4.5.22 Meeting Summary

Last night the Council met and discussed two significant items:

• We adopted a treatment for our ARPA funds that requires less onerous reporting with no restrictions on the use of funds. With the new guidance, any ARPA funds under a certain threshold (which we qualify for) would be allowed to treat the funds received as wholly revenue replacement. This means that effectively the entirety of the $2.9M the city received functions as unrestricted reserves. Consistent with past action, we will be segregating these dollars in a separate fund for tracking purposes.
  
  
• The Council adopted a resolution opposing an upcoming ballot initiative. The initiative purports to expand the definition of a "tax", require voter approval for state taxes, changes the approval requirements for local taxes to align with state taxes, and requires that allowable uses and duration of state and local taxes to be specified. There wasn't much discussion around this item. While it does seem like a poor general practice to tinker with the state and local budgets through constitutional amendment, in CA it seems like that ship has sailed.  In reading the staff report, I couldn't help but think it wasn't presenting objective information. The Legislative Analyst Office summary is here: https://lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/Initiative/2021-042.  I voted no not necessarily because I support this initiative, I'll reserve judgment for now, but more because I'm not sure the city needs to take a position on this.  The vote was 4-1.