March 20, 2012 Agenda

From: Anne Seeley

Date: Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 7:34 PM
Subject: City Council agenda highlights for 3/20/12

Friends: The big deal on the Council’s agenda is the new proposal for Police salary and pension changes. But first…

3:00 Special joint meeting of the Council with the Planning Commission.
3.1 Annual Review of the General Plan and the Growth Management and Housing Allocation Ordinances. The review of possible changes to the latter seems to have stalled, and since there hasn’t been much building activity, growth management certainly hasn’t been called into play.

4:00 Regular meeting
Staff Briefings
6.1 Transit Mall Relocation. This summer, the section of 1st Street between Santa Rosa Avenue and D Street will become the Transit Mall while the real location is being renovated.

Consent
10.2 Award of Transit Mall Renovation to Santa Rosa contractor RE West Building for $1,882,308.00.

10.4 Improvements to City Bus. The thing to report here (that I didn’t know) is that the City has a "Southside Transit Transfer Station" at Southwest Community Park. Maybe you knew.

Report

11.1 Approval of Amendment 4 to the Memorandum of Understanding for Unit 2 – Fire Fighters. They agreed to Implementation of a new 2nd tier retirement formula for new hires: 3% at 55 and a 36 month final compensation under CalPers rules. These new hires will also pay a 9% of salary Employee Paid Membership Contribution 9EPMC) to CalPers for their pension, which is the same amount the city will contribute.

11.2 Approval for 2 years of the Memorandum of Understanding for Unit 5 – Police Officers. It’s asserted that the City will save $631,000 over 2 years, with $530,000 of savings to the General Fund. The agreement has many elements but the results are these:

a) Over 2 years, the Police Officers will start to pay the Employee Contribution to CalPers in a step-wise manner, with the city compensating them more at each step to make up for their payment responsibility. Since the City has been paying for not only the 9% EmployER contribution, but also for the 9% EmployEE contribution for several years, the net result after 2 years is the city will be paying only the 9% EmployER contribution and paying the Police 8% more than today’s salary. Their conclusion is that the City comes out 1% ahead. There’s also a puzzling 12.452% EPMC reporting cost which the City will be free of at the end of 2 years.

b) The Unit agreed to a 2-tier retirement system in which new hires will have to pay their own 9% contribution to CalPers, and their "First Step" of salary will be reduced by 5%. Their pension will pay 3%at 55, as compared with the current 3% at 50. That means that a Police Officer can now retire at 50 years old and get a pension of 3% of his last year’s salary (it might have been changed to an average of the last 3 years of employment) multiplied by the number of years worked.

c) Agreement to reduce "Persable" compensation by reducing their 144 hour annual holiday payment to 121.5 hours.

Public hearings
11.3 Downtown Rezonings. This is part of the Economic Development planning work, with the City initiating rezonings to prepare more available sites for trouble-free reoccupation or development. The 47 parcels located between 2nd and 3rd Streets between E Street and Brookwood are proposed to have their zoning changed to Office Commercial to bring them into compliance with the General Plan land Use Diagram.

See you there! Anne