Due to the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day yesterday, this week's "The People’s Business" is an abbreviated report. The full City Council won’t meet, but two policy committees will — the Budget and Government Efficiency Committee on Wednesday at 9 a.m. and the Land Use and Housing Committee on Thursday at 1 p.m.

Budget and Government Efficiency Committee

Highlighting the Budget and Government Efficiency Committee agenda is a discussion on the Fiscal Year 2021 City Council Budget Priorities. Each year, the Council kicks off its budget process by having each member submit their ideas to the Council's Independent Budget Analyst (IBA). The IBA then issues a document that collates and summarizes the ideas, focusing particularly on those that are shared by a majority of the Council members. SPOILER ALERT: There is a strong consensus among Council members to fund parks, libraries, fire and rescue facilities, sidewalk and street repair, and transportation and mobility projects. Here is the full document.

On Wednesday morning, the committee, chaired by Councilmember Barbara Bry, will publicly review the priorities and pass them along to the full council, noting any modifications that might be made. The full council will discuss the ideas and approve a Budget Priorities Resolution at its Feb. 3 meeting. The Mayor will consider these priorities for his proposed budget, which will be posted online on April 13 and presented to the City Council on April 14.

The Budget Committee on Wednesday will also discuss:

• A proposal to accelerate funding for a new system for the Development Services Department (DSD) to manage its permitting, code enforcement, and invoicing activities related to the public and private projects under its purview. Since 2001, DSD has used its own tracking system. For the past few years, DSD has been working on implementing a new system purchased from the government-software vendor Accela. Roughly $1.5 million has been earmarked to complete this project, but DSD doesn’t have the authority to spend all of that right away. The committee will consider allowing the department to use $436,300 of it sooner than expected.
• And a proposal to allocate no more than $27 million to lease replacement vehicles such as heavy-duty fire trucks, refuse and recycling packers, pickup trucks, sports utility vehicles, sedans, dump trucks, flatbeds, cargo vans, trucks, heavy construction equipment, and trailers, along with a few other specialty vehicles. This proposal includes a master lease agreement with Banc of America Public Capital Corp.

The committee will also:

• Hear a report from the Municipal Employees Association (MEA), one of the labor unions that represent city workers, on the City’s recently presented Five-Year Financial Outlook. The MEA will detail what it believes are deficiencies in the Outlook. The Independent Budget Analyst reviews the Outlook here.
• And review its committee work plan for 2020. Council rules state that each policy committee must develop an annual work plan and post it online by Feb. 1.

Land Use and Housing Committee

Recently, the City Council approved 39 different changes to the City’s Land Development Code and Local Coastal Program. On Thursday, the Land Use and Housing Committee (agenda), chaired by District 3 Councilmember Chris Ward, will review three additional proposed changes, related to cannabis:

• Cannabis outlets may not be located within 1,000 feet of cannabis production facilities, and this distance is measured as the most direct access around barriers. One proposed change clarifies this distance as the most direct legal pedestrian route.
• Neither cannabis outlets nor cannabis production facilities may not be located within 100 feet of a residential zone. The second change clarifies that this distance is measured as a straight line between the closest points on the two property lines, regardless of physical barriers.
• The third change would essentially give Medical Marijuana Consumer Cooperatives that received conditional use permits from the City before California voters made recreational use of cannabis legal more time to convert to a cannabis outlet, allow expansions within the same premises.

The only other item on the discussion agenda is a review of the committee's work plan for 2020.

That’s it for this week — the full City Council will meet next on Jan. 27.