City Council Update 1.18.22

City Council Update 1.18.22: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

City Council Update 1.18.22: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Welcome to a Redding City Council update for full details on each of the items covered or to watch a meeting online, visit City of Redding.org or find the links in the episode show notes. For any questions, suggestions or comments, please email [email protected].

Barry Tippin, City Manager:
This is Barry Tippin, city manager of the City of Redding. I'm going to give you a recap of the City Council meeting of January 18 2022. The meeting was a long one last until about 11 o'clock that night, so we all went home fairly well worn out started off the meeting with two really good presentations. One was a mayor certificate declaring January 2022 as national mentoring month. Mentoring of our youth is a really important thing and if you have time, I encourage you to become a mentor. The other presentation was a presentation by Danny Orloff of the Greater Redding Chamber of Commerce regarding our Visit Reading tourism marketing program. It was a great presentation and Danny demonstrated what they've been doing since the city of Redding gave the chamber the contract for the tourism and marketing. And if you're interested, you can watch the video of the meeting and see all of what they've been doing. It was a great, great thing and we'll probably be doing this, at least on an annual basis. On the consent calendar, we had a couple of items, one that was grant for $10 million from the state of California to actually rehabilitate a mobile home park on Lake Boulevard, where we would refresh it landscape and improve the site and bring in some trailers. And not only make the existing mobile home park much, much better for the residents there, but also bringing in up to 20 or more new trailers, which we could use as housing and transitional housing for homeless individuals. So that's a really good thing. Another grant application that went in was for infrastructure improvements along Calaboose Creek Downtown and some improvements for the plaza just south of the Shasta College building downtown, which is associated with the downtown redevelopment.

Barry Tippin, City Manager:
We awarded a bid for playground equipment for Indian Hills, Martin Luther King Jr., Pepper Tree, Ravenwood Creek Side and Cumberland Park. So that is a really good news item so we can refresh those parks for those neighborhoods. And we awarded some other projects. One of the important projects we we awarded was the South Bonnyview Road I-5 improvements at Bechelli lane. It's the roundabout for the new Costco building, so you'll see a lot of construction happening down in that area this summer.

Barry Tippin, City Manager:
Moving on, we had an appointment to the Administrative Hearings Board and we also had a public hearing. A public hearing was to consider adoption of amendment to the downtown specific plan. There was a lot of discussion both on the council level and from the community, and the council decided they wanted to continue the public hearing until February 15, and they directed staff to put out additional information to more individuals in and around the garden tract property. So that will go out shortly. And then we will reconvene the public hearing on February 15th for the council to consider that item.

Barry Tippin, City Manager:
Moving on, we had an audit presentation, so every year the city has to audit its finances. The audit was presented and accepted by the council, and we also have a report that's called an annual comprehensive financial report. And there is a lot of data that is put out there in that report. If you're interested, I would encourage you to go online and take a look at it. But there was a lengthy presentation. It talks all about our net positions financially and also talks about our unfunded liabilities. There's a lot of good financial information in there if you're interested. Moving on to item 9.1e, which you may have heard about, and that is the sour plan approval for unrepresented employees. These are employees that are not represented by a union, and they mostly are the managers and directors in the city of Redding. We've been experiencing a significant amount of retention issues and recruitment issues in this group. We've had upwards of six or seven people who have departed the city of Redding for other employment opportunities over the last two years, which is a bit unusual for the city of Redding. And we've also had significant issues in recruiting this group of employees with having done recruitments with no applicants or with maybe one applicant with minimal amounts of qualifications. We've had some success over the last couple of years in hiring folks, but that's usually because of just being fortunate luck, if you will, where people wanted to return to the area and just happen to have the requisite credentials. We looked at a market rate. We hired a consultant who did the analysis of what the market compensation is out there and found that we were as much as 30 percent below on average for this group of employees. So the council decided to approve a increase, averaging about 16 percent. So as I noted, it was 30 percent down, but we recommended a 16 percent overall and the council voted to approve that three to two. Hopefully that will have some good results. In looking at that, we also talked a lot about succession planning. Succession planning for any organization is critically important and we do believe that this will help in that regard.

Barry Tippin, City Manager:
One other item that we approved was the establishment of a new position for personnel analyst for the City Redding Personnel Department. We've grown a little bit over the last few years and the workload is increasing, and in order to keep up on all of our required personnel issues, we needed to have some additional help. So the council was kind enough to approve that position and we'll be recruiting for that position as well. That's a recap of the meeting of January 18, 2022, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day or evening.

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