fees continuing the review of the two proposed to your financial plan jenna fund departments will be presenting the significant changes in their fees and then following that we'll have a discussion of the proposed expansion of the facilities energy program so with that we'll start off with fire department on looking at our revenues there we go they're looking at revenues in total and revenues this table shows our revenues and overall for fiscal eighteen we're proposing for revenues a three five percent increase and most of th increases do that first line first row in our fund reimbursement which is our rf charges primarily and so our revenues are going up about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars we expect this year's budget but today we want to focus on fees and service charges and those fees and service charges constitute about five percent of the fire department's revenues and in fiscal year eighteen we're actually proposing a seventeen thousand dollar reduction or eight percent reduction to these fees this is slide shows fire departments fees in more detail categorized by type of fee the fire department is increasing our fee rates three percent across the board we charge fees based on a cost recovery model and according to our cost they increase three percent from year to year we're projecting increases to all our few revenues except for engine company fire inspections which is our first row there and the reason why that went down is is going down is that we've removed in about two thousand fire inspections from the inspection rolls these are fifteen minute commercial property small occupancy fire inspections and to offset the loss of those inspections and in keeping with the goals of the prevention program the fire department is going to be or is starting to implement a building shell inspection inspecting the host shell of the building and the occupants rather than each individualized unit the shaw inspection allows us to maintain the goals of the inspection program but it reduces the amount of of our i've worked and undue burden on the commercial occupancies and it does keep with the spirit of regulations is provide provided in  california fire code and it does not reduce our prevention or safety one more slide and this is just some sample rates that were increasing now there's a three percent change and rounded to the nearest whole dollar and this as an example the first row apartments and hotels nine units for a quarter our inspection went from twenty seven dollars to twenty eight dollars and that's one of our most popular fees the one change to our fees is the shell inspection and for the the building entirety we'll be charging seventy five dollars this year so we believe we have a robust fire inspection program and i'm looking forward to this change and that's my presentation for today if you have any questions be happy to take them thank you you have any questions the change in this and inspection regime is that something that's come to council already or that we're gonna see again or is this our only exposure to this we're going to be presenting at our budget meeting next week  the fire marshal be talking about it a little bit more there and i thought that had gone to council once already come up in the code yes amendments but i was just curious but maybe i'll wait and save questions for the marshal on this that'd be a good idea okay yeah  i would like to hear more about it as well i'm not quite clear on what the how that's going to work and it sounds like a i don't i don't understand how that's going to be a reduction how that isn't going so good afternoon chair committee members i am norma samantha's the administrative analyst at the library today i will be presenting the proposed fee changes for the library and we'll start off with the user fees which are for items such as copies printouts unreturned lost materials and other fees and services that the library provides to its users so we are proposing fees and printouts to increase by five cents each and the unreturned or lost materials are mostly decreasing because we would like to standardize fees and make replacement costs realistic to current market price currently the library allows users to purchase replacements of items that are lost or damaged the staff to manage the st time to manage the account replacing the item and then processing of the item is greater than the loss of money due to decreasing the costs if these fees are adopted the library will no longer allow users to submit replacement copies this will reduce workload and be a net cost savings the other fees in on this slide are the fees and services that are increasing are the obituaries general research headphones flash drives and that is in an effort to recoup the staff and materials costs so the next one is the meeting room proposed fee changes and the last time that the library made any fee changes around the use of the meeting rooms was fiscal year fourteen we are proposing the changes to the fee schedule to be a monday through thursday and a friday through sunday schedule which you'll see there and you'll also see the increase by fifty dollars for the faulkner gallery and twenty dollars for the side galleries we're also proposing to add the lower plaza which is in the area between the library and the museum in our fee schedule because we would have we have received requests to book rent the area and have not been able to do so because our it is not on our fee schedule so the addition to the fee schedule would allow for at least a couple of rentals in some added revenue which and in the past has had to be turned away so and we would also like to eliminate the literacy center and the tech space from the fee schedule because we have built alive a lot of library programs around the rooms which make it difficult to have open for public use the litter ease the literacy center is always busy with tutors classes the tech spaces in is always in use by staff for in house trainings and for other programs such as makerspace coding club etc so then the next fee schedule slide is just for the sunday through thursday friday through sunday schedule which increases from fifty dollars for the faulkner gallery and five dollars for the east and west then the next slide is  gallery space so the library we have three galleries space rentals and it's for the wall space for local artists we are proposing that the rental fee for the gallery space be increased by twenty five percent for each gallery space approximately the galleries the the gallery space rental fee for the library charges for exhibiting is minimal in comparison to other galleries because the other galleries charge a rental fee and a percentage of all sales so that's all we have and we are also proposing that all of the fees be rolled out by january to give enough time to the community and give enough notice to everyone so that's it any questions thank you questions have questions regarding the copy fees can you explain a little more about this change the copies and print outs so we're increasing them by five cents in order to try to recoup costs for the actual machine rental and actual supplies and toner and be more in line with other places do you have some reason to believe that increasing the price will increase revenues versus people printing less we do think that it would increase revenue currently you are people usually pay with like dollars instead of change so it wouldn't really change much but i guess i can look further into it and are these copies and printouts i'm wondering are these students or printing things for school is it is the community members printing things for personal needs what's kind of the breakdown of whose printing things out and i'm really just concerned about making sure there's a high level of accessibility for people who may this might be their only resource outside of kinkos yeah so i'm not in i don't we don't take like any stats on that but from what i see it just depends it's people on the computers people actually coming in as library community members that are actually just making copies of things that they have or printing out actual like boarding passes or things of the sort so it just would depend on what is needed is there something we could do for students like have a student price or a student maybe bulk card or have schools maybe can have a program for their students we could look into that okay just seems because it is a pretty dramatic increase it's a fifty percent increase and i know one page at a time it doesn't seem like a lot but from a student who's really academic and really printing up a lot of stuff i think this could be detrimental okay and then i had a question regarding the the meeting room changes kind of looking at it from the same way of azura accessibility for some of the less well funded community groups is there a possibility to maybe have a community day once a week or once a month where there's a reduced rate like maybe there's an off night a monday or tuesday that you don't normally have the room scheduled is there a program we could have like a lottery for nonprofits or what else could we do to make sure that it remains accessible yet at the same time increase revenues if that's the goal i'm well currently the room is booked most of the time it's really hard to even get our programs in there as a library so we're competing with actual organizations to get our own to use our own room for library programs but we can definitely look into if there is off nights and potentially have a different fee schedule if you would like but we would have to definitely look into that maybe even probably not the whole itself because you may be closed but the days before and after holiday maybe lower usage but i'd like to see something like that if you if you think that there are groups who are going to be price sensitive if you don't haven't had that experience where people are asking is there a lower rate than maybe this isn't maybe we're not at the level where it's going to be an impediment but again it's it's a pretty dramatic increase fifty dollars that's almost a fifty percent increase so those are my questions thank you on the the the gallery space fees that's for what what time frame are it says it says you know five hundred dollars five hundred dollars for so the gallery space chair and council board members i'm so the actual it's for the entire month because it's a wall space yes yeah okay and then what's the total how much revenue comes in on all the fees  fees for both the meeting rooms and the fines and library the library system what is this whole thing generating in the way of total i don't have the exact number with me but i think just from fees and thank you good afternoon mister chair and committee members renee brooke city planner i'll be going through the proposed changes to the planning division fees and then larry cassidy will hand off to him to talk a little bit about changes in building and safety fee so overall for community development each year we take a look at our fees and assess how much we could or should raise them we typically range and raising them from about two to three percent each  year you'll recall last year we had quite a bit of discussion and planning division fees and our cost of recovery you did at that time recommend to council that certain fees do increase more than two or three percent we did that last year so at this point it's a rough estimate but we do estimate we're recovering about thirty five percent of the cost to provider services and the general fund is subsidizing the the rest of that building the safety is at one hundred percent full cost reach recovery  how they charge their fees so this year of for planning we are proposing a two percent increase in most line items with very few exceptions to that we're not changing our staff hourly rate that's  fee that we charge for miscellaneous work other services we provide and we don't raise that every year or else we would get out of line with our actual costs to provide that service same with those fees that are under one hundred dollars the two percent increase at times rounding figures can get out of line if we did that every year a significant change though based on council direction last fall was to increase  the type of noticing that we do for development projects and so beginning in july we'll notice not only property owners within three hundred feet of development projects but the tenants as well and so with that per council direction to make it full cost recovery will be increasing that fee from mailed notices by seventy four percent so that you'll see that significant change in our fee resolution quickly just on building and safety their fees would increase by two percent in most line items except for two very minor ones or they want to still incentivize people getting permits for these types of inspections so there'll be no change to electrical generator fees and festival wiring that are appealable to the planning commission we never had a fee actually called out for that so we're proposing a fee that's in line with our other appeal fees of two hundred and fifty dollars for someone to do that we also have not to this point had a minor coaster develop coastal development permit fee that doesn't require a public hearing and that's specific to one application type its accessory dwelling units in the coastal zone that still require coastal development permit but they don't require a public hearing so it's this odd duck that's in between in terms of staff resources it doesn't require the same amount of resources as a typical coastal development permit so we wanted to create a minor fee that was representative of the amount of staff and staff here in officer time associated with those permits we're also adding in a new fee for mills act related request so we have a fee when a property owner wants to enter into a mills at contract and that's a benefit that someone gets from having a historic property and they want to upgrade their historic property they get a property tax break for doing that the city staff processes those contracts each year and there's a cap you know the property can only be valued at one point five million dollars in order to qualify for that contract but there's an allowance for council to grant an exception to that we hadn't had a fee in the last couple of years for someone who wants to request that exception but there is time involved in preparing the staff report and presenting that to council so we are proposing a four hundred and eighty dollar fee for owners that want to request an exception to that property valuation maximum we also just had some sort of textual clarifications not really changes to fees in the resolution making it clear that if an applicant wants to appeal a staffs determination about whether an applications complete or incomplete we're clarifying that that appeal is to the planning commission i was never clearly stated in the resolution also a clarification about initial study fees when a development requires preparation of  clarifying and the text of the resolution that that fee which is not proposing to change other than increase by two percent only affords the applicant one round of review just again clarification point there and where we are revising a newer fee that we added last year is a design review pre application consultation or again clarifying and that that allows the applicant one consultation at the design review board it's a quite a reduced fee in order to get that quick check in with a design of your board on a conceptual development proposal and we are proposing that that small fee no longer be applied as a credit towards application review team fee with one review what happens on review two we would charge the fee again okay so it's just a repeat and then was the ad you coastal zone non hearing process was that built baked into the legislation is that how that got there prior to the recent state law regarding necessery drilling units we still had same process for those what was in our municipal code we call them secondary dwelling units when we had one proposed that might not have otherwise triggered any other discretionary review but because it's in the coastal zone it needed a coastal development permit the process for those wouldn't change we still do a staff report and make the staffing hearing officer makes a finding at a hearing doesn't hold a public hearing it's it's a bit of an odd process so nothing in the state law changed that process because the state legislation did not change its relationship to the coastal act but we had been charging not we had the fever of charging was and and and the accessory dwelling unit was added to that as for that basket of permits correct so what we have in our municipal code referred to as secondary dwelling units i superseded now by the accessory dwelling unit legislation that recently passed but it would go through the same process in the coastal zone so nothing in that legislation changed the permit processing in the coastal  concern is we haven't completed our latest round of labor negotiations but i know in the budget it was budgeted at three percent so it looks like the gap queen our expenditures and our revenues is growing in other and not in the good way we're actually going to be incurring more cost as our staff costs goes up and we're recouping less of that and and the three percent assuming that it comes in somewhere near there on top of that there's a calpers or some benefits i'm not sure if that's in addition to the three percent but it seems like we're we're losing ground so what's the reasoning behind the modest two percent increase and and then some of these no changes it seems to me we in the current proposed to your financial plan we have a one percent assumption for this just salaries and you're correct there is an additional cost for purse on top of that and benefits where does one percent come from i'd love to have only a one percent increase  it's a it's a budgetary assumption we don't have any we don't have negotiate agreements with all the bargaining units yet but we need to make uh some early assumptions and so that's it seems it seems reasonable based on where the revenues are going you know they're flattening out we don't really we can't support more than that and i so we put one percent in the current proposed to your financial plan but you're correct in the current year there is a there was a three percent assumption in the current year budget for fiscal year seventeen just to clarify so is there anything we can do to bring this up to three percent and then the ones that say no change can we make those three percent as well what would be the consequences of that you understand my basic concern is every year our costs are creeping up but then if our fees aren't creeping up to match those we're just increasing the deficit right so bostrom our finance director says mister pease indicated we give direction  early on it to departments about how to raise fees and it's really about how to raise revenues over all their departments and they can play with the individual fees up or down depending on what they want but the goal is to generate two percent more revenue at least level direction and that was based on the fact that we assumed in the next few years a one percent of solder increase total compensation will be at probably in the order of two percent but we said because it's a one percent salary increase let's adjust revenues and in forty departmental revenues two percent if we had a three percent assumption built in for the next two years for salaries we would be asking departments to bring in a three or four percent you know revenue increase as well so we try to align those two things so i think they are kind of aligning in most cases between the cost to provide the services and the revenues that they're generating they can't do it in all cases because some for some fees or if you start raising them too much you're going to actually lose revenue because you can lose participation so you have to balance that particular community development when you want to encourage folks to come in and use those services you don't want to price them out worth they're not coming in and using the services and then we start losing revenue but that's always that balancing act but i think you know generally speaking we're sort of balanced going forward lining the fee increases with the expected increases in compensation so would there be  changing the staff hourly rate two percent sue grey business manager and community development we i do a calculation every year for the staff hourly rate and when we change it a certain percent every year it kind of gets skewed a little bit and what i do is i take the the amount budgeted for the fiscal year coming up so fiscal year eighteen salaries that are in the budget and i do a full cost recovery from our last fees study we have a formula that we use and i use certain positions in planning for it and it comes up that we're pretty much right on right now so we could you know we could raise it a little bit i wouldn't raise it two percent though not this year last year i think we raised it a little higher so that and the formulation you just recited does that include the retroactive pay raise assuming that the negotiations completed no it does not include it includes all of the overhead though yeah it does not include that wouldn't that be captured by the previous level because the assumptions from administration was to increase fees to match the previous budgeted amount we've captured in that in last year's fiscal year yes whatever mister piece put in for what he's assuming for fiscal year eighteen that's the figure i use right in this case we're going backwards and that base already exists so i think that's what councilmember dominguez is getting to is that it's already cooked into the base that you're looking at the calculations you just described yes so your fiscal year eighteen costs forecasted salary range not last year's actual correct we get we get a spreadsheet of position control report for the budgeted year coming up and that's the figure i used okay figures that's a little that's a little more reassuring thank you that i advocate for getting closer to full cost recovery on on the planning fees i just think that's a to sort of repeat again sort of my total picture of of how this should work is that these ought to be like interest rates and go up when things are hot and go down when things are not and so i just definitely philosophically feel like we ought to get closer to community development director we agree with you and we have reserved some money in this year's budget as well as identified money in next year's budget to together pay for a comprehensive fee study that will tell us what our cost of service is and where fees should be and once we have that information we anticipate starting that after the beginning after mid year so we need to get through the new zoning ordinance process we need to get through launching our permit tracking software once we get through those milestones we'll have capacity with staff and also funding in place to do that to do that study and then we'd be coming back to council at some point after the study is concluded with recommendations so that the in order to do this we need to have that that our sort of our defense ability comes out of these studies and that was part of what the housing task force weighed in on was at that study that not particularly that study but that will that will inform what fees will be for a ud type projects and so it does it does have an effect on the cost of building an aud project for example but it's not the nexus or economic studies that we're looking at in the context of that committee so but it is a necessary component of being cost recovery excluding long range planning and then what i thought i heard was we are achieving cost recovery with our hourly rate so there must be another basket of goods and services that were not achieving cost on the fees that we charge for services related to going through design review going through planning commission appeals for example we know that we're well under we believe that we're well under cost recovery with respect to those fees and that would be precisely what we'd be wanting to better understand as we go through a fee study so until you do the fee study is it possible to ratchet it up five percent ten percent i would get uncomfortable going much above i would say five percent just because we don't know exactly where we're at and also i don't know where we're at with regards to the market as the finance director so mario mentioned we do like to encourage lawful behavior and to the extent that we start to ratchet the fees up where they're out of out of range for people beyond what people would consider reasonable we may see people launching into illegal construction and that type of activity that makes it very difficult on the enforcement side okay thank you thank you go right ahead good afternoon was mister chair committee members larry cassidy building safety inspection supervisor just want to cover the last few remaining slides for a building and safety  shells were based on type of construction which comes down to there's three types one is fire resistive that would be or i'm sorry it would be non combustible that was table a table b was fire restrict or fire resistive or one our construction and table c was non rated but in looking in hindsight we started looking back and realizing that separating it out and having three tables was was kind  of not not helping us gain our cover our time for review basically everything regardless of type of construction it takes about the same amount of time for review or inspection so we've consolidated those tables just to simplify it the next item temporary certificate of occupancy we've added this new fee to cover our expenses for the the time it takes to process and follow up on temporary certificates of occupancy also known as t cos you might hear that term thrown out oftentimes businesses will get a temporary c of o and  unless they have some sort of incentive to come back in and and close that tco out and get their final c of o oftentimes they they do not do that so this will encourage them to almost self regulate and get them to take care of their own business instead of us having to go asking them to a please call for your final inspection and get your c of o so this will help eliminate the time we spend trying to follow up on the t c in that in that world and stepping into it not not full time but eventually we will and that's going to necessitate an in house conversion of paper plans to pdf you know many of the larger design firms and architectural firms are set up to do that but the some of the mom and pops and homeowners who do owner builder projects they're just not set up to do electronic drawings so that they'll come in with the hard copies and and what we will do is convert those to electronic copies for them and that will cover our our cost to do that provide that service for them  we've also changed the the method for how we are going to charge investigation fees and this will apply mostly to illegal construction typically we've kind of used the formula put forth by the building codes years and years ago probably ten years ago is when we in two thousand and three we put out of this fee to our our fee resolution and we haven't made any changes this change will allow us to be more accurate in recouping our expenses for illegal construction and with that they move the building and fire code board of appeals here in ratifications so that's that takes place within the building of fire court code board of appeals and we have now have a charge for filing appeals oh if you don't mind says investigation fees including code enforcement building electrical plumbing mechanical energy accessibility grading requested site investigations in any form of investigation not specifically associated with an active permit so the investigations fee used to be thirty three percent of the required permit fee to legalize that construction we've changed that to say the total hours that the assigned inspector logged for acquiring access in the fuel investigation of the matter reported and it's a minimum of  three twenty eight and so in this situation did you study which permits this might tend to disincentivize and which ones it would incentivize in other words i'm assuming this is going to raise and lower the cost in different areas  accessibility femaie go up if it takes longer or fewer hours because there's a whole list of things you were talking about electrical plumbing and some of them require more access if the builder has to remove some bricks for example community member dominguez the the investigation fee is is for all construction that has taken place without and it's not related to an existing permit so it's it's down the overall revenue we anticipate will go up and it will allow us to collect fees for the unpermitted construction basically so will this disincentivize people who've built without a permit from coming in and getting a permit i don't think that will have an effect on it the if they're gonna do if they're gonna perform work without a permit i don't think the fee is gonna change whether or not they're going to do work planning or building through a site visit might see that something has been constructed without a permit so i don't think it will i don't think it will dis incentivize people to come in but it will assist us  in be more accurate in our cost recovery for that work so what are the areas within community development we're raising fees would discourage people that's something that seems like maybe there's some inconsistencies in our perspective yet whenever whenever we look at fees for building a safety there are a few permits that sometimes we do raise or there's actually like this year there there are two fees that we did not rais those were electrical generators and festival wiring festival wiring which i don't know what that is it's so the festival wiring let me clarify that is music it's everything not related to the generator in other words the distribution system or anything that's not related to the generator so like at the is what we consider festival wiring okay so going back to the whether or not this incentivizes our descent advises folks in my you know i'm not a contractor so i'm not sure how the economics work specifically but seems like they'd be less inclined to pay a permit for an inspection fee if they felt it was disproportionate to the amount of work they're attempting to achieve there seems like there's probably a fairness thing or is it just straight and economics can they afford dominguez are you referring to the investigation fee now or fees in general just to clarify though in general and with this particular and if there's a difference if there if one ways counterintuitive to the other manner i'd like to hear about that to dominguez i would say the investigation fee is wouldn't have any bearing on whether or not someone's coming in that's that's just to help us recoup our expenses once we do discover illegal construction as far as the fees in general and that's because at that point they don't really have a choice you actually you've engaged them in an enforcement process so in in the context we heard earlier then maybe someone who you're unaware of who tries to do something without getting a permit and they may be more price sensitive and that may be the reason why they're not coming in to get a permit correct okay thank you very much i appreciate it well thank you mister custody any more questions or comments okay thank you next item okay next up is public works good afternoon chair and committee members i'm adam handel principal engineer in the public works department i'm here today to talk to you about proposed fee changes for engineering land development and transportation planning we do have an increase recommended across the board to move us closer to cop full cost recovery we also have a new fee for overtime inspection for outside of normal work hours and that's primarily for public works construction that might involve night work maybe a water line shutdown something that we need to perform work at night to minimize inconvenience to the public and this fee change would just reimburse that the overtime expense for the city one hundred and forty six dollars an  hour recommending a reduction in the fee for what we call administrative encroachment permits for private or non city standard elements in the public right of way from six hundred and eight dollars to four hundred and eighty eight dollars in the cost of certificate certificates of completion for agreements and then an increased cost or fee for missed or rescheduling inspections from forty dollars to a hundred and twenty three dollars what we find sometimes an inspector will show up to the project and the contractors not ready for inspection and we've lost that hour or two of time and so we're recommending an increase in that fee for cost recovery purposes nex slide for transportation planning primarily related to parking design review to recommend it feed changes in line with some of the things they do in planning which is for preliminary plan review prior to a design review submit all charging half of the current plan check fee and similarly for supplemental reviews or reviews after the second review if the applicant hasn't responded to comments than a fee of a  what would what would be your communist one or two examples of administrative encroachment permits the committee member white an administrative encroachment permit is  it's different than what we call minor encroachment permit and then it's not something that requires a recorded agreement on the property in terms of what that might be it would be a special type of driveway apron in the street where we need to review the materials that it's not going to create an issue for the traveling public it could be something in the park way that the jason property owner wants to install in the parkway and staff review that that it doesn't create a traffic hazard or other issue in the public right of way us closer to full cost recovery for public works department was it somehow related to the three percent budgeted for salaries or is that just a coincidence it's just a coincidence okay and one hundred and twenty four during normal work rescheduling fee it's just a coincidence okay so it's not like we're saying if you miss your appointment that's an hour of time and that's worth it's correct so why one hundred and twenty three and i why not one hundred and twenty five or  and seventeen a broad range of program and facility fees fourteen of those we recommended for deletion those programs are no longer going to be offered we have thirteen new fees and we're actually looking to change about eighty percent of our fees leaving eighteen percent unchanged we have taken a view that typically if we're going to increase it's around the three percent mark we look at what the marketplace is doing we have a number of fees where we were in a competitive market and we try to make sure we still offer affordable of community benefits and we obviously need to make sure that we can still meet a broad section of the community with what we offer in some cases we're looking at specific audiences for those specific programs and we look at the fees in that relation  as i said earlier we are already competitive in a number of programs as a number of summer camps as many locations to book your wedding your party so we have to look at what other people are doing and try to stay competitive and we have a reputation in the community for offering affordable and quality programs and services we bear that in mind as well as we're considering our approach i haven't got a slide of six hundred and seventeen fees for you so i just pulled out a few of them to just sort of share with you the top line there in terms of drop in fee it's only one dollar but typically can have a you know one dollar on a smaller fee as a large percentage so sometimes when we think about are we raising fees ten percent fifteen percent seven percent it can only often be one dollar and so there you'll see where it's outside of the three percent range but one dollar we feel is appropriate camp three percent but it turns into a slightly larger dollar amount because it's a larger camp and that reflects some of the costs of actually providing that program we are looking to increase our oversized picnic rental fee we only have five of these in the city these are within parks where you can have quite a lot of people and it's just reflecting the higher maintenance costs associated with that larger and broader area west side kitchen rental again professional cleaning costs are increasing and so a two dollars increase per hour we feel is appropriate and won't adversely affect the current customers there and then you can see for our lights for our adult and youth ballfield rentals there are two dollars and one dollar but they then equate to an eight and a seven percent and rather than having things which are zero twenty three we like to have around dollars and so that kind of is where it leaves us and that again isn't reflective of water costs and turf for innovation and maintenance costs because those are very highly used assets in our community and then finally you've just pulled up there that we have taken our across the broad across the board approach i'm sorry to our rental facilities where we've looked to try and increase them by three percent to just again maintain our place in the marketplace and also be concerned and consider members and looking to see if we can attract some junior members of which you know there might be an incentive for them if we can drop the fee so there's a recommendation to have a fee for junior members which is a half of the current fee for any other member and that's on a six month or a twelve month basis and then we are looking also to increase the fee for the recker recreation obstacle program for the ten drop in pass there are a number of ways in which children can attend those and we have a thirty day  where we are looking to offer a new program called a terrific scientific thank you mister sean any questions customer right now could you tell what what are the two or probably the single biggest and then we'd have after that a number of other smaller buildings and then some of our park sites are particularly popular we tend to have a large number of rental opportunities which when you accumulate it adds up to quite a lot of money  but very few sort of very large single assets thank you any trends in rental business and use of city facilities i notice anecdotally that there are a lot other competing private sector rental opportunities and venues and museums that are renting their space and things how is that affecting the revenue generation from rentals so chair ha there's a very good question competition is ever increasing in in particularly when it comes to rental of spaces and demographics change over time you know we have a number of unique buildings which are in fantastic and in wonderful locations were on the beach for the pavilion we're downtown in in the career recreation center and we were in the neighborhoods for market to people and how we attract people and i think there are there areas where we are still very strong and as i mentioned earlier you know saturdays at the pavilion are very strong and and that's always a lot of demand for that and so we're we're seeing it more challenged is to try to fill up those shoulder days where there are just more opportunities for people now and i mean even the library today we're talking about introducing new fees to attract people to to hold you know events in the out store locations at the library and so you know we have a we do that sort of thing as well so i think a lot of people are looking at opportunity to grow revenue so that clearly challenges us to to keep people wanting to think about us first and just using that as an example do you have a different fee for the fridays and sundays as opposed to the saturday sit th schedule we don't have a different fee at this time but what we do do is offer promotions for those fridays and sundays and so there's current live promotion at this point in time whereby in certain buildings on certain days there's a percentage discount off of the standard fee recognizing that of course demand and supply affects everyone and we want to try and encourage people to take that friday and that sunday if we can incentivize them to do so kind of great okay thank you any other questions how much is the thirty day drop in pass and if you were to just drop in it would be twelve dollars a session so it's not much of an incentive for the ten day pass twenty percent discount yes i guess we could look it that way so my concern there would be for a family that either couldn't afford the thirty day pass or just wasn't going to be able to use it that that they we'd still have a higher level of participation so that's just something i bring up i'm not sure if there's an answer but i do i do have an answer to that we actually have in our general fund recommended budget this year and we've had it in the prior year's fifty thousand dollars for scholarships for that program for that intent and so our staff receive those applications and review those and and either off somewhere between twenty five to a hundred percent scholarship on a needs basis for that program and you utilize the full fifty thousand we do absolutely okay the so going back to your initial slide three percent is typical for the increases again with apologies to delos all three percent is the magic number here i note that's true for your rental and lease rates which obviously wouldn't be tied to wages because it's a whole different scenario where did the three percent come from so typically our strategy is to try to have a regular but modest increase in fees over time to try to avoid the the need to at certain points you know two or three years have a large sort of shock to people and because obviously costs are forever increasing but particularly in the area of rental as we as we talked about earlier it's a particularly competitive environment so we can't just be willy nearly putting whatever number we want in there because it makes it more difficult for us to then sell that that venue so again our strategy is to try to look at it and do a little bit often so that we never have to have that huge ten twenty percent jump because people will be used to paying x for that building and suddenly next year it's a lot lot higher right you want it to creep up not all of a sudden correct escalate do you do surveys after different programs and collect input i mean obviously not only on the program but in terms of the cost they're priced so give you value for money or how do you feel about the fee certainly that's a question which would be value and i can certainly confirm to you what that survey would look like tip we tend to look at the performance of the camps at the end of the summer and and if th was really good participation then we filled up with the fears okay or you know is there room for maybe to grow based on all the criteria we talked about earlier and if look of course the participation was somewhat depressed then we want to understand what are the reasons for that and of course fee could be part of it right and being a teacher i can tell you a lot of it is personnel related so if you have a course with a new teacher who's dynamic and compelling you're gonna get a much higher participation level so it the price  may be one point but the other point would be the value in terms of who's leading the group and what the parents and the participants think they're getting out of it i think that answers my questions thank you very much  folks in in our in our recreation programs as part of that presentation i'll take that back to you t today's presentations are different departments are using different methodologies to raise fees i'd like to explore more about about surveys both with parks community development and i throw in the library to to find out how sensitive users are to price increases when one department isn't getting full cost recovery it impacts the other department because you're all general fund department so i want to make sure that parks and police which are very critical at least in terms of what i'm hearing from residents in my district and citywide aren't being shortchanged necessarily because another department isn't doing full cost recovery so i just want to make sure we're we're keeping that in the backs of our minds as we move forward with this and how aggressive we are at the end of the day i want to make sure that all of our residents are getting good value for the money they pay for any of their services so we want to make sure we're as efficient as we can be and i think department heads know that part of their duties are to keep an eye on costs and to keep their departments efficient so i'm comfortable there but i want to make sure both of those principles are talked about discussed within the departments with with us up here on the council during the budget work sessions so i'm going to keep asking questions about how we can make sure our services are meeting the needs of our constituents and where some may be more price sensitive or shift demand curves more than others are there opportunities opportunities for us to expand on our funding for projects where there is some energy gains and some savings longer term so what we're gonna do is mike welch our who is the facilities manager is going to give you a presentation mister samaras said my name is mike wiltshire i'm the relatively new facilities and energy manager for the city i'll give a brief review of the city's utility management program and how it pertains to energy efficiency projects a little overview of the what i'm going to present on what is the utilities management program how is it funded energy efficiency projects that it may generate and the the feature of the program  the utilities management program was first established halfway through fiscal year two thousand and sixteen so this year fy two thousand and seventeen will be its first full year of implementation and what it does is the program centralizes the of general fund utility bills into a single program within the facilities division previously these utility bills gas and electric were paid by individual programs and they showed up as a budget line item within those within those programs throughout the city  again this program all is only currently looking at general fund facilities and general fund utility bills this does include citywide streetlights centralizing payment of utility bills has a number of advantages bills are now being managed by our energy management staff as opposed to program heads who may or may not be focused on energy and energy efficiency it kind of establishes one central point of contact for us and our utility art this program now they're centrally managed seventeen allocated cost revenue but it also kind of showcases our utility usage for general fund facilities because we try and match the allocated cost that we bring in to our utility usage and we look at the past two allocated costs within the budget amount will include a three to five percent increase over fy two thousand and seventeen and this is to cover expected increases in gas and electric rates it was intended that the program will be held harmless against outside price increases and inflation so we try and capture those those cost increases the long term aim and the program is to act as a revolving fund that rolls over any savings and and incentives and rebates and anything that's coming in energy related and reinvest this into energy projects for the city the program itself and staff are well suited to generate and identify these high quality energy efficiency projects  this is sort of a snapshot of where we're at for two thousand and seventeen at last utility billing cycle we were seventy five percent through the fiscal year so this kind of shows how the program funding is working at at seventy five percent through the fiscal year we've spent seventy three percent of the electricity budget so we're pretty much right on track there although we kind of expect to see a little bit of an increase in may and june because that increased air conditioning load so we don't anticipate to see mm in the electric and you know for the electrical for fy two thousand and seventeen but a good story is our gas usage we currently spent were at seventy five percent through the fiscal year we've currently spent thirty four percent of our gas budget and so that we've recognized dramatic gas savings from some past projects one of the main projects was the hvac replacement project at the police department this was a one point four million dollar full building  retrofit that occurred and came into play at the end of two thousand and fifteen so i located so we were saving thirty to forty thousand dollars a year in gas at that facility alone so we plan as of now we're planning to see fifty to seventy thousand dollars in savings in the utilities management program which will be rolled over to execute energy efficiency projects in fy eighteen  some examples of energy efficiency projects in fy two thousand and seventeen as i mentioned this was the initial year of the program so we didn't have any rollover funds a bit available for energy efficiency projects the program was given a twenty five zero dollar one time seed funding which is currently being used to upgrade the street lighting circuit on haley street so we're replacing the underground wiring and fifty three street light fixtures between state street back one to three year energy efficiency projects throughout the city and here's a bit of a breakdown on the types of projects we have available within general fund facilities so looking ahead we still have a number of facilities within the city they can benefit from these quick payback projects the main quick payback projects are interior lighting exterior lighting we are embarking on replacing streetlights citywide but there will be some catch all for that so replacing some catch all street lighting's like onesie twosie type stuff  the energy team could definitely utilize additional staffing to help meet some of these really quick payback stuff they're a little more vague but low cost measures and behavioral changes auditing benchmarking and fieldwork having staff to execute these kind of projects see if some of our major users are spiking we can we can address that  future of the program the utilities management program is a great way forward as i mentioned it puts the control of utilities management and energy project development in the hands of the city's energy professionals instead of spreading it across the city wide allows proper direction and prioritization of energy projects with good payback the energy team has direct access to our facilities project management staff along with our building maintenance staff and so we have the means and tools to kind of execute these projects quickly and effectively something that should be noted is for the success of the program we have to truly commit to rolling over the program savings so that they can be held for energy efficiency projects in the next years because that really is a fundamental goal of the program is to overall over time lower the city's utility usage by executing these energy efficiency projects and as i mentioned currently the program only covers general fund facilities so you can see the pie chart on the right there that's the city of santa barbara's electrical only that's general fund and enterprise fund so enterprise funds make up over fifty percent of the city's utility usage and they currently don't fall under the management of the utilities management program but there's a huge amount of opportunity there for energy efficiency projects and so finding a way going forward to at minimum review and sounds like a opportunity to explore that area some more i would think that how would that work the enterprise funds i mean and take the waterfront for example i mean they have a finance team management team there obviously and then we have a an energy management team for the general fund and so forth how how would you envision that overlapping or complementing one another or would you see that for example the the waterfront using that as an example would they have their own energy management utilities management program working in that little system or not enterprise fund projects so some way to delineate that but i do like the idea of keeping the energy program centralized within a central program so that we can maintain the energy staff there and review all of these funds so it would be finding a mechanism or a way to allow our energy staff to weigh in and support energy projects and programs within enterprise funds that would that was so that's how you would see it going rather than the the independent  s yeah that could add so the enterprise funds were not included initially because you know we recognize that enterprise funds have their own funding sources and we can't really commingled general fund enterprise funds do we have to maintain them sort of distinctly but that's not to say that are and his staff couldn't be kind of as advisors working as visors to enterprise funds and encouraging these kinds of projects they have their own funding sources the own have their own reserves so they can make it work it's just a matter of putting more attention and focused in to those kinds of projects and with mister weil trying to staff i think we can be putting more focus into those areas for the general fund departments we don't have that kind of x you know money we could play with so we're quite in this little program that's self financing to help develop some of these prod that benefit that general fun as a whole we don't do worry about monies from one department co mingling with another so that's kind of why we have this distinction but it's possible to do so it we would just be really more of an advisor capacity than really managing the money as well you know this perhaps and when we get into our budget budgetary conversations we can look into this further this sounds like a an opportunity a real opportunity to to make some save money and energy and such so  you i would see you know suggest that the committee at least provides you know some direction to staff if you want if you want us to pursue something more within the general fund departments or enterprise funds we can certainly bring back to you something as part of public works presentation in terms of how that might be funded the the funding question is really the critical issue here how are we going to come up the money how do we make that work i think there are some ways to make that happen so we'd be happy to you know receive any kind of direction or even questions about how that might happen today what sounds like the constraint the threshold constraint is staffing you there's only you and yeah and and a lately apparent to our energy analysts and so and then our capital project staff they can execute these projects but yeah that would be the limiting factor is if were taking on these additional management of the enterprise funds would be there would we would have to figure out some way to increase our breath to handle that and then mister smart do you have any thoughts on how that would enterprise funds to recover their time and costs and is that what you're proposing to cook and then bring back to us as part of this budget process or do you want from us direction and and for not just enterprise stones but just in general even for the general fund portion well before even council dominguez speaks i know he's interested in this issue and and wants to move forward as fast as possible like us i think we're all saying we don't know how but we think this is an obvious opportunity to save money and energy and be more environmentally sustainable  so i think it's on you to figure out the budget proposal for this year's budget that would make that happen yeah i don't think there's any resistance at all from us so make councilman err dominguez i know you want to add something to this so what what i'm not saying is the overall cost of the program and what's the return on the investment to the city the overall cost of the program is i think i had it on a slide there are fy seventeen budget was a roughly one  million dollars and that's just directly to cover utility bills there's nothing else built into that there's one six million dollars for fy seventeen to cover our electricity bills and two hundred and twelve zero to cover our gas bills one two million that's money going towards paying the bills that's not staff that it that's that's directly allocated cost coming in from other programs to just to pay the utility bills so what is your staff budget we have a small program a n energy conservation program and it's a program that also is fully funded by allocated cost it's about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars and it funds one our energy honest panelist position salary and some overhead for  the city's energy program just to make sure i'm on the right page when you say it's covered by allocated costs you're saying different departments are paying part of it as a kind of an overhead correct let me just jump in there in terms of how its funded so  indicated two thousand and seventeen was the first year we rolled out this program prior to that every single general fund department was paying their own utility bills and they would budget accordingly what we decided to do as a way to as create this mechanism for funding is  a base amount that each department was going to be charged so there weren't no longer gonna be paying their bill based on what it was we used devilish an amount that would go forward with a cpi index would always be on a grow up or trend that money then gets transferred over to forty to seventy thousand dollars in savings from projects that keep implemented so they're getting this the gross amount from departments and then they're able to take advantage of the savings from the actual cost of the bill as a result of these programs and hopefully over time we'll just start growing and growing in terms of an annual number because these projects that are they're implementing are ongoing so those statements will be ongoing where the the charges the department's will be continually going up hopefully i hope that helps in terms of background so the amount of money we're talking about is forty to seventy thousand dollars this year it'll continue to grow forty eight percent of the allocated costs and it's sixteen percent of the city's energy and i guess this slides a little different because it on page four because it doesn't have enterprise funds and seems like from the other  seventy sixty six percent of our energy is through enterprise funds that's correct so at this point we put in the twenty five thousand in seed money and we're collecting money and allocated costs from the department's and that doesn't quite reach the the discrepancy between what we're paying the utilities and what we're collecting that gap is not yet paying the salaries of the program staff they'll separate from that you know the before this program was in places utility management program we had energy staff mike and alia those were already being funded through other allocated costs from the facilities operations so it's an internal service fund it gets allocated across the organization so that their staff time already funded this is just the the piece related to the utility bills that were now funding  be the perceived return on investment or is our way to project that or is it to variable de to look at it that way because that would inform the council's opinion on what's the appropriate level of staffing obviously if we're making fifty percent return on investment we'd want to staff up very aggressively i wouldn't think to let might jump in but i wouldn't thinking in terms of you know percentage return i would look at what's the payback so if you have a project that's been she's cost you fifty thousand and you've paid back in three that and plus the lining with that with what's the cost if it costs you a million dollars but it takes twenty years to pay it back that's a different consideration and one hundred zero its feet back in three years the same as return on investment or is it a different chair i'm just harkening back to witnessing mister dewey bringing into the sustainability committee projects the ones that come to mind are the the lights in the well first of all there was there were some that were just getting different rates for certain bills i mean i guess one of the pieces that was going on again eight years ago was there were more bills than people even knew were happening they were sort of hiding under rocks here and there and and that just hurting all those bills into one place was was it was a project at one point and and of course that now we're seeing that becoming centralized and then to see the savings were just spectacular on some of these things it really some big improvements have been made so we're now we're talking about the enterprise funds it just seems like that's a yes there self funding and in particular with the waterfront they're doing fine however why not attack that and particularly again from the sustainability perspective that's just a place where it's an area where i think that everybody celebrates it and and thank you for doing that and let's explore it further we've had real success here over the last decade and it sounds like we have another decade's opportunities right before us so this is something staff likes as well it's why we came up with this kind of continued evolution of how we're trying to deal with our energy usage what i'm hearing from the committee is a desire to try to see how we can kind of roll this model out into the enterprise funds as well and so i think that direction is great i think we're interested in that i think our message back is it's not as simple as we'll have it already and teed up in a week when we come back with the public works budget but you know we'll put some thought in the next week about a method to try to take a crack at it because we'd like to do it and i think we would commit to doing it just not sure it's going to be an easy thing to come up with a program in a week to present to you that's fair and i guess you know one thing i'm thinking about is that perhaps this could be as another capital project and in this sense of maybe we trade off another capital project for this prick capital project because of the return on investment and the and the money that we save from that what we're really proposing i think is to accelerate that and capture those savings sooner  spending money sooner and so obviously understanding that money is limited we're going to have to choose what to spend it on and this seems like a very good candidate and it doesn't fit well into the capital program for the rest of the city in the sense that it's not on the same list because it's not a thought of the same way but i think it is similar mister smart you know i just could add you know for the smaller dollar items i think there is a fairly straightforward opportunity for example if we're looking at one hundred thousand dollar project that's got a three to five year payback we could use general fund reserves for that knowing that we're still going to get it back and without an interest you know for no interest to charge of course we it's just committing to the bigger projects then you're gonna for that have a longer term payback if we're just hovering around policy reserves do you want to depend to buy million dollars for the twenty year payback  right though that's part of the kind of discussion and see what projects are out there the other element in this conversation too i think is the parallel track of consideration of community choice energy and i think that that you know changes the whole conversation a very different way if we are going down a path of doing that as a municipality and having the resources of that as part of this equation too so i think there is a bridge here where we want to go as fast as we can giving you the right kind of staffing to be able to do these low hanging fruit things and then that other cop the conversation i think probably makes this different and puts it into a different structure and it gives us better financing capabilities for those longer term projects separate from the general and maybe a separate model to consider would be to do a consultant model so i see like with the airport there are ten percent of our electrical spend so that's about three hundred eighty five thousand dollars per year if we if our c was for example a hundred thousand dollars either for a direct employee or a consultant we'd only have to save ten percent which would be thirty eight thousand for three years we'd have a three year payback if i understand payback correctly that seems to be like that's it would be in the priority area  seems like payback is just the inverse of return on investment even if they were only able to save three percent of the electrical cost that would be a ten year payback which would still be worth it in my mind if they could do that and i think you we  if we had one employee working for a year at the hundred thousand dollar level they could they could really enumerate some good savings at the airport same thing with the waterfront it's seven percent so maybe a little less efficient but their electrical spend is probably a little more diverse than the airport but again maybe even bundling those two together and having one person serving just those two agencies it would be easier to allocate their cost because then there wouldn't be a general fund component or again using a consultant would be very clean to charge those two departments and you know potentially spending two years and a hundred and fifty thousand to really drop their electrical cost would make a lot of sense and greenhouse gases the situation improved it's just a it's just good all it's a feel good thing all the way around and so to the extent that we can afford to push it forward it's just that's  it's a really good thing and i appreciate the efforts that have been made for those i say for the last many years and this is just a continuation of it so thank you thank you kudos