City Budget process begins TONIGHT (+ Council recap!)

Mar 3

Hi friends,

Last week’s Council meeting went til 1:30am! Here’s what what went down! Click below for the video or keep reading if that’s your style.

Play Video

🏥 City debuted new online homeless outreach portal to dispatch mental health and housing services. It should be live in the coming weeks.
🚍 Council approved new real time tracking tech for Culver CityBus which should address issue of “ghost buses” on apps like Transit App and Google Maps.
📉 City presented its mid year budget report showing a $35M deficit for this year.
🚶 Council decided to keep $250,000 designated for Fox Hills safe streets infrastructure after community members noticed that the city was about to deobligate those funds.

⛪️ Council delayed the decision of whether to issue $16M loan to proposed 93 unit affordable housing project Jubilo Village (located at Culver-Palms United Methodist Church) to allow more time for financial analysis.

🏢 Council agendaized a conversation about expediting affordable housing production, taking inspiration from Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1.
👉 Next up: Today at 4pm is a decision about whether to establish an eviction moratorium and/or rent freeze in response to the wildfires’ impact on our housing crisis. And our budget workplan presentations will begin!
As always, you can watch in person at Council Chambers or remotely via Zoom.
You can request to speak here or send in a comment electronically here by 3PM or by emailing city.council@culvercity.org.
Hope to see (or hear) you there!

Request to Speak Today!

Budget Process begins tonight!

‘Budgets are moral documents”
”A budget is a statement of our values”

You may have heard these adages (often attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) before and even nodded along in agreement.

But how can we actually put these words into action and ensure our city spends its limited resources on what or community actually wants?

The city’s annual budget process is our opportunity.

Over the next 2-3 days, each city department will present its budget workplans. These documents will guide how much money they will ask for in the coming year.

This process is usually extremely opaque and hard for busy people to impact or even fully understand.

But the result of this process is a several-hundred-page document that will guide our spending in the coming fiscal year, beginning July 1, 2025 and ending June 30, 2026.

Deviating from that budget once it has passed requires 4 out of 5 councilmembers to agree, a high bar to meet.

That’s why ensuring that this process is accessible to YOU, the community, is so important— the budget sets us on a path for the entire year.

As a reference, here is how the General Fund budget (the only fund where that the city gets to decide how it is used) was set for the current fiscal year ending in June.

Are these the right proportions for the city’s General Fund? Why or why not? Let us know at today’s meeting.

Request to Speak Today!

Around Town

Screenland 5K!

The glamorous ghosts of old Hollywood ran through the streets of Culver City on Oscar Sunday! Shoutout to all the people who screamed “run Forrest run” at me yesterday - you kept me going.

And congrats to Michael Cohen and the @screenland5k crew on another year of fun racing through cinematic history.

Forrest and Elton John (portrayed gracefully by Vice Mayor Puza) hanging out as they often did.

Park bench gump & ‘run Forrest run’ gump

Celebrating with friends at Equator Coffee after the race

Walk n’ Rollers Walk More Bike More Festival!

Walk n’ Rollers put on a fabulous walk more bike more fest! Congrats to Yolanda Davis-Overstreet who received the Golden Sneaker Award for her years of tireless mobility justice advocacy and to Jon Riddle for being named Volunteer of the Year!

But they weren’t the only winners…. I beat my fellow cc electeds in a white-knuckle, adrenaline-fueled, 35-second folding bike race.

If they tell you they let me win, don’t believe them!

With Golden Sneaker honoree, mobility justice advocate Yolanda Davis Overstreet (congrats Yolanda!)

With Megan Oddsen Goodwin and Walk n’ Rollers’ Jim Shanman.

Sisters Came to Visit!

My sisters left the kids with their dads for a few days and flew out to visit Aaron and me. We had a great time just walking around the city and catching up. My sisters are my best friends, and I feel quite lucky to get even a few days to reconnect with them.