I was informed that former Sunnyvale Mayor Stan Kawczynski passed away this morning. The City Manager has ordered city flags to be flown at half-mast over the weekend in honor of Mayor Kawczynski.
Stan was a good guy who cared about Sunnyvale and worked hard to make it a better place for all of us. His passing is a real loss, and he will be missed.
This issue of the City of Sunnyvale’s Quarterly Report is a little different that past ones. In this issue, the city’s budget is laid out in very simple terms, explaining where revenue comes from and what the various services are that the city provides to you. It also gets into some detail about some of the more complex aspects of the budget and city planning – the multiple ways that new developments impact revenue, the different ways Prop. 13 affects property taxes, the top sales tax producers in Sunnyvale, how your taxes get divided up. It’s a good read, and I encourage you to check it out.
The Los Angeles Times just posted an article which takes a close look at Sunnyvale’s cross-training public safety model. It’s a good read. More and more cities are looking to us in tight budget times, seeing the savings that the model gets us. We get frequent visitors representing other cities throughout the U.S. who want to see how we do things and whether or not it might work in their cities. [Update – KCBS picked up the story as well][Update 2: So did NBC Bay Area with a video]
It was a little easier for us to adopt, because we did so when we were transitioning from an all-volunteer firefighting force to a larger paid force. A lot of the difficulty in making such a change is cultural, and the start-up costs are significant. So smaller cities looking to expand their services may have an easier time switching to a public safety model than a city with an established police and firefighting force.
It’s the first meeting of the year, which is always a light agenda. The bulk of the agenda is actually on consent, with mostly ceremonial stuff being handled by Council. There are no study sessions, closed sessions, special orders, or presentations. There may be an agenda amendment when we return from the break, but I’m guessing it won’t happen. So the big issue will be the public hearing on this year’s study and budget issues.
The consent calendar is fairly large, mostly cleanup from previous meetings (second readings and the like). There’s a contract for purchasing five new police cruisers to replace ones that are beyond their lifespan, and a janitorial services contract, and the rest is second reading stuff.
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