Action Plan - Growth and Finances

Laying a Foundation for a Strong Town

Our city needs to strengthen its financial situation by rebuilding our dangerously low reserve fund. We also need to update our growth plan which turned 30 this year.

The major roadblocks to achieving this are twofold: the bandwidth of city staff, and paying for changes to our plans while simultaneously saving money to rebuild our reserve fund every year.

I lead by doing. So, electing me to the city council gives you more than just a vote on the council, you get a councilmember willing to help augment the bandwidth and skills of city staff when necessary. One who will do outside research and bring new relevant data to discussions and can do the needed analysis to push us along to realize our goals.

How to pay for things needs to be a collaborative effort between all five members of city council. An effort that I am uniquely positioned to lead. My training, experience, and results in this area includes education from UC Davis (a top-ranked graduate business school), and saving my employer more in a year than the entire city General Fund budget.

Below are the steps and timeline I will push to use in order to address these two core issues we face.

Planning for Growth

By February 2023, City Council will conduct a full public review of our growth plans with the following goals

1. Identify and prioritize points of improvement by the end of June 2023.

2. Estimate the scope and cost of making the identified changes by the first City Council meeting of October 2023. The scope and cost of a new General Plan should also be estimated.

3. By March 2024, City Council will determine a plan of action and direct staff which changes should be incorporated into the 2024-2025 budget.

City Finances

To rebuild the city general fund reserve and strengthen the financial position of the city, we need to end each year with a surplus of at least $300,000 for four years. This will be done in these steps.

1. City Council will direct staff to prepare a comprehensive program list by department, deliverable in the first meeting of March 2023.

2. City Council members will then conduct a review by the first meeting of April 2023 and identify any non-personnel costs that could be temporarily paused if necessary.

3. Through a combination of holding expenses to the budgeted Fiscal Year 22-23 levels, targeted non-personnel savings, and new revenue sources; the City Council will approve budgets with at least a $300,000 per year surplus for four years beginning in Fiscal Year 23-24.