The Program From May 16th

Our speaker for May 16, 2024, was Dianna MacDonald, a Santa Rosa City Council member representing District 3. Diana was the Vice Mayor from December 2022 to December 2023. She is currently the Violence Prevention Program Chair and on the Long Term Finance and Audit Committee. She also currently serves as the legislative advocate for the California State PTC, a director for the Rincon Valley Education Foundation, and the co-chair of the California State Literacy Task Force. She has a long history working on a variety of important projects, including the Commission on the Status of Women, the California School Board Association, and on the Board of Directors for Zero Waste. She is a multi-generational Sonoma County native; her great grandfather moved to Sonoma County during the Great Depression!

Dianna took us on a whirlwind tour of the status of the City. The City Council has been working on several key objectives, including achieving organizational excellence, delivering housing for all, reducing homelessness and its impacts, promoting economic and community vibrancy, ensuring a health and safe community for all, building a sustainable infrastructure, and addressing climate change. These objectives are consistent with the City Council’s newly published goals for this fiscal year. The City’s recent accomplishments include ongoing efforts to improve the City’s website, updating emergency preparedness, providing vouchers for housing subsidies, attracting 89 current projects for affordable housing, promoting infill housing downtown, reducing encampments and relocating people, remodeling the Finley Aquatic Center, designing and constructing an overpass linking the College area with the westside of the freeway, among other things.

The City has created a new financing district for downtown and is actively working on potential plans for a downtown convention center. Fiscal responsibility objectives have led to an ongoing evaluation of the City’s services contracts, including efforts to determine how much these contracts cost the City. The City is in tough negotiations with its employees as well. Nevertheless, staff retention and parity with County employees is also a key goal of the City Council. The City has budgetary concerns since its projected expenditures exceed projected income. But there is good financial news: Communications and Government Relations (works with grants) received $21mm in grants and Congressman Mike Thompson helped with developing a $900,000 earmark for the Realtime Crime Center. The Fire Department will add 12 new employees as a result of a SAFER grant from FEMA.

The police department has been looking at bringing back school resource officers. Decisions about the use of resource officers are made by the schools. However, the decision to restart the program, which will cost $2.7mm, will be the City’s. The City has also approved an additional 2 public safety officers for the downtown area. It has developed the successful In Response program, which aims to have the right people responding to mental health calls from the public. In Response received 4,759 call last year; 3,568 calls were diverted from the police, which allowed the police to concentrate on actual public safety issues. The police department will also be adding a new substation in Roseland. The department has received 234,000 calls this fiscal year. There has been a decrease in homicides and shootings, but an increase in the number of illegal guns. Illegal side shows have decreased 89% this year after the police began cracking down on them. The Violence Prevention Program has been making $750,000 grants per year to different programs dealing with this problem.

Dianna also mentioned that she would like to see us help out in the Park-A-Month volunteer program. Check out SRCity.org/ParkAMonth to see how you can help. Many thanks to Dianna for her excellent State of the City message and for all of her dedicated work as a City Council member.

Click HERE to see a limited-time recording of Dianna's presentation.