1.3.2019 State of the City Minutes

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First, I have asked the city manager to create a complete list of links on the city website to all of the audits -- financial and performance -- that the city currently undertakes. My intention is to clarify where and how we account for public funds and to reassure the public that the city is diligent in its oversight of your dollars. But financial oversight is only one part of the answer in creating trust. We also need more clarity about the values, assumptions, and priorities that those funding decisions reflect. What information do you need to assess these choices? In what form should that information be provided? Before we began looking for our new police chief, the city very successfully engaged the public through an extensive and varied outreach process to identify our highest priorities and the qualities we needed in our new police chief. That process greatly assisted our recruitment and hiring of Chief Skinner. But we can't take the time for such intensive outreach efforts before every decision that comes to Council. I want the city-- council and staff-- to make effective use of online survey tools to inform the choices before council. More agile, timely, and accessible digital outreach will help the community be directly engaged in our decisions; and improve council's willingness to make the difficult decisions ahead of us. Among those is moving forward on the creation of the Town Square, including a City Hall and year-round home for the farmers market. This has been a process two decades in the making. My predecessor, Mayor Piercy, and six of the eight current members of Council engaged in a robust public process in 2016 which led to the decision to retain a city hall in our historic town center as key to our investment and commitment to a vibrant urban core. This year, finally, those plans will come into clear focus! In the coming months, we will also begin to see the impact of increased investment in public safety. Council approved an additional $8.6 million in one-time funds for an array of safety investments including more police officers, investment in a day center for the unsheltered, and preventative outreach to at -risk youth. This is just the beginning -- concerns about public safety impact all of our other efforts. We will begin to see the impacts of this investment in 2019 and that will inform council's deliberations about long-term funding sources for this priority. I am also proposing to create a Youth Advisory Board to offer council insight on issues that directly impact youth, including our climate recovery work, our housing development strategies, our transportation and public safety investments. We will take time in 2019 to reach out to existing youth boards to determine the structure and composition of this new board and expect it to be up and running by 2020. My fourth and final major priority is inclusiveness. Inclusion is not a word I'm using lightly. Our demographics are changing but our civic life has not kept up. As we look toward the 2021 World Track and Field Championship we have an opportunity to invest in legacy projects that will benefit our community for years to come. Civic engagement should be one of those legacies. Last year, I announced to you my goal of honoring 20 cultures within our city by 2021. Weare beginning that work at home. Our longstanding Sister Cities provide the first pathway in recognizing and appreciating our friends, colleagues and neighbors who hail from Nepal, Japan, S. Korea and Russia. Beyond that, our community is rich with citizens from Ethiopia to MINUTES — State of the City Address January 3, 2019 Page 4