HONORING_COMMITMENTS_TO_THE_PUBLIC.PDF.pdf

With regard to the City Manager’s response to Recommendation R8, the City’s FY 2024 Annual Budget does not provide a detailed plan and accounting of how homeless funds have been used. The City’s response only partially fulfilled its commitment to make related budget figures available. __ AGREE __ PARTIALLY DISAGREE _X_ DISAGREE Response explanation (required for a response other than Agree): The Annual Budget as presented by the City of Santa Cruz provides an overview of General Fund revenues and expenditures and Capital Investment Program for the City. The budget document provides information about total expenditures by department and is not intended to be a detailed expenditure plan for a specific program as recommended by the Grand Jury. An Annual Budget is a financial plan, policy document, operations guide and a communication device. The specific request relates to funds received in December 2022 in the amount of $14M from a grant from the State of California, and $4.7M from the American Recovery Act. Both sources of funds were one-time in nature and utilized over two Fiscal Years, FY23 and FY24. A detailed accounting of those funds was presented to the City Council during the FY24 Budget Hearing’s and was attached to the City Council Report which is publicly available on the City’s website located here: FY24 Budget Hearings Homelessness Response. The report details the FY23 expenditures and the planned expenditures for FY24 on of the power point presentation. The recently adopted FY25 budget provides an overview of the expenditures for homelessness response programs that occurred in FY24 and the budget for FY25. These expenditures are contained in three City Departments: City Manager, Public Works and Police Department under the Activity Code 6105. While the expenditures are not broken out into expenses by detail, they are reported categorically as is consistent with all of the city program budgets and consistent with the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) accounting and financial reporting standards. The FY25 budget is publicly available on the City’s web site.