City Manager Rolls Out 465 Objectives for 2026; Council Zeroes in on Homelessness, Fire and Equity

City Manager Mike Futrell opened the Feb. 10 City Council meeting with a challenge to every department head sitting behind him: stop thinking about 311 calls.

"To have each department not think about 311 calls and just what we have to do today — those are important, but also to think ahead," Futrell told the council. "What are the projects and initiatives that we should do in addition to that, so that a year from today we can look back and say we moved the needle forward in the city of Riverside in every department."

The Feb. 10 session — a nearly four-hour afternoon dedicated to the city's annual "Book of Work" — was built around a department-by-department planning document that Futrell has positioned as a bridge between broader strategic plans. With the Envision Riverside 2025 plan concluded and the city's General Plan update still two years from completion, the Book of Work fills the gap.

This year's document spans 16 departments and lists 465 individual objectives — a figure Futrell acknowledged with both pride and realism.

"I have asked them to include items without fear and to be ambitious, recognizing that there is no punishment for failure as long as you're trying," he said. "As long as you're trying to move the needle forward."

After department heads presented their sections, council members spent nearly 90 minutes sharing ward priorities — a look at where Riverside's political pressure is concentrated heading into 2026.

Homelessness: "When does somebody stick up for us?"

If there was a single issue that dominated the council's priorities discussion, it was homelessness — the feeling among several council members that the city is absorbing consequences of decisions made at the county and state level that it cannot control.

Ward 6 Council member Jim Perry said his office spends a majority of its time managing the fallout along the Magnolia Avenue corridor — residents and business owners furious about encampments and public drug use.

"We have trash enclosures in this city that are more secure than prison cells," Perry said. "People are tired. They're tired of the public nudity, they're tired of the public drug use, they're tired of the public sex acts that take place on a daily basis."

He said constituents keep asking: "When does somebody stick up for us? When does somebody stick up for us? Because basically the homeless is just destroying the quality of life in many of our neighborhoods."

Perry specifically called out church groups distributing food along the corridor that he said are making the problem worse by drawing people to the area without connecting them to services. He called for a special meeting with state legislators representing Riverside to press for funding tied to Proposition 36, the statewide measure voters approved to strengthen penalties for drug crimes and require treatment, and to push for additional mental health resources.

He also warned that LA encampment clearances ahead of the 2028 Olympics could push homeless individuals into the Inland Empire, and called for a frank conversation with county officials about the concentration of homeless services along the Magnolia corridor.

Ward 5 Council member Sean Mill said the city's Homelessness Action Plan needs to keep evolving. "People often refer to, 'oh, we have a Homeless Action Plan, like this is it,'" Mill said. "Well, I think it has to always be evolving."

He called for the city to actively pursue implementation of SB 43, a state law that expanded eligibility for conservatorship for people with severe mental illness, as part of the plan's next update. "Continuing to do the same thing over and over again because that's what our document says — it is insanity," he said.

Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said the city needs to take "a very scientific approach" to its next homelessness strategy revision — one that accounts for recent court decisions and new state law. She pressed for a more data-informed framework: "What tools do we have? What opportunities do we have? Also determining what our most urgent housing needs are — is it permanent supportive housing, is it affordable housing, or is it shelter to get folks off the street?"

Housing: "Progress should be a top priority"

Housing production and affordability dominated both the departmental presentations and council's priorities.

The 2026 Book of Work includes a broad housing agenda for the Community and Economic Development Department: an adaptive reuse ordinance expected to move to Planning Commission in the second quarter and City Council in the third quarter; "missing middle" housing prototypes — designs for duplexes, triplexes and small apartment buildings — developed with state REAP 2.0 funding and expected to be released for public use by midyear; and a faith-based housing toolkit to help churches and religious organizations develop housing on their underutilized properties, targeted for completion in the first quarter.

Ward 5's Mill asked staff to prioritize finding senior housing sites in his ward. "We're an aging population and there's a lot of folks that have a big home and they would love to downsize, but they want to stay here," he said, adding that he wants options across all affordability levels — not just income-restricted units.

"Progress on the housing element — looking at different types of housing, adaptive reuse, missing middle prototypes, all the different things — should be perhaps a top priority," Hemenway said.

Mayor Lock Dawson pressed for clarity on which type of housing the city should be prioritizing — permanent supportive housing, affordable workforce housing, or emergency shelter — rather than pursuing all three simultaneously without a clear hierarchy.

Fire: "The city is exploding"

Ward 4 Council member Chuck Conder said the fire department needs to hire 84 to 85 new personnel, and that a new station in Ward 4 should be the top facility priority. Ward 7 Council member Steve Hemenway called the department's strategic master plan the top fire-related priority for 2026. "Figuring out how to best grow in a responsible way and support the fire department," Hemenway said, citing the increasing demands from fires both locally and regionally.

Ward 5 Council member Mill pressed for identifying a specific site for a new Fire Station 10 in the Casa Blanca neighborhood — not necessarily to build it now, but to get a location locked in. "If you've never seen Fire Station 10, go take a look at it," Mill said. "It is absolutely incredible that we are running a fire department out of that location. Probably get three people in the kitchen at the same time, and that's if they're three small people."

Access and equity: "What about us?"

Several council members raised equity concerns that cut across departmental lines, and the most concrete example came from Ward 2 Council member Clarissa Cervantes, who flagged a shelved item in the CEDD section of the Book of Work: a Spanish-language version of the Business Resources Guide, published in English in December 2024.

The item is listed in the document as "continued" and "on hold." Cervantes pressed Community and Economic Development Director Jennifer Lilley on why it was stalled and how to move it forward. She did not receive a definitive answer on a timeline.

Cervantes also raised accessibility concerns at the One-Stop Shop permit center for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. She said a commissioner who is deaf had described having to schedule advance appointments for every visit — an accommodation that creates a different service experience than walk-in customers receive. She described a specific technology solution a commissioner had proposed: an iPad-based on-demand video interpretation service that could connect customers with a sign language interpreter within minutes, similar to services used in medical settings. Lilley said she did not have an answer on a current solution, but described the idea as promising and applicable across multiple language needs.

Infrastructure: "Ring, ring, busy signal"

Council member Perry flagged the ongoing problem of checkerboard patching on residential streets following underground water main repairs, and Mustafa confirmed the city has a dedicated contractor working through the backlog using funds shared with Riverside Public Utilities.

A sewer rate increase is planned for the second half of 2026. Mustafa confirmed the timing when asked by Perry, noting it was a "smart time of the year" — after the June primary election season.

The 311 system drew a pointed exchange. Conder said a constituent demonstrated the problem in front of him in real time: dial 311, get two rings, a busy signal, then a disconnect. Riverside Public Utilities General Manager David Garcia, whose department manages the call center, acknowledged persistent wait time issues and said a callback option is being developed with the Innovation and Technology department.

Hemenway raised the 2028 Olympics as a frame for the airport's potential as a regional gateway, noting that the airport and adjacent areas like Hole Lake could draw visitors coming to the greater LA region for the games. He called for the Visit Riverside Destination Initiative to treat LA28 as a top priority this year. Conder, citing 28 years of personal familiarity with Riverside Municipal Airport, called for a new control tower as the top airport priority and a terminal replacement as a longer-term necessity. "That terminal's got to get replaced," he said.

"Less ideation, more execution"

"I think 2026 should be less of the year of ideation and more of the year of execution across the board," Ward 1 Council member Philip Falcone said of the Book of Work. He singled out the Community and Economic Development section, which is the document's longest. "There's just a lot of wonderful ideas and I just worry that for staff, if we're asking them to do this much, that execution is going to suffer at the cost of just more ideas," he said.

Falcone also questioned whether a standalone economic development website — a new item in CEDD's section — was necessary, arguing that everything should run through the city's centralized marketing and communications infrastructure. He drew a distinction with the Visit Riverside tourism site, which was originally designed to eventually be spun off to an independent tourism organization. An in-house economic development site, he argued, serves no such spinoff purpose and risks fragmenting the city's brand.

On the Downtown sidewalk café bumpouts installed during COVID-19, Falcone said it was time to revisit the program's standards — arguing that some structures have become eyesores now that the emergency justification has passed. He said he would like to see that conversation go to a committee.

Falcone also raised the city's overall tree canopy score, noting that Riverside — historically known as the City of Trees — currently scores a 73. He called for a coordinated goal between Public Works and the Office of Sustainability to push toward a specific target by a specific year.

Perry struck a similar note on investment equity. He said the city's spending pattern is weighted toward Downtown in ways that leave the western end of the city behind. "There's a city west of Van Buren," he said. "When you don't live in this area and you see the millions and millions of dollars that are being spent in the Downtown area, you get other neighborhoods asking, what about us?"

He said his ward's residents have come to expect high-density housing and car washes as the dominant development outcomes — not the mix of retail, dining and placemaking investments that Downtown receives. "We need to remember that there needs to be equity not just for some but for all of the neighborhoods in this entire city."

More information: The Book of Work is available on the city's website. Formal council approval is expected at the Feb. 24 meeting.