To close budget deficit, Sacramento will start charging for on-street Sunday parking

To help the city close a budget deficit, Sacramento will soon charge drivers at downtown and midtown parking meters on Sundays and holidays, the City Council decided Tuesday.

In addition, as part of the city’s new $1.6 billion budget, the city will soon start charging for parking at 300 on-street central city spots that are currently free. It will also start charging for electric vehicle charging in its garages.

The budget, which goes into effect July 1, will also increase fees for sports field rentals, swim programs, covered picnic park areas, and room rentals at community centers. It will also start charging a fee for senior special events between $5 and $10.

The fees are to fill a $66 million budget deficit — the largest the city has faced since the tenures of Mayor Darrell Steinberg and City Manager Howard Chan. To close the gap, the council decided to hike fees instead of laying off employees or closing homeless shelters. It also kept a popular program that had been on the chopping block that lets kids ride busses and light rail for free.

The budget was not without controversy however. It passed 7-2 with Councilwomen Katie Valenzuela and Mai Vang voting against. They opposed the budget partly because it will eliminate funding for several vacant Internal Affairs positions in the police department that are tasked with investigating officer wrongdoing.

“I was hoping this was the first time I got to vote yes on a budget,” said Valenzuela, whose term ends in December. “For us to invest that much in (the Office of Public Safety Accountability) and then allow PD to cut the very positions that are essential to the proper function of OPSA...”

OPSA, which independently investigates complaints about officers, has to wait for Internal Affairs to finish investigating an incident before OPSA can. The shortage of Internal Affairs officers slows the process way down, Valenzuela said.

Including those positions in the budget would have cost close to $1 million.

In an effort to try to get a unanimous budget vote during his last budget as mayor, Steinberg suggested at least adding half the positions back in.

“This is just a question of restoration of accountability resources,” Steinberg said.

Police Chief Kathy Lester opposed it, however. She said if the department is going to get new money they should be for patrol, especially for the understaffed traffic unit.

“If it were up to me I would take as many sworn officers as I could and put them on the streets,” Lester told the council. “We’ve had three vehicular fatalities in the last 24 hours and that’s significant ... our IA officers are excellent but there is a better way to use those resources.”

After that, Steinberg called the vote and it was 7-2.

Real-time homeless response not included

Ahead of the vote, Valenzuela made one final pitch to her colleagues to decrease the police department’s role in responding to homeless calls. She suggested the city increase the Department of Community Response’s funding so non-police employees could respond faster to non-violent homeless calls. Currently the department does not work 24/7, and the wait can be weeks after a home or business owner calls to report a camp, Valenzuela said.

Last year Councilwoman Caity Maple and Vang sided with her on that, voting against the budget because they wanted to shift $6 million from the police department to DCR.

The council will hold a workshop in the fall to discuss the idea however, Steinberg said.

The budget eliminates 44 vacant positions.

Several of the removed vacant positions will be from the police department. However the police department budget will continue to grow, going from about $222 million in the current fiscal year to an all-time-high of about $250 million. It has fewer officers than it did before the Great Recession, and often spends over $10 million in annual overtime.

Several business leaders and police union leaders encouraged the council not to go with Valenzuela’s idea to shift money away from the department to DCR.

“We are the equivalent of a defunded police department,” Dustin Smith of the city police officer union told the council. “It isn’t a case where officers are abusing overtime. Overtime shifts often go vacant. We cannot afford any more cuts without further jeopardizing the safety of our community.”

Chan’s proposed budget included a controversial decision to cut a $1 million program that lets kids ride Regional Transit for free. Steinberg negotiated with Regional Transit and the school district superintendents and they agreed to help pay for it, so it will no longer be cut. Several of the districts still need their boards to vote in favor, however, which Steinberg said he expects to happen.

The city’s last large round of cuts was following the Great Recession. But with the pandemic moving many state workers out of downtown office buildings, parking revenue decreased, and the city is struggling to pay for Golden One Center and homeless shelters, as well as employee pensions.

The budget goes into effect July 1. During next year’s budget the council will likely be faced with much tougher decisions, and a larger estimated $77 million deficit.