund so that we can redeploy it for other first-time homebuyers. And of course, the equity that the first-time homebuyer has put into their home for investment purposes, of course, they would receive those funds back, but we can't allow people to become unduly enriched by our capital injection.

Thank you so much, Director. The other thing I would say, and this has to be on the bike rack, is we have to look at fee-in-lieu. I mean, the number of apartments we are building, endlessly building apartments, and very few of them are affordable.

I think in the budget it said we had gained $600,000 in revenue. I don't even know how, I'm not sure how many people that would genuinely help.

Right. And if right now, I think we're paying, we're allowing them to buy out of affordability at a very, very low rate. It should either go away or that rate should be higher. I mean, I think there's space where we need fee-in-lieu, but it is definitely not in the formula that we're using now because the city is not getting the benefit, and if we don't get the benefit, then the community isn't going to have the benefit of what that program should be doing.

And Mayor, Counselor Faulkner, in phase one of the land development code update, if the applicant chooses to use fee-in-lieu, they don't get the density bonus. They only get density bonus for providing affordable units on site. So, that is one step that we were able to take, but yes, I do agree with you, we need to look at those numbers as we've done with our water, you know, public utilities fees as well and at those recent increases.

Councilor Casset, did you have your hand up? Then I'll go to Council.

I did. Thank you. I just have, thank you guys for answering my questions ahead of time. I really do appreciate that. One word of caution, as I always say, especially with the general plan and the code update, as you mentioned, there's enough funding to complete as long as everything goes according to plan. But please do let us know if there is something else that needs a deep dive or, you know, there's an extension. I really want to make sure that we do this very well. So, please do keep us updated on how those are going. My only other question was, and I think, I think Director Chavez, I think you've alluded to this already, but it was that you plan, that the city plans to fund contracts for income qualification and other services out of this fund. So, that's out of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Are those contracts for income qualification? Was that what you were speaking about previously of making sure that individuals are renting to people who are income-qualified or selling to individuals that are income-qualified and having that third-party check that we would be funding?

So, Mayor Garcia, Councilor Casset, thank you so much for asking that question. So, what the contracts are currently doing, the Homewise contracts and the Housing Trust, they are actually working with tract developers. So, that would be like the Pulte's, the KB Homes, and they're income-qualifying those candidates that are coming into those tract home brand new developments. What we need to ensure, what I was talking about in the multifamily development aspect, is some of those developers that choose not to pay the fee-in-lieu and instead give us the units, someone has to be going out there and monitoring and ensuring that they're income-qualifying the residents in accordance to their contracts. That is currently not being done.

And are those the contracts that are being referenced in the budget book here under the Affordable Housing Trust Fund uses?

No, that is not.

Okay.

It's something that is done in-house, Councilor Casset, at the department level. So, we have to start going out to these for-profit developers that set aside low-income developments instead of paying the fee-in-lieu, and we have to audit them to ensure they are complying because they all come in and say, "Yes, we're going to do affordable housing." How do we know? Nobody's out there inspecting. Nobody's checking. And so we want to start doing our due diligence to make sure we're actually getting what is in the agreements.

Got it. Okay. Thank you. So, I apologize if I'm just not understanding. My brain is kind of oatmeal at this point in the day.

Perfectly fine.

I'm like, I'm not even sure I'm functioning. I don't know if I'm making words. But the sentence that I'm reading, "In 2027, the city plans to fund contracts for income qualifications and other services out of this fund." And that's referring to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Yes.

What contracts are those?

Those are the Homewise.

Okay.

Housing Trust Fund that income-qualify the Pulte's of the world, the KB Home clients that go in because they are required. These tract developers are required to implement 20% to affordable housing.

Okay. All right. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. That makes sense. I appreciate that. And then, as I said, all my other questions were answered ahead of time. Thank you again so much. Just to add to the agreement with the conversation, I feel like we just need to blow up Chapter 26 at this point. I think that there are a lot of issues with affordable housing, that the model was basically created on a previous time, and things have changed so much that, yeah, I agree, let's raise those fees. I was just whispering over here with Councilor Cash, I'm like, "Give us the money and let us take care of some things at this point." I'd like us to be aggressively going after properties. I want us to be looking at how we are subsidizing housing development. How do we have strategies for both affordable housing and missing middle? I think that we have a real opportunity to really change the paradigm by which we've been operating on affordable housing, recognizing that it kind of helped in the past. But I think with just cost of construction, and as you were referencing, Director Chavez, the model no longer fits reality. So I look forward to that conversation. I would say this year, let's really get on it because we know this is a crisis that we've been facing for a long time.

So, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for your support.

Thank you.

Yes, Mayor, Councilor Cassid, we really do need to blow up Chapter 26. I agree. There's so much room for improvement. I think it's just evolved slowly over time, but doesn't keep up with the times. I'd also like to bring to your attention that the paradigm shift includes partnerships because of that gap that we have. We had the opportunity to meet with Senator Ben Ray Lujan recently, and around the table included the Housing Authority as well as the county. Noya was a project that involved a huge group of people, probably together a capital stack to make it work, and same with Lamplighter. So that's, we need to make sure that the code reflects that capacity to make sure we can partner with other agencies effectively.

Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you. And that it reflects the fact that we need, we need to be able to bring stuff to that capital stack and contribute to that. So, thank you for already getting to work on that, and I really look forward to seeing how this incredible team that we have in land use and affordable housing, and the team that we have up here on the dais, how we work to address this. I have some high hopes, so we won't let ourselves down.

Thank you, Officer Barrett.

Sorry, I got lost in looking at all your questions and answers. I'm not trying to double your questions and answers and going back and forth, and I get lost in my own thoughts. Sorry. But the other day at Quality of Life, Lifelink was here. We were talking about their funding and where do you get it, and then clients that come through there and ARU, and where do they go after, and then lack of Section 8 housing because then we have the vouchers, but then we don't have, we have a total lack of Section 8 housing. Is there a plan for that, or what do we do about that? You know, we help these individuals and we get them on their feet again, and then there's like a lack of Section 8 housing.

Mayor, Councilor, I, we have talked to the Housing Trust, the Civic Housing Authority, and they're the ones that administer the vouchers for the Section 8 housing. The city does not administer that. So we have an intergovernmental agreement with them to administer all the vouchers. If we had more staff, we could bring that in-house, but for right now, with all the income certifications and qualifications, we just don't have the capacity to bring that in-house.

Okay. Just a thought because I didn't know how that all came together. What about renter protections? I know it says homeownership support services. That's different than that, but I just thought a lot of these services, I don't know what the connection is there, but renter supports and then homeownership support services, those are two different questions.

So, Councilor Barrett, thank you for your question. The counseling services come out of like financial counseling services. So that's what that paragraph meant. So it's any type of income qualification, financial counseling that people, that clients may need to enter into homeownership. And the Section 8 housing and the project-based vouchers, that's all handled through the Civic Housing Authority and then also the county's Housing Authority. They're the two entities within the City of Santa Fe that handle vouchers. There were discussions a while back that we could potentially bring in some vouchers into the city. But again, we would have to put in a very large grant into HUD, and we would have to also probably hire a consultant to draft the grant and even see if it's feasible for us. But again, if we don't have staff that can really handle, because you can't just income qualify candidates. You have to go to the residents, see, and make sure that that home or apartment fits the regulations based on HUD, what they say is a safe place to live. So it's not just, "Okay, yes, you're income qualified, go right ahead." We have to actually go out and inspect, do a thorough inspection of the apartment or the home. Okay. So this is probably the city has thought about it before, but then too cumbersome. So never like took action on it or just too much of an investment, right? It's very, again, administratively burdensome.

Councilor Garcia.

Thank you. Switching gears a little bit, and thank you for the conversation over the affordable housing. I mean, it's really important given the situation of how unaffordable things are really across the spectrum, and how do we address that? I want to switch gears a little bit to something that Councilor Faggali was kind of touching based on in terms of permitting and how long it takes people to get from their inception or their initial application to being able to break ground on something. Do we see that more of people or processes, and how do we address that in our budget? Because obviously, I think some of the breakdowns where I, especially when I hear from constituents, they reach out to say, "Hey, I don't know where we're at," and when we may make a phone call or find out to help them along the way in the process, "Oh, it's on so and so's desk." Well, are they overwhelmed? Do we not have addressing? I think people are addressing processes because I know that last year there was a big investment in trying to reimagine our software, which helps us maybe push these permits along. I think that's probably the number one issue that I hear from individuals, especially contractors that I tend to talk with very often in regards to how long it takes and then the length of time that it takes to do these processes. Obviously, costs money, and so that translates that into either not having people wanting to come and build here and or inflating the price because it's so difficult. How can you address that in terms of the budgetary that we're looking at here? Because in this, is it building permit division? Seems like it's an increase of 5.6%. How many other of your departments help with that and help this processes? Because there's probably a lot of hands in on a lot of these permits.

Mayor, Councilor Garcia, you bring up a really great point. Part of the impact to the building permits team was the freezing of a couple of positions. So being able to capture those back will help us. Moving people up and doing the training has helped us. But you have a piece of paper that goes from one desk to another. I have paper in my office. I'm helping out with archaeological reviews right now. It's very linear, and we could cut off at least two weeks off the top right away if we can do everything via e-review and probably even more because there's better communication. I've tried to go in as a citizen on Intergov and try to see like what permits are happening, and I can't even do that. So on the backside, I take a look at the timelines. So in other jurisdictions, there were very specific timelines associated with the review process. There are express permits that we have that we could increase the number of. So like electrical, mechanical, those we get out quickly. Re-roofing and stucco outside of the historic districts go up very quickly within a couple of days. But we, as part of this process, need to look, and we're doing a hard look right now at how we can change things so it is much faster. We can, you know, it's very hard to get those metrics from Intergov in terms of timelines. So I've done a sample, so I can't do a report right now. So I go in and sample the projects and see like the review timelines, and on average, based on the different types of projects outside of express permits, the first review time frame is one month. That's not acceptable. And then it takes a while because we do a resubmit. So there's also some upfront work there or pre-submit. So there's also some upfront work there that could also be managed through what was supposed to be implemented through decision tree but hasn't been yet, where we bought the software where you can only submit if you have these particular items, and it stops you from submitting. So we can, a big part of it is incomplete applications as well. So that upfront work is a part of it, that process, the process of actually pushing the paper, and then the process of getting the permit out and issuing it, doing the invoicing and the like. So a couple of problems we've had is we don't get notifications. Our permitting staff is very busy. We don't get notifications that somebody's paid for a permit. And so we get a call, and you're right, economic development is really supported through planning and land use processes for housing development as well as commercial development, and we need to be really, really mindful of the impact that we have. We as a public-facing department, all of our staff, we think about that every day, and so we are really, really trying to look at the processes, you know, the people part as well. Our building permitting staff really have a lot. They work very hard every day. We issue 6,000 permits a year, and that is a huge number considering we have five or seven people. We have seven staff processing 6,000 permits, and we have a couple vacancies as well.

Thank you, Director. How many, I mean, obviously that shows to be where a big bottleneck is. And so how many, how many of those permits could be streamlined through the new software that has been implemented in the last year?

Mayor, Councilor Garcia, all of them. And it would be a concurrent process, right? So right now, you can't have two people reviewing a set of plans at the same time. What the software will do is put up a PDF where everybody can see everybody else's redlines. So if there's a conflict or if there's something that needs to be worked out, for instance, between fire and the building permit review or historic preservation, that can be done in real time, and we could see each other's comments and really come to good solutions faster.

Thank you. That's all I have. I just, you know, I think it's one of the major things that's brought to my attention anytime I'm talking to any builder.

They're like, "Can you fix this permitting process?" It's just, it's, we want to as well. And I'm like, "You'll be a hero if you guys can get that done for us because it's just so tedious." But thank you. I know that it's not just building permits that you're dealing with. You're dealing with code enforcement. You're dealing with a lot of things that are coming through your department that is time-consuming for your staff and manager, more with your work on just these things that we've had to review in the finance department, and that's a lot of time, just extra that people don't really realize. So, thank you for your work. That's all I have.

Thank you. Right.

Any other questions? Just trying to wrap my head around all this affordable housing stuff because there's just so much to be done. I know we're going to have a study session, but just trying to gather up all this information and think through how many people need to be at the table when we discuss all these issues, like long-term planning, which you were talking about, having these planners work on a long-term affordable housing plan, which I'm assuming is going to touch on all these points, and just looking holistically at it. Yeah, just some of the issues I mentioned before, like paying more into fee-in-lieu, looking at the Santa Fe Homes program, bringing in Santa Fe Civic Housing, of course, and then obviously talking to planners about what it's just kind of so overwhelming. And like what you were saying, Director Chavez, there's just not enough staff. I know we're hiring staff, which is the number one thing we need to do. And so maybe looking at it after that, but even what you were saying too about inspections, I know you're probably working on this, like a cohesive plan right now. Are we in the midst of that right now? Like a comprehensive plan?

Yes, Councilor Barrett, Mayor Garcia, we are in the process of starting that comprehensive plan and also about our land, right, and how we're going to start utilizing that to capitalize on it for future generations, right? We want to be able to leave. We want to be able to sell the land for fair market value and then also go and purchase new land so that we can have it in our portfolio for the next generation that comes in to affordable housing so that they have some type of mechanism to work with. So, it's not just our programs, it's also looking at our land that we'll be strategizing on.

And Mayor, Councilor Barrett, that is a really critical thing that we need to do based on Los Arroyos project that just got approved last night for sale. There's also a lot of smaller pieces of land in the general plan update. We did an analysis of vacant and available land, also underutilized land, and there's a lot of city-owned property out there. So even leveraging one housing unit will be really important. And Director Chavez has lots of connections relative to very quick manufactured types of homes that are, it's not like a manufactured, like the trailer that you would see in Country Club Gardens or something like that, but it's actually something that could be built offsite and brought to the site quickly. Thanks.

Thank you, land use team.

Yeah.

Going to do a quick time check again. We got two more folks lined up. What's our folks' thoughts? Do we want to move forward with both? Do we want to tell our economic and development team that we'll push them off to tomorrow? I see very much ready. Director Nielson, do you mind if we push you to tomorrow?

It looks like staff is here and we're just.

All right. Well, we'll, I don't know. Do.

No, you have, you have no, right?

No, it got canceled. Back got canceled. So.

We have the room.

I knew it was a meeting.

Yeah, I said no because Thursdays there's something that has to do with something with wheels. But.

Okay.

Yes, we do not have a meeting later, but I don't know if folks, I don't know. I can't see them. I don't know if they can stay past 5 if we need to. I don't know if we can stay past 5.

I think, I think Director Nelson has been here for a while, so I would hate to waste your time. And.

Let's do this.

Okay, let's do it. Okay, here we go.

Floor is yours.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the governing body. This is my first attempt to handle this microphone this afternoon, so please bear with me. I'm not one for podcasts, so this is the closest setup I'll get. The proposed budget for the Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency this year saw a 13.5% increase. That increase represents two additional full-time employees, one of those being an admin manager as proposed, the other being a project manager. You can see here of that $674,847, about 60% of our budget does go towards those salary and benefits. We've even gone as far as to use some of the vacancy savings from the past year, having a vacant director position. Those vacancy savings being used towards an urgent request to hire. So, not only have we already opened those two positions with HR, we have also gone ahead and interviewed folks. And I was just running out into the hallway earlier to make calls to references. So, we're moving forward and I'm very excited. This part of the process has been already, it's already been brought to the Metropolitan Redevelopment Commission by myself and Mayor Garcia. They're very supportive of us bringing on additional staff and I hope that you'll see the amount of work that we're doing and the variety of projects we're taking on shows that we really do need this support. So, moving on to highlight some of the progress we've seen over the past year and some of our future progress. We have four parcels under three ENAs. We look forward to working with the contractor and consultant JLL to update our market conditions assessment, dispose of property specifically for low-income housing tax credit projects. We also look forward to having the 100% infrastructure design as of October this year. So we're expecting 90% as of the beginning of July, 100% for those parcels as required by the Aspect Media Village DDA will be complete by June 30th. And we'll do a proper page turn with all the necessary departments and divisions that we work with. You'll see that across our divisions and departments here at the city, a lot have a stakehold that be arts and culture who's collaborating on the Garson Theater, the library division that helps us with the Foggleson Complex, and public works facilities that keeps us running on the daily basis. There's quite a bit of overlap and I'm here to speak to that and also delegate where I need to. So, I'm happy to stand for any questions you may have.

Thank you. Questions or comments from the governing body? Councilor Faggali.

Thank you, Mayor. Director Vendetti, Deputy Director, we talked about this a bit a couple days ago, but could you elaborate a little bit about the tax increment financing district and what we would need to help you set that up or to help us set that up?

Yes. Thank you, Mayor, Councilor Faggali. We did introduce the Metropolitan Redevelopment Plan last night. It was read into the record. So that's a very exciting part of this process. As you know, we've already designated the area. The second part of this process is the plan which proposes the tax increment financing district. That district will later be enacted through another active resolution or legislation that allows us to identify how much tax increment from the city specifically in GRT will be designated towards that district and reinvested within the area. So, it will require a third resolution. We must make it through this step first.

Great. And is that a resolution you're going to write for us?

That is a resolution that I will work with our legislative services team in writing. And we have a lot of great collaboration with the Las Cruces and Albuquerque MRAs. We meet regularly to identify that we don't need to reinvent the wheel, right? We have the legislation in the state already and we can adapt it to Santa Fe, not put too much taxing effort on our legislative services folks.

Great. Anyone else have a question? Castro.

Thank you. What's interesting is that this budget actually is smaller than other departments because as CAB mentioned, they're pulling from a lot of different folks. We did discuss a little bit about Fogen already. We talked about some of the infrastructure costs. Do you want to speak maybe a little bit to spine infrastructure? We have heard about the need for that on Midtown.

Yes, of course. Thank you, Mayor, Councilor Castro. When we look ahead to our infrastructure as 90% and 100% come barreling down, we see a need to phase that to both support our existing proposals as well as those existing developers on the site. When we look at this as a larger photo, a larger picture, we see the tax increment financing district not capitalizing for about five years, which is normal across the state. That's what we see. It's typical. So in order to finance the first phase specifically the right of way down to the streets, the sidewalks, the landscaping, irrigation, what is necessary for closed systems like sewer, water, all those that go through joint utility trenches at the same time. We're getting those estimates for a phase one effort from our consulting group as of next week. So next Monday, they will present all of that to me. I will bring it to the Deputy City Manager and City Manager. We will discuss what needs to happen. And of course, all the while, I'm looking at opportunities and grants, including a recent RFI through Department of Workforce Solutions to help us mitigate that cost and get some grant money because it will impact affordable housing.

Wonderful. Thank you for looking ahead and being on top of it. We appreciate you. No further questions.

Casset.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, C, for being here. Really appreciate it. Thank you for waiting. I'll be speedy. There's mentions of getting Fogson administrative building Greer on the national and state historic registers. What does this mean for development for funding? What is, what is the benefit of doing this other than I believe it provides us some protections, but any other benefits that we're wanting out of this?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Councilor Casset. I actually received a letter this afternoon from Shipo, from Steven Moffson with Shipo saying that they would not be interested in having it as a complex with those three combined, but individual standalone buildings on the register. So, we will now pivot and pursue those after I discuss this with the Deputy City Manager and City Manager more about what that means. From a 30,000-foot perspective, any future developer, including the city itself, we wanted to go ahead and pursue a renovation of those facilities could also apply for federal tax credits. And that's a one for one on tax credits. We could get $1,000 in tax credits or even more. That helps us ultimately offset those costs.

Well, I really like that. Thank you for pursuing that. Hopefully, we can get that done individually. Talked already about Focusen. All right, looks like all of this has been covered previously or by my colleague. So, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Bamonte.

Thank you, Mayor. Deputy Director Vinity. Thank you. Question. Hopefully, it's just a quick one. It is complex. Well, sorry, the overall potential for it is complex. I've heard concerns about TIFF capitalization, one of them being increased potential for gentrification.

I just want to clarify, maybe for the public, this is work that you have been doing some back-end work, quite a bit of back-end work, working with organizations such as Chainbreaker. Is that correct? To help address these concerns?

Mayor: Counselor Bamonte, that is correct. We have been working with Chainbreaker as well as Mass Design Group on the Hopi-Alman Neighborhood Stabilization Plan. That is an effort that was called for through the Community Development Plan back in 2023 when it was approved to make sure that the development of Midtown, as well as the bolstering of this commercial area, would not ultimately gentrify or adversely impact the Hopi-Alman or other neighborhoods nearby. What I will say is that we're also giving them the opportunity to identify if they would like a TIF as part of the Hopi-Alman neighborhood overlay area. As part of this designation for the Metropolitan Redevelopment Area, we have to determine the criteria that it is a blighted geographic area. So when we went ahead with this first designation, we did not include any residential properties. We even took out T. Santos Apartments because we wanted folks to be able to opt in, right? We didn't want to go ahead and ultimately name something gentrified or having slum conditions when that wasn't necessarily the case, and a residential area could have a huge impact. So, we've been working with them on the whole neighborhood stabilization plan. And I want to be clear that tax increment financing does not increase taxes, rather capitalizes on the increment after a two-year base setting.

Okay. Thank you. I just wanted to get that out. So, I appreciate your response. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Any other questions? Not seeing any. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Next team up is the Economic Development and Creative Industries. Good evening.

Is yours, Director?

All right. Thank you so much, Mayor. Good evening, counselors, city staff. My name is Joanna Nelson, and I'm the Director of the Economic Development Division and newly formed Department of Economic Development and Creative Industries. So, thank you so much for your time. We know it's been a long day. I'm joined by my colleague, Director Chelsea Johnson of Arts and Culture. Can you hear me? All right. And then our Business Operations Manager, Loretta Obine. Unfortunately, Director Jennifer Labar Tapia is traveling and hopefully will bring back good news from the film front. So thank you very much. I've prepared a little bit of an intro, and then we'd love to take your questions about the proposed budget. And I'd love to give a quick shout-out to our staff and our colleagues that are watching. It's been a long day. We've been watching intently and really appreciate all of your engagement and questions. This work that we're presenting to you tonight would not happen without them, and we're really appreciative. So first of all, I want to begin by thanking Mayor, governing body, and the city team for their leadership, not only for this budget process but for forming this new department. What you have in front of you is really bigger than just a department reorganization. We are excited about this amazing opportunity to intentionally build a department that reflects the reality and future of Santa Fe's economy. Santa Fe has and will be, and has always been, shaped by creativity, culture, entrepreneurship, people adapting, people wanting to build something different. Our artists and filmmakers, our entrepreneurs, our small businesses, and creative workers are not only a part of our identity, our story, but a part of the economic. We want the people creating that value to be able to build lives here and thrive. We want our young people growing up here to see this creativity and innovation, our filmmakers, our entrepreneurs, our scientists, our technologists, and have pride in those stories and be inspired. Understand they have access to opportunity in our community. We want them to find a future here and not have to leave Santa Fe. And while we approach economic development traditionally, we also take seriously our responsibility to reduce barriers, social and economic, to create the conditions for people to access that opportunity. For years, economic development, arts and culture, and film have already been working alongside one another because the work naturally overlaps and intersects. This structure and this new reorganization allows us to align strategy, investment, partnerships more intentionally so we can work more effectively. And that's been an ongoing trend in the conversations today. We're hopeful to coordinate better and ultimately do more with limited resources. At the core, our department is about connection and opportunity. It's about showing up, listening to those barriers that our residents experience, and helping people connect to the resources they need to find those pathways that they can stay here and thrive. This new reorganization gives us that ability to do the work more effectively at a larger scale. And again, I want to acknowledge the incredible leadership and staff across our divisions. These are lean teams doing a tremendous amount of work with limited capacity. What you cannot always see on a budget sheet is the level of passion, commitment behind the work. And I can say confidently, every person on our respective teams cares deeply for our city, for your constituents, for our residents and neighbors, and we are committed to this work together. Over the past year, our department deployed more than $3 million in ARPA investment supporting workforce development, small business support, digital access. We launched a new community investment portfolio, strengthened support for arts and culture, expanded business engagement efforts, and continued growing Santa Fe's role as a major creative economic and film hub. ARPA gave us the opportunity to pilot new ideas, build partnerships, and respond directly to community needs during an incredibly difficult time during the pandemic. But what we learned and exposed were those gaps in our community and in our economy. We were able to understand those needs and build programming systems that are reaching a need in our. The challenge now is capacity. Looking at our team, the scope of the work has expanded dramatically, but the operational structure has not kept pace. We are asking relatively small teams to lead major economic, cultural, and community initiatives across the state. This is why the fiscal year 27 budget is focused on implementation capacity, and the proposed project management positions specifically in economic development support and build a department capable of delivering at the scale of work we now require. Just as importantly, we are continuing to evaluate how to streamline operations, reduce duplication, and build systems that allow us to work smarter and more efficiently over time. We have spent the last several years building a foundation and a framework and now have the momentum. Our work is to build the structure and capacity needed to sustain it and continue creating these pathways to opportunity for the people shaping Santa Fe today. And I want to recognize that this work is always ongoing, especially in the current economic conditions that our residents are facing. Many of the challenges we are looking at in our community are not solved overnight, as you know, but we are committed to continuing to build partnerships, reducing barriers, and again, strengthening opportunity to create a more resilient and connected economic future for Santa Fe. This budget that you have in front of you reflects that. So, thank you very much, and we're open to taking your questions. Thank you, Director. Went to that side first. That last time, I'm going to start over. Excuse me. Sorry. Start on this side. Any questions? Left side of the dais. Counselor Kesset.

Counselor Kesset: Thank you so much. I don't have questions. Again, thank you all for answering these ahead of time. That's been really wonderful. Really appreciate it. Excited about the $15,000 for the Arts and Culture project in the district. I really want to spend it this year because we have not been doing a job. We're going to spend it. Thank you. I would love us to get together ASAP, like in June, and get started and spend out the FY27. I just really want to thank this team. I obviously get to work very closely with Economic Development as Chair of EDAC and have been for four years. So I just, I'm always so impressed with the work that you do. I don't have questions because you get to expose me to it all the time. But for those of you that do not have the privilege of working with Director Nelson and her team on a regular basis, it really is a small but mighty team. Very creative, very innovative, always looking for ways to solve whatever problem comes their way. And what I really love about our Economic Development Department, that actually, former Director Rich Brown was also very good at this, of this idea of what economic development is, and it's so much more than job creation, bringing companies to Santa Fe. Really very adaptive to what Santa Fe is. Arts and culture being within economic development, as well as film, I think is a really wonderful mix because it really does highlight what is special about Santa Fe. But, you know, we've taken on things like we're talking about affordable commercial space and how do we deal with that issue in the City of Santa Fe. We've been talking about the funding for Appren came out of ARPA with Economic Development. I mean, so really just a wonderful department that's looking at all the various things that are going to impact economic equity and growth in our city and for our individuals. So, I just wanted to have the chance to sing your praises. So, thank you all so much. Really appreciate everything that you do and for being here.

Counselor Castro: Okay. I also want to sing your praises. Thank you so very much. But I do have a little bit of a different answer to one of the questions of what we fund. So going back to the $15,000 this year, but the $10,000. So that is what you fund as a department, and then we each sort of have our own fund to promote and put into the community. Chelsea or Director Johnson, would you just give us a little bit more on that?

Here, I'll just take some.

All right. Thank you, Mayor Garcia, Counselor Castro. We have written up some updated guidelines, too, that I'll send out to all of you that outline exactly what the funding is for and how you can better use it because it often comes at the end of the year, but yes, people want to spend it down and haven't had a chance to yet due to various capacity issues. So your question is about the 10 or the 15, just moving forward, more about how we should be utilizing it, which you're going to tell us, maybe how it had been utilized in the past to support community.

Great. Thank you. So there's a couple ways that you can use it. Sometimes counselors might come with a specific initiative that they want to bring to their district, right? And sometimes what we can do is we can connect them with good work that's already happening. So for example, in District 3, the city councilors applied their Arts and Culture funding entirely toward Las Patas this year. Great example. It was something they were already doing, and we connected them with those funds to help support that. Previously, counselors have supported things like the Canyon Road Summer Walk, an Art by Bike initiative that we did in conjunction with MO.

You can fund a local organization. It could be anything from Zobra to the literary festival to the Siler Rufina Arts District. There are all kinds of ways that you can use those funds. The impetus really is that we trust that you know your districts best. So, we want to offer that funding to help counselors fund initiatives, programs, and organizations that align with what we do, but be able to make that connection yourselves.

Thank you. So, the legislature, they have discretionary funds. We get arts and culture funding. So, that's wonderful. I do want to touch a little, and I've been asking about this all day, so feel free to tell me, we'll discuss this offline, but Greer Garson is also in the questions that we had for you. What is your involvement with what's happening at MATA and Midtown? How are we supporting the arts in this redevelopment of the area?

Well, arts and culture. This mic is a little bit squirrely. Pardon, I'm either yelling or whispering, so sorry for that. Counselor Garcia, sorry, Counselor Castro, Mayor Garcia. Arts and Culture has been teaming up with MRA on the Greer Garson project. We funded the feasibility study for it. We worked hand in hand with MRA on that process with Artspace and Autotrove, with touring the building, and we've been very integral in engaging community stakeholders and in thinking about the future of it. And Director Nelson can speak to the capital outlay piece that we've been working on to try to fund additional funding to restore it.

Sure. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Counselor Castro. Thank you, Director Johnson. What Director Johnson is alluding to is we worked with city staff at Public Works, who is leading the ICIP list compilation for the city, and we submitted the project for consideration for the ICIP list. One of the advantages of partnering with Economic Development is our connections to the many different funders that are in our ecosystem. So, we're thrilled to be able to add some supports, whether it's state, regional, or philanthropic, too.

And that leads me to my next question about our collection. So, there are significant tangible resources that we have both inherited from this space and that we also have in our own collection. Is there any thought of how we start looking at these assets?

Yes, Counselor Castro, Mayor Garcia, that's a wonderful question and very timely. We just discussed this at the Arts Commission meeting on Monday. We're, with Assistant Director Jan Joy Ryel, we are starting to draft a strategic plan for Art in Public Places going forward, both short-range and long-range, which includes assessing the entire portfolio and collection and figuring out what the best paths forward are for each of the different sectors that we're managing. And I think those will be all my questions for today.

Any other questions? Fagali.

Thank you, Mayor. We know you do a lot, Janna. Especially, I see you all the time everywhere, which is great. Director Johnson. So, we were talking about the Garson. So, is there funding for it? And then also you mentioned new murals, and I would love some new murals. Do we have a plan for new murals?

Counselor Vagali, Mayor Garcia, as for the Greer Garson Arts and Culture, I believe in 2024, verbally committed $500,000 toward the restoration of the Garson Theater from our capital improvement funding. So, when that becomes applicable, we remain committed as well as working with other city art city partners and development options.

And the other like million, two million to make it habitable, that's still?

Oh, it's, yes, that's where, yes, a capital campaign, capital outlay requests. It'll be a big ask, so it's still theoretical at this point.

Still getting the cost.

Yes, and we do have a list of mural projects that we're adding to currently, especially the low-hanging fruit of city-owned property and walls, but we're going to be issuing a call for a roster of mural artists and really developing a more comprehensive mural program, including training and maintenance as well as creation.

Great. Thank you. In your first paragraph here, you mentioned the launch of the Creative Hub. I'm sure I know what that is, but I don't actually know what that is. So, could you tell us what the Creative Hub is?

Counselor Fagali, Mayor Garcia, the Creative Hub is not a physical existence just yet, although we would love to see it become one. It's an initiative that involves a series of workshops and professional development opportunities specifically for artists and creative businesses. I would say is sort of the headline around it.

So, really building a network of resources that speak specifically to their needs.

Great.

Mayor, Counselor Fagali, thank you so much for the question and Director Johnson. I do want to elaborate as well to mention that we applied for a Creative Industries grant. One of the first recipients through the state program received funding to work with some of our partners to launch the Creative Hub. And when you think about the work we do at Economic Development and our ecosystem, industry development and support is a part of one of our approaches. So, supporting creative industries and the Creative Hub is just one of those sectors, and it's been fantastic working with Director Johnson and the Arts and Culture team as well as other community partners to really get that going. So, we've established the foundation and really we'll be looking to the next 12 months to building that out much like our other eight easy eight industries that we're.

Excellent. Yeah. And I just want to thank you for having all these community initiatives. Equal Grounds. Counselor Castro and I were just at a downtown business meeting. Your department does so much out and about, and it's really great. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Any other questions, comments? Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate it. That's it.

Yes.

Okay.

Right.

All right.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilors.

Okay. So, I'm going to hand the baton off to our Deputy City Manager for the last portion.

Well, thank you so much everyone for all of your questions. Thank you to the staff. Thank you to the budget team. At this time, we've concluded generally the presentations that we had scheduled for today. And as a reminder, we did move it from tomorrow's schedule to today. So, tomorrow we would start at 10:00 a.m. If we're going to stick with this schedule, we would start at 10:00 a.m. back here with Human Resources and then go into General Government, which includes Municipal Court, City Council, City Attorney's Office, Mayor's Office, City Manager, Internal Audit, Risk and Safety, and Finance. We would do Finance and then Community Engagement. We do have lunch scheduled for tomorrow as well, and then we have the whole rest of the afternoon, depending on where you want to go with that. So, at this time, are there additional requests for information? I know I've been sending a lot of emails to you all. So, maybe you need some time to sift through those. I sent out the templates which provide the line item expenditures and revenues. We've also been sending out the dashboards which provide the goals, objectives, and KPIs through third quarter. We've been sending out some additional information as it comes up, like the contracts list for Community Services, and then of course we've been capturing our things here in the bike rack. But at this time, I just want to maybe turn it over to you all and see where, if there's additional information you would like to get in advance of tomorrow or just kind of roll with the schedule as it is.

I have not had a chance to read through all the stuff we asked for, which shame on us. No, just kidding. Can, did you put in how many vacancies? Can we get how many vacancies per department and how many are frozen?

Yeah. So, we actually have that in, if it's in here. Okay, good.

Yeah. In the budget book, there is an FTE table. Anita Medina spent a lot of time putting that together. Thank you so much. And that does show the vacancies by department. It shows the number of FTEs and it shows what's being proposed for FY27. And then we do have the, one of the four emails that had the documents last night does have a list of all the frozen positions. Yep.

I just want to thank Andrea. She's been amazing in this process. Staff has been great this whole time. I think we need a round of applause. You guys are rock stars because we hit you with a lot in a little bit of time. I don't know if Andy can leave.

Any other requests before we adjourn for the day? Yeah. Yeah.

Announcement.

Sure. Council.

Tomorrow is Bike to Work Day, and if anyone, before we come here at 10:00 a.m., wants to go to South Capitol, where the trail and the train station are at that junction, there will be free breakfast burritos and donuts starting at 7:30 in the morning. So, if it's on your way or if you feel like going a little out of your way, come join us.

And, Madame City Clerk, did you have something?

Mayor, yes. May I please enter into the record the consideration of a resolution for the budget?

We did that last night. I thought we introduced it.

Yeah.

Okay, never mind then. Okay. All right. Well, with that being said, we're adjourned till tomorrow morning.