After a year-long delay due to the pandemic, the Beverly Hills City Council met for a marathon four-hour Special Study Session on April 27 to set priorities for the new fiscal year. With a budget still sore from COVID-19, the normally annual affair saw the City Council review the status of last year’s priorities for each city agency and consider new priorities for fiscal year 2021-22, including studying the creation of a City Health Department and a City Prosecutor. City staff will now collect the updated priorities and present them to the City Council at a future Regular Meeting for formal adoption.
In the same way that an agenda dictates the direction of a City Council meeting or commission hearing, the city’s yearly priorities map the goals and focus of the city’s many branches. The City Council Priority Setting Session for the fiscal year 2020-21 was a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last year, city staff deferred to the priorities of the prior year while also following City Council directions in regards to the evolving civil unrest and public health crisis.
