Talk Budget to Me: City officials, staff headline September Biketivist Forum
A huge thank you to those that attended and spoke at our September Biketivist Forum!
The forum featured presentations from local city staff and elected officials on city-specific budget processes, project planning, and funding for future bicycle and pedestrian priorities. It is vitally important to understand these mechanisms to effectively organize your communities and transform your streets so they work for all, not just cars.
We hope you learned something new, and were inspired to take action on a campaign that’s been simmering on the back burner. Never forget, it’s your passion and your commitment that powers SVBC’s work and shapes the partnerships we have with city staff and elected officials. They joined us because of you!
If you missed the forum, you are in luck! We recorded most of the breakout sessions and you can access the video below, along with short blurbs about each session.
Please feel free to send any questions, comments, or topic recommendations for a future forum to the advocacy team.
Mountain View-Palo Alto Break Out Session
Mayor Lucas Ramirez joined the Palo Alto and Mountain View teams for an excellent high-level overview of Mt. View’s budget priorities and process to help us better understand how city hall prioritizes active transportation projects.
In addition to breaking down the city’s revenue streams and funding allocations, Mayor Ramirez outlined the budget timeline, the city’s strategic priorities, and one of the most important programs for advocates in the Bike Movement, the Capital Improvement Program (CIP).
CIP funds a wide variety of essential infrastructure and community facilities, including parks, utilities, sidewalks, streets, and traffic signals, making it a key program for any successful bicycle and pedestrian improvement project. However, there are restrictions on what CIP funding can be used for, and the window of opportunity to add a project to the plan only comes once every two years.
This is why it is increasingly important for advocates to start organizing now before November, when the council begins the process of reviewing CIP projects and budget allocations for the next fiscal year.
For more details, we encourage you to watch the breakout session and review Mayor Ramriez’s presentation
Click here for slides from the Mt. View- Palo Alto breakout session.
San Mateo County Break Out Session
Mayors Giselle Hale (Redwood City) and Rick Bonilla (City of San Mateo) joined us to discuss city budgeting. Both cities have a process between staff and city council for setting the budget priorities. City Staff work to create a draft of priorities between departments, and the city council directs overall priorities.
Mayor Hale spoke about the three types of budget asks:
Something that is a priority, but hasn’t seen much attention in the past fiscal year.
Something that is a priority, but should be higher.
Something new that isn’t already on the list.
The hardest is the last type of ask is - unless there is outside funding, the money for a new item will have to come from something else in the budget.
Number One take away – don’t be a stranger! Speak with council members about our priorities regularly and often - they are thinking about the budget year round. On-going dialogues will be more effective than only meeting yearly at budget time.
Another great suggestion, invite non-residents to show up to support a budget prioritization, let’s see some collaboration opportunities with neighboring teams!
San Jose Break Out Session
For San Jose’s local team breakout session, we heard from John Brazil, Transportation Options Program Manager, and Bobby Gonzalez, community member and analyst. John shared an overview of the city’s bike and pedestrian safety goals, and the city’s annual $5.7 million budget for these priorities.
Although it may seem like a significant figure, it falls much short of the projected $19.660 million to implement the City of San José’s Better Bike Plan and Emerging Mobilities Plan. In the last two years, the department of transportation has applied and been awarded an average of $15.150 million and has $25.7 million in pending applications.
Bobby’s expertise on the city budget was evident. He shared the process of developing the budget each fiscal year, beginning with the Annual Budget Process that begins in October and ends in March, and detailed the different buckets of money that fund active transportation projects. It is crucial that we get our projects prioritized during this time to ensure they make it into the mayor’s budget in May.
To assess the priorities of the entire community, a survey is conducted every year and, unfortunately, traffic safety is not on the top 5 lists of priorities. This is where the uphill battle begins. Thankfully, Bobby was knowledgeable and shared how advocates can leverage this new knowledge to better advocate for our bike projects.
Click Here for slides from the San José breakout session.
Sunnyvale - Santa Clara Breakout Session
This room was joined by three city experts from the City of Sunnyvale - Tim Kerby, Director of Finance, Dennis Jaw, Asst. Director of Finance and Dennis NG, Transportation and Traffic Manager. While Tim Kirby presented Sunnyvale’s budget process, Dennis helped link the budget to transportation needs.
Tim broke down the budget process into - legal framework, Study issues and budget proposals and the annual process. He also gave an overview on what are some past and current funding sources for bicycle improvements The staff helped answer questions around what is the timeline for proposing something for the budget, what is considered during pavement maintenance, how the city leverages grants since the budget is generally tight and more!
Click here for slides from the City of Sunnyvale breakout session.
