Vallejo approves tighter spending plan without mayor’s approval

VALLEJO – The Vallejo City Council approved a budget for the coming year which freezes 12 city positions from the city manager’s office, the economic development and finance departments and human resources. 

The council approved its new budget 5-1 on Tuesday with Vice Mayor Peter Bregenzer absent and Mayor Andrea Sorce voting no. The $323 million spending plan makes several cuts but contains new funding in some areas, including $500,000 for dredging the marina and $100,000 for a local crime prevention program.

Finance Director Rekha Nayar identified some additional savings to help improve the outlook for 2025-26, including finding $722,000 of unspent funds from capital improvement projects. She said her team identified 14 non-essential vacant positions totaling $2.2 million, of which $1.76 million had already been accounted for.

The council approved freezing 12 of those positions. The frozen positions include an administrative analyst, an administrative clerk and an organizational development manager from the city manager’s office; an economic development program manager and a secretary from the economic development department; three positions in the finance department and four in human resources.

Nayar also proposed freezing $1 million allocated for projects under the current participatory budget cycle, giving staff time to allocate a currently $2.2 million fund for existing projects and close projects that can’t go forward.

These actions and other adjustments would net $2.5 million to add to the current 2025-26 budget to avoid using any reserve funds to balance it, Nayar said, leaving the budget at $323.9 million in total expenditures.

Councilmember Helen-Marie “Cookie” Gordon said she preferred freezing rather than eliminating unfilled staff positions. However, other councilmembers demanded another round of budget revisions, after having asked for a new draft on June 10. 

City Manager Andrew Murray and Nayar said then that their proposal was balanced – months after facing a looming deficit – in part by relying upon a 25% staff vacancy rate. But Sorce had pointed out the five-year projection reflected a $6.9 million spending gap with Vallejo “going negative” by 2028. 

The mayor on Tuesday was the sole opposition to Councilmember Alexander Matias’s final amended motion, saying that the city has been balancing budgets off of staff savings for many years without making structural changes. She said she plans to recommend creating a budget subcommittee to set expectations for budgeting and procedures for where all of the city’s funds go, and when.

“It’s unacceptable that we’ve grown so substantially and our services have declined so much,” Sorce said. “We’re not in a position right now to know what to cut. I don’t think creating a status quo budget was the right approach.”

Councilmember Tonia Lediju pointed out that the Vallejo Housing Authority is one of the city departments that will likely face a financial shortfall as its expenses outweigh fee revenue, which will impact families without more assistance from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Lediju criticized the finance department’s suggestions for additional cuts, saying that some city positions can be eliminated, rather than frozen, if they have been unfilled for more than a year.

“You all have not brought real solutions, from my perspective, and I continue to say you can’t balance your budget on salary savings,” Lediju said. “We need to get down to business and make some real changes to our budget. When I look at this presentation, it’s all over the map. It’s not clear-cut.”

In response, Murray said that to assume that all positions that are vacant for different reasons are nonessential would be “premature,” adding “It wouldn't at all be strategic.” 

He defended some decisions from cuts, such as investing in new budget software. “We’re literally doing our budget in excel spreadsheets,” Murray said. “That’s not best practice.”

Murray added that the council needed to be clear about freezing positions due to the city employee unions. “We will need to consult with our labor organizations to discuss whether they think there's an impact on the work of the remaining employees by freezing those positions,” he said.

Matias said the city staff took the same approach as during previous years, saying, “It’s the same exact script.” 

Matias’s alternate motion won over Gordon’s, with some adjustments, including that staff leave two positions in the planning department unfrozen and assess and report on its internal budget team’s processes during the coming year.

“This agency is top-heavy,” Matias said. “Part of the issue the public is experiencing is, they don’t feel like we’re making progress on their quality of life issues, year in and year out.”