Read the February 12 meeting.

All right, well, let's go ahead and get started. And let me go ahead and call this special meeting of the Santa City Council to order for February 12, 2021. Good morning, everybody. It's good to have you all with us. um it's uh uh new year's uh and um we want to make sure we recognize that let me just start by um by just doing this um uh this uh recognition that we are meeting today in accordance with

the california governor governor's order executive order number uh 25-20 regarding the brown act and guidance from the california department of public health on gatherings so this meeting is taking

place entirely by teleconference via zoom the council chambers are closed the public public is accessing the meeting via the stand youtube channel or the city's website council members and i along with the city manager the city attorney the city clerk and the executive team are all

on different locations so once again please bear with us as technology may disrupt the flow of this meeting uh that's always something that could happen so thank you all for your patience I wanna thank staff, especially the city manager's office

for facilitating this meeting. Let me go ahead and have the clerk call rolls

so we can officially make sure all of us are present.

Council member Becerra?

Here.

Council member Hernandez? Present. Council member Lopez? Here. Council member Mendoza? Here. Council member Fan? Here. Mayor Pro Tempeñalosa. Mayor Sarmiento.

Here. Thank you everybody. Let's go ahead and I'll go ahead and have you follow me

on the Pledge of Allegiance before we start this meeting. So you'll all please rise and face the flag.

And please repeat after me. I pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of American to the Republic which stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Great so um Madam Clerk do we have any members of the public that would wish to address the

council at this time? No we do not and we did not receive any written communications.

Great. Why don't we, I guess we'll be recessing this portion of the meeting to consider the

single item on the agenda, which is to do the, to consider the goals and objectives

in relation to the city manager or suing to government code section 54957. So we, do we, do we stay on, Madam Clerk, do you clear the room or do we have to bump off and come back on?

No, I will just connect my other device. So we are no longer part, the public will no longer hear us.

Why don't you go ahead and do that and let us know when you're back.

It's live? Okay, sorry. Yes, we're live.

Great, so actually before we recess in the closed session,

let me just make these brief remarks for the record

and so they can be included in the minutes. So we're meeting today in closed session to develop some performance and expectations

for the city manager, Christine Ridge, for future goals and strategic priorities for her and her management team.

So I think it's been almost two years that the city manager has been with us. I'm not sure I lost track, Christine, but I know it's close to that. We haven't had a chance to really sit down with you,

either the previous council or the present council to talk about strategic goals and expectations. So this session is really critical for all of us to provide clear and defined guidance to the city manager and her team and staff,

because we have to have some measurable goals when we go into further performance evaluation for the city manager. So it's important that all of us give her our thoughts and she shares with us her expectations, especially in advance of the budget discussions that we're gonna be having. So we're gonna try to identify some priorities and she can help us identify her priorities and look at those so they can be presented during open session. So what we discussed and what she discusses with us,

we'll come back to the public for additional public input and commentary from members of the public and that will provide the council an opportunity to adjust any goals that she may have and integrate them in our five-year strategic plan. So as you all know, we have some principles that guide us at the city and those are governed by the strategic plan and some of the guidance that we have there. But we wanna provide some ongoing, maybe more specific direction that may not be included within that strategic plan.

Just as, you know, as I see this, it's kind of a living document.

It's a, you know, living process. I mean, priorities change. Nobody knew back when we were doing a strategic plan early on that we were going to be dealing with a pandemic and we were going to be dealing with, you know, changing conditions in our city. So I think it's good that we do this, especially since this council is relatively new with one another. And we've had, you know, three new members of the council. and I think the existing council has two years or less time on serving. So I think this is a good moment that we give some direction.

We try to make our team and our staff as efficient as possible to the extent that they have seven of us.

We're giving direction, you know, seven different ways. It confuses us, it confuses staff for the success of the organization, both for the policy makers and for the professional staff. It really is important that we have some defined goals

and to the extent we can achieve those and present those to the public, obviously, so they can comment to us

and we can make those adjustments. I think that's the real objective for today. So I wanna stop speaking so we can go in

and listen to the city manager and listen to those expectations and hopefully have us share some thoughts with her. So with that now, Madam Clerk, why don't we go ahead, with those remarks being included, why don't we go ahead and recess and close session. And I believe we're gonna give ourselves till about 11 o'clock, hopefully right around there, to wrap up. And if we wrap up earlier, that's not a bad thing, but at least that time, so we can report something out to the public and let them know that we will come back to them so they can continue to have us adjust any priorities and goals and objectives that we may come up.

Okay, thank you, Mayor.

Okay, Mayor and Council members, we are public, we're live.

Great, thank you, Madam Clerk,

and thank you, Madam City Attorney and Madam City Manager. So we are back from recess from our closed session. I just wanted to report out that the city council established some goals and objectives and strategic priorities in order to evaluate

performance by the city manager in the future. The public will have an opportunity to review these and provide some input so the council can consider how we can adjust the five-year strategic plan based upon some of these conversations with the city manager. I wanna thank our facilitators that helped us work with the city manager so she could identify where the priorities are so far to date and then for her to provide her opinion on some of those as well so i do want to thank everybody for joining i know it's a friday morning as somebody said now it's sunny so we kind

of got together during the gloomy part of the day the day so i will now go ahead and adjourn the

meeting and wish everybody a great weekend, a great president's day weekend and let you all know that the next city council meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 16th. So with that, thank you all. Thank you for the time.