 maybe you got to 20 30 all right welcome everyone to today's study session mr. assistant city manager would you like to update us and introduce the item thank you and before we begin the session I want to let the public know let the council know that I think item 15.1 and 15.2 both public hearings have been moved to November 12th so that was both those items 15.1 and 15.2 will not be heard tonight but will be on November 12th so the item before us right now is a study session item 3.1 is a proposed fee based rental inspection program and I'm going to turn over the city attorney to start the process good evening we this evening we do have an unusual situation we have an item where four of our members four of the council members have potential conflicts of interest we the four members that are affected are vice mayor Rogers as a less sore in a rental and then council members combs tidbits and Sawyer as landlords I will note that council member combs no longer rents a room in her home but the fpbc regulations do have a prohibition period for a period of 12 months which is why she is included as well due to the potential conflicts of interest and there is it is not clear at that at this point that those conflicts in fact will materialize but due to those potential conflicts we did ask for advice informal advice from the fpbc we received that advice last week and they recommended that out of an abundance of caution that all four of the affected members of council recuse themselves we are going to follow that advice at this point they did invite us to submit a formal inquiry at a later date should we desire which we could get into more details but at this point we are going to follow that informal advice and all four council members will recuse that being said that leaves us without a quorum and the fpbc regulations do include a provision the rule of necessity is what it's called which allows a process by which a council member can an affected council member can be selected to join the rest of the the remaining three so as to reach a quorum we will do that process now before we begin the before we begin hearing the item excuse me and it will be it will bring only one council member back into the fold we the rule of necessity allows you to come up to quorum but not beyond that with process that we've decided to use is pulling the name out of a hat except for it'll be out of a bag today because we didn't have a hat behind the scenes the four names have been put on pieces of paper that have all been of uniform size uniform type folded in the same way and I will hold their for in this bag I will hold the bag and we'll have the city clerk pull the name they the council member that is selected will participate in the discussion for the entirety of the study session and we will revisit any issues if this if the item comes back at a later time we'll revisit the issue but for today whoever selected will sit for the entire study session give including the discussion on giving direction to staff and the remaining three council members will need to recuse themselves so and the participating council member is vice mayor Rogers okay and so to start off the study session I'm going to turn this over to David Guine our director of housing and committee services good afternoon mayor and council members the study session is going to ask you to consider a proposed fee space rental inspection program you may know that it lands as a tier one priority in your housing goals and it's been on the work plan since you adopted them back in June the overview of today's program we're going to go through the purpose background consider a process by which you would consider a program we share the number and types of units that we understand to be in Santa Rosa including since the annexation we want to review existing inspection programs that exist already share the feedback we got from stakeholders as we did our outreach and then walk through different components for your consideration and we it with the mayor's permission we would prefer we walk through those components and revisit them with your questions at the end if that would be the best way to proceed so the first thing we want to do is confirm if the council wants to advance a rental inspection program staff understands you do otherwise we might not be at this place we want to review the existing rental services that exist and if proceeding we want to seek the feedback on a proposed rental inspection program that's our purpose today so briefly background a rental inspection program is designed to proactively rather than reactively inspect rental units and what I mean by that is is actually invite ourselves schedule the inspection to go through different rental properties rather than do it on a complaint base from neighbors in 2016 we held a study session on options to improve the code enforcement division and in that discussion we included a consideration of a proactive inspection service we were developing a program in 2017 meeting with council members stakeholders and the whole program idea has been deferred since the disaster so if the council is interested in moving forward the program tonight we would consider input from this session and continued stakeholder feedback we would come back with an ordinance estimated program cost and fees in the short term the November December timeframe and you might know your advanced calendar had us coming back it on November 19th assuming we would have had this study session last month before we ran into the conflict problem and then from there we would be working on operating procedures outreach plan develop the program administrative details with stakeholders with into the spring and summer we would probably look at hiring a program manager in this timeframe to join us in that feedback loop and getting the program stood up so the estimated rental units just by sheer coincidence it comes to a round number if you consider single family dwellings properties with one to three units and properties with three or more units and as I mentioned before this includes the annexation area of Roseland you have three existing inspection programs for rental units the first is the housing choice voucher program and that is required by HUD housing and urban development to inspect every unit for a condition called housing quality standards making sure it meets housing quality based on HUD's definition and just by common that inspection is not intended to be for a damaged deposit so next week you're going to hear a presentation on the host contract and based on your direction from a different discussion where we expand that risk mitigation pool to about landlords and vouchers holders you'll see that that considers a separate inspection process than HQS we also have a complaint based code enforcement program and in fiscal year 1819 we inspected 214 units based on complaints or all unit types single family multifamily all scattered throughout the city and then you have a very focused proactive inspection program and neighborhood revitalization through budget reductions over the last few years that is now down to a part-time inspector but we're able to still do a thousand units annually in our more focused neighborhood and a point there is is that because it's in our most distressed neighborhoods the many of those units don't pass the initial inspection roughly 70% so that's what we know about NRP so here's an example the groups we outreach with as we were talking about the rental inspection program you can see it was pretty broad and diverse primarily with industry and as well as tenant advocacy groups and here's the feedback summarized based on just general categories of property owners and tenant representative organizations certainly property owners message to us that they weren't supportive of a program they wanted to know what kind of need would demonstrate that we should set up this new business enterprise here in Santa Rosa what problem we're trying to solve they also message clearly that we should rely on our existing programs the code enforcement neighborhood revitalization and possibly consider enhancing those and from the apartment owners association if we were to proceed with the rental inspection program they would suggest it apply to three or more rental units not single family dwellings not duplexes we would exempt units built in the last 10 years however over the weekend a letter came in that asked that to be considered at 15 years and allow a process called self-certification this is where we learned from other communities that both property owner and the resident get together and document the condition of the unit certify the standards that we would develop that and maybe even the benefit of photographs that the unit already meets the definition of habitability tenant represented organizations were generally supportive of the program they message clearly that some of our minority community some of our entry level neighborhoods be sensitive to those populations so consider an outreach program not just expect to show up and inspect a unit but really get to know the community well and also the educational component of this and this was also a feedback from the property owners make sure folks know what it's like to be a responsible tenant property owner landlord good neighbor their rights and responsibilities under the program what we would be looking for if we were coming for an inspection well in advance so that takes us through the feedback the next few slides I'll summarize what might be your component choices we call them and that is for example the first one we would consider you we would ask for your direction on whether you want the fee and the cost to include a community engagement position either full-time or part-time for that outreach and educational component that I just mentioned making sure we have flyers website information to people before we show up for the inspection also might we consider translation and relocation services in advance in neighborhood meetings and as you may know we when we inspect a unit that's occupied many times we have to displace the resident for a variety of reasons you think about the new wave of this to fire you think about what we were going through recently with the gold coin and so might you want to consider a fee in here to help resource and pay this the program outreach person that skill set so we're not reacting in the moment relying on other not-for-profits just something we can talk through today the other thing we have to decide is are we inspecting all rental units or single family all the way to apartments or do you want to consider properties of three or more units up to multifamily frequency of inspection so what we find community survey for example conquered they inspect every two years in their multifamily program others such as Sacramento others can go up to seven years so finding the frequency of inspection would be key to build the staffing model in the budget model accordingly self-certification I mentioned we're asking if a property owner should be able to self-certify with the tenant the condition of the unit and if they do should we set up a program where we inspect a certain percentage of those units that are self-certified every year to confirm compliance whether that's five percent ten percent or more that would influence the program design also we're relying on the number of units based on our information technology group referencing assessor partial numbers against mailing address things of that nature but the real way to do it to do the outreach and let property owners know what's expected of us through the program is to do a registration and so we as staff would be suggesting we set up a registration program the fee and would just be to cover the admin cost to do that but also for your policy consideration what if someone doesn't step up and register the property that's a rental property should there be a consequence to that penalties and others and the last kind of key component is exemptions so do we want to exempt newly constructed rental housing units five ten as the apartment owners would ask 15 years do we exempt units inspected under other federal and state programs such as the housing choice voucher program we mentioned and also some board and care facilities that have other inspections that take place and of course manufactured home communities they come under the jurisdiction of the state HCD so I just make that point there that those we would think that this program would not be part of the mobile home program then I list four optional components for your consideration tonight one is called the local representative this is where if a investor owner is outside of the area should there be a local contact within say 35 miles of Santa Rosa that can respond quickly in case we need to have them on site in case of an emergency under the registration program the others an amnesty program this would be allow property owners more time and waive penalties to bring non permitted units into compliance ad use conversions of garages for example things of that nature we want to be flexible in allowing them to have those certified again I mentioned a relocation fund you want might want to consider a fee to sponsor displaced tenants at risk of homelessness and operate a displacement program rather than what we do now which is by the way we contact Catholic charities we try to get a program worker assigned to that individual have them access the risk mitigation pool of rapid rehousing funds but sometimes there's a gap in just coordinating that of say a few days or a week and also you can consider outsourcing the program we could get receive your direction of solicit proposals if I have a private operator run the program that you might be considering this evening all the different components so those are some choices also here's an example of the process we would notify a property owner 30 days in advance the owner is also responsible to secure tenant consent and that we would encourage them or the representative be present we can provide the results of the inspection as quickly as possible we're looking at getting iPads or tablets to do that rather than rely on paper if violations typically we would allow 30 days to repair we would extend that timeline of course if they needed to get a permit or more work required or get bids things of that nature and if a person isn't responding to the inspection process and not following through on their obligation to do the repair rather than have our fee and this program pay for our continued work there we refer it then to our code enforcement people who would then open a case for a code enforcement action so next steps is to get feedback hear from you what your interests are find out what if you're interested in some of the core and optional program components and then return as soon as possible with ordinance for your consideration and then here's the closing slide that I mentioned where we list the six core components to consider and also the optional ones so we can get your feedback and build the program accordingly so that concludes the presentation be happy to answer questions and great thanks for the presentation today so for counsel we'll go through the questions and solicit get any public comment and then feedback on slide 17 we'll go after that so counsel any questions over the information we just heard this morning thank you mr. Mayor thank you for your presentation and thank you for your community outreach I'll wait for this pass is it possible to this wasn't brought up in here but is it possible to exempt owner occupied rentals yes that's a policy decision you can make okay do you have any data on how that works in other jurisdictions we have information from the city of Sacramento and Berkeley that if you're much like the anti-discrimination ordinance if you're an owner occupied but you rent rooms you could be exempt from a rental inspection program okay because it seems like you know in your own private home that you might want to be exempt from this type of thing since you have to live with whatever it is that you're gonna let go right on slide 10 I'm wondering what let me go back slide 10 here when we look at ending a community engagement position for outreach and education what is it that you're envisioning in that position first from stats perspective there is two things to consider one is the neighborhood revitalization program had an outreach coordinator that was part time funded half with the measure of funding from violence prevention and half with general fund so we could build a work plan where roughly half time this person could help with the outreach engagement getting the neighborhood meetings coordinated helping with translation services etc we could also build a work plan where this could be a full-time effort because with 35,000 units or even a few exempt single family there's 24 more thousand units so there's at least yeah there's there's plenty of work to to just promote the program make sure that folks understand rights and responsibilities what to look for before we even arrive for an inspection the alternative councilmember is what would we expect our what's the expectation of an inspector right I mean the skill set to understand if there's violations the condition of the unit but we're going into people's homes and so we want to make sure there's a soft skill set there and if we're also expecting these people to be translation and also to the outreach we can also try and build the model that way but I as staff we would recommend you consider an engagement position and forgive me if I missed it I believe in one of the previous presentations in the last study session there was a list of the various standards that can be used in these situations in terms of what what level of basic habitability or inspection is used did you have a matrix that you had proposed in terms of or did you want to carry something over we would be recommending the international property management code that's what we see in most other communities that was what is understood by the board of realtors the apartment association so that's that's why it's not as an I didn't put it as an option that certainly could be if you wanted to consider something how similar is that to the inspection standards that are used for our HUD vouchers and our NRP program it's it's very nuanced so for example a housing quality standard inspection HQS doesn't have a minimum square foot standard for a sleeping quarter or a bedroom international property management code IPMC does it has to be a minimum of 70 square feet has to have a certain size window opening another nuance is that window in HQS it just has to be secured that crack broke in let the elements in but it doesn't require a screen IPMC requires a screen so it's very nuanced that way okay and then what do you see as the sweet spot in terms of inspection frequency two years to seven years is kind of a large span yeah the average for the industry I would say would be about five years okay and then how does a self-certification work with vulnerable populations like in is that an option in the NRP program it is not currently an option in the NRP program what we would be recommending that if you include a self-certification program that it's done by both the resident and the owner together document with photographs and that we randomly inspect some of those that self-certify annually okay and then what is it's hard for me to see why we would inspect new construction can you give me any reasons why we would inspect construction built within the last five years I I wouldn't be recommending that we inspect new construction okay and then you suggest on slide 14 as an option slide 14 be program mail-out time and waiver penalties can you give a can you flush that out a little bit what you're thinking when you say amnesty yeah so instead of allowing just 30 days to conduct a repair or perhaps it's an unpermitted unit somebody built accessory dwelling unit without the benefit of planning's inspection or services like that we would work with that property only to allow that particular unit to come into compliance many times we see folks that might have converted their garages to sleeping quarters but they haven't done it without a permit they haven't addressed say the gas lines or the venting things of that nature so we want to make sure that we bring that up to compliance and it might take longer than 30 days to do so yeah I understand that it might take longer than 30 days are you thinking about a timeline or support for potential landlords who are providing much needed units but may need a little bit of help in these situations I mean I know my unit passed inspection I mean I'm paying for my my neighbor's gas line because there's not a separate meter I mean this is stuff that that is pretty common but in a housing shortage you know we need to be sensitive and stuff but I also want to not unburden tenants or landlords actually in this situation right we would have I would take it as case by case through the program manager if we wanted to go so far as to set up like a loan program or rehabilitation loan program that's a big conversation had we'd have to identify a resource things of that nature and that brings me into my last question and I appreciate your forbearance to my council members which is when we talk about a fee have you come up with a fee that a sweet spot there that wouldn't overburden landlords but would get the protections that we need to for our housing stock in our residents we think we're close we're going to finalize that I've been talking to the city manager we didn't want to share a range tonight until we knew what your program expectations were but I think we're in a place where it's not going to be a burden okay thank you any other questions mr. Olives David I think you mentioned that we have 35,000 rental units in Santa Rosa and then you mentioned that on the complaint based process we had 214 complaints of all types so with those complaints included all types did they include all types was there any type that was not part of that 214 you mean like a single family dwelling exactly they were all types of housing they were all types so that we didn't receive complaints in all types yeah thank you yes mr. Rogers thank you mr. Mayor see you mentioned that 70% of the homes that were inspected in the neighborhood revitalization program had some sort of issue can you talk a little bit about what that actually looked like sure so consider again these are our focused neighborhoods they're selected based on calls for service from fire and police windshield survey windshield survey means looking at the condition of the exterior and so then they we set up a process by which we go and inspect these properties there you know West 9th Street apple valley pop a go Corby Avenue things of that nature and so what we're finding is everything from say large holes in the wall electric outlets and aren't covered the bathrooms that aren't properly vented so there's a mold issue pest firm and that type of thing doors that might not be fully secured those are examples of things we encounter so typically in a 30-day window a responsive property owner is able to correct that and we have a good unit yeah so typically it doesn't take more than that 30-day window do we have a percentage that fall outside of that that require sort of major rebuild yes that's why we're recommending 30 days because by the time a property only rallies and gets the work done permission from the tenant sometimes it takes a little longer if they need to get a general contractor a plumber for example electrician but that's pretty much it do we see tenants typically typically being displaced during this time while the work is being done not so much under nrp but sometimes yes under code we'll find such an egregious situation that we just can't have the person occupy the space and for the most part the property owner helps with the relocation whether it's you know during the work process and they're motivated to do the repair okay does the tenant have the opportunity to refuse to let somebody come into the unit they do yes even if the prop that the owner is wanting them to provide access they actually can refuse it and then there I'm not quite clear on all of the landlord-tenant law there but typically a process is run that the is initiated by the property owner okay so the property owner would not it sounds like would not be at risk for some form of penalty for not having it inspected in a timely manner if the tenant is refusing that would be my recommendation of operating a program yeah okay we talked a little bit last time about potentially having expedited permits for some of the homes that end up needing some work to try to keep people in their home have you proposed anything of that nature in this we have we've talked about it briefly but we haven't gotten into the level of detail we don't know how frequently that situation would occur how the priority of permitting and planning and economic development would be sequenced but we in my mind we would like to see is that a frequent event and if so then build something into the system okay last question for the neighborhood revitalization program which I think for all of us it it's sort of the closest we have to a working example of what this might look like does that distinguish between types of unit it does yes it's all multifamily duplex and above falls into the three or more I'm sorry it duplex or above duplex or above okay thank you thank you yeah just going along with the same on slide 7 you talked about the number inspection programs I heard you say that all different types it's difficult for me to make a recommendation should this policy cover single-family dwellings one unit or three plus units without knowing what has been our experience so when we talk about the housing choice voucher program those are 1900 inspections that were not complaint generated as part of the HUD rules that we have to inspect that is correct not a good indicator we could use that data the same thing what I just heard you say about NRP so no single-family homes were inspected from NRP that's correct so with the 217 since that number does seem somewhat manageable could you before we actually end up not tonight obviously but have a breakdown because you're asking the question should reply to single-family dwellings one less units or three or more and I would love to know what's our experience for me to give you a recommendation if the 214 were three single-family housing units and 200 something multi units well that that gives me information to make a recommendation to you but absent that information I'm kind of stuck knowing what's been our experience I think I know we can get that information and break it down in detail that would be very helpful and then it's interesting me regarding the self-certification and I like the random checks so if we if we went that route did I also hear you say that they could refuse entry on that type of a situation in any situation mayor a tenant could refuse entry to for an inspection even though the landlord is encouraging them I'm just not clear on the the steps the property owner can take to cause access so I know when I've been in some neighborhood some when we've talked about this there are some concerns saying that because of the lack of housing there may be some multi-family unit or some units where the occupancy has exceeded because there's nowhere else to go and if you start doing this that you're going to displace a whole bunch of folks at what point would the inspector saying this is I don't think there'd be a red tag but this may be a safety issue due to the number of people living in that house that's designed for a family of five and there's 15 people there how would we deal that we we would okay so there's two two ways I would like to respond the first is the experience we have talking to the city of Concord and Sacramento is their rental inspection programs rarely encounter overcrowding because when the inspection is scheduled the the household make sure that they don't know if we were to encounter overcrowded condition where the occupancy exceeded the square footage and the number of bedrooms that's where we would be asking the vacate the unit it's unsafe and that's where we would be considering that displacement fund or some process by which we could help people find suitable housing okay and then with that displacement you know my question was what if a place gets red tag now who pays for that relocation of that tenant the unit's been red tagged what happens next so if a unit is uninhabitable red tag the primary responsibility falls to the property owner unless that property owner can document its tenant caused and then that's another consideration for the council even if it's tenant caused and the tenant might be at risk of becoming homeless does this program step in to help them find other housing situation or at least some temporary living situation in that funding would come through fees to implement this program it's an option for you to consider yes okay any other questions from council okay we have several cards on this item start with Carmen Flores followed by Debra Tavares is Carmen here looks like she may have left Debra Tavares followed by Alan Thomas thank you very much Debra Tavares I find this to be rather horrifying in many senses and you have the illusion of a big job to consider because I say illusion because these plans have already been rolled out in other communities and in fact in London when I was in London I got original copies of inspections and ordinances and the requirements to permit the occupancy of apartments this is the same thing you're talking about the same thing and it is a tremendous displacement of residents there's no doubt about it because tenants can refuse for occupancy throwing the landlords into a conundrum aside from that this is also a very interesting way in which to enforce on older construction all of the climate action plans that will continue to be required for retrofitting so you know that all the older construction is not going to be in compliant with all of the climate action plans that are reducing greenhouse gas emissions to somehow miraculously change the weather so when I look at only inspections on older buildings I'm looking at red tag possibilities of what the climate action says they will red tag and that is non-compliant appliances not insulated walls accordingly a green roofs and I heard someone say about loans for financing yes there are pace loans there are hero loans those are all loans that you I know have approved for the county that are backed by Rockefeller and this is a worrisome reality it is going to force more homelessness it is going to be an impact on home ownership and it is going to be an impact on owners of multifamily construction that have pride of ownership when the city believes they can send in a hired consultant to come in and override their abilities of pride of ownership and I think this is robbery in every sense of the word when tenants have the opportunity then to be on the same level as the landlord and yet bear no consequence if they don't allow access into their units and then whatever occurs falls on the laps of the owners this is outrageous don't you hear what you're saying look at the Joe redota trail right now we are a burned out community the comparisons of Sacramento and other areas they're not dealing with as much displacement as we have in a war zone of fire and floods we have a very unique situation here and I sadly know that with Ernst and young you hired from London as an accounting firm are very helpful in looking at alternative revenue sources and I look at this as a theft program through Ernst and young and you and just all over the country thank you Alan Thomas follow by Nohemi Palomino thank you mayor Alan Thomas 306 Boy Street I've been a landlord for 20 years and I have some very big concerns about this actually I think the people that were asked to leave are probably more adept at understanding what's going on being a tenant and or a landlord first of all to answer the questions having lived in a downtown area that has been infested with drugs and different things throughout the years bad apples can be in single family homes own single family homes duplexes triplexes multi units that has no bearing whatsoever so whether it's owner occupied or not inspections empty units are much easier to inspect I have two experiences this year with two voucher programs one is run through the city and one was another private group and it's a lot easier to go to a unit when it's empty so you can tell that the GFI's are working you can take pictures it's really simple when you go to an occupied unit I can get into any of my units with 24 hour notice you just give the tenants 24 hours it's not super hard thing but if you knock on their door and they don't want to let you in you have no right that's part of being a tenant you get that bundle which is the property which you have access to the but as an owner it's still yours and so you can still go inside of it you just have to give proper notice so it's all there all the legal ease are there tenants rights are there it's just people don't know their rights you know I know what I'm supposed to do so getting in it's not a problem unless there's a flood that I can get in immediately if there's a life and safety issue if there's water dripping down I get a plumber in there I don't have to wait 24 hours the water to you know go throughout the whole unit so there's a lot of things you guys are getting into that I don't think you have any concept if you go into an occupied unit and the smoke detectors are all out the screens are off and you're pissing off the tent the landlord because those it's a long-term tenant that's been there for ten years and they just kind of let the house deteriorate the owner's not going to continue to go in there and make the tenant make those repairs you do that at the end of the thing and so what are you going to do you're going to take people that have single-family homes they're going to sell it you're going to lose a rental unit so now it's just going to go to market rate those tenants will be gone so think this through what is the purpose of this program why are you doing it and I don't think that this makes a lot of sense it first of all from the slides I didn't understand what the purpose was what is the problem so that being said and then if you're going to fund it don't put it on the landlords take it out of the transfer tax the sales transfer tax make it everybody's responsibility not just the apartment owners or the people that make it everybody's thank you thank you no hey me she left also Gregory Farron followed by a needle off a light thank you mayor and members of the council Gregory Farron great discussion we're often faced with two competing good needs good goals homelessness preventing it and homes that are safe and inhabitable and healthy and I don't envy your decisions I read through the material sorry I got here a little late and I think the only things I object to is contracting out I don't think you ought to do that if you're going to take it on take it on I go for four years I think there ought to be a little more aggressiveness here in the city than there is elsewhere I'd like to see the fee and I kind of agree with Alan that it ought to be shared citywide not necessarily put on the landlords maybe a combination of landlord and city I do think that you ought to try to extend to single-family homes and addition to apartments I think as has been said before it's it's a problem that's you know doesn't really pay any attention to how you build it it can get bad and I think that's about all I have to say I support this program I think it's a good move for Santa Rosa and I think you can do both provide safe and healthy homes and also follow through to make sure that no one additionally gets booted out thank you thank you I need a lot of light excuse me I just want you to know that if you are trying to tell what's going on in this session by reading what's put on the board here is not adequate because they leave out words and they sometimes make mistakes in the spell you can't understand what's really going on this needs to be upgraded a bit I just want to let you know that I think you're proposed I really want to know why you're doing this because it seems like you've got enough on your hands trying to get people into homes and now you're trying to over inspect them so much that every home what about the tiny homes that we're trying to build we built tiny homes you know and they weren't adequate to your inspection process so people can't live in them they're stored somewhere we can't build tiny homes that live up to these expectations and what we're trying to do is keep people into homes and if this inspection process is going to push them out into the street you've already gotten 94 people living at Joe Rodota trail that you can't put into homes so why would you be upgrading I think that's what you're doing I'm not quite sure why would you be upgrading your inspection system this doesn't make any sense to me at all I I want to live in a home that's significantly fine and it's not necessary that it have smart meters to tell them when the water turns on and off it's not necessary to have smart meters to turn when tell them when the electricity goes on and off I mean everything has to be so automated that it's it's impossible to find a unit that's affordable there are many many apartments along you loop Avenue and over here on Kiwana Springs as you know they're building a whole you new complex over there there are a lot of available units but nobody can afford them and this inspection project is only going to increase the cost of the unit you know that cost will be sent down to the people that are trying to afford a living in our community people who work over there at pizza parlors and hamburger stands you visit them you probably bought a hamburger yesterday they don't make even $15 an hour depending so they can't still live and thank you Alex coffin good afternoon Mr. Mayor and members of the council Alex Calvin with the California Department Association thank you for the opportunity to be here and comment on this item as your staff mentioned since 2016 we have been meeting with staff to talk about various parts of this policy and the one thing I would say you know it's important to look back and really think about I think why this conversation started and I think that the one comment that I would make is that the rental housing industry today is significantly different than what it was in 2016 and it will be different starting January 1 so before you really dive into this and go in you further I think it is worthwhile to pause and asking why we're really doing this is there really a problem that needs to be addressed if there is a problem that you ought to address it if we absolutely do not support some standard housing units if there are code violations we do not support that if there are properties that are not livable then they should not be their for rent I mean we agree with that the the issue becomes and how we do address that and if you are going to move forward today I think what you have to do is really look at zeroing in on properties that are problems and I think staff most likely has a good idea what those are I don't think a one-size-fits-all ordinance is going to really help you accomplish your goals I mean if it takes five years to inspect each unit I mean are we really addressing this issue so I would recommend to really looking at some ways to really address the problem rather than making everyone go through this process again we're really thankful for being part of this discussion and I suspect we'll continue to be part of this discussion and I'll offer our association as a resource as you move forward in trying to navigate this issue because it is complicated and it is hard to figure out what's the best way to do this so we are here to help the city work on this policy and thank you again I look forward to it thank you any other additional cards okay if you could pull up your slide 17 so that's the feedback that mr. Weissner okay yeah if I could director one question that popped up for me looking through the relocation fund idea would that be different based on if somebody has a month-to-month or if they are in a long-term lease and is that a consideration in other policy areas along here as well the as far as stats we we looked at this it would be for example if you decide to move forward a program all 35,000 units and you charge an additional dollar to whatever the cost are to run the program that provides a pool of $35,000 for a relocation fund we didn't get into scaling that at all based on any other consideration but we could I'll be particularly curious when we get to that in our discussions of understanding sort of a distinction of as a somebody who's had a month-to-month lease I knew that at any point I would be given potentially 30 days notice to find someplace else whether or not that factors into our conversation here on some of these discussions I think is going to be important yeah and just a comment on that vice mayor is we were looking at approaching this without getting too much in administrative detail that whether it's a month-to-month or a year lease the cost to inspect a unit and run the program would be so much per-door regardless of a month-to-month or ongoing this morning thank you I'm wondering the NRP program what percentage of tenants or units inspected were in some way displaced for more than 30 days as a result of that inspection since that's the most active model we have going in the city yeah in NRP there wasn't any displacement of 30 days or more in the code enforcement program I'd have to go look to see the length of time that the displacement was we know for example the Nueva Vista fire displaced 40 households for I'm looking at like in a regular inspection program of a thousand units how many are don't pass inspection in an annual cycle yeah there's there's like I said earlier there's roughly seven out of ten that don't pass inspection because the focused neighborhood the condition of the units the age of the housing stock that hasn't caused the displacement problems that we've seen right so does that mean you know we're fixing you know a smoke detector or does that mean that we're I'm trying to figure out are we needing to relocate people or are these you know really basic standards of habitability basic standards of habitability and if there is egregious violations then it's we open up a code enforcement case and it goes to code not to NRP and what's the length on the NRP inspection cycle the length frequency I mean yes yeah we have a part-time inspector and we focus on just one neighborhood for a couple of years until we see compliance consistently and then we go to another neighborhood so it isn't the same model we're talking about with a rental inspection program more broadly but we are not seeing massive we're not seeing a significant percentage of those individuals inspected being homeless or otherwise significantly displaced as result of that model okay that's correct all right council then if we could provide feedback on those six core questions and four optional questions mr. Oliver's we start with you certainly as to the questions with the course of community engagement I'm not sure what you're asking yes there needs to be community engagement throughout this process I think probably up to the end any any input that we can get from stakeholders would be important I think the goal here is to provide safe housing for all houses that are up to code that are safe so I at this point I don't know why we would not include all types of housing but I am interested in the information that you bring forward as far as the types of violations that we've seen in the past the frequency of inspections it's kind of looking at capacity and how does number four fit in as far as self-certification I would hope that many would take advantage of the self-certification we can allow that make that happen so that would probably help us determine at the end what the frequency would be so I'm open to a recommendation from from you all what the frequency should be again based on what we're seeing it whether their cities what they're seeing as far as the level of violations etc would be important the registration and penalty process I am in favor of looking at some type of a registration process penalties for not I think you know as we move this forward and it's assume they would pass that we would look at providing landlord some type of reasonable timeline to get to go through a process I think it's the effort should be in helping people be be compliant with what we put out not to say I got you didn't meet this requirement how can we help everyone be compliant with whatever we come up with the exemptions I think you know it's you know new construction I think is important to look at five to ten years I'm kind of leaning towards the 10 myself I mean if if we're seeing concerns over the next ten years or so maybe we can we look at that but I think we need to stop and maybe start start with something reasonable and I think the 10 years would be something reasonable from my perspective I think we talked about too about fees yeah that there should be a fee I know when I had a rental in another city there was an annual fee that I paid it was it was nominal to to to provide the services the local representative I think in certain circumstances we need to have somebody available to respond we have had situations where we have had some urgency as relates to tenant needs yes exploring some type of an amnesty program would be important in addition to a relocation fund the outsourcing I'm not so sure I think we need to maintain some kind of control on this internally as a city it is our program we need to take ownership of this but if this is going to work for us I think it's all in meaning we need to have from my perspective as we as we sit now is have involvement from all types of housing types I don't see why we would be exempting anyone I would not want to be that one that's exempted be to have the problem that I can't do anything about or not be noticed so that's where I would stand now on this issue thank you and once again thank you to everybody who came out in the middle of the day to give your input both on the landlord side and the tenant side I want to make sure that we are careful not to create any more displacement or homelessness in our process and that you know I do believe that most local landlords are good actors even if their units aren't fully in compliance that these are people who are small business owners who really are trying hard and so with that in mind I'll give you my feedback I support community engagement wholeheartedly and with that I mean that translation services are an absolute requirement in my mind the types of housing to be inspected I'd say yes to all except owner occupied I think that that's one exemption that I would be in support of the frequency of inspections I would look at best practices whether that's four or five years certainly not any more frequent than four years and then self-certification I would like to see four units that have passed certification in the last five years and have the agreement of the tenant and in that be coupled with a community engagement outreach to make sure that our more vulnerable residents are not somehow coerced into going along with that registration penalties I don't love the wording of that because what I what I've seen is that there's broad recognition that housing is a crisis in our city and more than one year in a row the council has made housing a tier one priority and so to that end I'd like to see the fee and the burden shared across the city with the recognition that housing of all types is not just one type of problem whether it's for landlords tenants homeowners owner occupied people we all need our whole community to be housed securely I think I spoke to exemptions already local representative I think that I'd like to hear more information about the pros and cons of that one of the things that I'd like when you come back is more decision points with more fleshed-out information with more matrices as you did on the last presentation an amnesty program again I'd have to see more data and same with every location fund I'd like to keep this in-house for item D under optional outsourced program I think that we should keep this within the city if this is something that we're willing to take on all right thank you mr. Vice Mayor thank you mr. Mayor so I think before I jump into those I told this from the days before but I definitely was one of those tenants who was living in a substandard unit and not because the landlord wouldn't have addressed the issues if I had brought them to him but because I understood that my unit was below market and I was struggling particularly with student loan debt trying to figure out how to stay in the community and I didn't want to risk that they'd have to raise rents or that I'd be displaced and so I understand it from that side of the equation as well and I think what we're really talking about here is looking at what tools the city has to address substandard units for the folks who can't actually report it so for undocumented population for folks who are living so close to that edge that they are not risking anything that'll push them on to the streets because to them the definition of substandard housing is different than what we might say the definition for substandard housing is so what we're really talking about is a program that supplements our existing ability to have this type of enforcement on substandard housing that gives cover across the board for everybody to where it's not just complaint-based but some form of random sample to where it could hopefully prevent any type of retaliation from a bad landlord on their tenant and what I'm struggling with is trying to figure out how we do that while not also increasing the cost for those who are trying to stay in their units and so I'm going to be looking for probably some form of a hybrid program that achieves both of those two goals from a community engagement perspective I think that that is an obvious one that we have to do the question that you presented to us is whether or not we should hire an additional person within the community engagement department specific to do this I'm not sure I'm ready to go there yet I'd want to hear more about the capacity within code enforcement or what other options that we might have working with some of our existing partnerships that we have out there such as with legal aid to get that in that information out again with the purpose of trying to keep the program as cost-effective as possible on the community I want to hear other options on that types of housing to be inspected I agree with the comment that Alan made that bad tenants and bad landlords aren't exclusive into one category on or another so I want to hear about how we can target that differently not just based on housing type but based on need and you explained a little bit about how the neighborhood revitalization program is able to to push that forward and to do it based on where we expect to find problems and do in fact based on the data find problems the frequency of the inspection I heard five years I don't know if that's a good middle point but to me looking at the data that means if it did apply to everyone that be 6,000 units a year and I imagine that this is the type of program where once you've gone through a full cycle and you've inspected that you actually see fewer and fewer problems the more frequently that you do these inspections so perhaps the time limit or the amount of time between the inspections starts off a little bit more frequent and then becomes more permissive as we see fewer and fewer problems but I want to hear more about that as well from a self-certificate certification standpoint I do think that there's a role to be played there because I do know that there are one tenants who don't want to have their landlord have to come in to inspect as well as landlords who would prefer to do it at the time that somebody does leave and perhaps between tenants that's an opportunity for a landlord to do a self-certification that would not extend beyond a certain point without actually having to go in and look at it along with a random sample from the from the city to make sure that we're addressing those those as well so that's where the hybrid that I talked about might come in registration and penalties this doesn't work if you don't have a registration program you'll just have folks who are ducking it I'll tell you as I've looked around the community at places to live I am continually amazed by how many unpermitted and substandard units are available sometimes if you know where to look and that's why I will also be in favor of an amnesty program let's actually give folks tools to come current so that we can actually provide that level of registration from exemptions it makes sense to me to exempt duly constructed buildings particularly because I know our code enforcement has to go through and sign off on the workmanship as well to make sure that folks are moving into a unit that is up to code and is not going to be a problem for them 10 years sounded like it made sense but I'll want to know the rationale behind that it also makes sense to me that if you are going through another program where you have to have a certification hide mobile home that perhaps we don't need to double up efforts and thus double up the cost for the implementation on our side as well I'm open to hearing about owner occupied that also seems to make sense but there wasn't much data along that line local representative I don't feel like I have enough information to make a determination on that I want to hear more when it comes back I already mentioned yes to an amnesty program relocation I want to hear about the difference between a lease and a month to month it seems like if somebody is breaking a lease or has to break the lease that that's a different circumstance than somebody who has been given notice that their their month to month is going to be terminated so that work can be done so I want to hear from staff on that one in terms of outsourcing the program I'd prefer to have it run in-house but again looking at cost options particularly in a hybrid system that could keep it lower in terms of cost for the landlord and the tenant I'm open to those ideas great thank you so my perspective I believe is a shared responsibility for the safe housing and I'm more of the carrot approach versus the stick approach so as we just go through your list here community engagement I think is vital what that looks like I think depends upon the size of it because correct me if I'm wrong David that we would still have a complaint driven system so let's say we do this program but if someone has to complain that this is unsafe we would still have our current system in place to do those via complaint that is correct code enforcement would be in place thank you absolutely we need trans translation relocation services advanced neighborhood meetings it's kind of um I would ask the sub-matter experts so if we do the community engagement whether continuing in-house or harris someone from the from the outside to give it a blanket yes we need to do it neighborhood meetings prior to this it may make absolutely no sense but again let the sub-matter expert um decide that I think it's key that the people that need to know the information have the information types of housing as I mentioned earlier I want a little bit more data on that it's a shared responsibility for you know this the safe housing but I don't want to create a system that doesn't need to be created ad bureaucracy to address an issue that's not currently present so I'd be interested in that data specifically on those 214 units that were uh complained about regarding the frequency again the sweet spot seems to be from the data I've read is about five years but again depending upon how wide ranging and how expansive the program is I could be convinced to go a little above or below that but seems like five years seems reasonable uh self-certification absolutely I think that'd be a key component that needs to be in here registration yes they should be registered um again I'm more about incentivizing people to register versus uh penalize them uh exemptions again whether it's five or ten years I would lean towards ten years but I'd be interested again what's the data show at what point from a building official typically degradation of units if not maintained starts occurring at what year let's not do things that um again create a bureaucracy that doesn't need to be created uh let's see the local representative like other colleagues who said I'd like a little bit more data I don't know what the consequences if we go with that direction I'd like a little here a little bit more information here's the benefit of actually having the local representative here's a consequence and how would we deal with either of those absolutely an amnesty program relocation fund I think it could be part of this program including those fees and I'm really not interested in creating an outside source to do this we should do this inside as part of our community so with that did you get enough information Mr. Mayor can I go ahead and make one more request please on the self-serve vacation piece I would like more information on what that looks like what what does that process look like between the landlord and the tenant and what information are tenants given to understand what this is about and why they're being asked to be involved in a self-serve vacation okay okay you got your information yes okay um Mr. Goind do we need a break to transition to regular council meeting are we ready to roll I think we're ready to roll into the next next time so let's invite the council members who had to accuse themselves back into the chamber so actually let's give it five minutes to see who wants to rejoin the meeting thank you all right mr. Groom we ready ready so welcome to tonight city council meeting madam city clerk who would you get a roll call please let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member tidbits and council member combs and can we get a report on our study in closed session yes mr. Mayor the council met in closed session and discussed item 2.1 and gave direction to staff great thank you uh mr. Groom would you like to make an announcement about how we're adjusting the agenda a little bit tonight sure I will uh thank you so items 15.1 and 15.2 which are both public hearings have been postponed to November 12th so neither uh public hearing tonight 15.1 or 15.2 will be heard tonight if the public is here to talk on those items there'll be an opportunity during item 13 which is items that are not on the agenda but there'll be time to have feedback anything but at that point great thank you to clarify so on item 13 we usually just take the first 10 if there are more than 10 people because people want to comment on 15.1 or 15.2 we will allow it this evening so with that item 6.1 proclamation mr. vice mayor you have this all right we have a proclamation for active 20 30 week and we have a number of club members who are here to receive the proclamation so ryan the president we're going to bring down yeah if you all want to come on down feel free so whereas active 20 30 club united states and canada provides young adults with an opportunity for personal growth friendship and leadership development while improving the quality of life for special needs children in the community and whereas active 20 30 of santa rosa number 50 was formed on october 15 19 29 and is celebrating its 90th anniversary in santa rosa this year and whereas currently 67 active members focus on service and citizenship in our community and whereas tens of thousands of hours every year are volunteered to raise money for children's charities in sonoma county and whereas since its founding active 20 30 of santa rosa number 50 has benefited over 1500 local members through their service to the children and our community and whereas some of the annual projects include children's shopping spree djl memorial kids fishing trip santa rosa red white and boom battle of the bruise and windsor kaboom and whereas there are currently 36 clubs with more than 800 members within the united states representing internationally in 10 countries throughout north central and south america including mexico el salvador ecuador nicaragua costa rica panama peru columbia and dominican republic an active 20 30 international is a member of the world council of service organizations which has members in in over 21 countries all over the world and whereas active 20 30 of santa rosa will host the 2020 national and international midterm convention in january 2020 which will welcome several several hundred guests to our community from all over the world and whereas this year active 20 30 of santa rosa will celebrate 90 years in santa rosa california during the week of october 14th 2019 now therefore be it resolved that tom schwethelm mayor of the city of santa rosa on behalf of the entire council does hereby proclaim october 14th through 20th as active 20 30 week thank you city of santa rosa council members and mayor schwethelm it's an honor to receive this and obviously we couldn't do it with our greater membership our team of clubs around the greater the nation and the south american nations but the fact is is we've got a key members of our leadership but we couldn't do without the partnership that we share with the city and and all the organizations that we serve so thank you it is a great honor thank you guys so much for all your club does it's really about a lot of the behind the scenes things and some of the things you do in other countries too that's very impressive congratulations mr gillian item seven staff briefings we have a couple yes item 7.1 is a transit integration and efficiency study and presenting will be abracial edin deputy director of transit good afternoon mayor schwethelm and members of the council i'm pleased to be here today to present a brief overview of the outcomes of the scta transit integration and efficiency study which has recently been concluded and will be presented to the scta board on November 4th the study looks at recommendations to better integrate the three local bus transit operators in sonoma county for the benefit of the riders but also to increase efficiency so quick background on this study this concept for the study goes back to 2012 and honestly probably previous to that but in that year mtc's transit sustainability project identified the need for a closer look at coordinating transit services in sonoma county especially with the advent of smart service coming down the line really wanting to understand how we can make transit more seamless in sonoma county this growing focus on seamlessness has continued over the past few years with 28 different transit operators in the bay area there's a growing concern that we need to do a better job breaking down the barriers between those systems so that people are able to move throughout various jurisdictions on the transit system efficiently and with minimum confusion the study was funded jointly by mtc and the city of santa rosa and conducted by scta with consultant support from nelson-nigard so the study focused on the three local bus transit operators you see here city bus sonoma county transit and petaluma transit together these three operators provide about 3.5 million passenger trips annually and about half a quarter million revenue hours city bus makes up about 60 of that ridership and about 40 percent of those revenue hours we also received input from golden gate transit and smart while they weren't directly included in this group that was the focus of the study a lot of the strategies that are being brought forward as recommendations would affect how we interact with those services as well so the goal of the study was to improve the seamlessness of the passenger experience by reducing those barriers to multi jurisdictional travel on this very fragmented transit system we have in the bay area to find ways to reduce our capital and operating costs through more efficient use of resources working together and to better integrate our systems just to improve the basic level of service quality so a lot of times when we think about transit integration we go right to the concept of full administrative consolidation where various agencies would be dissolved and reformed as a as a single legal entity that was part of the look at the what the study looked at but the study also looked at this whole continuum of transit integration activities from activities in the communication realm to the left which is more like informal information sharing a lot of what we do today to more formal integration of function which is sort of in the middle of the spectrum and then all the way to the concept of consolidation the recommendations that consultants brought forward touch on all these areas and so there there is sort of a a phased set of recommendations to how we can move along this continuum to meet the goals that were laid out for the study so we're not starting from square one there are a lot of things we do already to coordinate i've thrown a bunch of examples on this slide everything from ensuring that we have a common base fare so if you board a local bus in Sonoma County on any of the three systems if you're an adult it's going to be a buck 50 if you're a senior person with disability it'll be half there it'll be 75 cents we've had for decades reciprocal free transfers among all those systems as also extend to golden gate transit and smart we work together to implement the clipper card as a smart card technology in this area more currently as of the last couple years sharing costs for transit mall operations used to be in the past Santa Rosa paid for all the costs of operating the transit mall but as a regional transit help we're now asking for participation from the other operators and have received that we're doing collaborative planning for electric bus charging joint procurements etc so there's definitely a baseline level of coordination going on that the idea is how do we grow that and do it more formally to better integrate the ties study was very broad and looking at a wide variety of topic areas for the concept of integration everything from looking at our fleet and facilities and how those could be shared or coordinated looking at our technology vendors both for our internal processes as well as our public-facing technologies like real-time passenger information it looked at how we provide customer service how we market our services how our systems are designed do we acknowledge each other's services on the corridors for the overlap or are they essentially several systems laid on top of each other how we operate our three different paratransit systems and then finally the overarching issues of finance labor force and governance in terms of recommendations as I mentioned there's recommendations that span that whole integration continuum I laid out on the previous slide these are very high-level examples there are many more recommendations than this in the study but this is to give you an idea of some of the recommendations being brought forward in these different phases so the first phase is kind of the low-hanging fruit phase that these are things that we could do with current staffing levels with minimal investment things like looking at more opportunities to do joint marketing promotions improving coordination of customer information so if you go to our website you're going to easily find links to an information about the other operators that serve Santa Rosa and vice versa better coordinating how we collect data and provide metrics and standards for our service performance that sort of eventually leads towards and build the foundation for our coordinated service planning later in the process and then thinking about how we begin to simplify our fair structures you know these are things like aligning our fair media we all have different fair media products right now how can we bring those into a more uniform set of products how are we talking about things like what is a child or what is a senior for the purposes of fair payment so that when one person is going to city bus site and then later to Sonoma County transit site they're seeing uniform language around that and it makes it easier to understand how to navigate the systems the second phase builds on that first phase these recommendations are more about beginning to integrate specific functions again these can be done with in current staffing and minimal with minimal financial investment concepts such as emerging customer service operations could be one day have one phone number that you call if you need transit information and whether if they're even if there's three different customer service centers all of those staff are trained to answer questions about any of the operators in Sonoma County coordinated marketing programs can we begin to move our websites and our collateral towards a uniform look and feel that makes it easier for people to know where to find the information they need beginning to integrate bus service planning in a more formal way there's a lot of informal coordination that goes on right now but there's a possibility of having a much more structured process for doing that in the future and then implementing sort of a basic standard for the experience at bus stops and transit facilities in Sonoma County the third phase gets even more complex and more robust in terms of the level of collaboration examples of these types of recommendations are to begin to look at how we could possibly share staff and Petaluma transit and city bus are possibly jumping the gun on this one we hope to bring to council in the short term a proposal to share one of our staff members who's an expert in transit technology with the city of Petaluma they have a very small staff and don't have that capacity in-house but we have the same systems there's an opportunity there to have some shared staffing the concept of developing a unified transit brand is an interesting one this would be with all of these other phases of coordination activities even if we retain the current government structures at the existing jurisdictions even if we keep our labor arrangements in place eventually we could evolve towards the type of system that looks like one system from the standpoint of the customer and really functions as one system for the customer even if we keep some of those jurisdictional government structures in place one strong recommendation from the study though was to consider a consolidated paratransit system we all contract out our paratransit so there's three different paratransit systems in Sonoma County for the local services so could we work towards having one countywide system would certainly be a benefit to the riders there could be some administrative savings those would likely be offset by the increased demand of having a much more convenient system but it would definitely be a benefit to the riders and especially for our paratransit ridership population so for the the for phase four the consultants took a light touch on the concept of fixed route consolidation their sense was that the the integration activities in the first three phases were a lot to do but if they were successful and there was some traction gained at a time later in the future with success there could be further evaluation of the concept of a full administrative consolidation of the local transit systems in Sonoma County if that was something that the policy boards thought would have some merit so in terms of next steps for this study the one concept for follow-up is to develop a memorandum of understanding among Santa Rosa City of us petaluma transit in Sonoma County transit where we formally set forth the types of integration activities we plan on working on in the short term obviously we would bring bringing those to all of our policy boards including the council for input on that mou and for you to have a chance to weigh in on what you'd really like to see us work on but that would lay out more of a formal intention and a formal program for the types of things we want to achieve in the next two to three years and there also be another chance to discuss these topics when we bring our short-range transit plan forward for adoption in the late spring early summer we always include coordination activities and as an appendix to that plan and we jointly negotiate those among the operators so that that will also be another opportunity to have that discussion so a lot more discussion had a lot of these recommendations i've laid out definitely need some additional study and consultation with the council for your feedback but we wanted to at least give you an idea of the types of topics that are coming forward for consideration how we move forward with integrating transit in Sonoma County so with that i'll answer any questions you may have great thank you for that presentation i have one quick question where would one find the study so the study should be available shortly on scta's website they're going to publish it as part of their board packet i would imagine since for the november 4th board meeting so i'd imagine the week before it will be available so it hasn't been yet released and with the integration can we have it on our website also absolutely of course council questions it's funny i know that there's a lot of interest from council members across the county in this particular effort and i'm wondering have we thought about how we might be able to bring in other jurisdictions that don't necessarily have their own transit organizations but would be interested in supporting these efforts for their residents and for the broader community sure absolutely i i would say that uh if a if an entity as a jurisdiction has transit service they're likely already included in this effort you know Sonoma County transit provides the local service for example in ronart park and katadi and winzer and cloverdale so they've sort of all been at some level brought into the conversation through the study however i don't know that there's been a lot of direct involvement of the councils in those jurisdictions around these concepts so i think certainly that would be an important follow-up activity once we sort of move forward with defining this mou and understanding you know the priorities or trying to understand the priorities for what we want to work on i would imagine there would need to be some additional engagement with those other jurisdictions and i didn't highly encourage that i had a conversation with mayor belforte of ronart park last week who said that she wanted to take the bus into santa rosa for a meeting and it would have taken her nearly an hour and a half to get here and that she's very interested and other members from other jurisdictions i know are really interested in how we can improve our services across jurisdictions so thank you for doing this work great thank you other question mr vice mayor yeah mostly a comment it was really interesting and instructive i think for us to see some of the polling from measure m and this plays right into one of the for me one of the biggest surprise that i for surprises that we saw we had been asking whether the public would support free public transit and what actually came in a lot higher in terms of support from the public was higher frequency and better usability and it kind of falls into that concept that we've talked about about it doesn't matter if it's free if it's not usable people aren't going to use it and so i'm really interested to see how we are able to respond and build a network across those jurisdictions integrating smart because i do think that that's a key as well so that people can actually get from point a to point b i'll also point out because i think it's a really useful tool for folks that google maps when you put in a destination there's a public transit option where they actually are doing exactly what we're talking about where they pull in information from multiple jurisdictions and tell you you take this bus in santa rosa to get onto the smart train get off and you take public transit across the ferry if that's what you're going to do to get to san francisco and it's really helpful for folks to figure out how to plan around using public transit and if i can respond i think google has become the default baseline you know for five one one and others everyone's evolving towards that and there's also some really great new uh aggregators out there for example there's an app called transit that will bring together the real-time information of all the transit operators even if we're using different vendors to provide that information so it becomes one app instead of three apps and so there's a lot that we're doing to try to promote those types of solutions as well which are coming out of the private sector which is nice mr. sorry thank you mayor well thank you very much for this i have not seen uh in my years on the council quite this kind of of um uh this effort we're bringing everyone together to create that frequency and convenience and people sharing power and allowing their their systems to to work better together so i very much thank you for the effort and and all of the your colleagues in transit across the county in this region thank you thanks and i would also just want to echo that i love seeing integration strategies i mean that's a sweet spot so i'll be anxious to see what our next steps and how we can improve the system so thank you so much for sharing that information great thank you mr. groin item 7.2 do we have a report we don't have a report for item 7.2 okay then let's roll into the city manager city attorney reports who'd like to go first sure i'll jump in that would be you that's me out and sorry apologize we've got two items today first i just want to give the council an update that the city has uh activated its eoc emergency operations center activated that this morning at 9 a.m it's currently in operation the eoc's efforts right now are preparing for a possible plan pgp pss outage starting tomorrow afternoon so we're we're doing is encouraging residents to check the website src.org slash emergency the scope and the timing are continually to evolve so the best thing to do is check online state use social media media channels from the city and mpg needs website to identify if you're where you where you're located or where you're going might be affected by this outage so again the website that the city has is src.org slash emergency for that information and secondly we have some news on the folton road project reconstruction project so that has resumed it will resume tomorrow on the section between west third street and occidental but one of the big out one of the big things to be aware of is that both southbound lanes folton road will be shut down starting on thursday the anticipation is that it'll be completed by november 23rd and the goal is to have that completed before the holidays and the rainy season so a lot of coordination went into this obviously with the rebuild efforts and the power the pss events but that is moving forward and it's exciting to see that project go and for information on that project you can visit the web our city's website src.org slash cip and i believe you can find the project there for more information on the construction activities Mr. Green if you could just provide a little bit more information on the pss because my understanding i know the advisory council was informed apparently many people experience problems with pgne's website but they've upgraded that and ours i think ours is robust enough to handle the traffic but could you just comment on that yeah so our city website worked really well in the event but it did lead to lead to the pge's website they did have some issues with theirs last go around we have been informed that they do have they have put a lot of work into making sure the website does not crash again this time so there's a lot of detail information on there they have two different types of maps one map shows the general area where the outage is planned to be but the more in-depth information is where you type in your address and i'll tell you if you're in this in in a plan shut down or not that's the most accurate way to find out what what impact it is to you specifically again or a site that you're going to visit yeah it's correct that currently we're under red flag warning status we are correct the red flag warning was established earlier today on this afternoon and so that's been in place so we're anticipating the the shutdowns i believe are anticipated to start tomorrow afternoon again near rush hour so there's a lot of information and education out there on our website when the power does go down the street lights do go down so i'm making sure that that that when the street lights do go down it turns into a four-way stop so just making sure residents are aware of that right mr. as you have a comment just a question a question mr. geowan do we have confirmed locations for the community resource centers and if so at what point do we expect them to be open for for vulnerable populations yes the they are confirmed the site that in santa rosa is located at the vet center similar to last shutdown and my understanding is that that would be open starting tomorrow the event isn't supposed to start till tomorrow okay and are there any others in sonoma county there are i'm going to remember off the top of my head that the other one was the other location is at hanes boy's center and understand that there were some considerations of some additional sites as well but not yet confirmed as of the last time i checked and it's my understanding that the community resource centers actually may not open until thursday morning again i would check i'd recommend that folks check the pg&e website or our own sr city website okay anything else mr. geowan that's all i have okay i'm city attorney and i have nothing else to report okay do you have one card on this item debba to ours much regarding the psps on stop the crime net on our youtube video channel we have the story behind the power outages but my concern and my question right now is many street lights were out of were not synchronized when the power was turned back on i want to know if that has been remedied and also the kids are becoming traumatized we had a lockdown where my granddaughter was in school today because of an active shooter now we have a psps there is so much emotional disruption in this city because of pacific gas and electric and because of a variety of policies i'm hoping that you'll look at the psps as also a psychological traumatized situation that expands beyond the power outages themselves thank you thank you okay excuse me maric i just want to confirm one thing i did get confirmation so the community resource center will be open on thursday morning thank you from 8 a.m to 6 p.m great thank you okay any statements of abstention by council members for the remainder of the agenda i do mayor on for the minutes i'll have to abstain from 11 1 and 11 2 okay any others yes i'll i'll be abstaining from the october 1st minutes any others already mayors and council members reports anyone have anything they'd like to share mr sorry thank you mayor well i just wanted to say thank you to all the the individuals who came last night to our merit awards it was a it is one of those great evenings in santa rosa where we recognize volunteers volunteers only so it's it is a uh the get a they get nominated by people that either worked with them or their friends and neighbors or family people that do good things and good deeds all year long and this is one of the ways that we can say thank you to those volunteers it was very very well attended the the chamber was packed and council members participated as well the committee works very very hard it's it's difficult when there are so many people doing good things around the community that committee has to say no to some and yes to others at the difficult task i served on that committee in the past and they do great work so it was thank you to all of their hard work and thanks to the recipients of the merit awards last night it was a great event that's it's so nice to have such a positive energy in this chamber um and every year it has it is filled with that great energy so thank you this one yes the merit awards were quite exciting in in fact um the mayor and council member soyer hijacked it to give out additional awards to two of the members of our excellent committee and that was quite entertaining to watch these people who don't typically seek out any type of accolades be forced to reckon with the great work that they do i have a report on potter valley project provided by director burk in our water department on october 7th the water advisory committee unanimously approved resolution regarding the potter valley project and um the this is a quite detailed report and i'd be happy to push it out but essentially what we're asking for is an agreement between the sonoma water mendicino inland water and power cal trout county of humboldt and round valley indian tribe to keep us informed of what is going on the ultimate plans will continue to keep the public updated and um and in the loop as far as we we get the um the information as it comes in i wanted to say on a note that it's somewhat outside of the scope of our jurisdiction but happened today right um in the overlay of you know district four district five and the school board that i consider it frankly unacceptable that we had an active shooter situation today and that uh even though it might seem and it does often seem insurmountable to solve this problem of gun violence in our community that i cannot uh be remiss in registering my deepest outrage over this frustration at our with our federal partners and i continue to urge everybody to not give up to take action and to pressure our local electives our national and state electives to take action put your money where your mouth is and let's get this problem solved please don't give up mr ish mayor thank you mr mayor so last wednesday we had the smart board meeting uh we did vote uh to advance a ballot measure to extend the smart measure q tax that was passed by voters the board voted to do a 30-year extension so that'll be presented to voters in the march election as well and just as a by way of information for this council the discussion has largely been around not increasing the funding for smart but advancing that extension and the way that we need to think about it is refinancing your mortgage uh so smart advanced bonds at the beginning of their construction uh based on the understanding that the smart tax was going to be in place they are now repaying those bonds and there's financing that's on that that we're all very familiar with an interest by extending the tax it actually would lower smart's payments for their bond financing by about 12 from 18 000 a year to about 6 000 or excuse me 18 million to 6 million a year uh the expenditure plan that was passed on wednesday which i think was really important uh if that extension goes into place and they are able to refinance their bonds would provide funding for operations to get the train up to cloverdale it would not provide the capital needed to build out to cloverdale and so they'd continue to have to leverage additional grants and additional funds for both that and for the bike multi-use path so it's something to keep an eye on as it goes forward but if you get questions from the public about the the measure i've found the busiest way to explain it to people is to talk about similar to refinancing your mortgage so that you can extend the payments so that year to year you're able to make those payments but it does take longer thank you for that update i just two items again recognizing the mayor awards yesterday and i like to think we enhanced it versus hijacking the meeting last night but i also remind everyone that the only way people get nominated is for members of the community to recommend them so throughout the year we'll be doing this again next year so if you know someone who's doing something outstanding to for the betterment of our community please take a shared responsibility filled out send it on in and we have a committee that very diligently goes through it it's and it's a wonderful event i encourage everyone to attend those probably same time next year uh additionally additionally uh last week myself and a couple other council members attended league california cities annual conference along with some staff members and just you know my overall takeaway um i just feel privileged to work in this city because attending a lot of the different sessions related to items that are of interest to the city santa rosa staff has kept us on online on board and updated with it there is no holy smokes i didn't know that so again just uh that was a big takeaway for me thank you to the staff being so well-prepared and giving us all the information might come to some other um conclusions based on what other cities are doing but we have the same information and there's nothing that wow that's totally new for us so thank you i know you were there assistant city manager going and city managers there along with our city attorney so thank you for your helping that okay moving to approval minutes let's take these one at a time i think we have a quorum for each of the four votes there should at least be four folks there so starting with 11-1 the minutes from september 24th any uh adjustments seeing none item 11-2 the special meeting minutes any corrections seeing none we'll accept those 11-3 the regular meeting minutes from september 24th any additions corrections seeing none and finally on october 1st regular meeting minutes any additions corrections seeing none we'll accept all those Mr. Gowen consent items all right consent items we have four consent items tonight item 12.1 is a motion contract award for bicycle and pedestrian gap closures piner road piner road dutton avenue item 12.2 is a resolution resolution authorizing application for and receipt of senate bill two planning grants program funds item 12.3 is an ordinance adoption second reading ordinance of the council the city senator rosa adding chapter 10-45 to the san rosa city code to establish minimum wages to be paid by employers item 12.4 is an ordinance adoption second reading ordinance of the council the city senator rosa amending title 21 of the senator rosa city code updating chapter 21-02 housing allocation plan to modify the requirements for providing on-site inclusionary housing units and to establish a commercial linkage fee file number prj 19-036 great thinking council any questions on any of those items seeing none uh since this is the consent calendar uh i've decided to allow two minutes on each item so mr ruberty you have two minutes for the three items you don't need to take all two minutes but starting with item 12.2 then 12.3 12.4 if you'd like step up the mic please let's start with 12.2 uh so what i'm looking at is the grant application for state funding the amount of $310,000 for various planning initiatives to accelerate or incentivize the production of housing now i'm looking right here at the grant application and the first thing i see on agenda item 12.2 is on the environmental impact it says this is exempt from CEQA but then uh i'm looking at uh this page that has a list of costs project timeline and budget and i see a complete CEQA analysis uh cost at $35,000 um so i mean if i'm the person evaluating this grant application i'm gonna want to see that CEQA analysis and if this is exempt from CEQA uh $35,000 i mean that sounds like i feel like i just can i have 35 g's i think i just finished it we don't have to do it uh next is $110,000 identifying uh eligible properties now this is an estimated cost right i mean it's my understanding that we estimate the cost of things that haven't happened yet but as i'm looking through this i uh see that you know part a right the missing middle we see 87 parcels uh right that are undeveloped 2,785 that are developed 1014 age eligible properties 627 uh outside the development district that are potentially age eligible um that's for b for c is just you know regulations so um i mean if you're estimating that that is going to cost $110,000 in the future i don't i mean i we are we're already done right i mean i just i just i'm i'm a little concerned uh here my other uh issue is i mean i'm for this missing middle uh dimension of it i'm definitely for that i i feel like this historic thing where we're evaluating the historic uh i feel like that's something that very much stands in the way i mean i understand that it's you know you got it you're trying to streamline that process and you know move it along but i feel like if there's anything that we can do i mean streamlining it means you know getting this age eligibility requirement out of the way as much as possible just because something was built in 1870 doesn't mean we need to keep it that way for the rate it stands in the way of progress for a reason all right let's get that out of the way as much as possible if we really want to streamline development um and then uh the other thing is that the the growth initiative getting around that as much as probably like the things that we have right now that say developers can't if you're one developer you can't build more than 75 units at a time absolutely let's move i mean let's get those things we have the power to remove them whatever power you all have to get those things out of the way let's get them out of the way um am i running down the clock i can't see you from here am i running out the clock you got three minutes left uh okay so uh the next thing that i'm seeing is uh on i'm gonna skip ahead here at 12.4 uh adoption of an ordinance of the city council amending title 21 of the center of the city code the housing allocation plan to uh modify the requirements for onsite inclusionary housing units and establish commercial linkage fee number one yes to commercial linkage fee um you know i've spoken out against it before but that's my issue is that i don't feel like like collect the fee absolutely apply it to building affordable housing yes um actually getting you guys to do that is another issue which is evidenced by everything that i'm reading in this in this requirements that you all have for how these affordable units are charged how they're collected now what i'm seeing is that uh for rental units we have a requirement eight percent for low income eight percent so i mean if we build a hundred units we get eight we build a thousand units we get 80 people in i mean that's if they can rent low i mean low income is still you know what you guys use to measure it is still not going to get oh we got 3 000 homeless people in the city you're telling me you you build a thousand units which i guarantee you're not going to make we get 80 people in there or five percent for very low right ten percent from i mean a thousand we get a hundred times well i mean what are we looking at 150 in a dream scenario low to moderate units i mean it's a joke this is this is a list of ways it was like if i was trying to figure out ways to break the law ways to get around the affordable housing requirement you just made them for me if i'm looking at this as a developer the director of planning and economic development can waive any off-site units if i don't feel like complying with it um or you can instead of building affordable units you can just dedicate land that's not constructing units right preservation of existing units is not constructing units or this is my favorite part or other innovative approaches right which is just a way of being like a abracadabra if you don't feel like it say you made another innovative apartment it's just vague enough to make it impossible not to get around i mean if you don't want to you don't have to as long as you're on the right side of the director of planning economic development now there's a reason we're failing and this is it right this is it these ridiculous requirements eight percent give me a break we got three thousand people with nowhere to go right three thousand eight percent is not going to help them all right uh the the preservation of existing units is not going to help that's not building what we need to build it's not doing what we need to do it's inventing ways to get around building affordable units right and that's wrong okay it needs to be explained mr rogers you have this item thank you mr mayor and just for the the public's uh we'll get to item 13 if you have something else you want to add yeah so just for the the public's uh edification uh the submittal of an application to get grant funding does not require an environmental impact report but some of the projects funded by that by those dollars if we get it might require an environmental impact report so i want to make sure that that distinction was very clear what we were doing with item 12.2 is submitting an application which does not have an environmental impact as defined by cqa so with that i'll move items 12.1 through 12.4 and wait for the reading of the text we have a motion and a second your votes please and that passes unanimously thank you since it's not five o'clock let's move on to item 14.1 mr gowan okay item 14.1 is a report item ordinance amending certain sections of santa rosa city code title 15 sewers to maintain compliance with environmental protection agency industrial pretreatment program regulation revisions and presenting this item is martin st. george uh the city of santa rosa waters environmental compliance supervisor let's see yeah there we go good evening uh mayor shod home and council members i'm martin st. george and i'm here to talk about the ordinance amending certain sections of santa rosa city code title 15 sewers by way of background the city of santa rosa regional water reuse facility receives over five million gallons a day of wastewater from the collection system and this is one of the requirements to have a epa pretreatment program that's required by our national pollutant discharge elimination system permit and we also have significant industrial users which are industrial users that discharge over 25 000 gallons a day and also the lagoon of the santa rosa is an impactive receiving water when we do discharge it's impacted for nutrients as well as mercury so what do we do um any pretreatment source control program we inspect and we sample and we permit our industries in the regional system that includes the city of santa rosa uh surpassed by rona park and ghattadi as well as south park also we enforce federal and local limits federal limits are categorical limits from epa designated industries such as computer chip manufacturing machine shops and also porcelain and amylars all of which we have in our system and we also protect the collection system and staff and we also enforce stormwater compliance on those industries a reason for the code edits today as the recently we have an approved local limits study from the north coast regional water quality control board um we most recently received a hard copy letter that was dated uh october 16th which approved our study um we also um through the epa we are required to make changes that came from some of the audits that we received recently the most uh recent was in 2018 we also have new regulations for dental dischargers um a brief history of the local limits the city started conducting a study in december of 2016 we presented the results to bpu and on 8 2018 and we then received a approval of the draft to keep moving with the local limits study we presented the results to the regional board in october of 2018 after that and then had some conversations and meetings with regional board staff and work through different comments and questions that they had and then we um um got back to the regional board and uh with some comments answers to their comments and then receive feedback from the regional board again and uh written feedback in uh march of 2019 the regional board had received our july 10th draft that was submitted and had a public notice comment period in august of 2019 the regional board received no public comment during that period but i did in my section receive a few comments from the industry industrial sector which were both positive and then one uh from a groundwater engineering firm which um i just wanted a clarification again we came back to bpu earlier this month and they approved us to come back to you with this uh ordinance amending certain sections of uh city code so the recommended increases um that are to local limits would be increasing cadmium from 0.04 to 0.2 milligrams per liter increasing copper from 0.2 to 1 milligram per liter increasing nickel from 1.51 to 3.0 milligrams per liter increasing silver from 0.17 to 0.5 milligrams per liter and increasing zinc from 1.63 to 2.0 milligrams per liter um recommended local limits to remove or biochemical oxygen demand and total suspended solids and total keldal nitrogen um these have been found to be better restricted in the industrial sector by having surcharges on them over they pay a cost per pound and that's been a much more effective strategy and keeping them from discharging these constituents um antimony, beryllium and thallium aren't present in our system have a don't commit our headworks at the wastewater plant and during inspections we don't see these as precursor materials in our industrial sector so um and the cleanup of the local limits we're removing them um hexavalent chrome is is not uh is also tested with total chrome so it covers it it's a more costly test so um and since it's already covered by total chrome we're we're just taking that out of local limits as well selenium is not present in appreciable amounts so we're moving that and total toxoreganics is um a list of organic compounds and to have a local limit which is the same as a federal categorical limit um didn't seem to be practical because there's already a federal limit and if you're an industry who's discharging these type of organics you're already covered by a federal limit um so that was another reason to pull that out when we had the last local limits starting in 1989 there was um some groundwater water remediation limits that were not um specifically spelled out as being for just groundwater sites and this is these uh two limits total petroleum hydrocarbons and b-techs were a cleanup of those limits and also the revised halogenated total toxic organic compound list needed to be updated um also there's another item here on this slide waste taller program uh edits to allow halt septic waste from outside the county is also one of the edits our EPA audits had requirements for some definitions and references these are minor technical corrections we also had some changes to our prohibitions and 15-08.070b and number 18 is a prohibition of sewer discharge and stormwater requirements have changed uh now you can't dump your pool like into a creek or a spawn to a creek that sort of thing because of the chlorine in it so we had had edited this area to make it more usable for people to get rid of their pool than spa water and then and item 27 we had to add pesticide to the prohibition list as well so i did say there was a new federal dental office rule 40 code of federal regulations 441 and this came out this was promulgated a couple years ago and we had already had our amalgam separator program which is uh was implemented in 2010 when we did the last major code edits from sewer section title 15 and um what we're doing in these to our amalgam separator program is um just weaving in the requirements of the federal rule so that it uh we meet all the requirements of this federal dental office rule so for recommendation it is recommended by the board of public utilities and the water department that the council introduce an ordinance adopting amendments to certain sections of Santa Rosa city code dash 15 sewers 15-04.030 definitions 15 dash 06.120 publication of users and significant non-compliance 15-06.20 appeals 15-08.050 wastewater discharge permit classifications 15-08.070 prohibited discharge standards 15.08.100 local limits 15-08.210 hauled wastewater 15-08.215 cleanup and remediation projects 15-08.340 wastewater discharge permit contents 15-08.430 sampling and 15-08.567 amalgam separators thank you for your attention and any questions today council any questions go ahead miss lemmy thank you mr st george and i'm sure this is very clear to everybody in the public including myself as your WAC representative can you help me uh make this uh i'll just throw myself under the bus and say that this is not um easily intuitive to the average water rate payer in the city of santa rosa or to myself right so a couple questions here one is what were some of the findings that that from the epa audit that are leading us to make these changes the findings from the epa epa audit uh and reference to the certain items that are in there um in the definitions we had some wording that was just off from the epa wording and that was also true in some of the um other references like public the public notification of significant non-compliance the epa has um very specific language that they like to see and during audits it was spelled out that this language did not completely line up with theirs it is it is difficult to tell from um maybe some of the challenges or differences in philosophy that we have at the local and state level from our federal partners whether or not the epa is coming in with more environmentally protective language here or less environmentally protective language here is is this um here you know we go to slide um slide five here and we've got uh what looks to me um to be i don't know a five-fold increase in cadmium that you mentioned hexavalent chromium not our favorite thing is this going to allow us to better protect our environment or is this going to loosen our regulations that's an excellent question um the first of all the epa guidance document that we used to do this study was from 2004 and it's been this document in a form of it has been in existence for over 30 years we used it also in 1989 but the last time it was added in was in 2004 and that was the document that rmc a wooded current company used as a guidance for this and in the local limit study itself you'll see that um there are anywhere from 10 a 10 percent is a required safety value that exists in this local limits guidance document and we use 20 and 40 percent safety factors for these metals here so even in keeping with the guidance document we even used more conservative percentages on these metals to make sure to address these concerns knowing that when we'd be coming out the other side there'd be some concerns about this also from 1989 to now our industrial basis changed significantly i mean we went from a heavy industry with significant metals discharges moving to a winery brewery food-based industrial base and with a lot of the industrial sector changing and moving away so and also in the industrial sector heavy industry that remained chip manufacturing machine shopping the there's been product replacement there's been initials stock materials have been changed to reduce metals that come out in their discharges also there's been green chemistry innovation and there's also been just an overall change in purchasing from these industrial sectors the purchasing from end users that want to see more responsible green production so all these things together um our industrial base including our industrial base changing from 0.47 million gallons a day to 0.252 million gallons a day almost half all these things account for the change and i know that's not a simple layman's term it is not but i certainly appreciate the level of detail that you're offering i'm trying to be able to i don't like to pass an ordinance if i can't explain it to somebody and what i'd like to be able to tell one of my neighbors or residents is that this will strengthen our environmental quality protections or that it meets the CEQA test or that the EPA simply has jurisdiction and we are compelled to do this and so if you can i appreciate the level of detail and i'd love to sit down with you and learn more sounds like you know just a ton and i really appreciate that i'm not trying to give you a hard time oh no is is this going to make us more environmentally protective or less yeah i think i think maybe we can answer i think Jennifer's gonna jump in too but i think looking big picture the treatment plants are pretty amazing plays i'm biased i think one of the best at the state um but i think what what martin's talking about is what comes into the treatment plan what leaves the treatment plan is governed and has rules and has regulations and that's not changing here so in terms of the effect on the environment what martin's team does is really important which is protect what comes into the treatment plant and so those levels change and what can go in there these numbers up here basically are saying the treatment plan is doing so well that it can take on more it can it can treat better it can treat more stuff which is really good from a city standpoint because it does help with our the businesses that come in it's it costs them less to operate because our treatment plan does such a great job and so these these modifications here are actually showing how great the treatment plan is working so that what leaves the plant is still at that high level per the state federal law thank you yeah good evening mayor schwaethelm and councilmember fleming i think um assistant city manager go and did a great job explaining that in essence we have enough treatment plant capacity that we can look to reduce the burden on our commercial businesses and industrial users so there's no need to make them kind of treat to a higher level if we can take care of it it's not affecting any of what's coming out of the treatment plant also i do i think there was a question about hexavalent chromium just to be very clear we're not taking away that requirement either it's included in the test for total chromium so it's a component of it so all of these are still in in place and being protective of the environment and any recycled water that we would be putting out into the lagoon or into the community thank you for doing all three of you for doing i mean there's an abundance of water at the staff table tonight thank you for doing a great job and explaining that this just we're doing a great job so our capacity's increased and so we are going to be able to offer additional services with the same level of environment or an enhanced level of environmental protection thank you very much jennifer could you just introduce yourself for those i'm so sorry uh jennifer berke i'm the water director thank you any other questions mr soyer thank you mayor and i'm not sure if this is really the place to ask this question but how are we doing with pharmaceuticals and how how's the um technology as far as removing those from our from our waste stream are we getting are we getting better are we pretty much status quo or what's i know how tough it is to do that so i'm just kind of curious it's been a while since we discussed that so that is a great question from a from a treatment plant capacity pharmaceuticals or something that treatment plants aren't typically designed particularly to remove but we do see some removal in terms of risk we have a lot of analysis that's been done on recycled water and risk of exposure in particular for using recycled water for irrigation purposes statewide work has been done a blue ribbon panel that was in and put together by the state to find that there were no concerns about using recycled water for irrigation purposes in terms of exposure or any kind of risk from pharmaceuticals for using recycled water for potable reuse purposes which we don't currently do here but there are some additional analyses and studies that they're doing and watching but still finding that the treatment that is required for that type of reuse does remove enough of the pharmaceuticals that they don't have any concerns at this point but they're continuing to study that excellent thank you any other questions okay we have one card on this item thomas ells there's just one minute oh maybe you got three oh i see thank you um thomas ells and i'm a civil and environmental engineer and i have a postgraduate certification in hazardous materials management so the toxicity level of the toxins is measured at the lethal dose 50 so they feed animals enough material that 50 of them die and then that's what they call the lethal dose and then they kind of base the amount of contamination on that it's unfortunate that they would increase the levels of discharge into the water stream of these particular items most of them we look at them as being really helpful in preventing bacteria so silver you know you wear it you use it it prevents bacteria copper we use it all time uh in application in the environment uh copper sulfate things like that nickel all those things you see that are really metals that don't degrade and they're really clean that's because bacteria doesn't get on kills the bacteria cadmium all these things um so when you put it in the water and then you put it in the waste then it kills bacteria so it's really great that the dreamer plan is able to eliminate that from the water to a certain extent not not not completely but then it goes into the compost so it goes into the solid waste stream and they're not able to apply the compost then to the to the local farms or or if they are then they they'd they'd be excluded uh it would be really helpful to just have a separate system or to have them if they're you know as as they mentioned that there's been such a reduction in the production of of these contaminants in the water stream they're contaminants there's no doubt about it uh and a lot of that has been because of of you know uh court consequences to people that that actually had spills and then they just said we're not we're not going to have these on our sites or or having to do with worker compensation you know filings and these things that eliminated the the use or required the use of of pretreatments that that eliminate the discharge of these contaminants there's no reason to have a two system sewer system that has industrial waste at these small levels these are insignificant in the great scheme of things there's no reason and then there's no reason why Dennis should be should be discharging their waste into the waste stream they should be accommodating and treating that and then re they can use of recycling except for what they put in someone's mouth in the way of water that they wash somebody's mouth out but those thank you Dennis uh miss fleming you have this item i do thank you i'd like to move an ordinance of the council of the city of san aroza amending certain sections of san aroza city code title 15 sewers to maintain compliance with epa industrial pretreatment program regulation revisions and waive further reading of the text second so that was moved by councilmember fleming seconded by mr oliver is your votes please and that passes unanimously thank you all right we will move back to item 13 which is public comment on non-agenda matters as we mentioned earlier in this meeting we will not be hearing item 15.1 which is the proposed building code and all-electric residential reach coded option and fire coded option nor will we be hearing item 15.2 which is the objective design standards for streamlined and ministerial residential developments we will be hearing those items on November 12th but if you came to speak on those items you can share your comments with us during this item um additionally if anyone is here to share comments regarding recent article of the current situation on the joder dotted trail uh council has had two closed session items on that most recently today so if you have comments um we're more than happy to hear them but we will not be able to make any comments regarding those closed session items so with that our first uh comment or our first card is from debra and i think debra may have left okay jason kindle followed by george uberti are you jason yes okay you're on good evening i'd like to thank you all for taking the time to listen to me i don't mind words often i'm told i'm too blunt but i speak to truth and from the heart and that's where there is an agree area the current policies practices guidelines regarding the illegal occupation camping and trespassing on public and private property is no longer attendable you guys could treat it like a mash casualty incident you know i served on a volunteer fire department i did it when i was in the service you need to diagnose and treat what's critical and at the moment and remove it from the street because there's a danger to a public and then you could step off and so forth the problem of homelessness public drug and drunkenness and using in the streets and violent mental outburst need to be called for what they are and assessed for what they are and fixed accordingly to each of these there's their own appropriate actions and occasionally and only occasionally is somebody one or all three of them i've called 26 times in the last nine days i've been violently threatened my kids have been threatened there's public defecation and not one arrest was made i was asked to provide video of the threat because it was i was told that it's a he said she said um if any of the dozens of felonies or threats were committed by any of you if the gentleman that was just speaking about water and wastewater that's kind of what i do for a living um if he does any one of these small little things in public he would have to be held accountable for it none of the people that trust passed on my property or on the trail are held accountable for it and i just have to ask how can we continue to let this happen um don't like to start rumor mills but there's been an ongoing discussion with you and the county about who owns what who's responsible for what the injunction um many other municipalities deal with it very simply they send an officer they send a staff member and then they send out somebody from cox they assess the situation they offer shelter they offer to store their items those are both requirements of the injunction in place above and beyond that it's all fair game you guys can choose how to fix this but choosing nothing affects your residents choosing nothing affects the housing and throwing in that crazy housing inspection it's just going to exaggerate the problem thank you thank you george uberte followed by steve mozier george left steve mozier followed by thomas ells uh ma'am is throughout all of them and city council members i'm here to talk about the smart crane and their whole tax scheme isn't isn't based in a reality and a way that shouldn't be gone about as in shouldn't you should vote no on that measure is it all started back in 2009 and they said the great recession harmed their cash flow and it ended up for six point six million dollars they blame that on not being able to get a hundred million dollars extra in bond funding so anyway if you look at the other end they had 200 dollars in bond funding then they can't afford now and so really there's a saying oh if we if the great recession hadn't happened we'd have 300 million in bond funding with that which would have been 30 million dollars a year so they've been broke before at this point so anyway now measure q i mean measure n measure q right um stated that the the smart train was supposed to be a commuter train with rush hours uh schedule and weekends now smart the only thing they've over ever done overdone is make the schedule for all day and and have an ant mark to go out to launch when that was not the the uh purpose it was a commuter train so anyway with when smart fails which it will on this this tax measure it's good for them because it will make their make them run a train in an actual manner and also they can pay up bond debt on time so when the when the tax gets redone if it does get redone in uh 2028 they'd have a blank slate and they'd have available funds on this this way they're putting off 30 years of uh of the bonds that we should have been paid up already so they'd be losing out on that money so that's my um that's that's just it puzzles my mind that they go by their rules when in reality is a better thing to vote no that make them run their train make get them out of the business of going to cloverdale they've never make it okay so just uh vote no that's make with the wise thing to do thank you thank you tomas else followed by gregory furan thank you for the opportunity to speak um i was intending to address the the consent items uh 12.2 which was the senate bill two uh funding and it seems to me that $310,000 is not a lot of funding that you could have asked for uh considering the cons of funding that it could incorporate uh in the first year state administered 50% planning grants and 50% homelessness programs and then in the second year uh locally minister 70% affordable housing and state of minister 15% middle income rental 5% productive incentive and 10% farm worker housing so that could have been the purpose so there could be a lot of um opportunity there and then it said um rezoned permit by right objective design and development standards specific plans and form-based codes coupled with sequas streamlining accessory dwelling unit and some of those have been addressed which is great an expedited processing course particularly within the red and and um housing really infrastructure finance and fee reduction strategies which which have been uh encouraged and and developed um in the city and in the and in the county but but uh it also did say that uh rezoned and permit by right but it it also was talking about uh specific plans and form-based codes and I believe it did say in here that you could have actual general plan update as well so 310,000 this really is a minuscule amount I I believe that there's a lot more available and I think it's it's incumbent on us to maybe in the second year I'd like to see I would have liked to have seen you ask for more at this time and I don't know if there's a way to do that but certainly next year thank you thank you Greg if you're unfollowed by Kevin Brown thank you mayor and members of the council this is sort of addressed to the young people over there it's an explanation of why it's important for you if you feel about something if you feel important about that something's important to you that you get up here and you talk to the council about them I'm going to do that now because there is something that's important to me that isn't on the agenda and I I thank the mayor for inviting comment on the Joe Rodota trail because it's important to me as most of you know I've spent an awful lot of time and energy and money trying to make that situation as humane as possible last time the payment that we made my wife and I for the porta-potties that were out there for a short period of time until the county said we couldn't have them the payment for the personal possessions which were seized and had to be stored I paid for that the trash that was held hauled away for about four weeks I paid for that now I'd like you to join in this new adventure a new encampment eviction if that's what we're going to call it to join with the community in helping pay for it you have the ability either through chap or any other funds you've got to respond today to the need for a porta-potty or two or three for sanitary clean washing of hands and others for storage of possessions afterwards now I have to applaud the city the city and homeless action has reached an agreement for how we should do this and we're light years ahead of where we were last year but the thing that isn't in the injunction is all the things I just mentioned keeping them healthy keeping their possessions stored if it goes beyond what you're required to do having trash hauled away this isn't going to be done tomorrow we're going to be here next week or the following week and we'll be in the midst of it and in the meantime a couple of weeks worth of really unhealthy situation will have continued so I'm here today to ask you to go beyond what we've agreed and try to help out with those items thank you thank you Kevin Brown thank you for having me today this is my first time here so sorry I didn't know I needed to turn in a card and all that stuff but hope they won't mess up too bad I'm here today just like the last beaker said because you know I care about something and I love this town it's my hometown born and raised here for those of you that have been around here for a while you remember Channel 50 down the road my grandfather started that my family ran it and worked there as long as they could before they had to give it up I'm the last one out of that family who hasn't left this town I love this town I consider myself a success in life because of this town from the summer camps to my shop teacher Santa Rosa High School I wouldn't own a home if it wasn't for him I'm here today because I've got to fight every day with my family just to stay in this town my wife wants to leave they want to join the rest of my family who have left this town and left this state the homelessness situation that we're dealing with I've traveled all over this country I'm a firefighter I've worked as a firefighter for the past almost 20 years most of which have been in the city of Oakland we don't see the homeless situation anywhere else in any other parts of the country I work in Oakland and I see an I see an Oakland homeless person up here who is homeless that I served in Oakland they're here because Santa Rosa is offering more services than they were in Oakland they're offering more services than they were in Berkeley we're becoming the nation and the states and the Bay Area's service center for homelessness we live near the Joridota Trail but the Joridota Trail is the symbol of everything that's going on with the homelessness in this town you can't take a single year over the past decade that you've seen the home situation get better there's the study that comes out this is our numbers have gone down oh but they've been pushed off the off the train tracks and now they're just more visible when they redid the smart line all that stuff the homeless we call them homeless squatters because the ones that are outside of Sam Jones Hall which just changed their sobriety requirements and their curfew has become more intrusive on the public around us they've become more violent that we've dealt with in our neighborhood this injunction or the combination of the change at Sam Jones Hall with their sobriety has created a worse situation in the neighborhood i sent each of you an email last week involving an incident when a homeless man was jerking off to my wife i didn't get a response from either one of you but one of you was nice enough to send it to the chief of police who sent it down through the chain of command of their sergeants one of which contacted me these are the situations that we're dealing with police took over an hour for that response that sergeant called me gave me reasons why i understand i'm in public service i understand sometimes but this is what we're dealing with we are getting to the point of i don't even know what to call it i really don't thanks thank you justin glover uh my name is justin glover i'm actually a petaluma resident um and a practicing architect um and i wanted to just just say a few words i came here today to to talk about the reach codes that are being considered here in santa rosa and many other jurisdictions around the bay area in the state of california i've spent the last couple months and probably will the next couple months going to meetings like this and meeting with different jurisdictions around the bay area to advocate for the adoption of these reach codes it's i think it's a very important piece of meeting the state carbon emission goals that have been set on a statewide basis and we're we're really not going to get there unless the local jurisdictions take the action to move into specifically electrification that's tied to the major portions that are supplied by natural gas lines currently part part of these reach codes i'm sure you guys have been looking at all this and understand is we're we're trying to move away from natural gas as a as a fuel source and trying to electrify our buildings our building stock um so that we can further make that more efficient down the road but the the big issue now is that we need to get natural gas uh out of out of away out of the fuel source mix for our buildings um and that is so critical to do now because we can make our buildings more efficient later right but if we have before building now buildings are going to be dependent on a a source of fuel that has methane and CO2 emissions tied to it into the future endlessly um we're just we're never going to get there um so i just i just wanted to um put some of these these pieces out there for everybody um in addition i think some other other important pieces are you know PG&E is actually like what is actively trying to get rid of gases source too right so they're they it's it's a risky asset for them and i think that's an important important piece to take into account um i've i've been to some of these meetings in Cupertino, Hildsburg, and Petaluma and in in each of these sessions i'm sure you guys are going through this as well but it's come out also as a cost-effective measure it's not more expensive to to transfer these new technologies even without incentives um so i just wanted to to push for that and say i hope you're all considering it um and i'll i'll plan to come up next month when it's uh when you're going through the first reading thank you thank you do we have any additional cards okay item 15-1 and 15-2 been continued till November 12th no written communications no further items on the agenda meeting adjourned