i'll call to order the santa barbara city council finance committee meeting for may th is there anyone in the audience who would like to speak on any item that is not on our agenda today seeing no one will go straight to them today we have the general fund departments so with that we'll go ahead and get started i'm actually just gonna start with the library and do theirs for them as there's only one change to theirs they're adding a replacement feet to their a wireless hotspot we have staff here if you have any questions but this is the only change for them any questions for mister burdette okay no thank you very much i guess i do have a question i didn't realize you could rent or borrow a hotspot from the library so that is the case that is the case that's good to know everybody who's listening on watching on television to go down to the library to get your s but okay next item next we'll bring up police  lauri peterson business manager for the police department we have two minor changes basically for the department this year this is the old slide show don't look at  the two things that we have are the insufficient funds had been added to our various categories like special events and that was just for clarity's purpose just to make sure that when someone is unable to pay or their check bounces that we have that covered in our f schedule and then the other minor change that we made was in the parking citation payment system the vendor is allowed to charge a processing fee for online payments and we increase that from two hundred and fifty to three dollars which is still significantly less than other online processing fees at this point and that's an anticipation of contract renewal at the beginning of the fiscal year and that was it for the police department at this point we're still working on some larger issues that we're looking at but we don't have those finalized at this point in looking at special events etc okay thank you any questions right thank you very much dominguez can you go back to the slide that's in terms of special events i understand that over time or cost like that or a pretty big driver for the police's budget is there anything that you contemplated as a change there too it's just going through the analysis process again of looking at our fees set appropriately for the amount of overtime that it costs us and making sure that they're at close to a hundred percent recover bull you know where we are now we're probably just a little bit below the range where we should we we haven't revised our rates for officers and equipment in several years so that's why we're going through and looking at those again so will it come up in this year budget i'm not in this year so it'll probably go into next year and they'll have to come as a special item for review okay thank you thank you next we have the fire department good afternoon i'm ron lichty a fire business manager i'm here to talk about the fire department's fees and our proposal to increase them this fiscal year nineteen and to begin with i want to show you our department revenues in total and you can see that the first column is fiscal year eighteen and we have a three eight million dollar budget we're expecting to come in at six six million dollars all that is having to do with the extras having to do with all the mutual aid activity we've had and then we're we have a recommended budget of four three million and we're here to talk about  service charges and we can see that our recommended budget is two hundred one thousand and that represents about a two percent increase over our budget from lat this current year and fees in general constitute just about four percent of our total revenue budget so looking at our fees more in detail it comprised five major categories and our our largest fee is our engine company fire inspections and we conduct about four thousand inspections annually and then we have our various other fees building plan check is th amount of time our fire inspectors are at the counter conducting the fire review of plans land development team is also fire inspectors time on large development proposals in t inspections is title nineteen that's for licensed state mandated licensed care facilities it's a fire inspection but it's for licensed care facilities we can't change those fees because they're mandated by the state and when they change their label to change them and then we issue permits overall we are increasing to keep up with our cost recovery this we're increasing across the board our fees about three percent and this is a sample of some of our fees commonly used fees for fire inspections and for example the first line talks about engine companies for an apartment and hotel with three to nine units takes only fifteen minutes and that fee for example we're increasing it to the nearest whole dollar from twenty eight dollars to twenty nine dollars and then the same goes for the remainder of those fees and time for questions thank you thank you mister luke t any questions councilmember doing is i'm curious why why is it called an engine company fire inspection you're not inspecting engine companies okay yes i think it's called that because it's our engine it's the crew on an engine that go out and conduct the fire inspection do they actually go out in an engine or do they take an suv yes i think they're taking the engine because so there are still within the parks and recreation department we have over six hundred fees for a multitude of different programs and services that we provide and the recommended budget for nineteen suggests no increases on just over half of those fees and we're looking to increase two hundred and sixty nine fees and delete twenty seven fees for programs and services that are no longer operated when we make our fee proposals we have a number of considerations to can take in to board we're looking to try to maximize participation in our programs and services and also make sure that our parks and facilities are used as often as they can be we obviously want to make sure we're providing a broad range of the community and opportunity to utilize those programs and services and of course we will look to target specific audiences accordingly we also don't operate in a vacuum in a number of the areas in which we do provide good services and programs so we have to be considerate to what are other people doing out there in the marketplace particularly in regards to rentals for parties and events and things like that's extremely competitive there's a lot of private competition out there and of course you know we look at where we have a good reputation for quality to make sure that we can support any fee increases and even the fees that we are charging to make sure there's good value for money for our constituents i'm not going to take you through all of the three hundred and however many was changes just pulled a sort of a subsection here so within the majority of our rental facilities we're looking at about a four percent increase we are like most other departments seeing increases in our costs primarily in salary and benefits and so therefore we need to be aware of that when we're looking at our pricing decisions we also think that there's ample room in terms of the prices that we do charge in comparison to comparable operators out there every year we do a study of where are we and where what are other people doing in terms of how much does it cost to rent this building or that park or this building within our summer camp programming there is a range of increases that we are looking to make and when you course look at percentages  sometimes it can be a little high but it could be representing a small dollar amount but again we're looking to recover in some cases some increases in costs we're seeing do two minimum wage or two mou changes  significant portion of our summer program is supported and provided with hourly labor and so of course a lot of those people will be first affected by any minimum wage increases that have been coming through our some of our buildings we are recommending a three percent increase to keep in line with general cost inflation they are still very very good value leases for our partners in those areas picnic sites again consistency there with the activities where we offer things for like night moves and those kind of multi person events that take place and we're recognizing that the cost to provide services have been increasing they're now likely to continue to increase over the next few years as a minimum wage creeps up to fifteen dollars and so what we bring in before you here is the approval to increase those fees by up to sixteen and twenty percent while we're still working out where do we actually need to land those fees so that we're still providing the services but aren't necessarily looking to try to gauge people too quickly or give them a very large increase in one go so there's still a bit of work that we're doing to try to define and iron out exactly where we think that needs to be with all the changes that have happened and are likely to happen this fee that we bring in to you wouldn't apply until after this summer anyway so it wouldn't impact anyone's programming right now we just want to sort of bring it forward and just let you know that that's an area where we think that we do need to see a slightly larger than percent increase to to maintain cost recovery and then to just mention to we're really excited about the fact that we now have a new facility available for the public at the old site of the  old carousel which was removed back in december and the carousel house which took a long time to come up with as a name we held an event a few weeks ago which a couple of council members were able to attend and  think this can be used for recreational programming and also for private events public events although of that nature right adjacent to a wonderful parkway and we've priced that very competitively because again we want to see that building being used throughout the week and at the weekends there's actually an item before the full council later today to hopefully approve our fee schedule and again it's it's been priced competitively to make sure that carousel house is the working name i think most people would know where is that which is obviously one of the good things you want to think about when you're branding a building abbey i'm sure would be open to any new ideas that might come forward but at this time we are marketing it as the carousel house it's the former carousel and the life guards service fees that you mentioned and you mentioned night moves so do we require them to pay for our lifeguards kind of directly or is that just a service that's optional for ocean and pool events so the activities that take place along the beach that are permitted do require us to provide lifeguard services to make sure that the safety of all the participants is in  place and so within the permitting process for people to say hey we'd like to operate this activity or that activity that's a conversation that takes place with these supervisors for the big and for the public events and and then we look to recover those costs associated to make sure that we've got think it's the right thing to do i'm i would be guessing so i can get back to you in terms of what specific requirement whether it be federal state or whether it's just a risk assessment that we've taken as a city i'd be happy to follow that up and send you an email great thank you any other questions for mister hsu well thank you for presentation next we'll hear from commune development who's gone first city planner i'll begin the presentation and then at some point i'll be handing it off to chief building official andrew steffler the community development departments fee resolution was part of the packet budget package submitted to in april of this year i will be going over those recommended feed changes that were part of that budget submitted we also have some additional changes that we are proposing since then and i'll spend a little more time on those for your discussion today and those additional changes were just distributed to you and our two fee resolutions there and are represented by additional cross out and underlined first i want to let you know that we have recently released a request for proposals to seek a consultant to do a land development team fee study this is something that we've been wanting to do for many years the last time we did a comprehensive fee study for land development services was in two thousand and four and since then we've taken very conservative approach to increasing our fees related to land development with the information that we hope to receive from this feast study at the end of this calendar year we can use that information for next year's fee resolution and so our approach this year for the fee resolution is similar to one that we've taken in many years past which is a pretty conservative approach to increasing fees by two to three percent to adjust for the cost of living and salary increases we also attempt to certainly not increase the amount of general fund subsidy to planning division  services based on some additional fee increases last year we estimate that at this point we're at about a forty percent cost recovery for those programs and planning that charge a fee for services so that it excludes long range planning services in terms of the fee resolution that was submitted as part of our budget to city council that represented a general three percent increase in most fees and as i mentioned that was to increase our cost recovery for our services and further reduce the general fund subsidy for the planning division services there were a couple of deviations from that three percent increase in that fee resolution that was submitted to you we did propose some higher increases to certain appeals that would go to the planning commission and that was really to make those fees more equitable we had a couple that were set at two hundred and fifty dollars and some that were set at five hundred and five dollars and so we made them all go up the same amount this year at five zero to five forty five we also increased design review fees by ranging from about ten to thirty percent increase in design review fees and that is to reflect an additional service that we intend to provide and have already begun providing to applicants to do a very thorough review of plans before projects go to the design review boards for project design approval we had had some instances where we had not done that thorough review and projects would get into building permit plan check and we would catch errors that we did not catch prior and so with that additional service we intend to increase those fees by a pretty significant amount also we found that it takes a lot more time than we initially thought to process mills at contracts and th contracts for those historic properties you wish to renovate their properties and therefore they get a property tax break we're proposing to increase those from four hundred and eighty dollars to five hundred and twenty five and then the modification pre application fee and the planner consultation our two services we provide early on in a project review before an application is actually submitted and we are proposing to raise those fees to better reflect the actual time that we spend with applicants and those in that part of the process we also needed to add some fees to our fee resolution to reflect either changed procedure or new applications that were introduced as part of the new zoning ordinance so we several months ago formalize the process to do zoning information reports without going on the site if we were not authorized specifically to do the site inspection so we have a reduced fee for z irs if we do not do a full on site inspection and then we have some new applications like minor zoning exceptions some new types of performance standard permits and some temporary uses including mobile food vendors we needed to add fees to our fee resolution for those and then we've eliminated some fees  revised and fees including eliminating two tiers of the supplemental design review fee clarifying some wording and the environmental assessment section clarifying and also adding fee for recorded agreements that specifically is a fee that we are using or would be using a lot going forward with the accessory dwelling unit covenants and then separating fee for a very specific type of vegetation removal agricultural use fee and then i'll hand it off now to andres toeffler thank you so building in safety our fees as rene had mentioned we try to recover a hundred percent of our direct expenses with our fees so our increases initially were two percent and we were encouraged to increase them to three percent and we'll talk about that at the close of the power point here so you'll see a three percent increase for most fees there are some that we choose to not increase every year to try to assist the community and making you know environmentally responsible decisions so we try to minimize the cost of the electric charging stations the photovoltaic systems we want to support the the use of our parks for festivals so the generator set up inspection that we do we try not to increase that and the festival wiring so that if we if you've been through this a couple times excuse me you'll see these these fees always kind of stay where they're at we try not to increase them we are adding two new fee two new fees one is in response to some direction that we've recently received for requiring signage neighborhood signage of accessory dwelling units since those permits are processed through my counter as opposed to the planning counter we need to put that less similar fee into our feast feast schedule so that we can charge for that sign that's going to go up to help the neighborhood understand what development might be going going on in their neighborhood relative to ad use the stormwater pollution prevention system fee were specifically putting in in the fee schedule we had another fee in here that was hourly but people our customers couldn't anticipate what that hourly cost would be that in another hour factor so we thought we'd bet be best to put in an inspection fee that does kind of cap it at a certain amount four hours of inspection time minimum this is in response to our stormwater pollution prevention program in the permit that's issued to us from the regional water quality board so we do these inspections on recreation we have one minor modification we changed the stucco work fee to per thousand square feet to try to provide some relativity so that you people who are doing a small patch or maybe a hundred square feet or two hundred square feet of stucco work after they put in new windows or something are only paying sixty eight dollars for their permit as opposed to the same amount that someone might pay to restock oh their entire home of four or five thousand square feet so we tried to add some proportional basis two that keep the fee low and i think with that back to so that portion of the presentation really concludes the fees that were submitted to you and our fee resolution as part of the budgets of middle what i'll be covering now is are some additional requests that were not included in the original budget  and this is in response to really several discussions that we've had the city council in the recent past about services and the expectations and meeting the community's needs in terms of providing timely plan review so we are proposing for your consideration and discussion today some additional fee increases in both planning and building and the planning division we're proposing an additional five percent fee increase to the three percent that was proposed originally for  generally an eight percent across the board fee increase there are also some other specific fees that deviate from that eight percent that i'll cover in a moment but what that five percent additional fee increase would generate is approximately one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars and then we would also propose an additional one percent fee increase in building and safety to generate an additional sixty two thousand dollars and with that we would propose bringing on an additional one and a half full time equivalent of an associate planner for specifically plan check purposes and that could be funded by these additional fee increases and our estimated revenue this is both  additional money would be generated not only by fee increases but the additional workload that we're seeing and plan review that we believe we could support an additional one and a half planner to help keep up with the workload in addition we've proposed some other revisions to the planning fee resolution which i've distributed to you today that further clarify some existing fees some additional revisions due to the new zoning ordinance again mostly clarification and reorganization within the fee resolution to make it match the terminology that's in the zoning ordinance we've also proposed to eliminate the two tiers of an optional pre application review that had been in the fie resolution for many years and really doesn't the amount of work for the pre application review team review that's done by the land development team doesn't warrant two tiers we've  proposed to eliminate the lower tier and just retain the higher fee which would be two thousand seven hundred and sixty five dollars also as i mentioned we are clarifying and increasing the fee for staff to prepare recorded agreements we also need to add a fee for the release of prior recorded agreements as we are now being charged to perform that task by the county  clerk and so the fee there is in accordance with california government code section two seven three six one point three it's not a specific dollar amount it just reflects whatever it is each year that the county clerk needs to pass on to us we would want to pass that along to the applicant that is for the application that's triggering the release of a prior recorded agreement and that concludes our presentation for community development any thank you what is the timeline for the  evaluate and choose our consultant bring that to city council in july and based on the expectations we've laid out on the rfp we expect a consultant to submit their final findings in november increased cost recovery further reduce general fund subsidy i noticed one of the previous presenters had a list of considerations and i'm wondering as part of the process with the consultant will they kind of fill out that list will there be more considerations committee member dominguez we do have that wrapped into the rfp in terms of what we expect them to provide in terms of service would be recommendations  for not only looking at neighboring communities and what they charge for land development team services but also what else should be taken into account like our long standing city council policy to subsidize planning services should that reach out to stakeholder groups i believe we left that in the rfp so that we can assure that the public understands our users understand what we're going through and developing the fees and i was thinking about it in terms of something like the mills act contract fee are there some things that we want to keep the price less than a full recovery because it provides an extra community benefit and that's something that i'm not sure if the consultant necessarily needs to do or wants to do or if that's more staff or if you want counsel or planning commission's input thank you that's a good point councilmember dominguez and one where i think if the consultant came back with a certain recommendation of here's a full cost recovery fee to perform the service then we would take that and and consider that and in our recommendation to council would weigh the pros and cons for exactly the reasons you mentioned and and reasons that mister seller mentioned why we do purposefully keep some fees low to encourage people to get permits for some of the work that otherwise they might not if the fee was a hundred percent full cost recovery so and to use the mills act i was kind of curious do we get a number of applications for those low we do have a goal i believe right now because it's set up as a it's not a trial program but we at the outset our goal was to bring forward eight applications from mills act contracts and we've not had a problem receiving eight that are interested so far so we've been able to carry forward at least eight each year okay no one's guys planning to make sure that that actually increases the speed of service and i could see it increasing the quality and maybe not the speed or hopefully both but what do you is there anything you can do to to show the community that hey this really we're tracking this and it really is effective that's a great question too and i think i'd be more qualitative i do believe it will increase the quality of projects their likelihood of getting through building permit plan check more slight delay in getting on design review boards for project design approval because we do want to make sure that before we do that it's really ready and that that project could be quickly turned around and submitted for building permit application so it in many cases the overall timeline may be the same but we would catch those major issues earlier in the process before more time and money has been talking about it in terms of the accelerate and i think it was it mister hart you were asking what the numbers were and i think it was pretty minimal and i'm wondering if increasing the fee will have an even further detrimental effect on that number or if there's another way we can incentivize those users to go that path that's a good question councilmember dominguez it's it's my impression  opinion that the decision to participate in a pre application review relative to the accelerate program is not based on the dollars what i heard during the testimony of the the stakeholders and the private sector during the accelerated update was we would gladly pay for services if it would help us in the long run to shorten up our time frame and get our businesses going the the predicament or paradox is no one wants to pay the extra money until they're in trouble and plan check and then it's that time has already passed so we're trying to help people understand that this is a benefit to them through outreach but really the professional community has to acknowledge the benefit and then take advantage of and we're struggling to get them to do that they prefer to submit something to us to get into the plan check process because that that starts the process for them and they think that starts the clock so they'll be done sooner whereas maybe taking a couple weeks to have a preliminary review of something and iron out some kind of core problems might save them four to six weeks at the end but it's difficult to see that when your clients pushing you to get plans submitted so they can get in the tenant space they could see where there's kind of a hurry up and wait dance particularly if it's a complicated project with several vendors involved or several parties in a bank so if you see any solutions you know that we can this in any way related when we had our planning commission and joint council discussion about future work efforts and there was a hybrid a funding model approach so we could fund some of these long range planning projects that had been delayed with this in any way address that or would it free up other resources so that we could get to some of those longer term projects because i know there if i recall there was about a one and a half position increase part of that hybrid so is this that is this that component of it or is this something else committee member freedman it it's a separate position request that we're talking about here what we discussed that the joint meeting was can be confusing because it was also one and a half fte at the project planner level to help move forward some of those longer range major work efforts this request would be specifically for plan check and it would be new staff brought on board so equated to about a half of a planner that we were just paying people extra money to come in and work on flex fridays in the weekend to try to keep up with plan check and even then we're not meeting our expectations with the additional workload we've seen with accessory dwelling unit s we believe we need one and a half associate planners to meet our our timelines to meet our p objectives so this is specifically just for current planning and building and permanent plan check they wanted a half f t v for project planner to move forward some of those major work efforts we're still looking at different funding sources that we may have for that we believe there may be a potential with some of the success agency money i'm related to affordable housing that we might be able to bring someone on board if they work on certain work efforts that are related to affordable housing to either incentivize or encourage or somehow  generate affordable housing but we're looking at we need to look at some other options to try to fully fund that one and a half fte that we discussed in early april and the only question i had is when the consultant is looking at the fee study will they be able to have some examples of typical developments and what the bundle of fees would represent and at the different price points because i think it's easy to get lost on the cumulative impact of all of these separate disparate fees on a homeowner who's doing a simple remodeling job i think there's a lot of sympathy here and on the council for those folks maybe less so for folks who are doing development i'm other co about that but i think it's really important for us to understand how these individual pieces add up to a net dollar amount and the impact on that on somebody trying to do something simple in their home so is that part of what they're going to be looking at  chair i do believe so part of what we've asked in the rfp is for the methodology that a professional consultant would propose in order to carry out the fee study but we do expect in order to meet our shortened time frame that we would need to provide for them some examples of classic permit application types that we see fairly often like a coastal development permit with a modification what does that typically take us and what are the fees for that and so we'll have to help them along since we won't be tracking our time on a daily basis for a year or more we'll need to provide them with our best educated estimate of how long certain applications  take across the scale of all types of development yeah well that work product is really important for this conversation so thank you for planning ahead and making that happen any other questions for staff  we need a motion is this direction or do we have a round up at the end but there's one more okay excuse me sorry about that sorry about that lastly we have public  good afternoon chair and members of the finance committee i'm adam handel principal engineer and public works and i'm here to talk to you about land development fees in the public works department primarily engineering division which is the division i'm in and also transportation for supporting land development is currently near full cost recovery today so we don't have a high general fund subsidy and to piggyback on the the feast study discussion i think  we'll be looking at potentially higher fee changes or modifying our fee structure during the next budget cycle after we have the results of the fee study with potential changes in the service levels that we provide  terms of plan track inspection services for public works permits and that's all i had any questions for mister handel thank you pretty good do you need a mesh motion we don't need a motion today okay we'll get that at the end we do nevermind what does anybody like to make a motion i would move that we recommend these proposed changes to the council nsf bring it to council motions