Regular Governing Body Meeting - Second Wednesday
Wed, May 14, 2025 · Governing Body
https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/261

== Executive Summary ==
The Santa Fe City Council convened for a regular meeting, addressing critical city operations including water management, the annual budget, and land use. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to the annual water update, highlighting successful conservation efforts, ongoing infrastructure projects like the Nichols Dam rehabilitation and the San Juan Chama Return Flow Project, and the necessity of a proposed water rate increase to fund these initiatives. The council also engaged in an extensive and often contentious discussion about the Fiscal Year 2026 operating budget, ultimately approving it unanimously despite widespread concerns about the budget process's transparency and inclusiveness.

Key decisions included the unanimous approval of the city's FY26 operating budget and the extension of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund's sunset date for land sale revenues. The council also approved a rezoning request for a property intended for medium-term housing, though not without dissent regarding the Planning Commission's quorum. Throughout the meeting, councilors expressed a strong desire for significant improvements to the budget process, advocating for earlier starts, greater transparency, and more comprehensive involvement from all council members.

== Key Decisions ==
- Approved the city's Fiscal Year 2026 operating budget unanimously.
- Approved Bill 2025-9, extending the sunset date for depositing land sale revenues into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund from December 31, 2025, to December 31, 2030 (8 Yes, 0 No).
- Approved a rezoning request for a 2.5-acre tract at 214 Camino de los Marquez from R21 PUD to R29 Residential (8 Yes, 1 No).
- Adopted Ordinance Number 2025-TBD, authorizing a $5,500,000 loan-grant agreement from the New Mexico Finance Authority for repairs to the Nichols Dam outlet conduit.

== Motions & Votes ==
- Motion to approve the agenda as amended — Passed unanimously by roll call vote.
- Motion to approve Bill 2025-9 (extending the Affordable Housing Trust Fund sunset date) — Passed 8 Yes, 0 No.
- Motion to amend Bill 2025-9 (to sunset land sale revenues upon excise tax implementation) — Failed 2 Yes, 6 No.
- Motion to approve the rezoning request for 214 Camino de los Marquez — Passed 8 Yes, 1 No (Councilor Michael Garcia voted No).
- Motion to approve the city budget — Passed unanimously.
- Motion to move items 17-20 (petitions from the floor, public comment, public hearing, land use case) to be discussed next — Passed.

== Public Comment ==
Public comments touched on several themes. Stephanie Benonato raised concerns about the Axton Apartments density, advocated for greater public participation in budget hearings, suggested offering overtime to lifeguard supervisors to keep pools open, and questioned the clarity of Bill 2025-9 regarding affordable housing funding. Another unnamed speaker opposed the rezoning of Camino de los Marquez, emphasizing the importance of preserving Santa Fe's unique charm and neighborhood character. There was no public comment period for the Wastewater Utility Services Rates and Fees (Bill 2025-11).

== Topics ==
- Water Utility Update
- Nichols Dam Repairs
- Agenda Amendments
- Land Use and Zoning
- San Juan Chama Return Flow Project
- Employee Anniversaries
- City Attorney Updates
- Capital Improvements Advisory Committee
- Micro-communities and Leases
- International Folk Art Market
- State of the City Event
- Pledge and Invocations
- Roll Call
- Budget Discussion Rules
- Community Events and Recognition

== Full Transcript ==
Madam Clerk, are we live from New York? We are live. Right. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. I am going to call us to order for the meeting of the governing body regular meeting for May 14th, 2025. It is 5:05 p.m. according to my clock. We'll begin with the Pledge of Allegiance led by Councilor Lindell. Salute to the New Mexico flag. Councilor Romero Worth and beginning invocations and remembrances from Councilor Lee Garcia. If you would stand as you are able.

Heavenly Father, we come to you today as a collaborative group, seeking solutions for our community, working together, dealing with very hard issues that are in our communities. We always ask that you give us peace of mind and ability to work with each other to bring out the best outcome for our communities. Thank you.

I just want to remember Jose Alberto Mujica, president of Uruguay, known as the poorest president, a great model to follow. Thank you so much for your service. Let's take a moment to think about all those in our community who are struggling, suffering, dealing with pain, dealing with hard times. Whether it's of their own making or not, doesn't matter. We care about them, and we want the best for them, and we want to do our best. Help them. We reach out to everyone that needs some help. Let's take a minute. Think of them. Thank you, everybody.

Madam Clerk, I would appreciate it if you would call the roll.

Councilor Cassett: Here.

Councilor Castro: Same thing.

Councilor Chavez: Here.

Councilor Faulkner: Here.

Councilor Lee Garcia: Present.

Councilor Michael Garcia: Present.

Councilor Lindell: Here.

Councilor Romero Worth: Here.

Mayor Weber: Present.

Everyone is present.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Are there changes to the agenda as published?

Yes, Mayor. We will be removing 21A, the appointments, from the agenda tonight. We'll be adding that at a later date. That's the main change. And then we're going to be removing the, sorry, off the consent, we're going to be removing the minutes because they were not in the packet.

Okay. Can I get a motion to approve the, approve as amended?

Thank you very much.

Second.

All in favor say aye. Oh, whip. I'm sorry. I got, I got your hand too late. Councilor, what, what can we do for you?

Just wanted to remind our colleagues on the governing body that the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee, each governing body member has the ability to appoint one member. And so I know that there was, at least some colleagues that were not, that was not brought to their attention. So I just want to reiterate, each governing body member has the ability to appoint one member to this committee and then refer that name for the appointment via the Mayor.

Thank you for the reminder, Councilor. Yeah, I think we can, I was going to get to that later because it won't be on the agenda for exactly that reason. Director Wheeler had spoken at the podium at one point saying we had to make, we had the opportunity to make those appointments and asked everyone who had a name to please forward it. That offer still stands. So, if there's some individual you would like to see as your designee on that body, please forward that name through Director Wheeler as soon as possible. We held up the names in hopes we would get recommendations, and then when we didn't, that's how this list was compiled. But taking it off the agenda is specifically designed to provide the opportunity for nominees. So, please make them if you have them.

So, we have a motion and a second to approve the agenda as amended. Is there any further discussion? Madam Clerk, go ahead and call the roll.

Councilor Castro: Yes.

Councilor Chavez: Yes.

Councilor Faulkner: Yes.

Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes.

Councilor Michael Garcia: Yes.

Councilor Lindell: Yes.

Councilor Romero Worth: Yes.

Councilor Cassett: Yes.

Mayor Weber: Yes.

Motion is approved. And you mentioned something off consent before we approve the consent agenda. Could you remind us what the change is?

Yes, Mayor. Nothing was pulled off the consent agenda, but we will be removing the minutes, which is from the agenda because they were not in the packet. So, they'll be on the next agenda.

Move as amended.

Second.

There's a motion and a second. Is there discussion? Call the roll on that, please, Madam Clerk.

Councilor Chavez: Yes.

Councilor Faulkner: Yes.

Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes.

Councilor Michael Garcia: Yes.

Councilor Lindell: Yes.

Councilor Romero Worth: Yes.

Councilor Cassett: Yes.

Councilor Castro: Yes.

Mayor Weber: Yes.

Motion is approved. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

Mr. Mayor, if I might, for point of privilege, could you make sure your mic's in front of you there? When it comes to the budget discussion, could we ask for the 10-minute rule? And I do think that we need the councilors who didn't, were not on the Finance Committee, to be given first option on speaking.

Great. Happy to, happy to abide. And feel free to remind us when we get to that item so that we, we follow that proposal. In the meantime, Madam Clerk, let's go to the first item on the agenda. We have a presentation, City of Santa Fe Annual Water, sorry, Santa Fe Water Annual Update. And here to present is Interim Public Utilities Department Director Jesse Roach. Welcome.

Thank you, Mayor Weber, members of the Council. Let me deal with some technology here and then get started. Let me guess, we have a technology. Oh, look. It's working. Okay. Thank you for your time tonight. And I know there's quite a bit on the agenda later. So, much of this will look familiar, and I'm going to move through it relatively efficiently, I hope, and leave time for questions.

So, the overall summary here is that we're going to do a couple of public webinars tomorrow that we call "What's Up with Water." This is the sixth time that we've done it. And we'll look at sort of the past, present, and future of the water utility. In the past, sort of where did, where do we get our water and how did we get here? How have things changed over time? The present in terms of the infrastructure that we're, we're investing in. And then looking forward, the, the long-range planning that we do. And so we're going to go into more detail on these tomorrow in virtual, two virtual meetings, one at 9, one at 6. And the meeting links are available on our website at santafenm.gov/water. And we have been pushing that out via social media and radio and, and hope to have a good attendance from the public.

The "What's Up with Water" coincides with us publishing our annual report, and so you all should have one of these. And this is a summary of, of what happened in 2024, and we try to write it so that it's fairly digestible, and it's really written for the governing body. So, I hope you get a chance to look at it, and if there are things that are not in there that you would like to see in there in the future, please let us know. It's also available on the website at the same santafenm.gov/water.

So, let's jump into it, and I'll start with this figure that shows where the water that the city has used has come from for the last 100 years, actually 101 years, going back to 1925. And there are four different colors of water on here shown. And so we have the light blue, which was water from the Santa Fe River, which was the original source of water. And that was the only source of water until 1950, when a historic drought caused the utility to drill wells within the city limits. That's the city well field, the second source of water that was brought online. And those two sources lasted as demand increased until the 70s when the Buckman Wellfield was brought online.

And the things to notice about this graph are sort of an exponential growth in demand until 1995, at which point the city actually bought the water utility from PNM. And since then, we've seen the total amount of water that we've produced drop by 33%, even while population during that time has increased by 25%. So, the two real takeaways from this graph are the impressive conservation success that the city achieved since 1995, and also the that in 2011 we brought on a second source of, of river water from the BDD. And you can see that the system was surface water only in the early days, and then for the stretch between the 70s, 80s, 90s, it was heavily groundwater dominant, and we are mining groundwater. We are using it unsustainably with the, with bringing the, the BDD online in 2011. Since then, we've been mostly using surface river water, with a little bit of, of groundwater. And that has allowed our, our wells to recover.

Zooming in a little bit on the conservation piece of this, this graph shows the total population served by the utility from 1995 through 2024. And you can, and that is labeled on the right side. And so you can see that the population served was less than 70,000 in 1995, and now it's approximately 90,000. And if you divide the total population served into the water, total water supplied, you get a metric which is gallons per capita per day. It's sort of the average use that can be attributed to the users of the utility. And that during the stewardship of the utility by this city dropped from 168 gallons down into the high 80s and low 90s where it is now. So this is an impressive accomplishment from a conservation perspective. We're essentially using water almost twice as efficiently as we were 30 years ago.

The other piece to point out again in a different way is the shift from mining groundwater to using surface water preferentially. This graph shows in 1995, which was the peak demand year, that we used mostly, that we used almost 8,000 acre-feet of groundwater. And subsequently, since 2011 when the BDD came online, the rest of these bars show about 80% surface water and 20% groundwater. And again, as I mentioned before, that has allowed all of the, the, the water levels in our wells, both in the city well field and the Buckman well field, to recover from a period of overuse.

This figure shows where the water came from last year specifically, and the wheel is color-coded by source. And so from largest to smallest, we had over 4,000 acre-feet or 43% of our total production came from Buckman Direct Diversion. 35% from the Santa Fe River, and the remaining 22% from the two well fields. So, talking a little bit then, I'm going to switch to some of the big, one of the really important projects that we're working on for our future resiliency. This is the San Juan Chama return flow project, and the idea here is to take water that was diverted originally at Buckman and treated at the Buckman Water Treatment Plant and distributed into the city and used indoors. On average, about two-thirds of that water ends up back at the Pojoaque Water Reclamation Facility near the airport where it's treated to, to standards that allow us to discharge it into the Santa Fe River or for use on golf courses. The idea of this project is to take the portion of the water that, that originated as a diversion from the Rio Grande and ended up at the wastewater reclamation facility and send it back to the river and put it in the river just below the diversion location. And so the idea here is that at the moment if we need a million gallons at Buckman, we have to release more than a million gallons from Abiquiu to get it to Buckman. In the future with this return flow, if there's a 50% return flow being experienced, we would only need to release half of it from upstream and the other half would be returned to the river below the diversion to keep the river whole. And so the, these, these bars are, are showing three different things. Let's first look at the left side. This is essentially from 2011 through 2024, we've used, and so that's from when BDD came online through last year, we've used approximately 9,000 acre-feet per year, about 7,000 of that from river water and the rest from wells.

And we estimate that the sustainably available water during that same period of time was very similar for surface water because essentially we're using all of our river water. We're losing some of it by storing it in reservoirs where it evaporates, but we're basically using it all as it comes in. And we estimate from our groundwater models that we could produce about 4,500 acre feet of water year in and year out without impacting the long-term viability of that resource. And so together, we estimate about 12,000 acre feet currently of renewable water available to the utility, of which we're using about 9,000. So we're using about three-quarters of the sustainably available water that we have now.

And do we think that that's enough? No. We would like to have a little more cushion than that. And so that's where the return flow project comes in. And this bar, this bar on the right, shows our estimated surface water sustainably available once we have that return flow project in place, stretching our San Juan Chama water resource by nearly three. So at that point, we think we'll have in the neighborhood of 20,000 acre feet of sustainably available water to meet the current demand of 9,000. So that puts us in a very enviable position from a resiliency perspective.

Let me go through a little bit of the funding and the status of that project. We received a permit from the Office of the State Engineer in April of last year, allowing us to have what they call return flow credits to allow us to return the water to the river and divert a like amount just upstream. We have a 60% engineering design, and we're working towards 90%. And we hope that the draft environmental assessment for the NEPA permit will be out this September. We have $12 million in grant funding from the Bureau of Reclamation for that project. And in addition, for two other large projects, we have state funding combined to a total of over $15 million as a split between grants and loans.

And I'll talk a little bit about the Nichols Dam in this next slide. The Nichols Dam outlet works rehab project began last July, essentially as soon as the runoff was over and we could empty out Nichols. We started working on it, and we were racing against time to have it done in time to catch the runoff from this year. So although we don't like silver linings associated with poor runoff years, this year there was a little bit of one from a construction perspective for us. And what this project does is it essentially connects the reservoir all the way to the treatment plant with a 28-inch diameter high-density polyethylene pipe. It will have vaults at the downstream toe of the dam to allow water to be metered and diverted to the river or to the treatment plant. And then a new filter drain system on the downstream side of the dam to allow any water that does move through the dam to be collected safely. There will be an aeration system in the reservoir that allows reduced chemical use in our treatment process and the potential to turn off Canyon Road during the winter, which we haven't had before, and the potential for hydroelectricity generation at Canyon Road. So there's a whole bunch of flexibility, operational flexibility, and most importantly, a big safety concern addressed by this project. And we do expect it to be complete this fall.

We actually, the River and Trails Division did a bunch of work monitoring Two-Mile Pond for moisture, vegetation, and riparian area health. And the Water Division chipped in with stream flow monitoring at five locations around that to help us better understand the hydrology. The result of that are some conclusions that are a little bit in the weeds, but essentially the pond system is being supported by groundwater flow. Last year totaled about 250 acre feet, which is about a quarter of what we bypassed to the river for the Living River ordinance. The pond didn't change size, and there was a healthy diversity of flora and fauna documented.

And then turning to sort of source water protection and thinning, we continued what has been a long ongoing project of fuels reduction or forest thinning in the upper watershed. So this graph on the right shows the upper watershed boundary, and the areas in hatched are areas that have been burned with pile burns, and the areas in color have been burned using broadcast burning multiple times. We did 250 more acres of that this year. And then for the first time, we coordinated and cooperated with the Santa Fe Fire Department's Wildland Division and also a local nonprofit, the Forest Stewards Guild, to thin and clear vegetation on almost six acres around our critical utility infrastructure to help build resilience in the threat of wildfire.

On the financial side of things, this chart is showing, and this is in the annual report, but it's showing essentially a simplified view from a cash basis for different things. In blue are revenues in millions of dollars per year, going from audited numbers for FY22, 23, and 24, all the way through projections for this fiscal year, all the way through 2030. So the blue bars are revenues, the red bars are expenses in millions of dollars per year, and then the line, the positive line, is cash balance, and the negative red line is debt. And essentially what this is showing is that although we have a healthy cash balance right now, we are expecting to need to take on debt and draw down the cash balance in order to fund several large infrastructure projects. Those include the Nichols Dam outlet works that I mentioned at about $20 million, an upgrade at Canyon Road for about $24 million, plus additional upgrades there, another $9 million, a work at McClure upstream of Nichols when we're done with that for another approximately $20 million, and the San Juan Chama return flow project at as much as 60. So putting all that stuff together, we're looking at the need for a rate increase for water, and the sort of pieces of that, which I shared with the governing body a couple weeks ago, have led to that are inflation of over 40% since 2013, which is the last time that we raised water rates, the large capital projects that we need for safety and resiliency, and the upshot of this increase for an average water bill, and that would be just on the water side of things, would be an increase of about $2 per month for five years. And so with that, I thank you for your time, and I will stand for questions. Thank you.

Mayor: Thanks for the presentation. And I, we do have this annual report document. Will this be put on the city's website or has it already been put on the city's website?

Jesse: Mayor Weber, yes, it has been put on the city's website. So there's an electronic version available there on the water website, SantaFeNM.gov.

Mayor: Great. Thank you. Questions from the to the left of me. Councilor Lee Garcia.

Councilor Lee Garcia: Thank you, Mayor. Not too many questions. I, I, I, you've been here quite often, a lot of information. Thank you for the presentations. You know, where does the water come from? I think that's the number one question many of us get when they see development, they see our city growing. And so I, I really appreciate the graphs in regards to how, you know, how we've been able to map out when we were getting just groundwater, when we were actually just fully dependent on the river to groundwater to us pumping so much water, we were almost depleting our groundwater supply. BDD comes in, the Buckman wells, and all of these things, because I think that's really important for people to understand. And I think the magical thing is we really can't fully forecast when we're going to be in drought. I know there's a lot of modules out there, when we are going to get, you know, enough water in any given winter and so on and so forth. But just a few comments. I do appreciate the information. I think that going down here in the future, we will be asked a lot of questions by our constituency in regards to why are we going to raise our rates? And I think that it's very important that the public does know that we're not just raising only rates, but we're looking at different avenues on how to fund this. It's they're going out to debt, bonding, or things of that nature. So anyway, either borrowing money, finding money through federal grants and so on and so forth. But mostly comments. Thank you for the presentation, Dr. Roach.

Jesse: Thank you, Councilor.

Mayor: Councilor Cassid.

Councilor Cassid: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jesse, for being here. I also really always appreciate when you come forward. It's both helps clear up a lot of information, and I always learn new information, but recently I've been getting more confident about the fact that I already know some of this stuff and understand it, which is really exciting for me. I do have one question though. You mentioned part of the benefit for, I believe, Nichols was being able to turn off the Canyon Road Water Treatment Plant in the winter. Why is that something that we would like to have the option to do?

Jesse: Mayor Weber, Councilor Cassid, that's a great question. And we would like to be able to do it because with the return flow project in the winter, we return a higher percentage of the water that we use. So because people aren't using it outdoors, we can see return flows of 80 to 90% of the water that we use. The only water that we're able to return is going to be San Juan Chama water. So if we can preferentially use that water in the winter and save the Canyon Road water for the summer, that will, that operational flexibility really allows us to optimize the use of those two water sources.

Councilor Cassid: Got it. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you know, as Councilor Garcia mentioned, I think that there will be a lot of questions around raising of rates. So I do appreciate the way that this has been laid out in a variety of different graphs to really demonstrate both the just the financial reality that we're in, but also we know that water is so important, and we know that making sure that we have the right water infrastructure is something that our constituents really care about. So thank you for presenting that as clearly as you do. Thank you.

Mayor: Yeah, Councilman Romero.

Councilman Romero: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jesse, for being here tonight. I heard this presentation last night at the Water Conservation Committee. I look forward to hearing it again tomorrow, because I think like Councilor Cassid said, you know, you keep hearing it and you get more and more from it. I do, can you just touch briefly, one of your slides talks about the planning that we're doing, and I'm just trying to find it here, in three different, three different ways: planning for long-range water supply, catastrophic supply disruption, and source water protection. Can you just speak a little bit more to the long-range water supply? I, I, I think it's really important that as we, that the people, the community know the work that's going on to to understand kind of supply side, the demand side, what, how we forecast into the future, and how that'll enable us to plan for that future. And I, and I believe, you know, you have resolutions that were passed by the governing body to do 40 and 80-year water plans. Just, I don't know, elaborate on that more than what I just did.

Jesse: Chair Weber, Councilor Romero, thank you for that question. You are correct. We are doing long-range water planning out to 2100, and I would point us back to this graph just showing that we have been doing planning to get here, and now we have this imminent return flow project that we're investing in, which will allow us to have in the short term an adequate supply.

But that's also not sufficient. And so we are looking at what do we think the demand is going to be going forward to 2100. And so we've taken population projections, and we've sent those out. And we've also looked at what has our GPCD done through time. Can we continue to reduce and be more efficient with water use? And so we put those two things together, and we get a projection out into 2100 of what our water demand at the community level will be.

And then the supply is something done generally with these large, large, it's big science, and we can't do it ourselves. We have to rely on partners to bring the information from these large global climate models to bear on essentially predictions of what will the Santa Fe River inflows to McClure look like for the next 80 years. And there's not just one, there's many. And so we take these many different projections, and we have a tool that's called Stewards, which puts the supply and the demand together to see the what if as we move forward. What happens if this is the supply and this is the demand, and do we see gaps? And if we see gaps, how do we address those gaps? And that's when community values and input come into play.

And so we're partway through a multi-year long-range planning process that we started at the request of this board council. And the next step is putting the supply and demand together in this tool called Stewards, and then reaching out to the community to say, "Here's what it looks like, and here's where we need to think about what we want our community to look like and how we want to avoid these gaps." And so I look forward to bringing that updated information to the governing body once we have it. But it's active and it's exciting, just not quite ready to pull the curtain just yet.

But I think it's really important that folks know you all are working on this. This is, especially as there is concern in the community about water, rightfully so. So these are things that you all in the water division spend a lot of time on and will be coming forward with, and I just think that's really important for folks to know about.

The water rate, you gave a presentation, and I just want to flag it to the Public Works Public Utilities Committee. I think it was our last meeting. Council Meworth, I think it was the governing body at the last meeting, April 30th. Okay, April 30th. Okay. So for folks who are interested, that's a deeper dive into the rate increases and why they're necessary, and the big infrastructure projects that we're doing and what other sources of funding are being sought to, not just as Councilor Lee Garcia said, not just that we're not just doing this on the back of ratepayers, but we are looking at a variety of funding mechanisms. So if people are interested, I would definitely refer back to that. So thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.

Mayor: Thank you, Mayor. I mean, questions. Yes, it's your turn.

Councilor: So I just want to commend staff for being proactive on this and really setting up a good program. It is commendable that we are doing our best practices around water use, especially because we live in the desert and we're developing a lot. That's all I have to say. Thank you guys for everything you do.

Councilor: Thank you, Councilor Dylan. Thank you, Dr. Roach. I have to tell you that your presentations, every one of those I can understand and read, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. You're a real master at that, or whoever is putting them together, but I think it's you. Thanks for making it so understandable. This is on the city website. I hope that folks will take a look at it. Tremendous amount of information. Really lays out what the path to the future is and also where we've come from and how much we've improved with our water usage. So thank you very much, Jack.

Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Garcia, Councilor, no comments.

Councilor: I just want to thank you for your work and how clearly you've communicated everything. So thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, sir. Thank you again, Dr. Roach. So we got a wonderful explanation about why we want to turn that possible Canyon Road station off. Thank you so much. Would you touch a little bit on the energy production, please?

Dr. Roach: Mayor Weber, Councilor Castro, yeah, thanks for that question. So currently, the way Nichols works is the water drops into a conduit that flows through the dam, and it's at atmospheric pressure. And so it's essentially just gravity down, and we actually, and then we get it to the, we get it to the treatment plant with gravity, but it's not under pressure by the time it gets there. And what this project will do, we'll have it be in a pipe buried underground all the way to the treatment plant. And so it'll arrive at the treatment plant with most of the pressure that it has because of the big elevation change. And at some point, when we have the capital to invest in that, we will potentially be able to add a hydroelectric turbine.

And I guess I should also say that all the work I do is thanks to my team, and I had very little time to prepare any of this stuff this year because I've been pulled in other directions. And so I want to thank the staff in the water division who has really continued the work and set all this up.

Councilor: And then one other quick question. I know that during that governing body meeting, we had discussed a little bit of the different numbers on the bill, right? That we have a portion and that there are other fees associated. So is that $3 a month reflect the total bill or just our portion?

Dr. Roach: The, Councilor Castro, the change for $3 a month reflects just the water and wastewater piece, and we have redone those slides so that the next time we show them, it'll show the entire bill. But that change, and this is for an average bill, that change is accurate. And the way that it pencils out is it's about a dollar a month raised each year for 10 years for wastewater. So for just wastewater, you'll pay an extra $12 the first year, an extra $24 the next year, etc. And for water, it's an extra $2 a month for five years. So the first year for water, the average bill would be an extra $24 that year, an extra $48 the next year for five years. And again, if folks want to go back and look at that presentation, it's laid out very well.

Councilor: Thank you so much. No further questions.

Mayor: Thank you, Director Roach. Great job as always. We, I don't think it's possible for any of us and the public as well to get too much information about water because it is so fundamental to all of our plans and aspirations. I just thought I'd take the opportunity to, in the spirit of water, drill down a little bit into some of the areas that are most interesting to me. First, I think because there is such a concern, as has been noted by my colleagues, about how growth in housing, which is a high priority, potentially affects our water future. How do we currently handle development plans that involve housing and the water responsibility for meeting the water budget for those developments?

Dr. Roach: Mayor Weber, thanks for the question. Currently, we evaluate the demand, and certainly there are building codes where the land use really comes to the plate to ensure that all development is done in as water-efficient a manner as possible. But once we have the plans, we calculate what the added water demand is that's brought to the system. And depending on the threshold, we offset that either by having the developer bring a water right from the Rio Grande and put it into the Buckman Wellfield, or if it's a smaller development, we allow them to pay a fee in lieu of that so that we can acquire those water rights or, in the case of the return flow project, invest in infrastructure that will allow us to need less water rights because we're using the water that we do have more efficiently.

Mayor: So all of the development, in a nutshell, development or people who want to bring something to the city is tied to their ability in general to provide the water to supply their own development or find a way to help us through the investment in infrastructure, make sure that the investment is made using their dollars to get the water supply.

Dr. Roach: That's correct. That's well stated.

Mayor: And one other thing that I think is really, I'm just going to ask one other question, and then I really want to thank you again for continually bringing this forward to us on an ongoing basis because water is so critical in everything we think about. That chart you had about the role that the return flow credit pipeline would provide for us in terms of our water future. If you could just, I'm not even sure you have to pop up the slide, but you have it, I'm sure, ingrained in your memory. How much of our water that we're allocated are we actually using on a percentage basis right now?

Dr. Roach: If I understand the question, the allocations are specific to San Juan Chama water, to our Colorado River water. Okay. So for the benefit of everyone, in a good year, we get a little more than 5,000 acre-feet a year, a 5,000 acre-feet allocation of San Juan Chama water, which ends up in Heron Reservoir. The federal government says, "Okay, we have enough water, here's your 5,000 acre-feet." And then at some point during that year, we have to move it down and store it in Abiquiu. We lose some water to evaporation as it's stored in Abiquiu. But through time, we have been storing a fair bit so that I would say we have a couple years' worth of water stored in Abiquiu. And on an annual basis, if my memory is correct, we're actually utilizing 50% of what is our, or rough, maybe I've got it the wrong number, is it 50%? You just said something like 75%, but my recollection from prior briefings was that we're actually, the reason we can get a return flow credit is that we're not using everything we're entitled to, and the return flow credit will provide a significant boost toward a more full utilization of what is rightfully ours.

So, Mayor Weber, I think if we looked at last year's use, we diverted 4,000 acre-feet at BDD, and we, in a good year, would have been allocated 5,000. So there's some extra there. We do, as I mentioned, lose some to evaporation. We actually give some to Albuquerque for the right to store it in Abiquiu, depending. So there are losses associated with it. The return flow project is really going to allow us to use that water more efficiently because what we see when we look at those climate change runs is if a good year was 5,000, in the last five years, we've been receiving 3 to 4,000, depending on the year. Out in the future, we expect that we won't get 5,000 on average. We'll get 4,000 or 3,500. But if we can use it three times more efficiently, then that will make up for the, essentially, by us being more efficient, we can make up for what climate change would appear to be taking away.

Mayor: Great. Thanks. Well, I don't have any other questions other than I hope everybody who learns about your presentation options for tomorrow takes advantage of it. I think it's incredibly useful for the entire community to get more information and more education about our water future and the amazingly professional and highly competent job that you and your team do to make sure that the city is well served and in a strong position. And I know there are cities in the Southwest that are seriously jeopardized in terms of their water future because they are so reliant on a single source or they are so wasteful of what they have as a resource.

And we are so well served by decisions made by our predecessors in terms of sourcing water, the accurate pricing of the replacement value of the water, the responsibility of developers to bring water. All of these things and the portfolio that has been developed over the years leaves Santa Fe in an enviable position compared to almost everybody else in the Southwest. And that's the work of you and your team and your predecessors. And I just can't tell you how I continue to be incredibly pleased with, proud of, and respectful of all the hard work you all do. So, thank you. Thank you all for your support. Thank you.

Madame Clerk, as Director Roach disconnects his laptop, what's next on the agenda? Item 10, action item 10A, consideration of Resolution Number 2025-TBD, sponsored by Mayor Alan Weber, resolution adopting the City of Santa Fe's Fiscal Year 2026 operating budget for the City of Santa Fe. Super. And as a reminder, yep, gotcha. You got it. Thank you.

Let me, I'm going to, first, I think if this works appropriately, I know the city manager has put some comments together that he would like to use to frame the conversation. I think Director Oster, did you want to have an opportunity and then I'll turn to our finance chair and then to the members of the governing body who have not had a chance to participate in the budget hearings? Although I see a hand up, Councilor, your finger is winking at me. Is that an indication that you? All right. So, we'll go to the folks who were not part of the Finance Committee first and then we'll take as much time if we can go through the ranks to just ask questions. But let's let some of our folks do a little bit of framing and then we'll take it down the row. And if you'd rather do it by raising hands or going in order, I'm agnostic. I'm reminded by one of our council members that everyone has arms and muscles, so raising hands is also fine by me.

Mr. City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the governing body. I'm happy to make a few introductory comments about the budget. I'm not doing the entire presentation that I did before we started with the Finance Committee, but I did want to make a few comments about the budget, not to talk about the dollars and cents of the proposal. That's all in your packet and we can go through that, but rather to talk about what the budget does for the community.

Early in my career, I remember having a boss who said to me, "When you do a budget, everybody gets so caught up in the numbers, they forget sometimes to tell the public what it is that the budget is doing for them." And I've always made it a practice to spend a little time at this point in a budget adoption process to talk about what the budget buys for the community. The annual budget, as you know, is a policy exercise that a city council goes through, which allows the governing body to make trade-offs among limited resources. So, as opposed to the annual financial audit, which is a financial health document, the budget process is a process by which elected officials are able to make trade-offs between those things, the many, many things that people would like to fund, and those that are possible to be able to fund in a given year.

And with any budget, the budget seeks to allocate funds that reflect community values. And those are such things as providing public safety, respecting place and purpose. I stole that from the Mayor's speech the other night. Contributing to quality of life, treating people with dignity and justice, and doing so with efficiency and dispatch. I think it's important to say those words because otherwise it becomes just a list of projects. So, I just want to go over very quickly some of the things that this budget provides for. And I'll say before I start that I'm not including on the list all those things that we do day in and day out every year: all the police coverage and the fire coverage and the public works employees, the recreation employees, the library employees, all those things that we do all the time every year. I'm not mentioning them, but that's 90% of what we do and those are obviously very important things that we continue to do in this budget.

The budget gets referred to this year. You've heard the phrase that it is pretty much a flat budget. It's flat in the sense that our revenues didn't go way up. It went up a little. GRT in particular went up a little. It went up 5.9% in our projections. That's projected that it will go up a little. But the budget itself, so the budget gets referred to as a flat budget. It's a flat budget, but there's plenty of substance in it. And I think it's worth the time to say that.

So, for instance, we've made noteworthy investments in the city workforce again in this year's budget. You're all very aware of that, that we've needed to do that to be able to keep employees and to be competitive in the market seeking new employees, and it's, if anything, it's getting more difficult, not less difficult. We are making, in this budget, it allows us to make major advancements in the Midtown project area. I won't go through the whole list, but as you all know, there are many different aspects of that project that are being moved forward right now and will continue to be during the course of this year. We will sell the bonds for the street paving, a major, major project that our community supported very heavily. And we'll be doing another annual paving project just like we did last year, only this time we're going to have some more money that this year and the few years following, we're going to have even more money to put into paving. Not all that we need, but way more than we've had.

Anticipated implementation of the critically needed new utility billing system. Our billing system has been a constant problem. The Finance Committee spent quite a bit of time talking about that. This is the budget in which that project should reach conclusion, and so that's a major improvement that we've had. We'll be able to advance the wastewater treatment plant project. We're still in the evaluation of the new versus rehab project and that's going to continue into this year, but that is being put on a much faster track and that will be making significant progress in this year. Implementing the overdue water wastewater rate structures. You've been talking about that. You're aware of that. Very much necessary. That's moving forward in this fiscal year. Implementing the conservation and sustainability initiative in public utilities. We'll be excited in very short order, very soon, to bring in a specific proposal in that regard.

Major initiatives in emergency management. We're very seriously talking about moving the agenda on educating the public on such issues as fire hardening of their properties, making their properties safer to avoid the devastating losses that other areas have had. And we're also going to do our best to do planning for with people to understand evacuation processes. Not a subject anybody hopes we ever have to use, but certainly important to do. We're advancing the Santa Fe Forward general plan program very nicely. I am, I love general plan processes and I will tell you this process is off to a great start. Heather Lamboy and her team and the consultants have had incredible responses from the community in terms of wanting to volunteer for the program and to be involved, sometimes with their community groups. We had way more people express interest in this than we had any idea we would get. So, this is a very exciting process that will, it won't be completed in the next year, but it's going to make major progress in the next year.

We'll be adopting the next phase of the development code update. Long explanation there. I think you're aware that we're working on that to bring our codes up to date. Continued implementation of the new immigration committee initiative, an important initiative that our public is very interested in and we look forward to working with that group and moving that agenda. Purchase and implementation of the police speed and noise camera equipment, which we hope to be able to administer through civilian processes. We're in the process of beginning the process of acquiring that equipment and we should be able to get that implemented in this year in plenty of time. Again, we think a major improvement that our community is getting out of this budget.

Pursuit of an enhanced nuisance property abatement program. It's not that the city hasn't been doing that because the city has been doing that. But we think that there's better ways to organize that, appoint somebody as a point person on staff and supplement legal services that we may need to be able to be more aggressive. But I think our community deserves us to be more aggressive in that arena. Significant reworking of the city's budget system. The Finance Committee has heard all they want to hear about that. We plan on revamping the budget system starting with the software system that's been used and looking to use some new processes that hopefully will provide you all with the information that you need in order to feel comfortable in adopting the budget. I understand that there's been gaps there and there still have been this year, but we are bound and determined we're going to meet your expectations when it comes to that going forward.

Substantial revision to the city's internal performance evaluation system. This is one of those internal things that the public doesn't really follow, but it's important for any organization to do that. We need to be accountable for what we do. It's the other side of the coin from the compensation increases. We also need to hold ourselves accountable and we think we need a system that will do that and this, in this year, we're going to move forward on that. Hiring key management staff. I don't need to go through the whole list. You know, we have several key positions that are vacant and initially I'm talking about department director positions. We've got key positions at every level of this organization and we need to get those positions filled at a much better pace than we have. Compensation obviously is part of that. We'll keep working on that. But that's a high priority for this particular year.

Implementing the equity and inclusion initiative and filling the director position. We came very close. We thought we had somebody. We ran into a little compensation issue, but we're going to go out and do that again. We are, we remain fully committed to that program and we look forward to participating with you and the community in getting that initiative off the ground. You will tonight, I hope, be adding $630,000 roughly in park maintenance contract funding. We all know that we have a deficit in our capacity to maintain all the parks, median, trails that this community is blessed to own. But it's a challenge to keep up with the maintenance. This is one-time funding, but it should make a real difference. And we are excited that through the process that we've been through the last few weeks that there's been an identification of a need for that funding. And I'm sure you all agree with that. Adding five police record specialists. My first reaction was this was required by the State Supreme Court and that maybe there's other things I'd like to spend the money on.

But let me put a good word for this. What this does, it allows us to expedite discovery relating to serious criminal prosecutions and allowing us to get those done allows us to move forward on keeping dangerous criminals off the street. So, I think that there is a positive associated with that. Greatly enhancing the city's capacity to address homelessness and the effects of homelessness. Those are two different but related things that we plan on moving forward as a major initiative in this budget. And I say "we," I'm talking about the entire group, the governing body and the staff and the community. There are key aspects of that, among which we've added three program manager positions in the Youth and Family Services Division. Part of that addresses homelessness and part of that addresses housing and other programs that Julie and her team are providing. That's a major step forward. That was one of your mid-year adds that is money in this year's budget.

Establishing at least two, this is my, I put this number on here, at least two more new micro-communities to provide the kind of transitional housing and services for some of our homeless population, the people that we can place in these communities. It'll make all the difference in the world in their lives. And we're excited to have the opportunity to do that. This is all the result of the governing body being willing to let us move forward with acquiring those facilities. And we are going to very seriously work with you on how to move forward in terms of the public participation on that in the very near future.

Implementing a contract for street-level intervention programming to address the needs of other unhoused people. You're all aware of our efforts to move forward on a contract on that which will be coming to the governing body within this fiscal year for implementation next year. And then implementing strategies to address the impacts of homelessness on neighboring communities. We've all heard so much about that and we do need to move that because the longer that the effects of homelessness sit out there, it causes people to question the whole idea of serving and helping the homeless population. They're all related and it's important that we address all of that as part of one campaign.

Enhancing, I don't have a whole lot to go here, enhancing several internal IT programs. And again, these are internal programs the public may not see, but they'll benefit from. Procurement budget, some of our human services, human resources programming, business licenses. These are all programs that need to be updated and we're trying to move them forward in this next year.

Moving forward with important airport capital and operating projects. We sit in on, every two weeks we sit in on an airport meeting, planning meeting on what's going on at the airport and there's a long list and every time we go into one of these meetings, they've checked off some of the boxes. They are moving forward on our airport improvements, I think as aggressively as our staff capacity allows and our funding allows.

Okay, I put on here, complete the Soldiers Monument options analysis and bring forward next step recommendations. I just appreciate so much having that assigned to the city manager. I will do my best. We're working on it. We're working on it. We've got the consultants working on it and hopefully it won't be too terribly long that we can have something that we can talk about. It's obviously important to the community.

Continued leadership in the tourism, film community and business promotion fields. We're very aggressive in those fields and this community is doing a great job on those and it's really one of our strengths and we will continue that in this budget.

Completing long-standing high priority capital projects. This should have been number one, not number last. Shelby Street Bridge, Hems Sewer Project, Guadalupe Street Project. These are critically important that we get them done and they will get done in the next year.

Addressing Warehouse 21 tenancy issues. That includes potential for staff offices to reduce some of our current lease costs. So, that's important to us.

Continued support for an ambitious slate of Santa Fe branded special events. Our special events people are very busy and they're doing a great job.

Conduct of the November municipal election and onboarding of new elected officials. That's a real task. And so, it doesn't belong on the end of the list, but that's about where it is.

And then completion of the counselor staffing study that you just recently approved. That will also be part of this budget. So, that, believe it or not, that's a partial list. I mean, there are other things that aren't included on that list, but I think it's important to say we may have a flat budget, but we don't have a flat operation. We got plenty of stuff going on and things that I think the public would feel very happy to know to the extent that we make them aware of that. So, it's my honor to have a chance to be part of this. I appreciate what I've learned in the last few weeks from all the meetings the Finance Committee did and I did learn a lot and look forward to learning a lot more the next year. So, with that, I'll leave myself for questions.

Mayor: Thank you, Mr. City Manager. I think we'll ask the chair of the Finance Committee to make any framing comments you'd like and then we'll go to questions, comments, and input from, as has been suggested, the members of the governing body who were not on the committee itself, but may have been monitoring the hearings that went on for eight days, nine, nine days. So, Councilor, you have the floor.

Councilor: Thank you, Mayor. And I want to just start by thanking the Finance Committee. It is an incredible commitment. The committee did spend nine days reviewing every department budget. The hearings are available on YouTube. If there's a particular department or issue that you're interested in, I highly recommend looking for those videos on demand. There was a lot of information. It's very interesting. I just highly recommend it as a resource for folks. In particular, I think the city manager's presentation and our economist's presentation on the very first day help, I think everyone understand kind of the environment we're working in and some of the uncertainty that we're working in. We don't know for sure, given what's happening at the federal level, what it's going to do to the economy and what we're going to need to do as the year progresses and we track how we're doing and what's happening. And I think if you're interested in specifics on that, that first day is very important, kind of foundational information.

I want to mention that we have very healthy reserves. And I think that is, you know, we are required by state law to have a particular level and then we go beyond that. And so there is that cushion for us for dealing with unexpected things that may occur throughout the year. And as we, I think the city manager has said and has explained to the Finance Committee that, you know, we will be tracking this budget and we may have to come back and make adjustments if revenues aren't coming in as we anticipate them to or if other things occur that impact the budget and the plans that have been laid out here. So, it is a living document and I think the city manager has very clearly said we'll be continuing to look at it.

I also promised Councilor Faulkner that I would provide some information. Actually, I just got a little bit ahead of myself. I want to say that on the first day the city manager said he had a couple of slides and he said one of the things that's not in the budget at that time was an additional park crew and he did mention in his list that we actually in the course of that nine days did identify about $630, I think it's more like $68,500, something in that area, that in funding that the Finance Committee adopted amendments on Monday night to provide one-time money to help Director McDonald with an additional park crew. And as a result, we found that money in a couple different places. The biggest, and we will, so the budget book is, as it's presented to us, is a proposed budget book. Once this budget is adopted, it will be the final book and it won't say "proposed" on it anymore, but we will be making some changes in the narratives to reflect the changes that were made when we adopted the amendments to create this additional park crew. So, we did find $500,000 on page 85 from the Clean Energy Program that wasn't needed in ESD. It that is called out on that page. We will be amending that language to reflect that that is not there because we did move that money. We also found money in the city manager budget in contractual line items on page 71 talks about a couple different things that we, the contractual money would have been used for. We'll be amending that language. And then in the Public Utilities, or no, Public Works narratives on the budget, we'll be adding language to describe this additional park crew that is, that was added when the Finance Committee accepted the amendments that were made Monday night. So, yes, true, true. It's not an additional parks crew. It's contracting to help move around how they do the work. So, thank you, Councilor Cassid. But it is more, more muscle for Director McDonald and her folks to meet the needs of parks. So, very important. And let's see, I think that's all I really wanted to say. And I'm sure we'll get into some more conversation. Thank you, Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you. I think the framing is useful and the context is important. I'm going to take Councilor Faulkner's free advice. She's also going to be our unofficial timekeeper. And I'm just raise hands and everybody gets 10 minutes. We'll go around as many times as it takes before every comment or consideration is given an ample opportunity to be expressed.

Councilor: Thank you, Mayor. So, first of all, I want to thank all the staff that is here because this is on our agenda. So, thank you for being here. Beyond that, I want to thank you for the work that you put into this. So, this is the fourth time I'm having a discussion around budget and I feel like this time I've taken a moment to kind of reflect on this process. And I want to start by thanking the staff that I just acknowledged and the hours you put into assessing need and seeing where money needs to be. You are the experts on the front line. You know what is needed. You know how funds could better serve you and you deliver that message through this process. I also want to thank the Finance Committee for putting in the countless hours and having these conversations with staff, reviewing this material. I appreciate your work, colleagues. Thank you for that. And I also have to say that our process is not the best and we have a city manager who I'd like to acknowledge, I'm just full of acknowledgements today. I would also like to acknowledge who has noted that and has started having conversations with us and listening to our input on how we could make this process better. And then I want to take us to, you know, my moments of reflection on this, which is we have long conversations around budget that include agreements and disagreements and long discussions and I will say those discussions are meaningful. However, I also want to emphasize and I will take ownership.

There are things in past budgets I have not agreed with. There are things that I have made noise about and I have commented on, and then I have never worked with staff to actually change. And I take ownership for that, and I will always acknowledge my own failures, and that is one of them. I think we often get this in front of us, and we want to pick it apart, and we want to say what is wrong and what is right, and what should be adjusted and how things should be. I have noted in my experience that, one, I'm not on the front lines. And two, if I want to make that much noise about something, I better actually make the change. That change comes with advocacy and collaboration with staff, the people that are actually doing the job.

So this is a moment that I really wanted to take to appreciate the work that is in front of us, to say there are things that I have noted that I've already had conversations with colleagues about that I would want to work with staff on to adjust. I don't have the knowledge because I'm not on the front lines to say right now publicly how it should change. I don't have that insight, and I'm not going to sit here and pick it apart. I have committed myself to not do that at this time because I have acknowledged that I am not in a position to do that, especially if I don't follow up with action, and I have failed to do that so far. But I am taking an oath right now to say that there are things that I would like to see a little differently. There are things that I would like to see more funds put or emphasized so that certain work is completed that I think are root causes to some of our issues. But I will actually put the work to make that happen, and I will bring that discussion forward when I actually have action in front of the governing body.

So at this point, I just want to acknowledge the work that has been done so far. I want to thank the individuals that have put a baseline to spending for the better of our city in front of us and to say that if I'm truly passionate about changing any of this work that is in front of me right now, that I will work with all of our staff behind you here, all of our staff in front of us. I will work with you to make sure that happens. I will work with my colleagues that have the expertise and insight and alignment in some of the things I'm passionate about to make that happen. So I just truly wanted to acknowledge my faults in the budget process so far while I've been in office and to thank those who have actually done the work and who show up for the work and who work through our flaws and lack of funding, and who truly have the voice and insight to create the baseline for where we need to be. So that's all I have to say.

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Garcia, and then we'll just do it by default. You get third bite at the apple, but Councilor Garcia, you have the floor, sir.

Councilor Garcia: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I also want to acknowledge the city team for all the countless hours. This budget was not produced in a week, a month. This gets produced in many, many, many months, if not, I'm sure folks are already starting to work on the fiscal year 2027 budget. So with that, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I will say that this is my opportunity to pick apart this budget because this is my really my first opportunity to have the opportunity to speak to this in a manner where I can actually take some action. I have tried to be proactive in regards to really understanding the budget and how this budget process works because it's an evolving process. In my tenure in the council, this is my sixth budget, and it's changed every year, and so I've had to adjust and change. What's frustrating is as I've tried to understand the process, I request information, and a perfect example, critical information doesn't land on my desk until today. That's not how a transparent budget process should work amongst the entire governing body. So my hope is we can do better. I know we can do better. I know there are colleagues of mine in the council that want to change this process that way it's not solely benefiting, from my perspective, the current mayor, because it's not a benefit to staff. It's a troublesome process. It's not a benefit to City Council because we don't get a—you see it reflected in regards to the amount of amendments that have been proposed over the years, and even with the ones proposed this year that should have been included, it shouldn't have been an amendment from the onset.

So with that, let's get down to brass tacks. I heard some updated information around the $3 million in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. That is something that initially was told to us that was going to come forward in a future BAR. I just heard information that there is now going to be shifting of money from previously allocated one-time funding to cover this. So can we once and for all settle where is the $3 million coming from for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund in this proposed budget?

City Manager: Mr. Mayor, Councilor, the $3 million that is included on one of the pages on the Affordable Housing pages, that $3 million is, my understanding is, the same $3 million that was approved by the governing body in the mid-year process, where you had the excess, you had the extra general receipts tax.

Councilor Garcia: City Manager Scott, I'm going to stop you there just because I want to respect the time. The last time the City Council approved one-time funding was similar to the process we're going through right now, where last year's budget cycle there was money included, and then what the council ended up having to do was appropriate one-time funding from fiscal year 20 funding, I believe, to include in last year's budget. Now we're talking fiscal year 26 budget that the numbers don't match up. We've already approved fiscal year 24 for the fiscal year 25 budget. Fiscal year 24 one-time funds were allocated for fiscal year 25 budget.

City Manager: So that's—all I can do is answer your question, and your question was, where did the money come from? My understanding is it's the same $3 million that the governing body looked at when you did the mid-year additional funding. And if I'm wrong, I hope somebody will come up and correct that, but I believe that's—

Councilor Garcia: You can't count the money twice.

City Manager: I'm not—I'm answering your question.

Mayor: Let me give it a shot. If you recall, before Mr. Scott came on as our city manager, at the time when Mr. Randall was the interim manager, we all voted on a slate of unanticipated revenue allocations. There was a list of projects that were funded. One of them was $3 million for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. In that list of projects—

Councilor Garcia: Let me stop you there, Mr. Mayor, because I have the list right in front of me. There is nothing associated with the affordable—

Mayor: It was done as a separate vote from the list and pushed it ahead. And the reason was that our budget team anticipated the tightness of this budget and said, "Let's put the money, let's kick, let's do it from this unanticipated revenue source because we were very concerned that in order to make the payments to our staff and to be able to fund the class and comp study and an across-the-board increase in salary, we needed to use unanticipated revenue to make sure we put that $3 million." So it was done separately and previous to this budget. Mr. Scott, you and Mr. Hopkins want to—

City Manager: Yeah, I think we need to let Mr. Hopkins answer the question. I'm trying to determine whether or not I'm accurate when I say it's the same $3 million. It is. And I think he's got something he wants to add to that. And so it's important to let him do, and you understood the councilor's question.

Mr. Hopkins: I believe so. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Garcia, we're really talking about $3 million in the current year and $3 million in next year's budget, so a total of $6 million. In the current budget, we have $3 million that was allocated as a one-time stopgap that was supposed to be replaced by the Home Excise Tax that was shut down by the New Mexico Supreme Court. As you might recall, that was one-time funding allocated from FY24 GRT in excess of budgeted estimate. That's the amount that is in the current year's budget that we're in right now. The amount for next year is an amount that was set aside during the mid-year BAR process when we did all those BARs. It was not approved by you yet because we did not have a BAR at that time to bring forward because we were talking about this money is going to go into next year's budget. So a BAR in the current year wouldn't have done anything. It would have said instead of $3 million in the current year, we have $6 million in the current year, which would have made sense. So the plan was we would, during that mid-year process when we're allocating all the funding that we have, including to all the BARs that you may recall that you approved in February, we set aside $3 million out of that amount of prior year cash that we had. And in this case, it wasn't just GRT in excess of allocations. It was the amounts that we had that we had been kind of holding back on because we had several years without successful audits, and we had, we basically couldn't say for sure exactly how much cash we had in the general fund. All we could say for sure in those prior years is that we had so much in GRT actual over and above our GRT estimates. That isn't necessarily the entire picture of cash, though. But until the audits were done, we couldn't say precisely what that entire picture of cash was.

Councilor Garcia: Understandable. So for the record, we have not approved a BAR for this $3 million yet.

Mr. Hopkins: For the $3 million that you see in the budget book, no.

Councilor Garcia: Gotcha. And that is exactly what I was trying to get to because it was stated by City Manager and the Mayor that we've approved it previously, which we did not. It's a BAR that we were hoping to bring forward, but in lieu of bringing a BAR forward, it's being proposed to be added in this budget in that process. And I guess that is my concern here is that we went through the whole entire process for the fiscal year 24 one-time funding with the understanding that we had maxed out and we're putting the rest in reserves. Now all of a sudden we have an additional $3 million that have been held back for this, which leads me to the question, how much more money has been held back? And I think this is, if this, this then leads me to another question. And I've got many questions, and I apologize. I'm probably going to exceed my 10 minutes here, and I'll wait for my next round. But when the city proposes a budget, that is what we anticipate our expenditures to be. And when we do actions like this instance, and this is just one instance we're focusing on, is it actually giving true budget figures to DFA? And are we in any violation of any DFA regulations, particularly any Chapter 6 DFA regulations around, "Well, we hope to have this money," because I again, I am somebody who operates off of the data, the facts, the paper trail, and for it to come to my attention tonight that we held $3 million back for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund when we were told in February we were allocating the majority of these reserves, it's quite concerning to me. And so I guess my question is, are we in violation of any DFA requirements, Mr.

Mayor: Councilor Garcia? No, we are not. And yes, the budget does involve, over the year as it always has, things come up, things come up on our radar that didn't happen before. A good example of this is the city's elevator. We didn't anticipate when we were doing this budget, and there's actually nothing in this budget right now, to replace the elevator, but we have to somehow find $100,000 to get that elevator replaced or else we are in violation of ADA requirements.

So, there are certain things, the $3 million notwithstanding, there are certain things that always come up as an emergency. And during that mid-year process, as I was saying, that was not part of the package of bars that council approved at that time because it was not appropriate to do a bar at that time. But that amount was set aside out of the money that was available with the intention that it would be going into the FY26 budget. So, it wasn't that we were trying to hide it. It was that we were saving it until it was relevant, meaning putting it into the FY26 budget.

Gotcha. Thank you, Mr. Hopkins. And yielded floor, wait. Thank you, Council. We'll come back around, of course. Go ahead, Councilor.

Councilor: Thank you so much, Castro. Dr. Hopkins, maybe you might want to stick around for a little bit. I have a couple of questions, and I'd be happy to get these answers offline if that makes more sense. But I was looking, we'll start with the amendments. I was pretty well aware of the amendment regarding parks. Can we talk a little bit about the amendment regarding the $600,000 for, thank you so much, public campaign?

Mayor: Yes, Madam Chair, Councilor Castro. That amount was, there was a bit of a misunderstanding in the community engagement department. They did not realize that they controlled the public election campaign fund. So they did not realize that they would have to request the budget for that in their budget submittal. We try to, every year in budget, we try to say, "Hey, you guys might want to put this in there. Don't we have an election coming up?" But I mean, there are just so many moving parts in this budget. There's only so much that my brain and my staff's brains can contain before it starts to leak. And so we did not catch that.

But the nice thing is, because of the way the ordinance is written and the way we have handled this fund in the past, there is cash in that fund that was ready and waiting to be appropriated for this election. All we had to do was put it into the budget. And that's what that portion of Amendment A does, is just put it into the budget. The money is there. It's sitting there waiting to be appropriated. It just was not appropriated in our first go-around with the budget.

Councilor: And that was the answer to my next question, which was, I thought that we had those funds allocated. They are wonderful. The next question is a little bit about facilities and public works. So I'm not sure that's for you. I think City Manager, at the beginning of the hearing that I was able to participate in, there were some concerns about public works and facilities that were not funded. Among one of those is something that's a little bit important to me, which is La Familia roof. And I didn't hear that that was one of the things that was funded this year. Do we have any anticipated funding or one-time funding we could allocate to that?

Mayor: Mr. Mayor, Councilor, yeah, we need to be able to fund that. There's no question. We intend to do that project in this fiscal year. We haven't done the ICIP yet, and I haven't seen it yet. I think it may be in my in-basket, but I haven't seen it. And when we do that, we're going to, we'll bring forward our suggestion on how we do that. But that's one of those projects that we need to get done this year.

Councilor: And I did hear on that list that you mentioned the pedestrian bridges, which was on our ICIP list this year and was not funded. Is that correct?

Mayor: That's, yeah, that's correct. In fact, when I did my introduction to the Finance Committee, I said, "You know, this project's hurting us, and we need to get it done. Even if that means drawing from reserves until we can find the money somewhere else, I would suggest doing that. We need to get the project done."

Councilor: And I just want to thank Finance and Director Wheeler and yourself for acknowledging that District 1 didn't get any capital improvement money and trying to bridge that gap. Thank you so much. No further questions.

Mayor: Oh, thank you. I'm going to come back around again, but I think there may be some other folks who have a hand up as well. But I absolutely will give Councilor Garcia more time because I know he's got a long list of items. Go ahead. Councilor Gasset, did you want to weigh in?

Councilor Gasset: Yeah, thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Obviously, I don't, I don't have much. We've, we've been over this a lot. There are a couple discussion pieces that we had throughout the budget hearings that I've been kind of stewing on. One has to do with the conversation around not freezing staff, but deep refrigerating them, with, and then but utilizing vacancy savings, counting those vacancy savings, but we may potentially, you know, fill these positions. I understand a lot of these positions are these unicorn positions that have stayed vacant for a number of years. So our likelihood of having the opportunity to fill them, if history is going to be something to educate us on, is not likely. But I am curious how we are going to continue to balance this need of these vacancy savings being budgeted and these positions still being potentially filled, and what that process is going to look like to ensure that we continue to have a balanced budget. And please just help me understand that more because it is something that feels a little scary to me.

Mayor: Yeah, I'm sorry we ever called it frozen. The, I mean, the short story on this is the budget team in approaching this year's budget did as good a job as they could do of going through and we call it scrubbing the previous year's budget to make sure that we were, we weren't bringing forward projects where there wasn't really a need for the funding. We had a couple in the City Manager's office that got through that has now, have, are now being reallocated for other purposes, but for the most part, they did a very thorough job going through and trying to do that.

One of the things they noticed in that process was that there was a list of positions, more than 31, that had been vacant for more than two years. And there was an early on in the process, there was a discussion, "Well, maybe these should be cut." But we were looking at police positions, we were looking at fire positions, we're looking at transit positions and lifeguards and positions we just didn't want to take that step on. So we, we held off on doing that. Meanwhile, we did put into the budget what we call a credit for vacancies because the city always has vacancies. Right now, the presentation from HR during the budget identified 360 vacant positions out of whatever 1400, 1300 that the city has allocated in the budget. We put in vacancy credits that are far less than 300 positions worth of vacancies. So as the year goes on, unless we are able to dramatically pick up on the hiring, and it's not just hiring, it's we have people that leave. So I mean, every, we hire one and two people leave and we're actually in the hole.

So, in looking at the math on that, it's pretty clear that there's possible likelihood of having that many vacant positions to cover the vacancy credit plus the value of the 31 positions. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to cover that gap during the course of the year. It's, it's something as a City Manager I've done throughout my career. It's a matter of managing the budget that you adopt and that's part of it. So when I look at those 31, what I said to a couple of the department heads at those Finance Committee meetings was, "If it's a critical position and you have the opportunity to fill it, if you can find candidates to fill it, bring it forward to fill it. Don't wait to fill those positions." Some of them are vacant, but we've needed them. So, we're not going to stop trying to fill critical positions because they're frozen. We will very quickly unfreeze them and fill them. And then we have to satisfy ourselves. There are other vacancies or other savings or extra revenue that allows us to be able to cover that gap from other places. But right now, when I look at 360 vacancies, I see no problem being able to cover that.

Councilor Gasset: Got it. Thank you for providing that additional information. It's, I mean, it does sound like a balancing act and, and I appreciate the attention that's going to take of having to, to balance it out. And of course, the way the finance team's going to, and HR are going to have to work with you there. So, future thank yous to them.

The other one that I just want to make sure we watch was contracts. I, I brought it up with, you know, land use in particular, knowing that a number of their contracts, those projects are finally coming to fruition, but we're doing this average. And so that's something I would like to be kept up to date on is when we get, you know, some of these where we, a lot of our departments where we, you know, took an average contract. I think City Attorney's office may be another one where we had this conversation. I don't know. It was, it was a long nine days. But understanding that point when, when you know that average contracts over the last three years runs, runs out, if it does, I think that that's just really informative for us. And also understanding the differences throughout the departments and what projects are happening. And again, some of these multi-year projects, we budget for them and then, you know, there's all this lead-up and then all of a sudden we're hitting them. And so although that money may not have been utilized, it may still be needed. So that's more just a request that we are really kept up to date. I think that is, is just helpful for us as we continue to look at our, our budgeting process.

And then my very last comment that I'll make at this moment in time, because I'm sure I'm out of time, I always am, is I really, I budget hearings are, are long. They're hard. But I really appreciate them. We really have the opportunity to dig into what's happening at the city. And as we look at, I mentioned this to Councilor Marworth on our, our last budget hearing, was this process should have happened, you know, in October. Like this should be the beginning of the budget hearing process because it really is such an opportunity, especially this year. I really appreciated that I think pretty much every single department told us what was not funded. And so having those conversations as a way to kick off the budget process, I would find really beneficial. I know that there's a lot of other ideas that, that many people have and we have tools that are hopefully going to be able to help us to do this in a different way. But that those conversations are incredibly educational. They're very important. And, and I truly appreciate all the time and the energy that staff put into them. And I wish that I did have the opportunity to, to marinate on them more. I don't know why that's my word today. I think I might be hungry. But, you know, to really think about what has been said and then really how we start to put together the puzzle. We were able to do some, some, put forward some amendments for parks and again, that was really because for the last three years, this is something that Director McDonald and her team have been building.

It's very possible that there are other things like that that I am just unaware of. But with a different budget process, with these types of really in-depth, informative conversations at the beginning, we can start to really have a much more collaborative conversation about the trade-offs that we inevitably would have to make in our budgeting process. So, that's just a comment.

Mayor: If I could make, Mr. Mayor. Yes. Go ahead, Mr. City Manager.

City Manager: Just a couple quick comments on that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. The budget process should start as early as October. It gets tricky in election years, but it's a process that really does need more than just after February 1. It just doesn't work very well that way.

And I will tell you, and I'm not sure there's a single person in the room who believes this other than me, but I couldn't be true to myself if I didn't say it. I don't believe that it's helpful to do budget committees that aren't the entire set of counselors. I honestly believe from all my years of experience that when you do this kind of budget review, it should be all eight counselors. It's the mayor's budget, but it should be all eight counselors that are evaluating it and going through the process together. I'm horrified when I get to an end of a process and I have council members say that we weren't able to satisfy their needs to do the budget. That's everything I don't stand for in doing this kind of work. So, I hope that you will take a very serious look at how we go forward doing this. Absolutely. Starting early, starting with goal setting, and moving on through the process.

And we are dedicated to trying to get you the information you need. And when it comes to the contracts, I hope we spend more time. I know Mr. Garcia's got interest in that because he's been asking for that. And sir, I would never withhold information from you to hold to the last minute on purpose. I would never do that and haven't done it here. And I look forward to doing that scrutiny that you very properly are asking for. It's a very good question. The same question about looking at the contracts to see if there's funding that can be gleaned for other purposes. Absolutely, we should do that. That's part of the process.

Mayor: Councilor, did you want to go forward? We've got every hand up. Is it up at this point?

Councilor: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, first just a few comments. As it's been stated, we who sit on the Finance Committee have spent a lot of time listening to each department. And I'm very appreciative of the dialogue between each of the Finance Committee members. And therefore, tonight, to give three counselors just tonight and 10 minutes is really, I don't get just 10 minutes. No, I and I get that. I think just in fairness, they could be here all night and I'd be okay with that. I don't think that's appropriate because at this point, the really most important part of this is to put forth a budget that goes to the state. We're in compliance.

And I am very appreciative of the comments from not only the City Manager, but from some discussion I've had with colleagues here in regards to how do we make this a more inclusive process for governing body members for sure. And so, not that again, I think it's very appropriate for people to be able to ask their questions tonight if need be. It's also appropriate that if there are concerns going forward, it's well within their right to work with departments and possibly request bars or things of that nature. Similar to the previous presentation, where does the money, where does the water come from? Where does the money come from? And I know that there's uncertainty in the markets right now, or what is GRT going to do and things of that nature. I look at things from a very business perspective where our income is, whether it's GRT or grants or funding from the state or fees from our enterprise funds. I think a lot of those questions I asked during some of the departments when they were here.

And so I think that I would just ask a question in regards to, and then maybe a request for future, because and we will have time in the to discuss these amendments, but we found money in previous budgets, which were 2023 and 2024, to move into the parks deal. And so how much more money out there is there in previous budgets that, and I think that would be something that I would like to know more about in the future. Because we got this big bank account, which is the general fund, and then we have where we move money from this account to that account. And I, for us to make amendments tonight, especially from three counselors who didn't sit on Finance, to try to get this changed, it took for these last two amendments, we had it proposed on the final day of Finance, and they said it could be ready in a couple hours, and yet it took until the following Tuesday. And we were just notified of the actual changes for the amendment half hour before the Finance Committee. So, I could see how difficult this would be to change things around at this point in the game. And therefore, I think that it's very important that we all work on what kind of process do we want going forward with budgets. And I think hopefully with your leadership, Mr. City Manager, that that will come to fruition. So, I don't know if you want to respond to that.

City Manager: Mr. Mayor, Councilor, yeah, I agree that the process is laborious, and not one that I've seen before. And I think it's appropriate to talk about what changes could be made, but then you also have to put it in the context of New Mexico state law and things that I'm not an expert on. So, I respect the fact that there that we need a broader table than just my opinion on how to go forward, but I think certainly we need to find ways to make that work better than it has so far. And I think we can thank, thank you.

Councilor: Thank you. And then the last, last thing, I will, I did ask questions over the $3 million in the affordable, in affordable housing trust fund. And I think it's an appropriate question to ask in regards to, was it, was last, this current year's budget, was the money that we approved, did it go into this year's budget or is that, and so I, I think I got that clarified by, by Mr. Hopkins, and I, and again, I think that's appropriate and the answers were, were true. So, I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Council Mayor Worthy, you want to have the floor for 10 minutes?

Councilor Worthy: Yes. Thank you, Mayor. So, just a couple of things. Process. Completely agree. I've been wanting to have a different process for a long time. We haven't been able to do that because we didn't have audited numbers. We didn't have the Questica software, which we are now getting. I have spoken with Rod Gold, who is working with the city about getting ideas about how to make this process different. And I think start earlier, and I look forward to doing some work on that in the remaining year.

I want to be clear that the money that was moved, that was the amendments that the Finance Committee adopted on Monday night to add money to help parks, is not money from previous budgets. It is money that is in this budget that we are moving from two different, from ESD and from the City Manager's office, and we're moving it over to Public Utilities so it can be used for parks. So I think that's really important.

I want to also, the length of time to get the amendments. We did, we were told on the last day of the budget hearings that it would take a couple of hours to get the amendments. The, the committee having met, dedicating a lot of time over the past eight days, I said there's no way we're going to sit around and wait for amendments for two hours. And so when we said we'd adopt the amendments and consider them on Monday night, they then became less of a priority. So because there was a whole week to get them done. So, and you know, our staffs have many, many things coming at them. And so it's, it's a time management thing. When the, when the committee said we'll take it up Monday night, then, you know, whatever other urgent thing was on staff's list to do that day, you know, that thing got moved off.

I want to go back to the affordable housing trust fund. I want to point out that on February 14th, and I, the governing body was given a memo by from Director Oster. "Good evening, counselors. Please find attached a memorandum which provides an overview of the city's FY24 unanticipated GRT revenue and proposed budget amendment resolutions. The proposed bars will be on council committee agendas beginning next week." And attached to that February 14th email from Director Oster was this memo. And it did say that $3 million will be proposed to allocate to the affordable housing trust fund in lieu of the anticipated funding from the excise tax on high-end home sales. Now, we thought that we would have that excise tax in place. We didn't. It's still in the courts and hopefully there'll be some resolution so we'll know whether we can count on that money in future years or not.

But this, so I think I too was confused about whether we had already approved it or not. I thought we had because of this memo that said that the bars were coming through and we get so many bars. I thought maybe I had just missed it. And so I asked the same question that's being asked by my colleague, when did we approve the $3 million for the affordable housing trust fund out of the FY24 unanticipated, thank you, unanticipated GRT? And the, the answer that came back was, you can't do a bar for a budget you don't have yet, is my understanding. So because there is no FY26 budget yet, there's no budget adjustment that can be made because we don't have that budget yet. And so that it was, and I wish, and I said to staff, I would have liked to have known that sooner because I had just assumed that in all the budget adjustment requests that we had done, we had done this one. So it turns out, and if you go to page 25, we discovered this in the court, in a conversation about this in the course of the budget hearings. If you go to page 25, in the Affordable Housing Department's expenditure summary, if you go to transfers to other funds, you will find in the proposed budget 2025-2026, the $3 million that is coming out of the unanticipated GRT from FY24. So, there has been a little confusion about that. I'm glad we can clear it up.

And then it's so that money will be in front of the Community Development Commission to award, award grants based on an RFP that I hope will be issued fairly soon. And that RFP is going to work more deliberately to ask for proposals to get actual units built with that money. And I think it's an important pivot for the city, especially if we ever get the excise tax money. If that clears the litigation hurdles and we're actually able to bring in the excise tax money, I think it will be important that we start to do a request that asks for units to be built with this money. So, we're, we're starting to make that, that pivot in anticipation of what we hope will be revenue from the excise tax if we're allowed to use it. And so, I again, I, I appreciate the opportunity to clarify and I, I appreciate Mr.

Hopkins. I had forgotten that the $3 million that's in this budget, the FY25 budget, was from unanticipated revenue from the budget year before. So, again, all this stuff is complicated, and it's hard to stay on top of. I'm glad to have the opportunity for us all to talk about it and to be clear about what we're doing. I would just argue that with Mr. Hopkins' choice of words about holding back, he didn't hold it back. There wasn't a budget adjustment request to be done. So that $3 million is sitting there from the unanticipated FY24, and we need to approve it. The governing body needs to say, "Yeah, we want to spend that $3 million on the affordable housing trust fund," which has historically been a priority for this council. It's been an initiative that the Mayor, in his budgets over the last, I don't know, three, four years, has made a priority and a funding request. That's all I have.

Mayor: Thank you.

Councilor Faulkner: Did you want to have a chance to weigh in? Thank you. So, last year I was a baby councilor, and I feel like this year I am an adolescent councilor, so I'm going to be a little precocious. A couple of things: I understand the concerns of all of my colleagues, but I really feel like the concerns that we're bringing up, that are detailed concerns, are reflective of symptoms of a bigger problem. The bigger problem is that our process for doing the budget is not the best process. I feel like if departments could report quarterly so that the council would have an understanding of what their wish list is, what their goals are. I know that one thing that I saw, and I'm not saying this is patently true, I'm just saying it's an observation that I made, is that directors of departments didn't even know what had been cut in their budgets, what the compromises were made. So when we would ask directors questions, they'd be like, "I don't know." So I do feel like this is one of the complications: our budget process has not been very transparent. There are lots of reasons why that's happening, but I do feel like unless we focus on making the budget process longer and making it more transparent, then we will continue to disagree or agree on these detail items. Because as councilors, we don't see what's in the budget until we get the budget book. The budget book has six items per department, and there's no way for us to do our job pertaining to checks and balances. The executive may promulgate the budget, but the council's job is to be checks and balances on what the executive branch is doing. That's the healthiest way to run a governmental entity.

So I feel like we can waste a lot of time back and forth on these kind of rabbit holes about the details, about what we're like, "This one program didn't get this, and this one didn't get this." To me, there's no point in doing that. We have to address the disease, which is that our budget process is flawed, and I don't think that needs to be a blame game. I think it is a product of bureaucracy, and for that reason, we need to step back and look at it and how we can make it better. I do think that departments, and I've been fighting for this since I got elected, departments should report quarterly because I found that a lot of what's happening with our budget hearings is there were some questions around the budget, but there were a lot of questions around what departments were doing, what their goals were, what they plan to do in the future. I do have empathy for my colleagues who do not sit on the finance committee because they don't have the benefit of hearing a billion hours of testimony from staff.

So my goal, moving forward, is there are things that are in this budget that I don't agree with. We are not going to solve those things tonight. But what we can do is we as a council can look at things that we think might need to be adjusted, and in the next several months, adjust those items. We have the power to do that as a council. We should be using that power, and rather than debating over the details, we need to be looking at those details and saying, "Okay, how do we now adjust the budget to match what we think is the best idea now that we have all the information on hand?"

That being said, I do want to thank staff. I know that this year when we requested information as members of the finance committee, we got the information and then some. It was a valuable lesson because I, for myself, I saw what I wanted to see, but I also saw that there are some items that I'm like, "This is not in my pay grade," in the sense that it's like, "I don't need to know a contract for a small amount of dollars for some kind of office supplies." That's not something that I would focus on unless it was an amount that superseded my tolerance for things that I trust staff to do. I do want to say that I do admire the staff for the work they put in because we sat as a committee and we met for hours and hours and hours, but we always had a homework assignment for the committee, and then they would have to go and produce the homework assignment, and so they were working harder than we were working, in my opinion. So I want to thank staff.

The other thing is, I think there's a little bit of an injustice happening in that Councilors Castro and Lindell fought for their district, and they did get money for a pedestrian bridge from the legislature. I don't want their constituents to walk away from the situation feeling like their councilors didn't do their job and didn't fight for their district. They fought for their district, and they got money for their district for the pedestrian bridge, and I just don't want their constituents feeling like their councilors didn't do their job. They did do their job. So that's all I have for now.

Mayor: Thank you. Let me just see, I don't know if Councilor Lindell has anything she'd like to add or not, but I do know that there's a hand up, and also I know Councilor Garcia has reserved more questions for the next go-round, and we'll just keep going. Go ahead, Councilor Lindell.

Councilor Lindell: Thank you. Staff, you're here again. Hopefully, it won't be as long as it was the last time you were here for the budget. You did a good job with this. Were we here for nine days? Chairman Romero Worth, was it nine days? Nine, nine, nine days. Here's the thing: any councilor, and it's happened in the past, any councilor is welcome to come to the budget hearings. Correct. The way that I've always seen that process work for 12 years is if you do not sit on the finance committee and you would like to come and give your nine days to the city, your constituents, and to work on this budget, you are welcome to be in this room with us. We made an obligation upfront to be on the finance committee, make that commitment, and follow through on it. Every councilor is welcome to be in the room. The way I've seen it done in the past is the finance committee takes the priority of being given the opportunity to ask questions first, and then any councilor that is not on the finance committee is offered the floor to ask questions. So it's not an exclusive club. Everyone is welcome. Is it grueling? Yeah, it's kind of grueling. Is it hard for staff? Yeah, I think it's probably hard for staff. Everybody did a good job. So, the idea that you don't get a bite at this apple isn't really exactly the case. I had nine days to gnaw on this apple. It's down to the core. Seeds are left. So I pretty much have a good feeling about this budget. Will there be changes to it? Yeah, there will be changes to it. That's a given. Everybody doesn't love everything that's in this budget. Departments don't love everything that's in this budget. But, you know, the overriding problem is that we have limited resources. That's the deal, folks. We have this pot of money, and we have to do the very best that we can with it in our best judgment. Do things change? They do. Will they change from now to 90 days from now? Perhaps. So, it's a fluid document. It's a fluid budget, and I am really grateful to certainly Chair Romero Worth and the rest of the committee. Perry, you've done a terrific job as the chairman of the finance committee. I'm deeply grateful. That's all I have.

Mayor: Thank you. I think Councilor Castro, you held up a hand, and then Councilor Garcia, we'll go to you, sir.

Councilor Castro: Honestly, just to echo my colleague, the last two years I have sat in on a few of these hearings, and I've always felt welcome. So, thank you, Chair, for offering me the opportunity to ask questions. It is fortunate that I get the opportunity also to watch them on YouTube and see things in post and also email questions to directors. So I think that it is a tedious process. I think it would be beneficial for all of us to be included, but there are opportunities. So thank you so much.

Mayor: Thank you for weighing in. Councilor Garcia, back to you, sir.

Councilor Garcia: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I guess I'll follow up on those comments, and you know, yes, we don't sit on the finance committee, but the big thing is those that don't sit on finance don't have any authority to make any changes, and I think that is the most frustrating part is we sit in the meeting and we get asked questions, but we can't make changes. So, the practice I've taken over the last couple years is I'll watch them on YouTube. I've watched every single minute of these hearings, and the City Manager can attest because I've reached out to him with many, many questions. I think the frustrating thing is, as mentioned before, is that by the time it gets to this moment here, the cake is baked. Whether folks want to believe that or not, that's how I feel is that at this moment, it's so hard to bring forward any proposed changes. You're fighting an uphill battle on many fronts. Right? Council at the committee level takes three folks to pass an amendment. The council level, it takes five. That's an uphill battle right there. So I think again, we can get into that process, which hopefully we change, but as I mentioned, I got many, many questions still. One thing we heard from union folks on the first day was that, especially in particular ASME, is that they wanted money for working conditions within the trash trucks. Is that going to happen?

City Manager: Mr. Mayor, Councilor, during the finance committee's discussion, the question was asked of the fleet staff, and they described what they're doing to meet that condition. And that in fact, there are air conditioning units in the trucks, but they need supplemental fans of some sort to really solve the problem, and that they are actively in the process of doing that.

Councilor Garcia: Gotcha. Perfect. I just wanted to make sure our union folks heard that loud and clear that we're working to meet their team's needs.

City Manager: If they haven't, we'll make sure they hear it.

Councilor Garcia: Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you, City Manager. Public safety, major issue in our community right now. Judge Chidum, sorry to put you on the spot, but I see you in the audience. I got a question for you. So, Judge, you play a very critical role in our community in regards to ensuring that offenders are kept off the streets, and you have all the tools as the judge to ensure public safety is a priority. Again, this is my opinion. I don't believe this current budget process really benefited you and your team in regards to really getting you the resources you need to carry out your job efficiently and effectively. How can we do better to support you? Because the way I look at it is you're an equal part of this government. You've got the executive, you've got us as a legislative, you're the judiciary.

How can we support you to ensure that you are working to keep our streets safe?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, I'll echo what some of you have already said about the process. During my paying attention, being vigilant about my budget, I had discovered, like some of the directors had discovered, that certain things were cut. I did bring that to the attention of Mr. Mayor, Manager, and that has been promised that it would be okay.

And so, I guess City Manager Scott, how are we going to ensure that Judge Chidam's needs are met? Oh, I keep turning it off.

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, we did make the guarantee to the judge that we would reinstate funds in his budget, and we will bring back a BAR. I'm still learning how to use these terminologies that we use here. We will bring that money in along with a couple of other places where we've cut further than we need to cut. There is some funding available before you cut into the emergency reserve, and so we'll use those fairly small amounts of money. I think we're talking about a couple hundred thousand total that we should be able to bring forward to cover the hundred thousand that he was missing in a couple of other places.

And thank you, Mr. Scott. I'm just quite disappointed that it was cut in the first place, and I'm glad we're taking the actions to remedy the situation.

Thank you, Judge Chen. It was cut out of enthusiasm to do right by the city and to cut contract money that didn't appear was necessary because the work had been done the year before. What the team didn't understand was that that money had actually been borrowed the year before and that the judge had been gracious enough to allow other money to be used a year ago, and that he was counting on this funding to be in the budget this year. As soon as that was brought forward, we promised to make the okay.

Thank you, Mr. Scott. And on the topic of BARs, I don't know, and the city attorney stepped out. I don't know who would be the appropriate person to answer this. Maybe I'll come back to this question when she comes back because it's probably best for her or maybe finance staff. Can city councilors bring forward BARs? Because ultimately, we're talking about looking and revisiting and reworking the budget. If there's a priority that Councilor Bills was not met with this current version of the budget, how would a councilor go and move forward to propose a BAR?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Garcia, I think that the legal issue of a councilor actually bringing forward a BAR, I think that would be something that Miss McSherry would have to answer. The best answer I can give with the knowledge that I have would be for the councilor to go to the department in question and say, "Can you bring this BAR forward through its normal process?" And then we would entertain it like we would any other BAR.

Right. And I thank you for that, Andy, for that update. But I think it really gets into a predicament where councilors can't really direct staff. We can direct the city manager. And then it gets into the much bigger predicament where what if a BAR is proposing to pull money from one department to move it to another? You might not have a staff that's willing to bring forward the BAR. So, I guess City Attorney McSherry, the question I've got is, can a councilor bring forward a BAR? And for the public that's not aware of terminology, BARs are budgeted amendment resolutions. Councilors, generally the mayor with the administration brings forward BARs. So, City Council of the budget, city councilors have no authority to bring forward a BAR. I don't think the charter includes that authority. No.

Okay. Just wanted to get that for the record. As we're looking forward and potentially anticipating cuts for federal funding, what plans are being made to supplement any loss of federal funding?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Garcia, at this point, mostly prayer. There's really, we don't really have a lot of options when it comes to, let's say that, for example, one of the scenarios that we've gamed out a little bit is what if we had an entire cut off of all FTA funding to transit? The city does not have a pot of funding to replace that. So the only real option would be a severe cutback in service or a substantial revenue increase. Just not to spend too much time on my soapbox here, but it was something like 10 years ago, I did an analysis of GRT and property tax in the state. We actually have, at that time, I don't know if it's changed, but it probably hasn't changed that much. We are second to TA in two respects as a municipality in the state of New Mexico. We have the second highest GRT in the state after Talos, or at least we did 10 years ago. We have the second lowest property tax in the state after TAL. We've been discussing in discussions with the senior city staff about ways that we can optimize our revenue means. There are some other things that we can do, but really there's a reason why municipalities throughout the country, almost all of them, rely on property tax rather than GRT. It's two reasons. And I understand that we are the city different. We have a little bit different situation here. But one, the nicest thing for me as a finance person is property tax tends to look like this when you graph it out. GRT tends to look like this when you graph it out. So from a finance perspective, this is much better than this. Also, generally property tax tends to be much more progressive, meaning that it hits the wealthy harder than it does the lower income people. The problem is the property tax bill comes all at once. The GRT is paid a little bit over time. So people tend to get a lot more up in arms about a property tax increase than they do a GRT, even though the GRT is actually hitting them harder.

Thank you, Mr. Opsson. I do, sorry for cutting you off, but I've got limited time, so I want to quickly move through. But given that we don't have plans in place, what I would like City Manager Scott for us to move forward with is a study session. That way the entire governing body can participate in this process on the topic of planning for any supplemental federal funding loss. So if we can get that on our calendar ASAP, that way we can begin to plan accordingly. I mean, with the way that things are happening at the federal level, typically, you know, you see things happening on a maybe weekly, maybe monthly basis. This is happening on a daily basis, and things can quickly change. And I want us as a government to make sure we're planning and prepared for that.

Mr. Mayor, Councilors, absolutely, we definitely need to keep our eye on this very closely. That's why when we started the budget process, I said it's not going to be mid-year before we have to come back and rethink some of the issues in the budget. I can assure you when the day came that we heard that America funding might be cut back, we immediately started working on what's plan B to cover those programs. We had several programs running that had impacts on especially on seniors throughout the community. We immediately got hold of the state, and we worked with the state on what potential there was going to be at the state level for them to find program, find funding that would continue to supplement that. And we started working on other opportunities, grants and/or other funding shifts that would allow us to keep that funding going. Obviously, it'll be much worse if we get one that cuts the entire transit system, but we're not anticipating that, but we will immediately work on plan B if any of those contingencies come up. So, we'll be happy to talk further about...

Thank you, Mr. Scott. I really appreciate that. Last question I've got is for Finance Director Oster. So, Director Oster, thank you. For the last couple years, we've relied on outside support to get our audit work done, whether it's the external auditors, which is always going to be contracted, but the internal support we've used to get the work done for the actual audit to be submitted. Are there resources in this budget to begin to transition away from contract support and to begin to build that sustainable infrastructure of staff employees that will support the completion of upcoming fiscal year audits?

Mr. Mayor and Councilors, thank you, Councilor Garcia, for that question. Yes, the Finance Department budget as proposed for FY26 reflects continued investment in city employees working in the Finance Department and reduced reliance on contract resources.

Okay, great. I just want to make sure that that's in the budget. With that, thank you, Director Oster, for leading this effort. This is a long, grueling process. There are some changes that I would like to see be made to this budget. In particular, when we're talking the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, I'm glad that there's the appetite from the governing body to dedicate the resources to build homes and not grant it out to another means. And so, with that being said, I would like to see all $3 million go towards supporting the development of housing at the Midtown campus. The Parks team, that should be bringing on full-time staff. I understand the quick fix of hiring a contractor, but that's a band-aid. Our parks aren't going anywhere. Our parks are only going to grow and grow, and I'm quite disappointed that we didn't, we didn't figure out a way to fund this in a sustainable manner. And that's why I'd been reaching out to City Manager Scott to figure out where can we ultimately shift resources from. And I think it could be done. I think we really need to bring in city staff to bring our parks because if we look at the numbers, I mean, and this is just an example of where we have come as a city government. If you look at the number of employees that were on board in 2018, you had 757 AFS employees. That's dropped down to 631. That's a loss of 126 union employees. How many of those employees were parks workers? You look at police, we're down 15 officers from where we were in 2018. But you know what's up? Management. We've got more managers than we had in 2018. I think that's the wrong direction we as a government need to be heading in. We need to be working in a direction where we're building up a robust workforce that is going to ultimately provide the day-to-day basic city services that residents not only are asking for, but they deserve it. I mean, it was mentioned during the committee hearing that the level of service being provided to our parks is a C level of service. Director McDonald, I'm going to ask for future budgets, put in A+ money because that's what residents are paying for in their taxes, A+ service to their parks. As we move forward, I'm a bit concerned on how we can actually move this given the council does not have authority for budget amendment resolutions, but I hope that we can work in collaboration with the city manager to make that happen. So, thank you, City Manager Scott. Thank you, Director Oster, and thank you to all the city employees that showed up here tonight. Thank you. You guys are what makes the city go around.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. We have a couple more hands up. I'll take it just in the order people have spoken up. Councilor Faulkner, go ahead.

So, I do have a question. Whereas we can't do BARs, is there anything stopping the council from doing a resolution that directs the city manager to take action where the budget is concerned?

Councilors, the city manager is generally taking direction from the mayor's budgetary authority when he brings the BARs, but this wouldn't be a BAR. What wouldn't be a BAR? Well, so we wouldn't technically be doing a BAR. What we would be doing is we would say, for this program, we direct the city manager to find funding and move it into this program. And it sounds like a BAR, but it wouldn't technically. I'm asking the question, we don't do budgetary things by resolution, not because we can't, but because it's a practice that we have that we do not. Is there anything prohibiting the council from making adjustments to the budget outside of the BAR process?

Mayor: Counselors, it's the charter authority. There's not budgetary authority for the counselors in the charter. What has happened previously is asking the city manager to work with the mayor to consider certain budget interests of the council. I think that's what happened in a couple resolutions this year. So that has happened. You can ask, you can direct the city manager to identify certain things as council priorities or as governing body priorities in the budget process. You can certainly do that. It's just the actual adjustment itself, which is essentially the budget authority. Just to be reiterative, there is no process by which the governing body outside of the executive branch can have any impact on the budget.

Mayor: Councilor Faulkner, the charter gives the mayor budget authority and does not give counselors budget authority. So, we do not have the ability to amend the budget.

Member: Counselors, I think you could amend a budget adjustment or the budget. Yes.

So, what's the process for that? So, there's been a couple amendments during this budget adoption. I think some BARs have been reduced previously, so it has to be within the scope of what's being proposed, not on an agenda. Okay. I'll pick this up off. Yeah, we can work on this later. Other comments, Councilor Cassid.

Councilor Cassid: Thank you, Mayor. I did actually want to go back to the conversation around the amendments for parks because Councilor Garcia, we had the same concerns in finance around, okay, fine, this is a band-aid. How do we make this a permanent? And Director McDonald, I'm probably going to need your help. So, if you don't mind coming over to the podium, I'd appreciate it. One, so part of those dollars actually are recurring dollars. So that is good to know. The money that's coming out of the city manager's office, those are not one-time. Those are recurring. But we did talk about some of the other complications around being able to add new staff, that it's actually not just funding for staff. We have issues with space and equipment. So it is a very robust conversation of how we add on an additional crew. But what Director McDonald, I'll let you speak to this more, is this discussion of this is a good pilot program. And we talked about really wanting to make sure that the metrics that we're measuring so that when we do come back to the budget next year, we're able to take a look at how this program worked, did it get us what we wanted, or is there something else we need to consider? So, Director McDonald, you spoke to it much more eloquently than I ever could. So, please go right ahead.

Director McDonald: Mayors, City Councilors, yes, this is proposed as a pilot project. What we're talking about is taking internal staff who have the skills and knowledge to address issues that come up in the parks and move them to be a team that can address kind of last-minute type of issues that take our regular crews off what they're supposed to do and kind of fill in and get to these complaints more quickly. So, we have a number of ways that we're going to track this. Number one will be the CRM when they come in, like how quickly we get them done. We do that already, but we're also doing a work order system that we hope will be coming online next year. So, that will also help us track it in real time, which will be helpful to us as well. And we're just going to be looking very closely at all of the work that's being done. Our operations manager, Nathan Sass, who is here, also meets with his crew weekly. He goes on ride-alongs with them, makes sure that we're on track, that improvements are happening, and that's been going on since he just started. He does a checklist so that every week we get a checklist, and the work order system hopefully will replace the checklist, but we have a checklist, and we see how much work's being done, where it's being done. We know when problems are coming up. So, it's kind of a give and take on a weekly basis. And then on a quarterly basis, we're looking at the parks to say, how do you superintendent grade your own work? And then the operations manager, Nathan, and I also look at those same parks, and we look at where do we meet and where don't we meet so that we can improve our service. So, this is something that we're starting to try out. It's working great. And I think this pilot project's going to really help us get to the other side of that because one of the things that we see a lot of is that as the CRMs come in, we have to pull people off and send them somewhere else. And that's very disruptive when you're trying to improve the overall conditions of the park. So, this is certain areas that we're going to focus on. It won't be able to be everything, but we're going to try to take the higher priority things such as weeds that are public safety, weeds that are multiplying incredibly because of the weather and the microclimate that they're in, graffiti, things that really kind of disrupt. We're really going to try to have this troubleshooting proactive approach to see if we can address those concerns. And then we are going to use contracts for where this crew was coming from. So, this is our internal median crew, and this money will get us that coverage because we couldn't really move that crew without having that coverage. And you're exactly right, Councilor, one of the things that we're hitting up against, which many people are, is our inability to house people, to provide parking. There's growth issues that we have, and we're busting at the seams in our facility, and so that makes it very challenging when you have the need for people. Now, crews are a little different because most crews work out of their units a lot of the time, but as we want to be more accountable, we have to have tablets, and we are expecting reports, and so we need these folks to be able to do their job. So, that's where we kind of have some conflicts with how we grow, but we want to grow, and we know we need to grow, and I think everybody here knows that as these new housing developments come on, we're going to have to step up. We're going to have to make sure that we can take care of those parks as the MRC comes on, as Swan Park, the splash pad, all these things that we have in the works, which I'm looking forward to coming to you guys over the next couple months to talk about our capital projects. But we have new things coming, which are so exciting, but we do have to really look at how are we growing and can we accomplish that work.

Councilor Cassid: Yeah, thank you so much, Director McDonald. I really did appreciate it. You know, and again, we had the same conversation in the finance committee about, you know, we understand that this is plugging a hole for now, but it's not fixing the problem. But that was really illuminating for me. And again, this goes back to, you know, these conversations need to start happening in October because there are all these different aspects that come into growing our staff. It is actually, it's not just funding for staff. We have issues with space. We have other conversations going on about that, but that interconnection of those two things was really helpful for me in how we look at this big picture and to speak to what everyone has already said is that this is why this process needs to start so much earlier. So thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you.

Councilor Marworth: You have a hand up. I don't know if there's anybody here who can answer this. It might be the city attorney. It might be Director Oster. I'm just a little concerned about the tax policy lesson that we got. While I think it's generally true that property taxes are more stable, more, don't have the fluctuations of gross receipts taxes, I don't want to leave the impression that we at the city level, at the municipal level, get to make those calls. We are given our taxing authority, I believe, from the legislature. And the amount of property tax that we receive is not determined by us. We don't get to make that trade-off and say, you know, we want to have more property tax. That's not happening on this. And I just, I don't want there to be any confusion. Wait one second.

Mayor: Counselors, Director Oster and I are looking at each other. I think you do have some authority up to a certain point, which is why up on gross receipts tax on both.

Councilor Marworth: Right. And I have, well, and maybe this is something we need to take up. Yeah, maybe this is something we need to take up at the finance committee. Like there, so we do the gross receipts tax. We are given certain increments that we can impose. And the governing body has the ability to impose certain increments, and certain increments have to be, have to go to the voters for approval. We have not used the full amount that the legislature has given us in terms of the amount of gross receipts tax we can charge. Now, I'm less familiar with the property tax piece. I thought that that was preordained by the legislature. And so if we can't answer that question tonight, it's probably something that's worth making a presentation at the finance committee in the future just so we have a better understanding of our revenues and our ability to make changes. And it's probably a deeper conversation, but just wanted to see. I think what I think what I said about gross receipts tax is correct. I'm less familiar with the property tax.

City Attorney: Mr. Mayor and councilors, I can address the gross receipts tax side of that. So, I agree with what Councilor Romero said. The legislature has enacted statutes around local option gross receipts tax, and the taxation and revenue department has actually produced a publication. It's FYI M121 specifically addressing municipal gross receipts tax local option. There was a piece of legislation that passed in 2019 that made significant changes to municipal local option gross receipts tax to allow greater flexibility for what local option can be used for. And it is accurate that the City of Santa Fe has not enacted the full amount of local option gross receipts tax that is allowed under statute. There is a portion remaining that could be enacted by ordinance through the council's action, and then there is an additional portion that would require a general election.

Councilor Marworth: Okay. Thanks. And I can pursue the property tax piece offline because that's something I'm not familiar with, but I don't think, I think that's also set by the legislature. But what's, I agree with you that it's worth a deep dive at a minimum at finance, and maybe the entire governing body would benefit from this kind of a, that's true too, exercise because I do think the one of the through lines that we've explored tonight is we have a very, very high series of goals and objectives for the city's performance.

We focused in this budget and the one last year on primarily making sure that we are competitive in the pay area with class and comp and across-the-board pay increases, and then in the course of the year with retention incentives. But we also have obviously great needs for ongoing investments that have to find revenue. Councilor Lindell mentioned the limited reality of our resource base. Councilor Garcia and I talked yesterday about this very subject when we had a one-on-one conversation that there really comes a day when the expanding needs and the limited means intersect. How we address that is going to be a very significant conversation around finance policy. So, thank you, Director Oster. Any other comments at this time? I've been reserving my mind to go last, but if everybody's pretty well satisfied, I'll ask one more question, Councilor.

Yeah, just a quick question, just because it came up during finance on Monday, and it was just brought up again around the lack of capacity to house parks members. It's my recollection we used to have a very, very, very robust team of parks staff. So now for us to have a concern around capacity of housing folks when our team is much smaller is quite concerning to me. So why is it that we were able to, and I don't know who, maybe Director McDonald, I believe maybe the team was a bit bigger before she took over the helm, but why is it that we had the capacity to manage over a hundred folks and now it's becoming troublesome to do so?

Mayor, Councilor, that's a good question. This is before my time when we had more folks. I believe that as other departments have grown, we've lost space at Siler Yard where we're housed. So there's all this equipment that we have to fit into places, and it's very difficult. We just don't have places to grow into. So all I can really say is that I believe that the other divisions have grown too, and we have reduced space. There's just not enough space at Siler Yard for us. Many of our crews need to be in one location, otherwise they're driving all over the place. So we do have some sub-areas we have grown into parks where we can park vehicles and equipment and things like that. But I think that's the best answer that I have. Also, I think probably when we had it before, maybe it was people just jumping in trucks. You have different amounts or types of work that's going on. So I'm not sure though, because it's before my time. I don't know how they managed it at that time.

Okay. Thank you, Director McDonald. Just one recommendation or comment is I don't want us to have lack of space to be the reason why we can't build a robust team that supports our parks. We have plenty of city space, whether it's facilities or unoccupied land, and we can work to accommodate that need. Again, I think that's our responsibility. So thank you, Director McDonald.

Thank you, sir. I just wanted to add a few comments of my own. I've been very impressed by the dialogue and the questions and the conversation about both process and priorities. To the public's knowledge, members of the City Council and I meet one-on-one with regularly scheduled meetings. If there are suggestions and recommendations in the buildup of the budget or in the adjustment to the budget, I'm always open to those. I know Councilor Faulkner and I have talked about the exact idea that she brought up tonight about some sort of a matrixed approach to updating progress reports by theme or by category, not just by department, but by policy area. I think the idea that we have a very interesting form of city government, it's a hybrid. In most city governments, the mayor would not sit as a member as I am tonight. I'd be off somewhere else and you all would be having a meeting of the council without me. We have an interesting hybrid structure where the mayor sits on the governing body. I think the one-on-one conversations that I have had, not just in the buildup to this budget, but in the suggestions for use of unanticipated revenue where people on the council and I talked about priorities and suggestions, is really how we try to do business so that there's a collaborative effort to address community needs, district needs, priorities, and ways to really be clear for the public that we're all on the same team, that this is a unified effort to make every day better in the lives of people in Santa Fe.

A couple of things do rise to the surface for future consideration as well as a process improvement. I'm very impressed that the subject came up tonight about our future revenues. We have not exercised that authority to increase the GRT for very obvious reasons. It's an impact that our residents have to contend with. A lot of what we get in the way of GRT, of course, is driven by the wonderful work that our tourism department does to bring visitors here, 3 million plus, and their contribution to our budget is something we shouldn't ignore. But if there are new revenue streams or other ways to elevate the amount of money that's available to fund the priorities of the governing body and of our department heads and of our employees, I think we are rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely have to explore all of those.

I raised several times, and I noted that the county just adopted their budget unanimously. I think it's about a $347 million budget. Didn't hear much about the dialogue that went on, but they have to do the same thing we have to do, which is come up with policies and priorities driven largely, I think, by the county manager in their instance. But I raised several times in the course of the budget hearings, and I was able to sit through all of them except for one brief spell where I went to celebrate some new officers being sworn in. The chair was very gracious in allowing me to comment from the peanut gallery. One of my comments was consistently to note how many services the city provides to county residents outside the city without real compensation from the county. I'm seeing Councilor Lindell nodding in agreement. We get something like $25,000 for our library use, and yet the county residents who are not city members account for a substantial proportion of the library services. This is not an adversarial complaint. It's simply an accounting problem.

The fire department, Chief Moya, has been very clear year after year after year about the number of calls that the city fire team provides on behalf of county residents outside the city, leading in particular to helping people in the ski area or when they're hiking in that part of the county. We're called to do rescue services, and we want to rescue people. That's the mission. That's the calling. That's the duty of our fire service. But the service level that we provide the county versus what the county does for us is a significant trade imbalance, if you will. Because we care so much about providing that service as the right thing to do, we haven't made any point about any kind of a payment by the county to help cover that cost. The same applies to recreation facilities and parks. It applies to many, many different services that we in effect are subsidizing our friends and colleagues in the county, and we do it as if we are not concerned about our budget, but we have to be concerned about our budget. We do it because it's the right thing to do, not because it's an accounting measure. But at some point, a discussion between the city manager and the county manager about the facts of life when it comes to paying for services, I think is really an important discussion because our requests keep going up and our revenues don't match.

That said, I really do want to circle back to where the city manager started us this evening with that list of the question that is the right question, which is what do our residents get from this budget? Because ultimately they're the customer. It's their tax money, and it's our responsibility to use it to the best of our ability to deliver the services that they're asking for and that they need. I would hate to have the discussion lose sight of that list that the city manager prepared for us. I appreciate you doing that and starting the conversation in the right place. The budget is a plan. It will change over time as situations change. It always does. We've never had a budget that didn't evolve, sometimes to our great delight because our revenues exceed what we anticipate, but always making mid-course flight corrections. Our budget team, who have also worked in the county, always make a point of, not in the county, I'm sorry, in the state, make a point of saying that unlike the state, which creates a budget and goes home when the legislature adjourns, one of the wonderful parts about city government is that we can make regular changes as we are called upon to do so. We'll do that this year. We will keep a close eye on the evolving economy. So far, many of the predictions have not come true about the larger macroeconomic environment. The country has a very resilient and large economy, and it's managed to make its way through lots of different federal policy changes. In the meantime, I think this is a budget that does serve the people of Santa Fe very well. Priorities: first and foremost, paying our people, rewarding them for their hard work, advancing their financial well-being. We adopted a very, very good benefits package most recently that even includes a holiday for them to get a paycheck without anything coming out of it because of the good work of our HR and benefits team. There's a lot in this budget to celebrate, which is where the city manager started us, and I recommend it. I think the public will be well served by it, and I think we will take to heart process improvements at the same time that we put this budget to work on behalf of everybody in Santa Fe. So with that, I would entertain a motion.

Motion to approve.

Second.

Motion and a second. We've had robust discussion. Madam Clerk, would you call the roll on the motion?

Councilor Faulkner.

Yes. Explain my vote.

Councilor Lee Garcia.

Yes.

Councilor Michael Garcia.

Yes. And I'd like to explain my vote.

Councilor Lindell.

Councilor Marworth.

Yes. And explain my vote.

Councilor Cassid, yes. Councilor Castro, yes. Councilor Chavez, yes. Mayor Weber, yes. Motion is approved.

And we have a number of council members who have reserved the opportunity to take a minute, minute two, to explain their vote. Go ahead, Councilor Faulkner. I'll kick it off with you.

Okay. So from where I sit, we can't not approve the budget because it would definitely cause problems for the citizens of Santa Fe, but I do intend to pursue some amendments, working with whomever I need to work with to make that happen. I know I'm not the only councilor who feels this way. We don't have the luxury of promulgating amendments to the budget because we really don't see the budget in the given process. So I voted yes for this budget because I do intend to come forward with working with the city manager and the executive branch to amend some things that I feel should be amended. Thank you.

Councilor Michael Garcia, sir, you are next in line.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think what is clear as day now is that this budgeting process is not working, and it needs to be an equitable process that not only works for the executive, the legislative, but more importantly, staff.

I think one of the concerns that I've heard is how staff's budget continuously changes, and staff has to have an equal hand in developing this budget. So, I definitely look forward to working with my colleagues and building a better process that works for everybody. Thank you, Counselor. Let me see. Counselor Romero Worth, did you ask to explain about? Yeah, I think we've heard that this budget will have changes, and those changes may be because of the economy, because of what's happening at the federal level. They may be because we're not taking in the revenues that we have predicted. They may be because of a loss of federal funding at a level we can't deal with what it means to services and the things we're providing the city. And so, I do think that there will be change. I also want to encourage my colleagues, there's nothing wrong with us working with staff and with the executive to find shared goals and massage things in directions that are needed and wanted. And I think that my experience has been that there is room for that. And while we may not have the ability to bring forward a budget adjustment request, we can certainly work to find things that we all agree on and can make happen through the process. Thank you.

Thank you, Counselor.

Yes, Counselor. Just wanted to make a motion to amend the agenda. I think, hold on one sec. So, everybody, I just want to double-check that I got my correct. Everyone who asked to explain their vote has now had a chance to do that. Did I miss anybody? That in mind, it's 8:00. We usually try to go to petitions from the floor at 7:00. I would entertain a motion to move the agenda so that we pick that up now. And I'd like to motion that we actually move items 17 through 20 to be discussed next since it could potentially involve individuals from the public, and then we carry forward with the remainder of the items on our agenda.

Second.

Okay. So, let's revisit the actual order of business. So, we would go from where we are right now, 17, 18, 19, 20, and then continue where we left off. Okay, there's a motion to move items 17 through 20, which consist of petitions from the floor, public comment on bills for first public comment, final action on legislation, also a public hearing, and then the land use case, and then revert back to where we stopped. Yes, sir. Is there discussion of that motion? Madam Clerk, can you call the roll?

Counselor Lee Garcia, yes. Counselor Michael Garcia, yes. Counselor Lindell. Counselor Marworth, yes. Counselor Cassid, yes. Counselor Castro, yes. Counselor Chavez, yes. Counselor Faulner, yes. Mayor Weber, yes.

Motion is approved. Very good. So, Madam Clerk, with that, we would move next to petitions from the floor. While people are filtering out, thank you staff for being here tonight. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you for all your hard work on the budget. It would not happen without your hard and day-to-day effort to build this budget from the ground up. So, thank you. Let's go to petitions from the floor. If there's anyone here in the room, first of all, who wishes to be heard on any subject other than one of the public hearings, please come forward to the podium, and we'll offer everyone a chance to have a two-minute comment on any subject other than an item that's a public hearing. Madam Clerk, is there anyone in the Zoom room with a hand up?

Mayor, I'm going to need assistance from IT. My computer completely died during our session, so I can't man the petitions from the floor currently. So, I'm going to ask Michael if there's anyone in the room who has raised their hand. There is one user on Zoom, Stephanie Benonato.

Okay, let's unmute Ms. Benonato and start once she's available to us. We'll have a time clock for her and anyone else who wishes to speak to us. If it's possible to keep it down in the back, please. We're going to have a constituent speaking to us, and we need to be able to hear what she has to say.

Am I able to go forward now?

Yes, you are.

Okay. Stephanie Benonato. I think that the public hearing is closed on the amendment of the general plan, but I would just like to ask the counselors to think about what the intent of the general plan is in terms of increasing density, especially for the Axton apartments. Again, in my view, it is really benefiting the opera, having nurses.

I'm sorry. We said to hold your testimony on that until we, this is, we haven't had that hearing yet.

Oh, I thought you had closed the hearing already.

No, ma'am.

Okay, then I can do that. I appreciate some of the comments made tonight about the budget. I do think that public participation would also be helpful at certain points, and there's no opportunity for the public really to participate in the budget hearings. And I'm happy that certain positions like lifeguard positions, which are really necessary, are going to not be frozen, that they can be filled. I have suggested that one way of helping with staffing shortage at the pools is to give lifeguard supervisors the option to have overtime as opposed to comp time, because comp time takes them out of the pool, whereas overtime allows them to stay in and actually make more money. And I think that this would be helpful in terms of the timing necessary. I also hope that we will not only open Salvador Perez in the summer from 6:00 to 10:00 a.m. I think that would be highly inefficient and a real disservice to the people who use that pool on a regular basis. And it always strikes me as odd that we cannot hire people and have them stay as lifeguards. And I just have to wonder why, because we used to have three pools fully opened every day until the evening, and now we barely have two open. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And we will still have that land use here. Okay. Anyone else in the Zoom room with a hand up?

There's nobody else in the Zoom room with their hand up.

Thank you. Thanks for taking on the Zoom room monitoring responsibility in the unlikely event of the Clerk's, the death of the Clerk's computer. I'm sorry to hear that. And there we have nobody coming forward in the council chambers at this time. So, with that, Madam Clerk, I think that completes the petitions from the floor and takes us to the next item on the agenda. Item 18A, public comment on bills. Consideration of Bill number 2025-11, adoption of Ordinance number 2025-TBD, sponsored by Counselor Romero, Carol Romero Worth, and Mayor Alan Weber. A bill updating the rates and fees for wastewater utility services. This is also a chance for public comment. If anyone is in the room with their eye on this item, this would be the time to come forward or in the Zoom room. And again, I guess we'll have to ask for support from IT as to whether anyone in the Zoom room has their hand up.

There are currently no hands up in the Zoom room.

Very good. In that case, I take it that there is no public comment on that proposed bill. There's no action attached to it tonight. Simply first public comment. What's the next item, Madam Clerk?

Item 19A, final action on legislation, public hearing, consideration of Bill number 2025-9, adoption of Ordinance number 2025-TBD, sponsored by Councilors Michael Garcia, Amanda Chavez, Alma Castro, and Pilard Faulner. A bill amending Section 11-14.5 of the Economic Development Fund Ordinance to change the sunset date for depositing certain land sale revenues in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund from December 31st, 2025 to December 31st, 2030.

Okay. This, this is also a public hearing. Before we get to that, I think I'll give the opportunity to any of the sponsors who would like to speak to it briefly about what the intent is, and then we'll, it's just public comment, I think though, right? Yeah. So, it's just public comment. No, it's final hearing, final action item number 19A, I believe. Am I incorrect on the agenda? Are we looking at 19A? Yes, I believe we're actually in a position to take final action on this, but it is a public hearing. Okay. I, I, I, I want to re, Counselor, you were out of the room, but I, this is the action item. And if any of the members who are here who want to speak as the key sponsors, I'd happily make that opportunity before we go to the public if anyone wanted to speak to it.

I think it speaks for itself, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. Okay. All good. I again offer the opportunity if anyone is in the chambers who would like to talk on this bill, now would be the time to come forward. If not, again, we'll ask our friends in the IT land to see if anyone in the Zoom room has a hand up.

Yep. We have one hand raised in the Zoom room. Stephanie Benato.

Very good. If you can unmute Ms. Benonato, and we will have a clock as we do with public comment on petitions from the floor, we'll have a clock so that we know how if we're keeping within the time, but go ahead, Ms. Benonato, as soon as you're unmuted, you would have the floor.

Hello, Stephanie. I am, I guess, unclear about what this is doing, and what I'm hoping is that there is a funding every year that it will be available to this trust fund, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and not just that you're going to have the same small amount being divided up over a number of years. I am sorry that one of the sponsors did not at least paraphrase what the intention of the bill was before the public comment occurred. Thank you.

Very good. I take it that was the only hand that was up in the, in the Zoom room.

Yes, Counselor Garcia, your hand is up, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And so, for the record, I'll just read the title. Bill amending Section 11-4.5 of the Economic Development Fund Ordinance to change the sunset date for depositing certain land sale revenues in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund from December 31st, 2025 to December 31st, 2030. And so, ultimately, what this is doing is it's extending the date where if there were certain land sales, city-owned land sales, these resources will be deposited into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. So, instead of that date sunsetting at the end of this calendar year, it extends that life by five years. That way, in the instance if the city does dispose of certain properties, the resources will continue to go into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. So, this has nothing to do with the Affordable Housing Trust Fund allocation that's made in the general operating budget, such as the $3 million that we've done for the last couple years. Correct.

Any other discussion on the bill? I, I have proposed an amendment which I'd be happy to describe because it does go to what Counselor Garcia was just saying. We, we have had very intermittent, to say is the best way to put it, and very limited dollars that have come into the city by virtue of land sales. And while this would continue it, oh, I've been coached to announce that we've closed the public comment part. Well, let me just describe the amendment first, and then we'll get a motion on all of the above. No, fair enough. Is there, let's get a motion on the floor for the, for the main motion.

Motion to approve.

There's a motion to approve, and there's a second. There is an amendment proposed that would take everything as it is, but say that in the event of the success of our excise tax and the first deposit of $3 million from that excise tax, that would then sunset this provision so that the funds would not from these very spotty dollar land sales would not be diverted into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, but would go back to the original use, which is in economic development.

My thinking is, and this is hardly a hill to die on, but I do think it makes a certain amount of sense. My thinking is, I've looked at the track record of money that flowed into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund from land sales starting in 2020. There was only one instance, and that was, it amounted to $243,669 from one transaction. So, we're really, and then that's it.

I'm happy to have this continue in the event that we don't ever succeed with the excise tax. I know we all hope we will, and I think our legal counsel advises us that we have a very strong basis for proceeding. But were the excise tax to succeed, this, I believe, would be superfluous, and we could then re-devote the money to the support of our economic development efforts, separate and apart from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. It doesn't actually amount, so far at least, to a large amount of revenue. And I know from the conversation about the budget, there's general agreement that our usual operations can use as much support as possible. If the excise tax kicks in, we'll be getting estimates north of $6 million from that source alone. So, I would urge that provision as an amendment simply in the event of the excise tax succeeding. So, I would move the amendment and look to a second.

Councilor Garcia: Go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I appreciate you exploring how to strengthen this, but I'm of the mindset every single penny we can devote to affordable housing, we need to do it. If we look at just the recent budget that just passed, economic development saw a 42% increase, 42%, where some departments saw a decrease in their budget. So, I don't agree with the amendment. I think should the 3% tax succeed, fantastic. But should it not, we need to ensure that we are dedicating every single penny we can to affordable housing. That is one of the biggest crises facing this city right now. And by saying, "Well, we've got another source of revenue and we don't need to then put that much more towards it," I would not be in support of that. So, and lastly, I don't consider this a friendly amendment to this proposal.

Any other comment? Councilor Cassett?

Thank you, Mayor. There would be nothing that would prevent a future governing body from deciding to sunset if the excise tax were to come into play, and then they decided that that money, that they could sunset early. Correct? Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, and I obviously really agree with a lot of the work that economic development does. Although, I will say that as the chair of EDAC, one of the number one things I hear about economic development is that affordable housing is the hindrance.

Now, I will say that there was something, I don't remember, I don't know if anybody else on the Finance Committee remembers, economic development did not actually see a 42% increase in their budget. I don't remember why that math is there. There was something weird. I would need the budget team to explain, and they've left. But good thing for us to note in the future. But I think that because the excise tax is one we're uncertain as to, and hopeful that it's going to pass, and there's been a lot of discussion on how do we move towards building and getting the city to build, that that is going to be a heavier lift, and that there is the potential that if future governing body members are either seeing, one, we don't, we can't get the money out the door fast enough, which I could see as a future issue. If we do get enough money, we might actually just have a problem getting out the door, and maybe at that point they'll say this is a better use of these dollars. But because the landscape is so uncertain, I would prefer to leave this up to future governing body members, and then they can, which might be us. Who knows? Maybe the excise tax will pass this year and we get to make this decision. Wouldn't that be, or not pass, but you know, get, win in that court of appeals. But that's my thought process there, is that affordable housing, it does underpin everything, but I hear it so much as one of the key issues with economic development.

That being said, the Office of Economic Development, how we support them is with every single one of our departments, is going to continue to be important. But they did speak about how they felt that this was easier for them because they were probably going to pop money over there anyway because of the needs of that office within their department. So, that's my thoughts on this, and I kind of went back and forth on this idea as well because of the potential of the excise tax passing. But there's a lot of uncertainty there, and as has been discussed throughout the committees, is that we potentially do have a lot of land sales coming up. So, this is a really interesting time that will allow a little bit more of the nuance of that decision to be made. So, those are my thoughts. Thank you.

Thank you. Other comments at this time? Nope. Madam Clerk, there's a motion to move the amendment. Could you call the roll?

Councilor Michael Garcia: No.
Councilor Lindell:
Councilor Marroworth: Yes.
Councilor Cassett: No.
Councilor Castro: No.
Councilor Chavez:
Councilor Faulkner: No.
Councilor Lee Garcia: No.
Mayor Weber: Yes.

Motion does not pass. Very good. So, now we have the main motion, which is simply as drafted, the bill would extend the sunset date for the way in which land sales revenue, land sale revenues are allocated. Is there any discussion on that? Would you call the roll, Madam Clerk?

Councilor Lindell:
Councilor Marroworth: I think she just stepped out.
Councilor Cassett: Yes.
Councilor Castro: Yes.
Councilor Chavez: Yes.
Councilor Faulkner: Yes.
Councilor Lee Garcia: Yes.
Councilor Michael Garcia: Yes.
Mayor Weber: Yes.

Motion is approved. Very good. I'm going to, I'm watching people trying to scarf down their dinners as rapidly as possible. And what I'd like to propose is, it's about 8:25. I think we've been at this for three and a half hours. Let's take a 15-minute adjournment, stretch our legs, take a bio break, and then we'll come back and take up the next item. So, we'll be in recess for 15 minutes, and then we'll come back to the next item. Thank you, everybody.

I hope I've been having a lot of problems, which is why I've been, this is deep. No. And I'm trying to load onto another coworker's computer, and it won't let me. Are you signing in? That's what I was doing. Yeah, just having no luck. I love you. All right. The wind globe. We're all back. It's, we took a five-minute extra there, but we're back in session. Madam Clerk, could you please read the next item on the agenda, please?

Item 2A, which is a public hearing in a land use case, consideration of Bill Number 2025-8, adoption of Ordinance Number 2025-TBD, a bill rezoning an approximately 2.5-acre tract of land located at 214 Camino de los Marquez from R21 PUD Residential 21 dwellings per acre planned unit development to R29 Residential 29 dwellings per acre, Case Number 2024-8898.

Thank you. I think we're going, as was opined during the last opportunity for public petitions from the floor, if there is, we'll go back to where we were in our process and resume public comment, and then go to questions from governing body members. So, if there's anybody in the room who wishes to make a public comment on this case, now you'd be sworn and be allowed to speak. Madam Clerk, I gather you're still having some computer issues. So, if it can tell us if there's anyone in the Zoom room who would need to be sworn and make public comment now, now would be the time for that to happen.

We have one user with their hand raised in Zoom, Miss Stephanie Benonato.

Very good. I think, Madam Clerk, you may need to do the swearing in, unless Miss Benonato, were you sworn last time? I don't know if she's, may have been sworn and didn't speak.

Yes, I was sworn last time.

Okay. Well, why don't you, if you have two minutes worth of testimony, now would be the time to offer it.

Okay. And this is about the general plan for the accident apartments, right?

This is about the zone, proposed land use case.

Okay. So, I am, as I've said before, opposed to this because I do believe it only benefits the opera. And I know that the applicant is really stressing the general plan's statements about wanting to have infill at a high density. This property is already at one of the highest densities, which is R21, R29 being the highest. The general plan talks about wanting to allow this very high density when there is, because of transit lines, walkability, and job opportunities. However, in this case, what we're really talking about is interns for the opera who are being subsidized to live in that housing for four or five months, and possibly visiting nurses for about three months. There is opportunity for people who are living here for three months to rent Airbnbs. And if you really question the opera, you will find that no one that they have rented to, no one but the interns. Additionally, this does not touch another R29 zone. And it's really a problem in terms of traffic, not only at the four-way stop intersection of Don Diego and Los Marquez, but also coming on from Cordoba Road. It's very hard and almost sometimes impossible to make a left because the traffic is backed up. And at Cordova and St. Francis, it's sometimes like a kamikaze alley down there trying to get into the right lane. The other problem is the sewer line. Even though they're willing to fix part of it, it's still attached to old sewers, and that sewer line has been problematic in our neighborhood. I know there's at least 180 people who signed a petition against this. I was not one of them. So, there's even more people opposed to this. And I would actually ask you to look at the intent of the general plan, which I believe is really for long-term residents who are going to be here and be productive year-round, such as firefighters, teachers, et cetera. Thank you.

Thank you. From what you can see in the Zoom room, is there anyone else there with a hand up?

Just one sec. We're still doing the Zoom room. There is no one else with their hand raised, but we have someone in the council chambers now who'd like to come forward and testify, and this would be the time to do it and be sworn.

Madam Clerk, we're going to need to swear you in. Please raise your right hand. State your name. Residing at state your street name. Solemnly declare and affirm that the testimony I have in reference to this item shall be the truth and nothing but the truth, and do this under the penalties of perjury.

Very good. Make sure you're speaking into the microphone so everyone can hear.

Great.

And is the green light on in front of you?

Yes, it is.

Good. Thank you. I'd just like to state, you know, I've spoken with you before. I was one of the individuals that initiated the petition, and I think there were some questions that came up from Councilwoman Castor last time about something being the benefit to the whole city. And while the opera has deep pockets, I do think there's something to be said for retaining really the core of Santa Fe. What is Santa Fe? We're a community that embraces multicultures. We are proud of our neighborhoods. People don't come here to have the LA experience, big buildings, hustle and bustle.

They come here for the charm. And we live in a neighborhood in the South Capitol. It's charming, and we don't want that destroyed. I live just three blocks or two blocks from the armory, from the Spanish armory there on Galisteo. And it's something we want to preserve. And I think we make a mistake rushing headlong into development to make all these changes. And I really would consider all of you to really think about what this city means. And it's more, it's a city different if it is the city different. And we're proud of that, and we're proud New Mexicans. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Let's reset one sec. We need to reset the clock, and then we'll give you the floor. There you go.

Okay. Hi. Good evening, everybody. I'm Deb Goldstein. I spoke last. I basically have my—

No, you get one bite at the apple.

Councilor, but never mind.

Well, maybe in the Q&A, we'll have an opportunity to pursue that, but according to the way we do the public testimony, we don't also apologize for being late.

Budget. We did. Wow. Thank you.

Last time we started at 11. I'm impressed, too. Thank you.

Anyone else in the room who wishes to make a statement at this time? If the answer is no, and there's no one left on the Zoom room, I will now close the public comment and turn to questions by the members of the governing body for either our staff who started with a presentation or other witnesses. Anyone from the public who testified is available to be asked questions. And we'll just think it is, we'll just do the old hand raise approach. So, yeah, I've been encouraging the hand raise approach. I think that it would just be helpful to all of us if we just start off where we left off, which was discussion around quorum. So if we could get a presentation on what we found there, I think we inquired some about some information around that that would be helpful. Thank you.

Very good. Sorry, I've been struggling with this car for a few months.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilor Garcia. Councilor Chavez, I apologize. I apologize. So, my name's Rebecca Kerman. I was going to give a short presentation on the quorum issue, just about the members of the Planning Commission that were present and the analysis that we used to reach the conclusion that there was a quorum at the time.

So, the question was about whether there was a quorum on December 5th of 2024 when the Planning Commission made a decision to recommend to the, recommend that the governing body approve this rezoning. So, at the time, there were seven members of the Planning Commission. And so those members were Chair Janet Clow, Vice Chair Jessica Eden Lawrence, Member Sasha McGee, Member TJ Reeland, Member Gerisha Bad Morando, Member Piper Capen, and Member Peter Smith. So there was a total of seven appointed members and two vacancies.

Chair Clow was present for the meeting, but she recused herself from this case. And then Vice Chair Jessica Eden Lawrence and Member Sasha McGee were not present for the meeting. And so that left members Reeland, Morando, Capen, and Smith, who were present for the case in person. So that was four of the seven members who actually heard the case before the Planning Commission.

And so in that, so because both the Chair and the Vice Chair were not present, Member Smith, who was the secretary, acted as Chair for the hearing on the rezoning matter. And so following a public hearing and a discussion, Member Morando moved to approve the case, and Member Reeland seconded. And then members Morando and Capen all voted yes on the motion. And so the question was why would three members constitute a quorum in that instance?

And so the way that we get there is through several sources, including the city code, the committee rules, and Robert's Rules. Santa Fe City Code Section 14-2.8E regarding procedures for land use boards provides the following with regards to quorums. It says, "A majority of members constitutes a quorum." And then Santa Fe City Code Section 14-2.8F states that "Action shall be taken by a majority vote of a quorum of the members."

Commission meetings are conducted according to Robert's Rules of Order, and that comes from our, our Santa Fe City Committees Resolution. And that's on the introduction, basically page two. Robert's Rules states that, "A majority of the entire membership is a majority of the total number of those who are members of the voting body at the time of the vote." The Robert's Rules does go on to note in its footnotes that there's a possibility that certain bodies could choose to define a voting requirement based on fixed membership. And so what fixed membership is, is basically the number of positions on a board. And so what Robert's Rule says is that in that instance, in the case of a body having a fixed membership, for example, a permanent board, it is also possible to define a voting requirement as a majority of the fixed membership to is greater than the entire membership if there are vacancies on the board. So then you would be, so if there, if you were using a fixed membership, then you would be looking at the entire number of positions rather than the number of actual members.

In this instance, the code does not define the commission voting requirement as a majority of fixed membership, nor does it make any reference to the determination of a quorum being based on the number of positions on the board, nor does it require a specific number of members for a quorum for the Planning Commission. There are some other boards that do require a specific number of members. For example, the Audit Committee does require at least, I think it was three members to constitute a quorum, and the governing body requires five members to constitute a quorum. But here for the Planning Commission, there's no such specific number requirement.

So instead, what the code does say is it expressly provides that a quorum is based on the number of members. And so in this case, the commission had seven members on December 5th of 2024. Four heard the case, and then pursuant to the committee rules, the Chair only votes to break a tie. And so because Member Smith was acting as the Chair for the hearing, he did not take a vote. Three members voted in favor of approving the resolution. There was no tie, and so that was why he didn't vote.

So just in conclusion, the commission had seven members when it met, heard the case because four was a majority of members. The quorum heard the case, and a majority of the quorum members, three of those four, voted to recommend that the governing body approve the case. So therefore, the commission's decision to recommend approval was based on a majority vote of quorum members as required by the code. So, and I would be happy to stand for questions should the governing body have any for me at this time. Thank you.

And I believe that there's a memo that was in, not in the packet, but or was included at some point. Madam Clerk, wasn't there a memo from the City Attorney's office that council member or governing body members received?

Yes, there was a memo in the packet, and it was also emailed this afternoon.

Thank you. Go ahead.

I thank you for that clarity. I do think though, and we have a lot of, over the last couple of weeks, there have been many things that I feel need to be clarified. This is one of them. And I think we have to communicate that better as a city because it does, it can appear that rules are changed as things come before us. And if we don't put that in writing and make that very clear and well communicated to the community, I don't, I agree with their opinion that we seem to change things as items appear in front of us. Your explanation was very clear. I appreciate that. But I think in regards to the bigger picture, we need to really emphasize clarity. I think City Manager Scott is aware of that as well. And some of those things that I've shared with him, we are making very confusing, and our community members have really emphasized the need for transparency. And when this is how we handle things as items come before us, it looks like we're not being transparent. So, those are just comments, but I want to thank you for the clarity and for the explanation. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Michael Garcia.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Rebecca, for the explanation and everybody that did the investigation into this. I would echo Councilor Chavez's comments in regards that I've been on committees, or I've watched committees that would have said this is, this does not meet the standards of quorum. And I, I, I think we as a city have some work to do then because what this opens up is a major concern of mine that somebody could not a fully appointed board. Let's use this issue. For example, Planning Commission is nine members. An individual, a mayor, could choose to appoint only three, have six vacancies, and by this definition you've provided us, would only require two Planning Commission members, two individuals to meet a quorum, which I don't think that's the intent. And I, I, my interpretation is different. And, you know, with conversation with, whether it's folks that have been legal support on committees that I'm currently on or other folks, quorum is always established by the number of members for a committee, not an individual, not, not John Doe. So quorum in this instance would be five members because there's five commissioners. And so it wouldn't, again, wouldn't meet that threshold. So I, I, I appreciate the work that went into this, but I, I, it interpretation is anybody's opinion. In my opinion, is quorum is based off of the number of members of a body, and that's been the practice not only since I've been on the council, but any other public body that I've been on. And I think this is an opportunity for us to just say, hey, we goofed. We send it back to Planning Commission. Planning Commission re-hears the case, and it can come back to us. It doesn't mean the case is invalidated. But seems like, I think Planning Commission has more members than they did in the past, and we can express the priority that there needs to be the quorum at, at hand. So with that, thank you for the work. And I think that's, because that's what it comes down to, right, is that definition of members. Action shall be taken by the majority of members, and I think that's even outlined in the memo. So, okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. Any other questions? Thank you for outlining the legal research you did and the, the description of the process or the, the criteria we use in, in our city's operations. I appreciate that. So with that, I'm going to move forward now to closing the public comment and questions of the governing by the governing body on the case in front of us. I just would use, oh, did you want, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off, Councilor Castro. You were waiting patiently. I apologize.

No worries. And I think I also just had comments about the character of the neighborhood. And so, if we could maybe dive a little bit more deeply into the specifics on what the character of this neighborhood is as we understand it.

Okay. So, what we'll do now is go to questions about the case. If you'd like to kick it off, and we'll, we'll, I'll ask our august timekeeper to try to keep us on track, but you have absolutely the opportunity to lead conversation with questions of anyone, whether it's staff or the applicant or residents who have sworn and testified. And then we'll just look at hand, we'll do the hand raising methodology for a change.

Perfect. And I think in this case, it is our city staff that would have the answer to the character of this neighborhood according to our code. Very good. Welcome back.

So, did you hear the counselor's question about car neighborhood character as on her first question?

Mayor, members of council, yes, I did. Give me just a few minutes to pull up that second. So, Mayor, Council, by Janice, and I'll just, I'll just read it. It says the question or the findings that have to be made for criteria 11435C1A. It says one or more of the following conditions exist. There was a mistake in the original zoning. We calculated that there wasn't. There has been a change in the surrounding area altering the character of the neighborhood to such an extent as to justify the change in zoning.

I'm going to go to that section of the findings that the Planning Commission heard, and I'll just read that one paragraph that identifies that review. And I'm only going to read staff's response. I'll let the, if you want to ask the applicant, she has a much longer response, but I am reading from the memo. So, if you can, you can follow along with me on that one. It says, "After reviewing historical aerial photographs of the neighborhood, staff finds that the neighborhood has retained largely the same mix of uses and land development patterns since at least 1992. The neighborhood contains a mix of single-family residences on a small parcel, multifamily residential developments, and commercial buildings with surface parking lots. Some multifamily developments have been constructed in the neighborhood since 1971, which brought a small amount of incremental change. However, the general character remained consistent. The neighborhood character in this area has been relatively stable for the last several decades. As such, staff finds that the character of the neighborhood has not changed to such an extent as to justify changing the zoning. Additionally, staff disagrees with the applicant's response that the citywide housing shortage constitutes a change in the character of the surrounding area." Ultimately, moving from R21 to R29, and I believe the additional 30 houses, doesn't in fact change the character that exists today by simply adding that small amount of housing to the area.

Great. Thank you for that. No further questions.

Thank you. I'll just, we shake your head if you don't want to say anything. Garcia, do you got some questions?

No, because I, I believe we, when we concluded the last session, we had gone through an extensive. Yeah, we did. I don't want to cut anybody off. Sure. We lost Counselor Faulkner for the moment, but anyone on this side have a question of any party, whether it's the applicant, the staff, or others? Yes. Go ahead, Counselor Marquart.

So, just because it's been some time since we got together the last time, you have to meet all of the criteria, correct? Or you just have to, can you go over that again?

So, for the first criteria, 1435C1, it's one of three options. You technically only need to meet one.

Okay.

The applicant chose number three as their defining fact of making or meeting the criteria, and our staff agreed with that defining fact. And review that briefly. I have in front of me, "A different use category is more advantageous to the community as articulated in the general plan or other adopted city plans." So, when you take the applicant's response and you also identify the staff's review of that response, the applicant has largely responded to this criterion based on future development concepts that is not part of the current request and therefore cannot be considered in analyzing how the proposed rezoning meets the required criteria. It is improper to base a relatively permanent zoning decision on impermanent factors such as the current ownership or other proposed elements that may never come to fruition and are not bound by this application, such as the potential tenants, possible architectural elements or appearance, conceptual lease duration programs, or the possible nature of work done by a development's potential clientele. Since no development plan or mesh plan has been included in this rezoning request, the rezoning analysis must strictly be limited to the elements of the rezoning request. That said, staff finds that the different use category in the R29 zoning would allow for greater density and therefore be more advantageous in that it will enhance compliance with general plan policy, specifically the themes and policies related to higher densities, compact urban form, infill as growth management, and allowing for a mix of housing types. The additional density included in this rezoning request has the potential to provide long-term permanent housing solutions in the center of the city where infrastructure is already present. Additionally, the general plan has identified this area as an appropriate location for future infill development, and a higher density would incentivize the infill redevelopment in a close proximity to employment and services.

Thank you. Thanks.

Back to you, Counselor Marquart.

That's helpful. Thanks. I just needed to refresh on which, what criteria was in play here. Thank you.

Any other questions from anybody who wants to raise a hand? We did have extensive discussion previously, but a little refresher is not a bad thing. Counselor Faulkner, anything from you tonight? No. Counselor Garcia, you good? Okay. Thank you, sir.

The public hearing is closed. I will now entertain a motion, and then we'll, we can take discussion from the, after we've had a motion, we'll clearly discuss it. Each person stating their reasoning to approve.

Second.

There's a motion and a second. Counselor Lindell, it, it would, I don't know if you're, this is a cold call, but if there's anything you'd like to say about your thinking on this case so that the record can reflect why you made the motion.

Sure. No, it's, and I'll, can I ask a question of? No. Okay. I'm not sure. Have a motion to reopen. No, we, we don't need to. You know, we, this isn't, we, we went back and forth a little on the semantics of short-term housing. I don't consider this really short-term housing. It's kind of medium-term housing. But whether you say short-term housing or medium-term housing, it's, there's a common word there, and it's housing. This is housing. And we have a need for, you know, we talked about traveling nurses, people in terms with the opera, I forget how many we talked about, but that's needed housing. And if there isn't the specific housing, then we're still looking that turns it more into short-term housing, and it takes long-term housing off from the marketplace for us because this kind of housing, we do have a need for it. And does it always end up being short or medium-term? I don't know the answer to that. I don't think any of us do. Things change. But I think that for me, it's housing. I have the need for it, and I, I, I think that it's strategically a really, really good thing for the city. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. Other comments about the motion on the floor? Yes, Counselor Cassid.

Yeah, I'm, I'm happy to make just some, some quick comments. And again, you know, I know I talk about this a lot, the process of, of land use and when we're setting policy and when we are, you know, looking at the code. One of my challenges with a lot of our land use cases is, I never understood why the future land use map, we don't get an automatic rezone. I always find it a little frustrating when we're getting this request for something that we've already said that we want, and then we have to go through this process. So, for rezonings, I think that that is, that's, that has been one of my frustrations and something that I've brought up in terms of the land development code update when we look at our processes. I, and then I think that it's also really important that we talk about the differences between the rezone action and then there's a development plan. That development plan will be going through Planning Commission. We can yank it up if we so choose. But that is going to be where a lot of kind of the meat of the conversation of how that zoning is utilized really comes to fruition. This is where we get into the details about, you know, parking and traffic and all of these different components that come into place. To me, rezoning to a higher density makes sense. Very, who knows? I mean, maybe this is going to not, you know, we know, we don't know what's going to happen if the opera is going to decide to sell this and then it's going to be, you know, available for another developer to come in and develop at a higher density. We don't know what this is going to be permanently, but we do know that there has been a history of not increasing density when there was an option to do so that has impacted our housing supply. Now, so that's really where I'm coming from at this moment in time is right now just looking at the density in front of us, and then the development plan comes, and that, that is a different conversation. But, but in terms of, of where we're looking with a rezone, really sticking to, to my understanding of, of what those criterion are. So, thank you.

If there's no further comments. Okay, Madame Clerk, there's a motion in front of us. Can you repeat who actually, there was a question asked by one of our counselors, who made the motion? Who seconded the motion? Do you have that? Do you have that on record, ma'am?

Counselor Lindell made the motion, and Counselor Faulkner made the second.

And the motion in front of us is a motion to approve 2928. Yeah. Very good. If there's no further discussion, I would entertain a calling of the roll. Counselor Romero.

Yes.

Counselor Cassid.

Yes.

Counselor Castro.

Yes.

Counselor Chavez.

Yes.

Counselor Faulkner.

Yes.

Counselor Lee Garcia.

Yes.

Counselor Michael Garcia.

No. And I'd like to explain my vote.

Counselor Lindell.

Yes.

Mayor Weber.

Yes. And I will also explain my vote. Motion is approved. Thank you. Counselor Garcia.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I voted no because I do not believe the merits of a quorum were established by the Planning Commission.

I, I voted yes because I understand what we did, which is, as described by Counselor Cassid, was to apply the zoning code criteria that were in front of us. There's more work to be done going forward as to what the development plan looks like, what the concerns are that would be the implication of the zoning change. But when I study the, the code as it is presented and as staff presented it, the criteria were met. And as long as the criteria are met, then our job as in a quasi-judicial process is to vote as to the fit of the facts to the criteria. In this instance, facts fit the criteria. Now comes the much more nuanced issue about what would be proposed to actually be built there. And as has been said by one of my colleagues, that will go to the Planning Commission, and should the governing body so choose, come up in front of us as well. So, this is not the last hearing on this matter. It simply votes the basis on the basis of what the code says. Thank you, everybody.

Madame Clerk, can you take us back in time to the item that we skipped over?

Yes. Item 11, matters from the City Manager.

Mr. City Manager, sir, we get to hear from you again.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I, I will very quickly identify the 16 city employees who are celebrating five-year anniversaries in the month of May. They include two from the year 2000, Roberto Anaya from Facilities, David Tapia from the Treasury function in Finance, one from 15 years ago, Estavon Ortiz from the Public Works Department.

And then two, no, oh, several from 10 years. That was a busy year. We have Deborah Trillo from Environmental Services, Eric Trigg from Recreation, and another bunch from Fire: Ben Wagner, Nicholas Penner, Frank Garcia, Joseph Rodriguez, Miguel Rivas, Kenneth Hardison, James Bruce, and Joshua Gonzalez, all of whom are celebrating 10-year anniversaries this month. And then from five years ago, we have three from the Police Department: Derek Arn, Lissa Gagos, and Jonathan Harmon. And those are our honored employees for this month. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. City Manager.

Madam Clerk, what's next?

Item 12, matters from the City Attorney.

Thank you, Mayor, counselors. We do have one of the temps that was funded with the one-time funding who started a couple weeks ago. His name is Fred Martinez. You can stop by and say hello. We also have a new office administrator, our administrative manager in our office. His name is Matt Harding, and I think a couple of you got to meet him this week, but please feel free to stop by and say hello. He's also learning all about the contract process and flow. And he used to do a lot of contract management with the movie industry. He's well-versed in complex contracts and reasoning. So, we're happy to have him on board. That's all I've got. Thank you.

Thank you. Back to you, Madam Clerk.

Item 14, matters from the City Clerk.

So, I just have two items. One is June 3rd, we are proposing to have a special meeting. There will be some discussion. I believe maybe the City Manager might want to talk about it, but what it is is a whole package of things regarding micro-communities and leases. And so, it'll be dedicated to community health and safety. So, Henry Hman Paul will be discussing stuff. So, I will be putting that on your calendars. And then I just wanted to say a big thank you to my team for all the work that they've been doing in events, especially the State of the City recently. And so, I just wanted to appreciate them. That is all. Thank you.

Next, please. Item 15, communications from the governing body. Let's do it. Counselor Garcia, lead it off.

Thank you, Mayor. I don't think I have anything tonight, so I'll pass. Thank you.

Fair enough. Counselor Cassid.

I don't think I have anything tonight either.

Counselor Romero Worth.

We're on a roll. Pass.

Pass. Counselor Lindell. Counselor Garcia.

I'll break the silence. Just one. Thank you. Give a shout-out to all the youngsters that are wrapping up their school year, in particular all the high school seniors. Thank you.

I just wanted to say I hope everyone who are mothers had a wonderful Mother's Day. Thank you for all the love you put into our youth, and I hope you had a wonderful weekend last weekend.

Thank you, Counselor. And similarly, congratulations to everybody who graduates this year. Nice.

I want to echo the thank you to the staff for the State of the City event. That was so well done. Everything from music to the food to the gracious hosting, the lineup that your team, Madam Clerk, organized, and the way in which everyone felt welcome was just the epitome of a lovely and very meaningful event. The blessings we got from the Governor, from Tsuk, and from the Archbishop, I thought were very moving, and I personally appreciate enormously how much work went into that because I saw how much work went into that, and I thought it was as beautifully done and as beautifully handled a ceremony and a celebration as we've had. So, thank you for taking that on.

We've got a lot going on in Santa Fe. Again, we just had an amazing Native Fashion program. This coming up very shortly will be the Literary Festival again with an incredible lineup of poets, authors of short stories and cookbooks and novels and poems. And please partake as much as possible. It is an incredible assortment of talent, and it's been put together again by a lot of volunteers, as is always the case, and by sponsors who make it possible. So, big shout-out to them.

A big, big congratulations and thank you to the Santa Fe Heroes Banner group, selfless organization, the Knights of Columbus at Santa Maria de la Paz, and Richard Martinez for taking on that project, taking it over, making it something that their community effort makes possible. They get the support of Comcast and Allegra Printing. Santa Fe County pitches in. The Elks Coats Tree Service helps with the banners, and it's such a remarkable job that they're doing to make sure that the banners are handled respectfully and all the families who want to be represented on a basis going forward have a shot at getting their family banners hung and recognized for the important role that veterans have always played in Santa Fe and continue to do. And I want to give them a great big thank you as well. And with that, back to you, Madam Clerk.

Item 16A, introduction of legislation, consideration of Resolution Number 2025-TBD, sponsored by Counselor Sydney Lindell, a resolution authorizing the sale and consumption of beer and wine during portions of the International Folk Art Market on July 10th and 12th, 2025, pursuant to Subsection 23-6.2C SFCC1987.

Thank you, Mayor. It's self-explanatory. It's a repeat of the resolution that we did last year. Thank you.

And Madam Clerk, back to you.

Item 16B. This is a mouthful, so bear with me. Consideration of Bill Number 2025-12, adoption of Ordinance Number 2025-TBD, sponsored by Mayor Alan Weber. It is ordained by the Governing Body of the City of Santa Fe, authorizing the execution and delivery of a Water Project Fund Loan Grant Agreement by and between the New Mexico Finance Authority, NMFA, and the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the borrower grantee, in the total amount of $5,500,000, including a loan in the amount of $2,200,000, evidencing an obligation of the borrower grantee to utilize the loan grant amount solely for the purpose of financing the costs of repairs to the Nichols Dam outlet conduit, including sealing of conduit joints, conduit lining, installation of filter diaphragm around outlet conduit, including related work and revisions, and solely in the manner described in the loan grant agreement, providing for the pledge and payment of the loan amount and an administrative fee solely from the net revenues of the water utility system of the borrower grantee, certifying that the loan grant amount, together with other funds available to the borrower grantee, is sufficient to complete the project, approving the form of and other details concerning the loan grant amount agreement, ratifying actions heretofore taken, repealing an action inconsistent with this ordinance, and authorizing the taking of other action in connection with the execution and delivery of the loan grant agreement.

I'm sorry, I missed a part of that. Could you start? No, thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. That was a brilliant performance. I think as my colleagues have said, it speaks for itself. Any other items to be brought before the governing body tonight, Madam Clerk?

No, Mayor.

Very good. In that case, thank you, everybody. We are adjourned.