Council Recap 3-15-22_mixdown.wav

Council Recap 3-15-22_mixdown.wav: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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Steve:
Welcome to a Redding City Council update for full details on each of the items covered or to watch meeting online. Visit the City of Redding org or find the links in the episode. Show notes for any questions, suggestions or comments. Please Email podcast at City of Redding dot org.

Chuck Aukland:
Hello everyone. This is Chuck Aukland, director of Public Works with the City of Redding. And I'd like to provide a brief recap of the Council's meeting on March 15, 2022. The meeting was pretty exciting. I started out with a presentation by several folks from the Hill Country Clinic, so they provide a lot of great services to the city, particularly folks that are in crisis and need take a lot of pressure off of our law enforcement and medical personnel, freeing them up to do other jobs and really provide a great service to this community. Following that, the Council took a little bit of public comment and then went on to the consent calendar. And camp consent calendar is kind of routine items, but there are a few things that I want to highlight on there that the council approved. The Community Services Department is getting some additional work for their aquatic center 50 meter pool, doing some improvements out there and needed some additional equipment for that project, as well as receiving a grant submission for the California State Parks Division of Boating and Waterways, getting a $36,000 grant for youth boating and water safety programs. That's good stuff in public works. My department, we had a couple of items of interest on the consent calendar.

Chuck Aukland:
One is actually both of them really related more to the airport and all the great work that we're doing out there. As you may know, there's a lot of great service happening out there. We got two new airlines and three new destinations with Alaska and Avelo Airlines out there. So many more options to to fly out of Redding. So fly local whenever you can. But we got a lot of construction work that needs to be done, receiving several grants to do runway and taxiway repair out there, to do environmental studies and some master planning so that we can grow and grow smartly as we move forward in these good economic times. So moving on to the regular calendar, step eight are deputy city manager and Nicole Smith, housing manager gave a report on $6 million worth of loans, residual receipts, loans that are going to be writing for some new housing in town. There are three different apartment complexes in a court. Phase one or phase two and senior apartments, the Alturas Crossing Project, which is at the corner of Victor and old Alturas and the Center of Hope Project, which will be actually behind the Lowes area. $6 million in loan for infrastructure and other investment that will help with the $67 million worth of investment going on for those properties. Provide 176 new housing units for for both affordable rate and a few market rate houses. So good stuff going on there.

Steve:
The council also talked about bond issuance for fire stations. The council decided to put some surplus money into public safety, a lot of public safety improvements. And one of those initiatives was needing to upgrade and fund new fire stations. So not only repairing the fire stations that we currently have, but actually looking at building a new fire station called Fire Station nine out in the northeast part of town to really service that area as it grows and reduce the response times and provide a real benefit for that area of town. So they are looking at doing a bond issuance for that at least revenue bonds. That would be probably 30 year term bonds that no more than $1,000,000 a year in debt service will provide about roughly $25 million of money for investment. Now and again, I think a big part of it is building a new one, but also rehabilitating many of the old ones. The other eight in town, at least six or seven of them are pretty, pretty good disrepair and need a lot of other improvements. So the Council will provide a direction for staff to initiate some of those conversations with bond counsel and looking at moving a strategy forward on that. In addition, I'd mentioned that a lot of that funding was from surplus money, so the Finance Department gave a presentation about doing some budget adjustments, and much of that had to do with two different programs. One was the American Recovery Act program, and that is some COVID stimulus funding.

Chuck Aukland:
The city is getting about $18 Million worth of that funding coming up. And the council at its meeting on March 1st, directed staff to appropriate funding in certain categories. Again, much of it public safety, new new police positions. And also there's a increase in our tax revenues over the last few years. And looking out over ten years, there's a surplus that will get us beyond our necessary reserves in the general fund. And so the Council provided again direction on March 1st on where to spend those monies and where to allocate that money. And so if Finance Department was coming back and appropriating that into. The categories of which they desire, again, much of it to public safety, but some community services a little bit to the airport or some project related expenses. A few other areas that will actually do really well for our community. So good stuff moving there. And then the final thing I wanted to talk about is I actually gave a presentation ahead of the bond discussion talking about the condition of our pavement and the roads in town. And it is what all of you probably can expect. I didn't have great news. The condition of our roadway is pretty low right now. It's a 43 out of 100 on what we call a pavement condition index. We are falling behind. The majority of our funding comes from state and federal gas taxes that are insufficient right now to fund a program.

Chuck Aukland:
We we get most of our gas tax allocated based on population. And I like to tell the council and the community this is that one of our big challenges in this town is how big we are. We are very spread out for the population we have. So for example, we have about 60 square miles of area, whereas a town like Chico has about 31 or two square miles. So about half that and roughly the same population. We have that many more roads in town. We have that many more water and sewer lines. We have that many more that much more area for our police to manage and our fire and public safety to respond to. We have multiple treatment plants on our utility systems. And so it just the infrastructure cost to maintain is really expensive when it comes to roadways. We rely on that that gas tax. That again, is much less for the amount of roadways that we get in this town because of our density issues. So I provided the council with a little bit of information. Like I said, we are at a 43 on a 100 scale and falling. We don't have sufficient revenue. There's a lot of competition for those those gas taxes. And in addition to the gas tax, we actually get some utility money. So our water, wastewater and solid waste facilities provide funding for the pavement because it's solid waste drives really heavy trucks deteriorates the roadways much quicker and then the utilities cut into the pavement quite often.And those cracks which allow water to get in and and more rapidly deteriorate the condition of the roadway. So that's pretty much our basic sources of funding is is gas tax and utility. And we also get some leftover transit money in the area that's based on actually sales tax statewide. But all in all, we get about $7 million worth of stable funding for the street system. So there's a lot of competition for that money, though. So not only do we want to put money on the roadways for pavement maintenance, but we have sidewalks that have got to be maintained. We have shoulders. They've got to be done. We've got pothole patching and crack sealing. And we got to do we have 115 different traffic signals and pedestrian warning devices that must be maintained, signing, striping, our engineering that goes to the roadway system, bike lanes, all of that competes for the same pot of money. And so once you take that 7 million and you take away about four and one half million for our in-house maintenance work, that leaves two and one half million to depending on other sources to put it on the pavement. And we actually need about 5 million a year to get us up to a condition that is in the good range. And then 8 million a year to get us into what's called an excellent rating, which requires only maintenance. So maintenance only costs maybe a buck or two per square yard to maintain.And that keeps the system good. Whereas reconstruction, when those payments have failed, it costs 80, 80 bucks a square yard. So you really lose that cost benefit. So unfortunately, there's no great solutions. You can't really bond for it because of the the lease revenue is based on leasing your facilities and you can't really lease roadways out. There's no value there. The only other ways to supplement funding are either general fund appropriating more money or adding some kind of special use tax or assessment or property tax based system to generate more revenue. And so we are doing our best to maintain what we have, keeping our focus in mostly on arterials and collectors, which are the higher volume, higher speeds to try to limit damage and potential safety issues and doing a lot of sealing as opposed to overlays and more heavy treatments out there. So we are looking for ways to lobby the legislature about additional funding for roadway and roadway maintenance as opposed to new, new construction. And so we will continue to try to maintain and then as the general fund gets some supplemental funding, hopefully some of that will come the way of the street system as well. So that's about all that happened for the council meeting on the on the 15th. So any questions or one or more more detail about that information again go to city or Redding dot org. Appreciate your time and for listening and hope you have a great weekend. Thank you.

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