City Council Update 12.5.23
Katie
I'm Katie.
Steve
And I'm Steve. This is the City of Redding podcast.
Katie
Welcome to a Redding City Council update from Tuesday, December 5th, 2023. To start the meeting, Mayor Michael Dacquisto presented an award and appreciation clock to the City of Redding attorney, Barry DeWalt, in honor of his retirement. City attorney DeWalt began his career at the city in 2003, and was instrumental in the Administrative Hearings Board, successfully advised Roo during significant power purchases and projects, provided staff guidance on over 12,000 city contracts, and much, much more. The city council and city staff thanked and appreciated his dedication and contributions. Barry will officially retire at the end of 2023.
Steve
Next each December, the Redding City Council elects a mayor, vice mayor and mayor pro tem. While the community did not elect any new Redding City Council members this year, the city of Redding's mayor is ultimately determined by the current members of the City Council. Vanessa Audette was elected mayor for a time of one year in a 3 to 2 vote. Julie Winter was elected vice mayor and a mayor pro tem was not selected during the meeting. A decision on who will assume this role is expected at a later council meeting.
Katie
Next on the agenda was a public hearing to consider a resolution to approve Redding electric utility rate increases. Nick Zettl, director of Roo, gave a thorough presentation on the reasonings and will turn it over to Nick for a quick recap here.
Nick Zettel, REU Director
My name is Nick Zettel. I'm the director of Redding Electric Utility. And just to kind of recap the council meeting on December 5th for the public hearing. It actually started on November 7th when we requested that the City Council approve setting December 5th for the public hearing date. We have a 15 day public notice between when we're going to have the public hearing. What notice the public. Um, but we went a full 30 just to give everybody time to be prepared and to come and comment and participate in. Between November 7th and December 5th, we held two public workshops on two separate days. One was here at our Aptech building and the other one was at the Martin Luther King Center on the other side of town. Just to give another opportunity for the public to come and ask questions and be prepared for it. So fast forward to December 5th. The way it works with public hearings is before the council opens it. I would give a presentation, which I did, and so I gave a presentation that it went through the history of re rate increases in the past, um, gave some context on what our other cities with electric utilities experiencing with rate increases, but, you know, fairly substantial. I talked about why do we need these rate increases at this point in time for Roo. You know, which to boil it down.
Nick Zettel, REU Director
Um, there's three main areas. Uh, number one is we have increasing power supply costs, including natural gas and pipeline costs to deliver that to the power plant. Uh, we have increasing pressure for renewable energy purchases and which is all causing pressure on power supply costs. But the second area is infrastructure improvement. We have a very large infrastructure replacement plan over the next five years, uh, to get the city ready for electric vehicles and electrification of homes and businesses. In fact, it just read this morning that the state is considering a requiring, for the most part, new air conditioning systems. When they get replaced, they get replaced with a heat pump instead of a gas furnace. This part of the ongoing push to electrify. So this is all sitting in line. And then the third area is increase in operations and maintenance costs, primarily our wildfire mitigation plan that council approved in 2019. And back in 2019. We anticipated returning at some point with a surcharge to the council, but at this point it's not so much of a surcharge. It's definitely ongoing O&M, uh, as we don't ever foresee not having a wildfire mitigation program. Then we moved to how does the rate impact our cash on our reserves and our credit rating, and why the credit rating is so important as we do plan to issue tax exempt bond debt and this five year plan to fund the infrastructure overhaul, and you have to have a good credit rating to keep your interest costs down.
Nick Zettel, REU Director
Um, I walked through our community outreach efforts. I mentioned, again, public workshops. I'm talked about the impacts to our individual customer classes and what these rate increases were going to do to residential, multifamily, small commercial and large commercial. And then we spent a little bit of time discussing options for folks who in low income brackets that would need some assistance here with this rate increase and how we're going to increase our residential energy discount to help offset this rate increase for, you know, the over the 4000 customers that we have to enroll. At that point, council opened the public hearing and then they received public comment. And there was a few questions of the council. They discussed it, and then they closed the hearing and they voted five yes and zero no for approval, which was good to see that they were unanimous. So I think it was a good night. Or are you? I think it's a great night for our customers to know that our council supports continuing investment in the infrastructure of our city, because this is our poles and our wires and for our homes and our businesses, and this is for our future. So overall, I think it's been very successful. Great.
Steve
Thanks, Nick. Next up on the regular agenda, the city manager brought back the Housing and Homelessness Incentive Program, or better known as Hip, to ask for direction regarding the $1.8 million that still needed to be dispersed. This includes categories like rapid rehousing, street outreach, services coordination and data system improvements, to name a few. Council member Marzano motion to approve the previous committee recommendations and accept the proposal as it was previously provided in November. After a brief discussion by the council, the motion was approved unanimously.
Katie
Finally, personnel asked the council to approve two resolutions with the Redding Police Managers Association rpma to approve amendments to the salary schedules for police and fire executive management pay for performance scales. This passed unanimously. That's it. For full details, be sure to watch the meeting at city of redding.gov.
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