The Vallejo City Council is set to adopt a list formally establishing the city's top issues to take on for the fiscal year.
During Tuesday's council meeting, city staff presented a document outlining the conversations among council members during Aprilo's goal-setting retreat. Those discussions prioritized community outreach as a council area of focus, in addition to economic and youth development, the city's response to homelessness and public safety. On the document are issues like street calming safety methods, and rebuilding trust between Vallejoans and the police department for the city to focus on.
Tuesday's meeting serves as a checkpoint between city leadership and staff, which is seeking clarification on the work plan ahead of the council's expected adoption of it at next week's meeting. This work plan is typically brought for council review before the fiscal year begins in July, said Kristen Bennett, program manager for the city manager's office, but the process was delayed as staff worked to fulfill council inquiries related to both the budget and goals before presenting on Tuesday.
"We were relatively aligned and understanding with where counsel was coming from in April," said Natalie Peterson, assistant to the city manager.
Some of the adjustments were semantics — Councilmember Charles Palmares requested Oxford commas — but others provided specificity as to how the council expects staff to meet goals for the current fiscal year. Discussions between staff and Vice Mayor Rozzana Verder-Aliga, for instance, revealed that rather than developing a vocational school in Vallejo, the council is seeking that staff promote existing programs through trade unions and schools.
Staff expects the final document to be published after the council meets next week, according to Peterson, and they anticipate a public database offering access to city data and the status of projects to be available by the end of 2023. That database is being developed between city department heads and the city manager's office, which will develop quarterly reports to present to the council once live.
"The things that council suggested (in April) that were already on the paper are things that we for sure know we can access data to," Bennett said. "We still need to look into some of the other metrics that were just suggested on Tuesday. I don't know if we have access or how difficult it would be to pull that."
None of the goals the council has established are unfeasible, Bennett said, but how fast they can advance is dependent on factors like staff bandwidth and their available resources, such as the types of specialists on staff. The city manager's office will be prioritizing the council's highest ranked focuses — defined under "Council Direction and Focus" — to concentrate staff time and resources.
The council is also moving forward in formally structuring when and how goal setting is conducted. Multiple council members expressed interest in switching to a two-day process, compared to this year's daylong workshop at California State University, Maritime. Goal setting has historically been in March for two days, with staff meeting at the end of the first day to expedite the clarification process between the council and staff. "It seems really clear, from council's and staff's end, that the two days are really, really necessary," Bennett said.
Staff opted for a shorter session in April this year due to scheduling challenges among council members. Council members suggested annually holding goal-setting in the first half of March to avoid future scheduling conflicts.
"When you see (scheduling) polls, we need immediate response," City Manager Mike Malone said to the council on Tuesday, which opted to select future dates available to as many council members as possible. "One of the reasons we don't get these things done faster — goal-setting is a perfect example — is because we can't get everyone together at the same time."
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