2026

California Public Policy Group reports that Caltrans's San Pablo Avenue repaving, street tree and pedestrian safety project had been slated for fiscal year 2027–28; after a joint letter from Senator Arreguín and Assemblymember Wicks, a council trip to Sacramento and testimony before the California Transportation Commission, Caltrans announced about $13 million on August 31, and construction is expected in early 2027. The firm and the League of California Cities run through the year's bills: the city supported AB 1821, which gives agencies 10 business days instead of 10 calendar days for an initial response to a records request, SB 1159, under which “person” in the Brown Act and Public Records Act does not include AI, and SB 1005, which lets cities round cash payments to the nearest 5 cents and is the basis for a consent item the same night. The League opposes Proposition 43 and supports Proposition 1.

In public comment a remote speaker says an unnamed incumbent candidate's web page wrongly states the city's rating as A-plus, puts the city's underlying rating at A-minus, “two notches below his starting point,” and criticizes years of budgets. The Mayor answers that the speaker is “completely wrong”: an A-plus on sales tax revenue bonds and an A-minus on certificates of participation, both raised, with reserves the highest in 26 years. The speaker replies that the Mayor is describing bond ratings, not the underlying rating; no staff member states the underlying rating at this meeting. The speaker also asks whether the city supported AB 1821, and gets no answer.

On consent, the City Clerk corrects the October 6 minutes to add the omitted consent vote and two resolution numbers, and Councilmember Motoyama asks why money in the Section 115 pension trust has earned less than it would have in LAIF; the Finance Director explains the trust's moderately conservative profile and that the money can only go to pensions. A side letter with the Public Safety Management Association gives its police and fire management units the 7.5% doctorate incentive in the fire chief's August contract, as CalPERS rules require, at no current cost; it passes 4–0 with Wysinger absent. The Mayor dedicates the meeting to his mother, who died the week before.

The Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District reports West Nile activity in El Cerrito “like we had never seen before”: four positive dead birds this year, mostly crows, after one in 2023. No infected mosquitoes were found despite heavy trapping, and the district believes the crows were infected elsewhere and came to roost; no human cases were reported in the county. The general manager asks residents to dump standing water and to report Aedes aegypti, new to the county, which can pass dengue, Zika and chikungunya from one person to another; it was eradicated in Martinez in 2022 by inspecting more than 1,000 homes, but has spread in Antioch and Brentwood and was found last week in Discovery Bay. Councilmember Wysinger describes a rat infestation beside her building when underground construction began next door; the district can advise but has no enforcement power over rats.

Superintendent Cheryl Cotton presents the school district's new vision, asks for El Cerrito's voice in its strategic plan, and says a board policy on AI is being drafted for later in November; elementary schools have moved from a device for every child to one for every four. She and a resident, the only candidate for El Cerrito's school board seat, ask support for Measure V, the district's parcel tax renewal at 7.2 cents a square foot, about $10 million a year; the resident asks the Council for a resolution of support, which is not on the agenda. Councilmember Ktsanes asks the district and city to renew talks about the Portola site for workforce housing.

On consent, Councilmember Motoyama asks where the $2 million for on-call professional services sits in the budget. Staff answer that most of it is salary savings, because consultants staff five building division positions, and that the cap is firm and needs no budget amendment, but that the City Manager can shift money between individual vendor contracts under it without returning to the Council. Staff say consultants cost more than staff one-to-one but save money used as needed, and that SEIU was noticed and met with under AB 339. The Recreation Director says the city struggles to maintain what it has, which limits the grants worth applying for, and names Central Park as probably the park in the worst shape. The meeting is adjourned in memory of Dr. Desmond Carson.

The Local Road Safety Plan sets a goal of eliminating fatal and serious injury crashes by 2035. Over eight years El Cerrito had 4 deaths and 17 serious injuries, a third on San Pablo Avenue, and a high injury network covering 5% of streets holds 72% of injury crashes. The plan sets a goal of a 25 mph maximum citywide, which staff would bring back to the Council, says staff will look at a Greenway speed limit as part of a crash analysis, and establishes a backbone bikeway network that repurposes about half the on-street parking along it, exempt from the city's parking removal appeal. Staff confirm the Ohlone Greenway has no speed limit, contradicting a speaker. Ktsanes, citing Richmond Street, asks what role the Council will have after adoption; staff answer that “right now is the opportunity for Council to provide that decision,” and he concludes the Council will not be involved in individual designs. He says he “would vote no”; nobody moves the changes he said would win his vote, and the motion carries without a recorded tally. The Mayor Pro Tem calls the 25 mph ceiling too timid.

The fourth-quarter update is preliminary: revenues 103% of budget, spending 99%, a $2 million improvement that cuts the planned draw on reserves from over $3 million to $1.1 million. Total reserves are 40%, with the unassigned reserve at 22%, $2.8 million above the 17% floor, and no projected dip below it. A councilmember asks whether El Cerrito's earthquake and fire risk justifies a higher reserve; the Finance Director says revenue diversity is what matters. On consent, the June election for Measure C cost about $43,000, not the $80,000 argued over in January.

The Police Chief says Peregrine was negotiated from over $80,000 to $44,999 to fall under his $45,000 spending authority, which is why it never came to the Council; the Mark 43 dispatch contract, above the line, auto-renews at a rate the vendor sets. The swim center receives a $200,000 county grant for locker room ADA work at no new city cost. The Council directs its League delegate to oppose a constitutional amendment for local control of housing, one member calling it anti-housing policy cloaked as local control. EC STARS reports ten interns in seven departments, and the school superintendent promotes a different Measure V.

The city's next step against a vendor whose equipment stays on public property past an expired contract is a municipal code violation notice, with fines to follow; the Chief also reports that nine of the remaining cameras were vandalized “in some form or another” and are under criminal investigation, without saying what was done to them. Several speakers ask the city to bag the cameras until they come down, which the dais does not answer; the City Manager says the city means to abide by the contract as it expects Flock to. A remote speaker argues that trash bags and a ladder would have saved the detectives' time. A remote speaker proposes that the Public Safety Committee develop a policy on which data contracts the city enters at all; like a wheelchair user's request for automatic door requirements in new housing, it receives no response from the dais.

BART's Alternative Service Plan ends service at 9 p.m., runs only the yellow, blue and orange lines, and would close up to 15 stations or line segments. A councilmember says she had not realized from the packet that “potentially our Richmond line would be one of the… one of the lines to go,” and BART's director answers that El Cerrito would still have service, “just not two lines.” The Mayor Pro Tem, a former BART director, says the Council faces “the end of BART” if the measure fails. The Mayor names the constituency he expects to lose on a five-county measure — inland Contra Costa — eleven weeks after county voters rejected a county sales tax.

The Fire Safe Council reports on a $15,000 grant: the last $2,000 of a PG&E-funded grant drew $6,500 from two owners and a $500 price cut to remove a $9,000 hazard, and four homeowners hired the contractor on site for more work. Many residents, the presenter says, “probably could have afforded to do some of this work themselves, but they wanted somebody to take charge.” On the chiefs' contracts, adopted 4–1, Councilmember Ktsanes objects to paying the raises from reserves and says reserves are already dipping below the Council's minimum; staff neither confirm nor correct it.

The district elections ordinance and the certification of the June 2 election sit on the same consent list and neither is pulled. The ordinance converting the city from at-large to district elections, fixing which districts vote when, passes in nine seconds without discussion. Earlier in the evening a resident argued that scheduling the two renter districts in a midterm year, when renter turnout drops by about 20 points, reduces participation among the communities the maps were drawn to protect. No one tonight responds to the argument. Apart from the consent-item title, staff mention the transition only once, in an announcement about filing deadlines: “this will be the City's last at-large election.”

On Flock, the City Manager reports that a work order exists, and while “the contract does not require a timeframe for removal, it does say that we cannot remove the cameras ourselves.” The city's remedy, for now, is to keep pressing Flock. A resident suggests that “any future contracts” include “a clear timeline for removing hardware” and let the city remove it after that deadline; another reports that in “several cities” where Flock did not take the cameras down in time, “government employees have put plastic bags over the cameras.”

AC Transit presents a fiscal cliff of about $50 million a year against an expected $52 million share of the November measure. The agency has a detailed, dated, line-by-line plan for contraction; if the measure passes, it says the money would protect existing service, but it has not been “working on a prioritization” for restoring past cuts. A resident's six-page technical analysis of a consent-calendar fire command vehicle, with comparative pricing, is credited by name by the Fire Chief (“It's incredible. A lot of good points”) and answered on its main points.

The Chief says of a four-year negotiation that Peregrine “provided a bid that is within the City Manager's spending authority,” so the purchase does not come to the Council for a vote. Bill Barish objects to it being “sprung as an item that doesn't need discussion, because it falls below some magic number of dollars.” Of the seven speakers who address Peregrine, four explicitly ask for it to come before the Council, two more object to how it arrived or ask for time, and one says she is “not at all concerned about the software.” No councilmember moves to agendize it; the Mayor Pro Tem asks for a memo so she can answer residents. The purchase next surfaces as a $44,999 line in the 15 September check register. One resident puts the Flock lesson in procurement terms, asking for rigor in choosing a vendor: “We don't want to end up in another weird data breach situation where we panicked, like we did with Flock.”

The budget presentation previews the 16 June dissent. Councilmember Ktsanes establishes that the budget draws about $250,000 from fund balance in each year, and staff name what would have to change to avoid it: landscape maintenance, library hours, and potentially positions. The Mayor Pro Tem raises two findings from reading the capital improvement program: no playground equipment funding for five years, and street repaving moving from an annual to a two-year cycle. Staff publish the unfunded capital projects for the first time in years and say in advance that the total should not cause panic. The budget was assembled from consensus heard in discussion, and staff ask the Council to confirm “that was the direction that staff heard.”

This is the night Measure C is decided; the Council's references to it are a reminder to drop off ballots and a warning that results may not come until Friday. A resident reports that 1,579 of the 2,000-plus neighbors on her email list favor the Flock contract, a figure from a self-selected list. A resident criticizes the school-zone-based districting map; the Mayor Pro Tem and the demographer make related criticisms on 16 June, and another resident on 7 July.

The Council picks five districts and a rotating mayor, unanimously, against a public poll running 60–25 the other way and against the practice of five of the eight districted cities in the county. One reason given is money — “we don't have a budget that is going to be good enough for a salaried mayor” — alongside the value of serving as mayor in rotation and the risk of concentrating power in one citywide seat. Councilmember Ktsanes reverses the candidate-pool argument — a smaller district is cheaper to campaign in, so “it might make it more accessible.”

In the third budget session, Councilmember Motoyama proposes reducing the city-funded library hours — $100,000 — two weeks before the election on the library tax. Councilmember Wysinger answers “I'm shocked”; Councilmember Ktsanes, recalling “the bruises you took last time,” comes round; the Mayor Pro Tem does not: the extra hours are about “allowing working people and families to go to the library” — “those additional evening hours are so important.” In answer to a councilmember's question about staffing, staff clarify that library staff are county employees, and the county sizes its staffing on the city's annual commitment.

The master fee schedule surfaces a business license exemption threshold frozen so long that correcting it nearly doubles the figure, and a tree planting fee that had produced almost no resident planting in twelve years. The Council cuts it to $150 from the dais. The annual vacancy hearing shows a 10% average and a contracted-out permit counter, and the union asks for the vacancies to be filled rather than outsourced.

The EFF representative's point is about where the data sits rather than Flock's conduct: “there is no way to make this arrangement meaningfully low-risk for a sanctuary city.” The EFF and the Mayor Pro Tem raise the same concern about section 4.3 two weeks apart, and the Flock representative says of the carve-out, “That concern is valid.” He opens with “no contract with ICE. Period,” then confirms a federal pilot with Homeland Security Investigations, a directorate of ICE, that ended in 2025. A resident who works as a data security engineer says El Cerrito shares its data with “319 external agencies” while Richmond shares with a “single external agency.” The audit log question is asked only at the end: the Flock representative says the records are immutable and offers the technical documentation by email, and no verification is offered in the meeting.

The case for the system: 88% of people arrested in El Cerrito come from outside it, the Chief's reason for an interconnected network. The cameras sit at the city's perimeter, and the Chief says they cannot follow a car once it is inside the city. Two of the traffic cases he describes involve pedestrians struck, at Cutting and San Pablo and near Safeway, and in the first the system identified the driver. His equity argument is that people without comprehensive insurance lose most when a car is stolen, and that the most common victims of violent crime, outside domestic violence, are the city's workers.

Districting dominates the first half. The demographer says a Martinez map, “called a parody of the original gerrymandering,” was “the reason we have the Fair Maps Act,” and describes a census block split three ways in a Southern California city where three councilmembers lived in the same apartment complex. The budget item establishes that no scenario involves layoffs, that “we already did the easy things if they existed,” and that the Flock contract and the library hours cost about the same — roughly $105,000 a year against $100,000. Councilmember Motoyama explains her position: “I trust the police. I do not trust Flock.” Councilmember Wysinger, whose cousin “walks free right now because of flock cameras,” votes to keep them “even in a losing vote.”

Five percent of the local road network accounts for 72% of injury crashes and 18 of the 21 fatal and severe injury crashes. The safe systems approach starts from the premise that people make mistakes: “in the past, we were looking at perfect human behavior.” Target speed design aims to end what staff call the “never-ending circular logic” of roads designed for 10 mph above the limit and limits that then rise. Hoboken is offered as the Vision Zero success story: a small, compact city without wide roads that has had zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries “going on 9 years now.”

The Caltrans San Pablo Avenue project has slipped to 2028 — two years later than the summer 2026 start described in December, on a corridor carrying 30% of the city's injury crashes. The city has applied for grant money “to install a pedestrian hybrid beacon at Waldo Avenue,” a street staff chose because the data showed two severe-injury crashes, cut-through traffic and high speeds. And staff say the constraint is capacity: “what we bump up against is our capacity to deliver them,” to the point that they have “found ourselves starting to think about” passing by some funding opportunities. A resident struck in a crosswalk eighteen years ago, still living with the injuries, speaks at the study session on the city's first road safety plan, which is due back for adoption in July.

The senior exemption study session ends in consensus to clarify the exemption without amending the initiative. An exemption is legally a rate decision — setting the rate to zero for a defined class — so the Council can create one. The same exemption language appears in the parks tax and the swim center tax, and staff found no record of anyone applying under them: “it's not that nobody qualified, it's just that nobody applied.” The Mayor Pro Tem argues that dropping two criteria would also cut staff work, since with “like, 5 different documents, at least” to confirm, “that's a lot more work.” Age-and-income or income-only options would cost roughly $222,000 to $400,000 a year, about 7% to 13.7% of first-year revenue. A drafter of Measure C says on the record that his intent “was to have an appropriate exemption,” and the Council reaches consensus on clarifying it eight weeks before the June election.

The city receives an unmodified audit opinion with no material weaknesses and no significant deficiencies — and, for the first time since 2013, the audit and annual report were finished by the 31 December deadline. Asked by a councilmember what should guide reserve use, the auditor suggests the city “look at those concepts of, can we commit something toward future needs”.

A resident reads the library petition's own numbers back to the Council: a debt service coverage ratio of 1.15 is “basically around junk bond status,” and $2.7 million of revenue less $0.9 million of operating cost leaves $1.8 million against bond payments above $2 million. “Oops.” He asks the city to hear from a bond underwriter; the city does not respond at this meeting. A proponent puts a $36 million bond at a $2.3 million annual payment. The safety pension picture is also on the record — contributions at 93.96% of covered payroll, net liability at 833% of salary.

The rewritten Rules of Order pass 4–1, including an optional process, at the mayor's discretion, for reducing per-speaker or total public comment time. The Mayor Pro Tem objects that a 30-minute limit means, in practice, “about 30 people.” “I saw it on the night I was sworn in.” A resident describes how Madison alternates speakers for and against and lets people register a position without speaking; the Council does not take it up at this meeting.

El Cerrito has no community room, while 19 of the county's 26 branches do (21 once two new libraries open). The branch has one family and staff bathroom, and the designated reading area is “the darkest part of the building.” Five scenarios start at about $10 million for renovation, with the TOD at “a little over 37 million,” and the parking assumption is what moves them: the Stockton site needs structured parking and the TOD does not. Staff's answer to every “why not just renovate” objection is that there “doesn't appear to be room to use existing reserves” even for the $10 million option, and they are “not aware of any grants at the moment” that would fund it. Asked about total spending rather than budget years, staff confirm that a June election costs roughly $80,000 more.

In the statistically valid community survey, a new library is residents' top facility priority; expanded senior services rank comparatively low. Seven in ten are satisfied with library services while the building is the top facility priority. 29 of 122 ratings improved statistically since 2022, among them satisfaction with economic health, which “rose notably from 29% in 2022 to 50% in 2025.” “Just over half” give positive ratings to the value of services for taxes paid.

A resident asks “what happens to our tax revenue if that building never gets built?”; an author of the ordinance answers that the tax “does not get collected until there is a concrete plan,” and that it ends “30 years after library construction begins.” An opponent says “we start paying this tax this December regardless.” On the claim that the city is subsidizing BART, Councilmember Ktsanes says “I think we are, but I don't have a problem with that,” and “I'm honest enough to say yes it is.” A councilmember says publicly that “probably if I really thought about it, I'd find something I wanted to change,” but the Council cannot modify the measure. And Councilmember Ktsanes objects to forming the task force only after funding is approved, because its information “is part of what informs voters.”